A Balanced Budget is the Ultimate Goal
Arrival Video: https://apnews.com/video/vivek-ramaswamy-elon-musk-mike-johnson-mike-johnson-united-states-government-2c37ceb651cc4d048253ebf0447d7744
PBS: Musk, Ramaswamy meet with lawmakers to build support for slashing government programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yo8XkRtaN8
The Goal is to achieve a Balanced Budget
Remarks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyiCjt-YgiY A historic moment for the USA
WASHINGTON–Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, leaders of the incoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, will meet with Republicans in Congress on Dec. 5 to discuss reducing the size of the federal government. Though few details of their plans have been released, members are divided on whether to scrap earmarks, a provision of the government funding process that has concerned fiscal conservatives for years.
Earmarks are provisions in Congress’s annual appropriations (government funding) bills that allocate taxpayer money to specific projects and locations, bypassing a merit-based competitive process normally required for government grants and contracts. Several fiscal conservatives in Congress, chiefly Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have long said that earmarking leads to wasteful spending and amounts to “pork” for local special interests.
According to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks such spending, more than 8,000 earmark requests totaling $15.8 billion were made in fiscal year 2024.
Congress imposed a moratorium on earmarks in 2011, which was lifted in 2022 with bipartisan support.
While House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), host of the meeting, has written that it will focus on “regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings,” several members of Congress told The Epoch Times that earmarks should be considered.
“[We will] collaborate on how the DOGE is going to operate in the upcoming administration, how we can create greater efficiencies within the federal government, and then, of course, cut waste and abuse where we can,” Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate DOGE Caucus, told The Epoch Times.
When asked whether earmarks should be considered in the process of cutting waste and abuse, Ernst replied: “I would love to see earmarks go, yes.”
Several Republican members of Congress agreed with Ernst’s position.
“If everybody would give up earmarks, I'd be willing to not participate in the earmark program either,” said Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas). “I’m not going to unilaterally make that decision and punish my district, but I would be willing to take cuts across the board.”
“Earmarks incentivize the wrong thing in Congress—spending too much money—by rewarding senators and representatives for supporting bloated & otherwise-problematic spending bills,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote on X earlier this year.
“Stop earmarks now!” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) wrote on X in all caps.
“I’m not for getting rid of earmarks. I’m not for reducing the authority of the Appropriations Committee. So, that’s not something I would support. But, again, that’s a relatively tiny piece of what we’re talking about, it’s not that much money,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told The Epoch Times.
“If you really want to save $2 trillion, you can’t do that off the discretionary budget. ... You want to, like, get serious about entitlement spending because that’s where the real money’s at,” he said, referring to proposals to reform Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid spending—which took up 55 percent of the federal budget in fiscal year 2023—but whose popularity has deterred reform efforts in Congress.
“Earmarks should be evaluated based on their merit. ... I absolutely was sent by my constituents to make sure that important projects are equally considered in my district as they are in others,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) explained the importance of earmarks to him.
“When we send money to Wisconsin ... they skip my district because we’re rural and we’re conservative,” he said. “So, I did earmarks ... I speak to my people directly, they tell me what they need directly, and then we fund them directly.”
Others have entirely different ideas on how to cut costs in the government.
“If you look at any permitting process, there’s usually several agencies that are involved. We could get rid of a lot of it without damaging any protections,” said Rep. Celeste Maloy (R-Utah).
Musk and Ramaswamy have provided few specific plans for DOGE, which will not have the power to order changes to the government itself. Both men have suggested personnel changes, with Ramaswamy suggesting that 75 percent of the civilian federal bureaucracy could be dismissed.
Despite its designated title, DOGE is not a government agency, as that would require an act of Congress. It’s unclear whether the organization has been formally incorporated or what the terms of its relationship with the federal government will be. DOGE did not respond to a press inquiry submitted via X.
The focus of reform: 1. Regulatory Rescissions;
2. Administrative Reductions; 3. Cost Savings
Powerful 7.0 Earthquake Strikes Off Coast of Northern California; Tsunami Warning Canceled
The 7.0-magnitude quake struck near Ferndale, located 250 miles north of San Francisco.
A 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Northern California on Dec. 5, according to U.S. officials, triggering a brief tsunami warning.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)?reported that the tremor hit about 60 miles west-southwest of Ferndale, California, a city located about 100 miles south of the California–Oregon border.
“We haven’t received any reports of outside damage, just a lot of inside [stuff] breaking and messes,” Ferndale City Clerk Kristene Hall told The Epoch Times.
“Things were thrown off the shelves.”
City officials were out in the town checking on the effects of the large quake on the morning of Dec. 6 but hadn’t found any houses damaged.
The city also had no reports of injuries at 11:30 a.m., Hall said.
“No houses are down or anything like that, which is good because it was pretty shaky here,” she said.
A tsunami warning was issued in the immediate aftermath of the quake but was lifted about 50 minutes later. The National Weather Service’s San Francisco office had issued the warning on social media about possible tsunami impacts: “We are still waiting for magnitudes of water rise.”
The earthquake struck at a depth of about six miles at approximately 10:44 a.m. local time. It was first preliminarily registered as being a 6.6 on the Richter scale, but the USGS upgraded it a 7.0 a short while later.
Several aftershocks of smaller magnitudes struck in the area off the coast after the initial 7.0-magnitude temblor, according to the USGS.
About three minutes after the 7.0 earthquake struck, a 2.5-magnitude earthquake also hit inland about 200 miles to the southeast in Cobb, located in Central California, the USGS reported. The Cobb tremor was revised down from 5.8 by the USGS.
Residents in Northern California and California’s Central Valley reported feeling the tremor, according to the agency’s website. Users on social media platform X also reported shaking.
Some users also posted screenshots of National Weather Service tsunami warning messages they had received through their phones before it was rescinded.
“A series of powerful waves and strong currents may impact coasts near you. You are in danger. Get away from coastal waters,” the notice said. “Move to high ground or inland now. Keep away from the coast until local officials say it is safe to return.”
Deanne Criswell, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has been briefed on the quake and is “monitoring the situation” in California, an official confirmed.
“Please listen to local officials and heed their warnings,” FEMA spokesperson Jaclyn Rothenberg wrote on X.
The Bay Area Rapid Transit, which runs metro trains across the San Francisco and Oakland areas, said that it is experiencing service disruptions because of the Ferndale earthquake and tsunami warning.
“There is a major delay system-wide in all directions,” the transit operator said. “There is currently no Transbay Tube service to or from San Francisco due to a report of an earthquake. Please seek alternate means of transportation.”
‘All indications are that it was a premeditated, targeted attack,’ the NYPD said.
Police released new photos of an individual wanted for questioning in the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on Wednesday, as police are still on the hunt for the shooter.
The New York City Police Department on Thursday released photos showing what it described as a “person of interest wanted for questioning” in the shooting in Midtown Manhattan that left Thompson dead.
The person, who appears to be male, is seen without a mask and smiling. It’s not clear where the photos were captured.
“All indications are that it was a premediated, targeted attack,” the NYPD said in an X post, reiterating a previous statement made by Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch about the shooting.
The NYPD said that anyone who can provide information leading to an arrest and conviction can receive a $10,000 reward, asking the public to contact Crime Stoppers with any information.
Other than the post on X, the NYPD has not provided any official updates on its manhunt since Wednesday’s news conference with Tisch, including a name or motive in the case.
Photos and video footage released Wednesday show a male suspect, wearing a hooded jacket, approaching Thompson from behind near a Midtown Hilton hotel before he fired multiple shots. The suspect appeared to have a noise suppressor, or silencer, attached to his handgun, and he also appeared to rack the pistol’s slide multiple times.
The photos and video footage, however, do not show the individual’s face due to the camera angle. Another set of photos shows the person wearing what appears to be a dark ski mask.
In the incident, Thompson was approaching the Hilton for a UnitedHealth Group annual shareholder meeting. In the news conference, Tisch said that the suspect was waiting for Thompson for several minutes before firing at him and allowed several bystanders to pass by him.
After the shooting, the suspect fled on foot before getting on an electric bike, officials said on Wednesday. He was last seen approaching Central Park’s Center Drive, they said.
Unconfirmed media reports, citing anonymous police sources, claimed that messages were scrawled on bullets or shell casings that were left behind at the scene of the crime. The Epoch Times could not independently verify those reports, which emerged Thursday. The NYPD has not responded to an Epoch Times request for comment on those reports.
UnitedHealth is the largest U.S. health insurer, providing benefits to tens of millions of Americans. Thompson, a father of two, had been the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, since April 2021.
The company has been grappling with the fallout from a massive data hack of its Change Healthcare unit that provides technology for U.S. health care providers, disrupting medical care for patients and reimbursement to doctors for months.
Thompson had worked at UnitedHealth since 2004 in several divisions, according to a biography later removed from the company’s website.
“Our hearts go out to Brian’s family and all who were close to him,” the health insurance giant said in a statement released on its website, also confirming his death. The corporation said it is working with the NYPD and other law enforcement officials in the case.
In Maple Grove, Minnesota, where Thompson lived, police administrator Theresa Keehn said that there were no reports of threats against him. However, there was one reported incident of “suspicious activity” at his home in June 2018, she said.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Key Things to Know About the Fatal Attack on the UnitedHealthcare CEO in NYC
The chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s largest insurers, was killed Wednesday in midtown Manhattan in what police described as a targeted attack by a shooter outside a hotel where the company was holding a conference.
The shooter fled on foot into an alleyway and was last seen on an e-bike heading into Central Park. New York City police said the attack on Brian Thompson was planned, but the motive was unclear.
Here’s what to know:
What Happened?
Police said Thompson was heading to the company’s annual investor conference at the New York Hilton Midtown around 6:45 a.m. when a person walked up behind him and shot him multiple times.
Thompson was alone at the time and did not have a security detail, police said.
Officers found Thompson on the ground outside the hotel with gunshot wounds to his back and right calf, according to Joseph Kenny, the police department’s chief of detectives. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital at 7:12 a.m.
What Do We Know About the Shooter?
Kenny said the shooter appeared to be a man who was wearing a black face mask, black and white sneakers and a “very distinctive” gray backpack.
He arrived outside the hotel about five minutes before Thompson got there, waiting near the building and ignoring others before he approached Thompson from behind.
After the assailant began to fire at Thompson, the gun malfunctioned, but he was able to quickly fix the issue and continue firing, Kenny said.
“From watching the video, it does seem that he’s proficient in the use of firearms as he was able to clear the malfunctions pretty quickly,” Kenny said.
The shooter ran into an alleyway near the hotel and later got on the e-bike that he took into Central Park.
Kenny said police found a cellphone in the alleyway, but it was unclear if it belonged to the shooter.
Who Was Brian Thompson?
Thompson was the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, the insurance wing of parent company UnitedHealth Group Inc.
He had worked at the Minnetonka, Minnesota-based company for two decades and led its insurance division since 2021. He was one of the company’s highest-paid executives, with a $10.2 million annual compensation package.
Thompson kept a low profile, with UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s CEO Andrew Witty taking on a more public-facing role that included testifying before Congress.
Thompson started his career as a certified public accountant and graduated from the University of Iowa. He lived in the Minneapolis suburb of Maple Grove and was the father of two high school students.
His wife, Paulette Thompson, told NBC News that her husband said some people had been threatening him. She did not have details, but suggested they may have involved issues with insurance coverage.
Maple Grove Police Chief Eric Werner said his department had not received any reports of threats against the executive.
Freeman [WSJ]: An ‘Educational Equity’ Failure/WFB: SF’s $30,000 ‘Equity-Centered’ School Closure Plan
Does DEI help or hinder education?? Here are two examples were it hindered.
WSJ columnist James Freeman starts with a generalization which could be applied to many areas of society.
This column is still searching for evidence of a great civilization built by progressive leftists. In the meantime, gazing out over the panorama of our largely free society, it’s hard to spot progressives at any level of government who are achieving genuine policy success. It’s become nearly axiomatic that their reforms harm the people they are supposed to help.Especially outrageous is when adults force children to bear all the costs of political experimentation.
Freeman's example is a three-year study by math and physics teacher Ryan Normandin, who chairs the faculty council at Newton South High School in Massachusetts.? Newton has a population of 88,415. Its racial breakdown is 74.7% white; 2.7% black; 3.6% Hispanic; 14.3% Asian.? Median income is $176,373.? Persons in poverty are 4.6%. Median household income is $176,373.? 80.4% of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher. In other words, in comparison to other places, Newton is not doing bad.
Prior ro Covid, most classes at Newton’s high schools were given a label: honors, advanced college prep, or college prep, with honors offering the most challenging content. This system of “tracked classes” had its problems. Students who began their freshman year in a particular level could find it challenging to change levels, possibly making it harder for them to eventually take more advanced courses such as AP Calculus. To make matters worse, Black, Latino, and low-income students were disproportionately represented in lower-level classes. The school administrators introduced a multilevel model to rectify this problem by mixing the levels together into a single classroom taught by a single teacher.
After three years in which the school system has been testing this theory,
Freeman goes on to say,
What may be especially interesting about this story is that this budding faculty revolt is happening in an affluent liberal enclave. [See demographics above.] Newton is a suburban sanctuary city and its teachers union appears to be of the more aggressive variety. This column will go out on a limb and guess that the Newton public schools faculty is not exactly a hive of right-wing political activism. When teachers there say a progressive educational fad is failing students, parents might want to believe them.
The second example comes from San Francisco, via the Washington Free Beacon.? Below is an abridgement of the story. There is much more.
San Francisco’s $30,000 ‘Equity-Centered’ School Closure Plan—Put on Hold After Parent Uproar—Used DEI Formulas To 'Target' High-Performing, Majority-Asian School - WFB, 12/4/24
Amid a severe budget crisis, the San Francisco Unified School District superintendent decided in March that some schools in the chronically dysfunctional, poorly performing public system needed to close. So it paid a Stanford University professor $30,000 to create an "equity-centered" formula that would determine which ones would shutter.
This points out a problem which has existed in social media platforms and automated decision-making tools.? Screening algorithms are written is a way which reflects the biases of their programmers.? This was dramitically demonstrated with the disclosures about Twitter after Musk took over.? If not controlled, these biases will become more pronounced as AI, a collection of programmed algorithms, becomes a larger part of our lives.? Remember the historical characters generated by Google Gemini 1.0.
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
?
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
An ‘Educational Equity’ Failure
Do progressive policies always harm the people they are supposed to help?
James Freeman
Dec. 3, 2024
This column is still searching for evidence of a great civilization built by progressive leftists. In the meantime, gazing out over the panorama of our largely free society, it’s hard to spot progressives at any level of government who are achieving genuine policy success. It’s become nearly axiomatic that their reforms harm the people they are supposed to help. Especially outrageous is when adults force children to bear all the costs of political experimentation.
Math and physics teacher Ryan Normandin chairs the faculty council at Newton South High School in Massachusetts. He writes in the Boston Globe about one such ongoing experiment:
In autumn 2021, against the already-challenging backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning, the Newton Public Schools decided to carry out a complex initiative at its two high schools known as “multilevel classrooms.” Previously, most classes at Newton’s high schools were given a label: honors, advanced college prep, or college prep, with honors offering the most challenging content.
This system of “tracked classes” had its problems. Students who began their freshman year in a particular level could find it challenging to change levels, possibly making it harder for them to eventually take more advanced courses such as AP Calculus. To make matters worse, Black, Latino, and low-income students were disproportionately represented in lower-level classes.
The multilevel model sought to rectify this problem by mixing the levels together into a single classroom taught by a single teacher. The district’s administrators claimed this would allow easier transitions among levels for students, increase exposure to more advanced content for lower-level students, and provide beneficial interactions among students who might otherwise never meet.
After three years in which the school system has been testing this theory, Mr. Normandin now describes the results:
Students — at all levels of performance, but especially our students who need the most support and for whom this model was intended to help most — aren’t having their needs met. In one of my multilevel classes, I received feedback that the lower-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want to “look dumb,” and the higher-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want their classmates to “feel dumb.” The result was a classroom that was far less dynamic than what I was typically able to cultivate.
Teachers — especially new hires — say they feel unheard and unsupported. During one meeting, an educator recounted their experience of finding a colleague crying in a closet because they felt like such a failure teaching multilevel… One world language teacher compared the challenge of meeting the varied needs of students to teaching a class where half the students are learning colors for the first time and the other half are analyzing a Salvador Dali painting. There’s nothing wrong with learning either — but in one room, it’s impossible to teach both simultaneously.
Without adequate training or support, many teachers are forced to teach to the middle (let’s list all the colors in the Dali painting), leaving the highest-needs students lost and struggling and the highest-performing students bored and disengaged.
Surely many parents would have predicted as much, so one might guess that administrators were carefully monitoring their experiment’s educational outcomes. Mr. Normandin writes:
The Faculty Council met with department heads all the way up to the superintendent, and what we found was shocking — Newton implemented this monumental change to instruction with no metric for success and no plans to collect data. In not a single conversation over three years could anyone present to us data showing that these classes had a positive impact on students.
He goes on to write that the school’s faculty collected data on their own showing the extent of the failure but administrators have only promised to study the issue and report findings next spring.
What may be especially interesting about this story is that this budding faculty revolt is happening in an affluent liberal enclave. Newton is a suburban sanctuary city and its teachers union appears to be of the more aggressive variety. This column will go out on a limb and guess that the Newton public schools faculty is not exactly a hive of right-wing political activism. When teachers there say a progressive educational fad is failing students, parents might want to believe them.
Some of the people overseeing Newton schools already seem to believe them. Adam Bernstein recently reported for the Fig City News on a Newton School Committee meeting:
Multiple School Committee members, including Paul Levy, Anping Shen, and Rajeev Parlikar, appeared to agree with educators commenting against multilevel classrooms.
Writing at the Globe, Mr. Normandin suggests the school has been engaged in a catastrophic virtue signal:
领英推荐
Classes may appear more diverse with all students mixed in one room, but no data have been presented to suggest these classes are actually helping Black, Latino, or low-income students. Instead, we have seen firsthand that the students who need the most support are those least served by multilevel.
The concept of anti-racism often cited by administration officials should not involve blindly insisting that these classes are working simply because they make administrators feel good
?Stanley Krieger shares that Government Spends Tax Money To Promote Non-Religion Abroad | United Liberty
This illegal conduct by the USA State Department is more proof of the Marxist control of our government.? Hopefully, Trump Will quickly rid the federal government of these communists asap!!? This is another example of our cultural and governmental norms, tenets and entities (education, religion, media, military, etc)? being taken over by the left/Marxists/Communists. We only have a short time to take our constitutional lives back!!!
The State Department’s controversial use of taxpayer money for promoting atheism abroad has come under scrutiny, with new revelations about their involvement in organizing and supporting nonreligious groups.
In a detailed opinion piece for “First Things,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, exposed how the department allocated $500,000 for activities that raised constitutional concerns. According to McCaul, these actions went beyond promoting religious freedom and instead violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.
The State Department’s program involved actively recruiting and providing training to nonreligious organizations, raising questions about the appropriate use of government funds and potential overreach in matters of religious and nonreligious beliefs.
McCaul’s investigation revealed concerning patterns in how the department managed these initiatives, highlighting the need for greater oversight in government spending related to religious matters abroad.
The findings have sparked debate about the boundaries between promoting religious freedom and potentially endorsing specific belief systems, particularly when using public funds for international outreach programs.
These revelations have prompted discussions about the proper role of government in matters of faith and secular beliefs, especially in the context of international diplomatic efforts and constitutional limitations.
Stanley Krieger also shares: Judy Maltz- Jewish and Israeli Americans Experience Discrimination in U.S. Hiring Market, New Study Shows - U.S. News - Haaretz.com
12-04-2024
Job applicants in the United States who are noticeably Jewish or Israeli are more likely to be turned away by prospective employers, a study released on Wednesday shows.
The study, commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League, found that Jewish-American job candidates needed to send nearly 25 percent more applications to receive the same number of positive first responses from prospective employers than Americans from Western European backgrounds when applying for the same position, while Israeli-Americans needed to send nearly 40 percent more applications.
Fox Business: ADL study finds Jewish jobseekers face significant discrimination in US labor market ahead of new Trump administration
We are? going back to the 1930s.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new study on Wednesday exposing significant discrimination Jewish and Israeli American job-seekers face in the U.S. labor market.?
The study, conducted by the ADL Center for Antisemitism Research and spearheaded by leading labor economist Bryan Tomlin, PhD, found that Jewish American job candidates needed to send 24.2% more applications to receive the same number of positive first responses from prospective employers as Americans with Western European backgrounds when applying for the same role.?
For resumes indicating an Israeli sounding name and professional background, applicants needed to send 39% more inquiries to receive the same number of responses from prospective employers compared to job-seekers whose names and experience suggested a more Western European background but who had otherwise matching qualifications, according to the study.?
As the ADL and FBI already track increased antisemitism through physical or verbal crimes such as assault, vandalism and harassment, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explained that their new study for the first time provides empirical data supporting how the concerning trend has trickled into the adverse treatment of Jews in the U.S. labor market.
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
ADL study finds Jewish jobseekers face significant discrimination in US labor market ahead of new Trump admin
Jewish American job-seekers needed to send 24.2% more applications to receive the same number of responses, new ADL study finds
Danielle Wallace
December 4, 2024
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new study on Wednesday exposing significant discrimination Jewish and Israeli American job-seekers face in the U.S. labor market.?
The study, conducted by the ADL Center for Antisemitism Research and spearheaded by leading labor economist Bryan Tomlin, PhD, found that Jewish American job candidates needed to send 24.2% more applications to receive the same number of positive first responses from prospective employers as Americans with Western European backgrounds when applying for the same role.?
For resumes indicating an Israeli sounding name and professional background, applicants needed to send 39% more inquiries to receive the same number of responses from prospective employers compared to job-seekers whose names and experience suggested a more Western European background but who had otherwise matching qualifications, according to the study.?
As the ADL and FBI already track increased antisemitism through physical or verbal crimes such as assault, vandalism and harassment, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt explained that their new study for the first time provides empirical data supporting how the concerning trend has trickled into the adverse treatment of Jews in the U.S. labor market.?
"We see a clear pattern of discrimination through this empirical research which bears out what we had heard anecdotally," Greenblatt told Fox News Digital. "There is real implications at our labor market where Jewish and Israeli people are being discriminated against. It's a big problem that hasn't been reported on that we're just breaking right now."
"So this data is significant because we are on the cusp of a new political administration in Washington. And we're seeing the results of unaddressed antisemitism," he continued. "At ADL, we've been focused on this fight for a long time. But since October the 7th, we've seen a legitimization of anti-Jewish prejudice. We've seen an expansion of anti-Zionist bias."?
To conduct the study, Tomlin sent 3,000 inquiries to administrative assistance job postings – a field selected because it is ubiquitously in demand across geographical regions and is a "forward facing" role – across the United States between May and October using identical email text and resumes. The inquiries differed only in the name of the applicant, which was selected to "sound" Jewish, Israeli, or Western European, and adjusted with "signals" of likely Jewish, Israeli, or Western European background.?
The ADL said each posting was sent a single inquiry from a single applicant which was randomly assigned. Across specifications, the study found that "both the Jewish and the Israeli Treatments experienced a decrease in positive response rates relative to the control."?
Greenblatt argued that instances of anti-Israel protesters demonstrating on college campuses, harassing Jews in public places and blocking access to synagogues in the United States have "longer range implications," as those events have been "poisoning the environment" for job-seekers who can be readily identified as Jewish or Israeli.?
"We know that anti-Zionism is antisemitism because it validates bias against people simply because of their national origin. And we're seeing that here. And we know that antisemitic rhetoric has real world consequences because it's resulting in, again, bigotry against people who are identifiably Jewish," Greenblatt told Fox News Digital. "We wouldn't tolerate this against any other group, and we shouldn't tolerate it here. Discriminating against people because of their faith, their ethnicity, their national origin is a violation of the law. And we hope that the Trump administration, specifically the Trump Labor Department, will take action to stop this once and for all."?
Greenblatt referenced a new complaint filed this week by the editor-in-chief of a student-run Jewish magazine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The petition against the student government alleged that the UCLA commissioner of cultural affairs warned against hiring "Zionists," created a "no hire list," and that all students who wrote about their Jewish heritage – but did not necessarily mention Israel's war in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 attacks – had their applications rejected, Campus Reform reported.?
"We've seen across different industries – therapists, entertainers, investors, authors, all being targeted, excluded, not hired simply because they are Jewish. We've seen black lists circulating trying to determine who is a, quote, Zionist. And I think what this study shows is … those kind of campaigns have a real world impact," Greenblatt told Fox News Digital. "The people pursuing these efforts are not a sort of activists. They're bigots. And they create an environment that's poisoned against anyone Jewish."?
"And again, anecdotally, we have seen this in the past," Greenblatt said. "Now, we have the empirical data that substantiates why I hope President Trump, why I hope the White House, will step up and stop this in its tracks. When he was in the White House four years ago, President Trump signed a really important executive order tackling antisemitism. And I'm optimistic that he's going to step up in this new second term and take additional steps to demonstrate that antisemitism is un-American and has no place in our society."?
Rindsberg: How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative: I came across this study of Wikipedia's presentation of the Israel-Palestine narrative in the Algemeiner, Wikipedia’s Quiet Revolution: How a Coordinated Group of Editors Reshaped the Israeli-Palestinian Narrative, 12/4/24.
In an era dominated by search engines and instant information, Wikipedia holds an outsized influence. For millions of users, it is often the first — and sometimes the only — source of information on global events and historical contexts. Yet, as investigative journalist Ashley Rindsberg revealed in an explosive report, a quiet yet coordinated operation has taken root among the online encyclopedia’s editors, monumentally reshaping the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is perceived.
In a conversation with The Algemeiner this week, Rindsberg asserted that the campaign has “actually changed what appears to be the face of not just the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but of the entire justification for Israel’s right to exist and legitimacy, which is the real aim.”
In a detailed exposé published by the American media company Pirate Wires in October, Rindsberg outlined a coalition of approximately 40 Wikipedia editors that has systematically altered thousands of articles to tilt public opinion against Israel. These individuals, acting in concert, have executed around 850,000 edits on nearly 10,000 articles on the conflict, Rindsberg said, subtly shifting the ideological foundation of content related to Israel, the Palestinians, and even broader Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Ideological Subversion at Scale
“What we’ve seen with the Palestine-Israel articles topic area on Wikipedia is a wholesale shift in the ideological underpinning of those articles,” Rindsberg said.
The report cited one prominent example:
These efforts are remarkably successful. Type “Zionism” into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators” (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel.”
This is disturbing on many levels. First, Wikipedia is one of my go-to references, as it is for many others.? It is today what the Encyclopedia Britannica was when I was growing up. This raises the question of objectivity of Wikipedia entries in general.
Second, it brings to mind the Orwellian Ministry of Truth and the adage "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."? As Churchill said, "History is written by the victors."
Below is the full Rindsberg study as published in October in Pirate Wires, "an American media company reporting at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture."? As you will see, it is very detailed.? Here are the article's bullet points:
Jared Silverman Email:?? [email protected]
PIRATE WIRES
How Wikipedia’s Pro-Hamas Editors Hijacked the Israel-Palestine Narrative
a powerful group of editors is hijacking wikipedia, pushing pro-palestinian propaganda, erasing key facts about hamas, and reshaping the narrative around israel with alarming influence
Oct 24, 2024
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On everything from American politics to corporate brands, Wikipedia plays host to a smoldering battle of ideas and values that occasionally erupts into white-hot, internecine edit wars. But no fire burns hotter than the Israel-Palestine topic area. The topic is such a flashpoint that the Palestine-Israel Articles (PIA) designation is used synonymously with its own dispute resolution abbreviation — Requests for arbitration/Palestine-Israel Articles, known as ARBPIA in Wiki-speak.
While always contentious, over roughly the past four years, and intensifying since October 7, PIA has been subject to a highly coordinated, sustained and remarkably effective campaign to radically alter public perception of the conflict. Led by around 40 mostly veteran editors, the campaign has worked to delegitimize Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream.
A separate but complementary campaign, launched after October 7 and staged from an 8,000 member-strong Discord group called Tech For Palestine (TFP), employed common tech modalities — ticket creation, strategy planning sessions, group audio “office hour” chats — to alter over 100 articles. Operating from February 6 to September 3 of this year, TFP became a well-oiled operation, going so far as to attempt to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British members of parliament into changing their positions on Israel and the Gaza War.
These efforts are remarkably successful. Type “Zionism” into Wikipedia’s search box and, aside from the main article on Zionism (and a disambiguation page), the auto-fill returns: “Zionism as settler colonialism,” “Zionism in the Age of the Dictators” (a book by a pro-Palestinian Trotskyite), “Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims,” and “Racism in Israel.”
The aggregate effect of these efforts is a wholesale shift to the landscape of the Palestine-Israel topic online. As I reported in a previous Pirate Wires investigation, this is largely thanks to Google, which grants Wikipedia a “most favored nation” status with articles automatically given the first spot on any topic-related search result. If you Google “Zionism and settler colonialism,” for example, what you get is a Wikipedia article automatically anchored to the very top of the Google search results, with its own knowledge panel to the right. A fringe concept that would have only shown a smattering of unfocused articles just two years ago — before the article was created — now has its own primetime Internet stage.
“The recent issue with the ‘Zionism’ Wikipedia page is fundamentally a Google problem,” says someone familiar with the matter. “Wikipedia articles act as an unprotected back door to top Google search results, with the article's introduction often populating the knowledge panel, giving the impression Google has vetted this content — when it hasn’t. Malicious editors exploit this vulnerability, platforming fringe views and giving them priority over more reliable sources.”
The kind of coordination carried out by these groups violates many of Wikipedia’s most fundamental policies, including one of its core content policies, Neutral Point of View (NPOV), which states that, “Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them.” The practice also violates the Gaming the System guideline, which prohibits editors from “engineering ‘victory’ in a content dispute.” It runs afoul of the broader Wikipedia ethos discouraging Tag teaming, when “editors coordinate their actions to circumvent the normal process of consensus.” Most flagrantly, it violates a guideline called Canvassing, which prohibits secret coordination with the “intention of influencing the outcome of a discussion in a particular way.”
To skirt this, the pro-Palestine group leverages deep Wikipedia know-how to coordinate efforts without raising red flags. They work in small clusters, with only two or three active in the same article at any given time. On their own, many of these edits appear minor, even trivial. But together, their scope is staggering, with two million edits made to more than 10,000 articles, a majority of which are PIA or topically associated. In dozens of cases, the group’s edits account for upwards of 90% of the content on an article, giving them complete control of the topics.
One of the most prominent members of the pro-Palestine group is the user Iskandar323, a prolific editor whose nuanced approach to historical and even esoteric articles is representative of the larger effort. In the article on “Jews,” for example, he removed the “Land of Israel” from a key sentence on the origin of Jewish people. He changed the article’s short description (a condensed summary that appears on Wikipedia’s mobile version and on site search results) from “Ethnoreligious group and nation from the Levant” to “Ethnoreligious group and cultural community.” Though subtle, the implication is significant: unlike nations, “cultural communities” don’t require, or warrant, their own states.
Iskandar also worked to sanitize articles on Hamas, in one case removing mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter, which calls for the killing of Jews and the destruction of Israel, from the article “Hamas.” (The edit remains intact today.) He removed mention of Hamas’ 1988 charter in at least three other articles.
To expand his reach, Iskandar also goes on editing rampages, or “speedruns.” Last August, he removed 22,000 characters from the article on Amnesty International that were critical of the organization, in one case wholesale deleting a 1,000-word long passage related to criticism of its stance on Israel. On the “History of Israel” article, Iskandar deleted a paragraph critical of the Iranian government; removed an account of 16th century Jewish immigration to Israel; excised a mention of the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem's alliance with Hitler; and made dozens of similar edits — all in a matter of minutes.
Far from a lone wolf, however, Iskandar is part of a group of editors that uses coordinated “swarm” tactics that, taken together, invert Wikipedia’s founding vision, turning the site's perceived neutrality and authority into an attack vector that can be hijacked to advance ideological aims at a mass scale.
In August, an analysis of the intensity of editing in PIA between January 2022 and September 2024 found that the top contributor to PIA by number of edits, a user called Selfstudier, made over 15,000 edits in the space in that period. Iskandar323 contributed over 12,000 edits to PIA articles in the same period. Other members of the pro-Palestine group are equally prolific, with top contributors including CarmenEsparzaAmoux (8,353), Makeandtoss(8,074), Nableezy (6,414), Nishidani (5,879), Onceinawhile (4,760) and an admin called Zero0000 (2,561).
The 15,000 edits by Selfstudier and the 12,000 by Iskandar323 put those two users in the top 99.975% of editors by number of edits — solely for their PIA edits made in under three years. The other pro-Palestine group members’ PIA edits from this period place them among the top 99.9% of Wikipedia editors. All together, the top 20 editors of this group made over 850,000 edits to more than 10,500 articles, the majority of them in the Palestine-Israel topic area, or topically connected historical articles.
It’s not just the raw number of edits that matters. The same analysis shows that fully 90% of total edits by Selfstudier in that period were made to Palestine-Israel articles. Other members of the group clock in at 90% (sean.hoyland), 86% (CarmenEsparzaAmoux), 82% (Makeandross), 64% (Nishidani), and 43% (Onceinawhile). After October 7 the intensity increased, with Selfstudier peaking at 99% in October 2023, while others got to 97%, 98% and even 100% of their total monthly edits dedicated to PIA.
To evade detection, the group works in pairs or trios, an approach that veils them from detection. They also appear to rotate their groupings for the same reason. Likewise, one or more of the group’s editors can come to the aid of another in the case of pushback. In many instances, editing by the group is made to articles focused on historical issues, where a single editor might be patrolling for this kind of abuse, making it easy for two dedicated users to overwhelm or exhaust the lone editor.
A separate analysis shows the number of instances in which two members of the group edited the same article to be extraordinarily high. As of time of publication, Nableezy and Onceinawhile have co-edited 1,418 articles. Nableezy and Iskandar323 1,429 co-edited articles. Onceinawhile and Zero0000 have co-edited 2,119 articles. Zero000 and Nableezy have co-edited 1,754 articles. Onceinawhile and Iskandar323 have 1,594 co-edited. Huldra and Onceinawhile have co-edited articles 2,493 times. Nableezy and Huldra have co-edited 1,764 times.
Incidences of co-edited articles amongst top 30 members of this group. Cells in purple indicate instances of two editors co-editing more than 150 articles. Click to enlarge.
One of the articles targeted most intensively by the group is the one for Amin Al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem from the 1920s to the 1950s, a pivotal figure in Palestinian history. While Iskandar323 worked to remove negative content from the Al-Husseini article, it was two other members of the group — Zero0000 and Nishidani — who would have the greatest impact, together making over 1,000 edits to the article, often in an attempt to erase or downplay Al-Husseini’s well-documented collaboration with Hitler.
In one instance in April 2021, Zero0000 and Nishidani worked together to keep a photo of Al-Husseini touring a Nazi concentration camp out of the article. While a single editor, Shane (a newbie), advocated for its inclusion, a trio of veterans including Zero0000, Nishidani and Selfstudier fought back. After Selfstudier accused Shane of being a troll for arguing for the photo’s inclusion, Zero0000, days later, “objected” to its inclusion, citing issues of provenance. Nishidani stepped in to back up Zero0000, prompting a response by Shane. The following day, Zero0000 pushed back against Shane, who responded. The day after, Nishidani returned with his own pushback. The tag-team effort proved too much for Shane, who simply gave up, and the effort succeeded: the photo remains absent. To date, Nishidani’s contributions to the article on Al-Husseini comprise 56.4% of its content.
In another case, Nishidani worked with a member of the pro-Palestine group editors, Onceinawhile to produce an article called “Zionism, race and genetics.” (The article’s title was later changed to “Racial conceptions of Jewish identity in Zionism”.) The article attempts to tie Zionism’s roots to 19th century views on “race science” embraced by the Nazis, thereby drawing an implicit — and, in at least one instance in the article, explicit — parallel between Zionism and Nazism. Pro-Palestine group member Onceinawhile created the article in July of last year, accompanied by a note arguing, “Early Zionists were the primary supporters of the idea that Jews are a race, as it offered scientific ‘proof’ of the ethno-nationalist myth of common descent.”Together, Onceinawhile and Nishidani’s contributions account for nearly 90% of the article’s content. Onceinawhile would continue to push this view in numerous other articles, including the article on “Zionism.”
In March, a Wikipedia user submitted a case to Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (Arbcom) alleging “a systematic removal of instances documenting human rights crimes by Iranian officials on Wikipedia, accompanied by the addition of misleading information favoring the IRP (Islamic Republic Party) on the platform.” The case shows that a member of the pro-Palestine group called Mhhossein edited the article on the Mahsa Amini protests — the months-long anti-regime demonstrations that rocked Iran when a young woman died in custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her head scarf — to change key wording to falsely depict widespread support for the Iranian regime and whitewash violent calls from pro-government counter-demonstrators.
According to the allegations, Iskandar323 (who has co-edited with Mhhossein nearly 400 times) worked with a separate editor to delete “huge amounts of documented human rights crimes by [Iranian] officials.” This included a claim about Iran’s post-revolution death commissions that executed thousands political prisoners; details showing executions were carried out by “high-ranking members of Iran’s current government”; mention of the Iranian government’s “unprecedented reign of terror” in the early 1980s; the sentencing of an Iranian official to life in prison in Sweden for his role in the executions; the targeting of an Iranian dissident group with “psychological warfare,” and dozens of others.
The charges are serious, and the evidence backing them up abundant. Nevertheless, seven months later the Arbcom case is still pending. The reason is systemic: in a lengthy request for arbitration on a separate PIA case, one of Wikipedia’s arbitrators noted that the final decision-making panel is staffed by 12 volunteers, only 10 of whom are active. “It is clear that AE [arbitration enforcement] has run out of steam to handle the morass of editor conduct issues in PIA,” the arbitrator wrote. “PIA is a Gordian knot; and AE has run short of knot detanglers.”
Electing more Arbcom members would require a massive overhaul of the site’s governing regulations, a task akin to the US government amending its constitution. And though Wikimedia Foundation, which owns the site, has around $500 million in assets, because of the air-gap between Wikipedia and WMF and the volunteer ethos of Wikipedia’s mission not a penny can be used to hire people to oversee contentious topics.
So the group’s pro-Iran efforts go unchecked. One of its most prominent members, Nableezy (over 6,000 PIA edits since 2022), has put considerable effort into sanding the hard edges off of Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah. Nableezy — who took the extraordinary step of including a userbox on his Talk page that links to a text that reads“This user supports Hezbollah.” — has worked to rebuff claims that Hezbollah is a terror organization. In one instance, Nableezy pushed back against another user characterizing a Hezbollah attack on Israeli population centers as a terror attack, arguing “An attack on military targets is not terrorism.” Last year, Nableezy, who appears to be an American, argued in the Talk page for the “Hezbollah” article that, “The US military is designated as a terror group by Iran, should we include that as an endnote everywhere the US army is mentioned?”
But Nableezy’s main area of focus is Israel. To this end, Nableezy’s editing has included subtle, ideologically consistent moves like removing a picture of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the “Israel” article (the image remains absent at time of publishing), pushing for the removal of the ancient history of Israel from the article, and altering a sentence on Zionism that described it as a call by its leaders for the “restoration of the Jews to their homeland” to a call for “the colonization of Palestine by European Jews.”
This exchange embodies the rhetorical approach taken by the group: the shifting of language, the torturing of settled definitions, and positioning fringe academic theory as mainstream — an approach developed by the radical left, in concert with global Islamist movements, in the wake of 9/11, when the attacks put Islamism on the moral back foot. In response, the leftist-Islamist alliance launched two decades of ideological assault on the US, and the West more generally. The same post-9/11 dynamic took place after October 7, when the savagery of the Hamas attack opened a vulnerability as the broader public would recognize it as a barbaric attack on civilians.
In response, the ideological push-back on Wikipedia ramped up. In February, an explicitly coordinated effort was launched when leaders on a group called Tech For Palestine (TFP) — launched in January by Paul Biggar, the Irish co-founder of software development platform CircleCI — opened a channel on their 8,000-strong Discord channel called “tfp-wikipedia-collaboration.” In the channel, two group leaders, Samira and Samer, coordinated with other members to mass edit a number of PIA articles. The effort included recruiting volunteers, processing them through formal orientation, troubleshooting issues, and holding remote office hours to problem solve and ideate. The channel’s welcome message posed a revealing question: “Why Wikipedia? It is a widely accessed resource, and its content influences public perception.”
At the heart of TFP Wikipedia Collaboration was a veteran editor called ?vana, who was tapped as the resident expert on the site, and whose Discord username featured the red triangle affiliated with Hamas’ targeting.
With ?vana’s guidance, as well as her hands-on editing of articles, the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration group coordinated both on Discord and Wikipedia, where they created editing staging grounds on Talk pages that included elements like “Work in Progress Table,” “Investigate and Decide,” and a volunteer job board with detailed responsibilities. Off-wiki, the group created planning documentation with agendas, meeting notes, goal setting, role allocation, skills and breakdowns. Their activities ranged from editing celebrity articles by adding pro-Palestine statements they made to creating new articles out of whole cloth, like a proposed article called “Palestine: The Solution.”
The group focused extensively on the article for German discount supermarket Lidl, adding a section in the “Criticism” section about products from Israel being incorrectly labeled as Moroccan. They also put special emphasis on articles concerning sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, with ?vana questioning the veracity of reports of rape from that day, while adding to other articles claims that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians. (In March, a senior UN official who investigated sexual violence on October 7 concluded that, “There are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.”
The official wrote her investigation produced a “‘catalogue of the most extreme and inhumane forms of killing, torture and other horrors,’ including sexual violence.”)
In its most audacious case, TFP members developed a project to use Wikipedia as a means of pressuring British Members of Parliament to change their stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict in advance of UK elections in July. The plan called for scraping data on visits by MPs to Israel and Israel-related donor information, to create a dedicated Wikipedia article using the data to (as the originator of the project put it) inform “voters to put pressure ahead of the next [parliamentary] elections.”
Within the TFP channel, there was always a background awareness that what they were doing was not in keeping with Wikipedia norms. Early in the channel’s existence, a user and veteran Wikipedia editor called shushugah wrote, “I’m a little confused what the goal is here. I’m an active Wikipedia editor, and for any Israel/Palestine topics you need a solid grasp of Wikipedia policy/culture, and have 500 edits/30 days of activity…no shortcuts.” Within minutes, another user, Heba, wrote “Let’s chat [hand wave emoji].” One of the channel’s power users, zei_squirrel, who runs an X account with 270,000 followers, noted “it’s important to keep this as decentralized and organic as possible to avoid it being used against us, but again this should all be familiar to those who know how wiki works.”
The anxiety was not unwarranted. In September, a researcher discovered the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel and published a number of posts on a blog called Wikipediaflood. (A magazine called Jewish Insider also stumbled across the group, but mostly failed to appreciate its full significance.) These events sent the group into a panic, with ?vana erasing all her chats in the channel, and deleting the Talk pages and Sandboxes staging pages she’d created. The group locked down the TFP Wikipedia Collaboration channel in September. At minimum, the group made revisions to at least 112 articles on celebrities, American cities, pro-Palestine organizations, and figures and events related to the Gaza war.
There is little doubt that the kind of careful, intelligent Wikipedia coordination detailed above will continue. Wikipedia is simply too powerful a tool — and one too easy to manipulate — for actors like the pro-Palestine group and TFP activists to stay away from. But Wikipedia is coming to a crossroads. The ask-and-answer modality of generative AI will eat away at the value of the site’s privileged position within the Google information ecosystem. Groups less savvy than pro-Palestine will also learn to exploit the site, to much more public effect. As with so many of our once-cherished institutions, trust will be lost, and credibility will soon follow.
One of the hallmarks of an institution in crisis is that, far from preparing for the future, it is barely capable of managing the present. With Arbcom grinding to a halt and edit wars erupting in all corners — all while Wikimedia Foundation, fiddling to the baroque tunes of DEI, has turned its attention to funding progressive activism — it seems Wikipedia is facing exactly this challenge. In most cases, calling a crisis existential is overblown. While Wikipedia may not be there just yet, it’s clear that moment is not far off.
— Ashley Rindsberg
Miami Lakes Mayor Joshua Dieguez invitation to the Swearing-In Ceremony to be held on Tuesday, 12-10-2024 @ 6:00 PM @ Government Center: Be there!