Washington Free Beacon

“I cannot see how I can hold a typical class right now under these current conditions, nor how you can be expected to prepare for an exam, so I am cancelling in person class tomorrow and cancelling the mid-term scheduled for Thursday (everyone will receive an ‘A’ on the midterm),” Albernaz wrote in his email.

The cancellations came as Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine distributed sample emails for students to send to their professors calling for no in-person courses for the rest of the week. They also came around the same time Columbia provost Angela Olinto emailed faculty members to stress that, amid “a stressful time for many on campus,” classes and exams “will continue as usual, in person.”

“We want to urge generosity and mutual patience as we navigate this together, especially as students study for their midterms,” Olinto wrote just before 10:30 a.m. Monday. “This is also a reminder that faculty must meet all scheduled classes, as stated in the handbook, and that the provost’s office will announce any unexpected changes to the modality of course offerings.”

Columbia did not answer questions on how—if at all—school administrators will compel faculty members to hold scheduled classes as required. Instead, spokeswoman Samantha Slater pointed the Free Beacon to a nearly two-week-old statement that addressed an unrelated “unauthorized class cancellation.” The statement vaguely referenced a Columbia instructor’s decision to cancel class so students could attend an anti-Israel protest.

Albernaz did not respond to a request for comment. MacLeod, who wrote in his email to students that he would excuse any absences to ensure “Registrar policy on scheduled class requirements” were met and instead hold a “class space in which to speak together without prejudice,” nonetheless told the Free Beacon he would “be holding my class as normal.”

“[T]here is no discussion of Mahmoud Khalil’s detainment planned for the class activity (unless students wish to discuss that with each other),” he said. “I have no further comment to make to you or anybody else not involved in the class.”

In addition to Albernaz, MacLeod, and the third faculty member, several professors made their classes hybrid, granting students the option to attend class over Zoom. Glenn Mitoma, the director of undergraduate studies at Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, offered Zoom and in-person options for his History of Human Rights class for the rest of the week. In his email to students, he characterized Khalil’s arrest as a “significant escalation of federal actions targeting the Columbia community” and a “gross violation of human rights.” Both Mitoma and Albernaz signed a letter in support of the pro-Hamas encampment that plagued campus last spring.

An Introduction to Urban Studies class held at Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College, was also made hybrid in consideration of Khalil’s arrest and “students’ expressed concern.” The professor, Andreina Torres Angarita, said it’s “important to not be overpowered by fear at this juncture and maintain our presence on campus.” The professor excused those who were absent and wrote that they had spent their morning asking “college authorities as well as public safety personnel” to understand the circumstances under which federal agents can access campus.

An organic chemistry professor, meanwhile, reminded students of the Zoom option to attend class, citing the “distressing news about ICE around campus.”

Albernaz, MacLeod, Mitoma, and Torres Angarita did not respond to requests for comment.

A Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies director, Jessica Rechtschaffer, told students and faculty that her department requested that Public Safety lock the doors to Knox Hall—where the department is housed—and make it “only open to card-holders 24/7,” according to an email obtained by the Free Beacon.

Before Khalil’s arrest, philosophy professor Jessica Collins warned students Saturday that Columbia was being “singled out” and that it was possible ICE would soon seek access to campus.

“If this were to happen to us, I will attempt to delay as best I can: (i) ask to see credentials, (ii) ask to see a warrant; (iii) state clearly that I have be en [sic] told by the University that I am not authorized to grant permission for them to enter our classroom, etc.,” the email to Collins’s class read. “In the meantime, it would be of great assistance to me if one or more of you were to contact Public Safety immediately on my behalf, and if others of you were to start documenting the evolving situation by videoing the entire episode on your phones.”

Khalil’s arrest “should serve as a warning to foreign students on temporary status in America—under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you,” a State Department official told the Free Beacon. Rubio issued a similar statement, saying he will “be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

A judge paused Khalil’s deportation pending a ruling on a petition Khalil filed in federal court on Monday, in which he claimed there was “no basis” for his arrest and subsequent detention.

In April, Khalil led negotiations with Columbia during the student encampments, demanding divestment from Israel. He pledged further unrest in the buildup to the fall semester, telling The Hill he would continue to push Columbia to divest from Israel by “any available means necessary.”

“And we’ve been working all this summer on our plans, on what’s next to pressure Columbia to listen to the students and to decide to be on the right side of history,” Khalil said in August. “We’re considering a wide range of actions throughout the semester, encampments and protests and all of that. But for us, encampment is now our new base.”

On Wednesday, Khalil again served as a negotiator for CUAD after a mob of radical Columbia activists stormed a Barnard library. Once inside the building, the agitators distributed Hamas propaganda meant to justify Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack.

Conor Cullen, a Columbia philosophy lecturer who defended last spring’s pro-Hamas encampments, similarly canceled his Feb. 27 classes so students could attend an anti-Israel protest. Columbia called Cullen’s decision a “serious breach of University policy” and said it would be “investigated and addressed swiftly.” His class cancellation came one day after radicals stormed a separate campus building at Barnard. The agitators hospitalized a security guard and caused $30,000 in damages.

Within hours of the Trump administration’s Friday announcement that it had revoked approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia over its failure to curb anti-Semitism, the Ivy League institution suspended its four students who had been arrested while clashing with police during the more recent incident.

The post Columbia Professors Cancel Classes in Solidarity With Pro-Hamas Activist in ICE Custody appeared first on .

Chris Murphy has a new (and younger, but not necessarily more attractive) lover less than four months after ditching his wife. The prominent social media user and Democratic senator from Connecticut is reportedly dating Tara McGowan, the Soros-funded dark money operative who has been denounced by the Washington Post for pushing “partisan propaganda” via a network of misleading “local news” websites. The happy couple was spotted canoodling at a hipster bar in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.

It’s unclear when Murphy, 51, and McGowan, 39, initiated their love affair. Both of them recently exited failed marriages. Murphy announced his separation from Cathy Holahan, his wife of 17 years and the mother of his two children, days after winning reelection to the U.S. Senate in November. McGowan finalized her divorce from husband Michael Halle, a former adviser to Pete Buttigieg, in April of last year. She has been described by former employees as a shameless grifter and “soap opera villainess” who destroys morale with her “constant gaslighting.” She recently posted a photo with Murphy last week on her private Instagram account, along with the caption, “not postponing joy,” which appeared to confirm the relationship.

Murphy has allegedly distinguished himself in recent months, according to mainstream political journalists, for his relentless opposition to Donald Trump and his even more relentless efforts to promote himself. NBC News reports that Murphy spent more than $1 million on Facebook and Instagrams ads in the month of February, which is more than he’s spent on such advertising over the last five years combined. He’s also raising lots of money despite having just won reelection. He’s constantly on television, or sounding off on a podcast with liberal influencers. It’s all part of his strategy to “flood the zone” with anti-Trump hysteria. “We don’t have another year to fight this attempt to destroy democracy,” Murphy said last week. “Our democracy might be gone in six months.”

McGowan has been promoting Murphy’s content on social media for years, touting the senator as a “prominent pro-democracy leader” in November 2023, when her divorce was still making its way through the court system. McGowan deactivated her X account on Monday after her relationship with Murphy was first reported by Semafor. The self-described “childless woman voter” is the founder and CEO of several liberal activist groups funded by billionaires George Soros and Laurene Powell Jobs, which allows her to exert tremendous influence within the Democratic Party. McGowan, who made nearly 20 visits to the White House under President Joe Biden, has urged Democrats to adopt a more aggressive form of online activism, a message she shared during a recent meeting of party operatives and liberal journalists to plot resistance strategies in Trump’s second term.

One of the activist groups McGowan founded, Courier Newsroom, also spends heavily on Facebook to promote Democratic talking points under the guise of local “news,” which allows Courier to avoid labeling its content as political ads. McGowan has claimed the organization’s goal is to combat so-called disinformation. One of Courier’s local “news” websites, the Nevadan, spent considerable sums during the 2024 election advertising its misleading “stories” about how Trump was plotting to reinstate the draft. Current and former employees complained that McGowan actively discouraged “honest journalism” in favor of partisan “propaganda” explicitly aimed at “low-information voters.” Gabby Deutch, a correspondent for the nonpartisan media watchdog NewsGuard, argued in a 2020 Washington Post op-ed that McGowan was “exploiting the widespread loss of local journalism to create and disseminate something we really don’t need: hyperlocal partisan propaganda.”

Murphy stands to benefit from his new lover’s ties to Democratic billionaires. Powell Jobs, who owns a majority stake in the Atlantic through her investment firm Emerson Collective, has extensively supported McGowan’s activist ventures, including the for-profit media company Good Information, Inc., which launched in 2021 to “counter the right’s disinformation machine.” Soros was a major investor, as was LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, a former associate of the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Murphy insists he is not interested in running for president in 2028. That’s probably a lie. If he does end up running, he will almost certainly lose on account of his obnoxious personality. “Murphy … is not exactly charismatic; he is cerebral and serious,” the New York Times wrote in an otherwise friendly profile last month. “At times, [he] can sound like a high school history teacher giving a civics lesson.”

Murphy is best known for vigorously defending Biden in February 2024 after the release of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, which argued the president was unlikely to be convicted by a jury for mishandling classified documents because he would come across as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Murphy insisted Biden was “ready” for the reelection campaign several months before Biden dropped out of the race. “There are literally thousands of people alive in this nation today because Joe Biden is incredibly competent, and he’s incredibly effective,” said Murphy, who now joins the esteemed ranks of prominent Democrats who ended their marriages under problematic circumstances.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), a member of the left-wing “Squad,” famously destroyed two marriages after allegedly having an affair with her married political consultant, Tim Mynett, whose firm raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Omar’s campaign. In 2016, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.), who was elected to the Senate in 2024, filed for divorce from his wife when she was nine months pregnant and “likely to give birth any day.” Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner ended his marriage to Hillary Clinton’s longtime servant, Huma Abedin, after repeatedly sending photos of his genitals to teenagers. Abedin was recently engaged to Alex Soros, the son of billionaire George Soros.

The post Lust for Power: Dem Senator Chris Murphy Ditches Wife for Soros-Funded ‘Soap Opera Villainess’ Tara McGowan appeared first on .

Harvard University announced Monday that it is implementing a hiring freeze as the Trump administration threatens to withhold federal funding over the Ivy League school’s response to anti-Semitic protests on campus.

“Effective immediately, Harvard will implement a temporary pause on staff and faculty hiring across the University,” school leaders wrote in an internal message, citing “substantial financial uncertainties driven by rapidly shifting federal policies.”

The hiring pause comes as the Trump administration scrutinizes 10 universities, including Harvard, over their handling of anti-Semitic campus protests, which have spiked since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The administration’s anti-Semitism task force on Friday canceled $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University for failing to curb anti-Semitic incidents.

Harvard leaders said the hiring freeze “is meant to preserve our financial flexibility” as they navigate the Trump administration’s policies.

The university is also instructing administrative leaders to “scrutinize discretionary and non-salary spending, reassess the scope and timing of capital renewal projects, and conduct a rigorous review of any new multi-year commitments,” according to the Monday message.

Harvard and Columbia have drawn significant backlash from lawmakers and donors over their repeated failures to address rising anti-Semitism on campus. The public outrage led to the resignations of both Harvard president Claudine Gay and Columbia president Minouche Shafik.

The post Harvard Announces Hiring Freeze as Trump Admin Threatens Funding Cuts Over Campus Anti-Semitism appeared first on .

A Washington, D.C., maintenance crew began dismantling Black Lives Matter Plaza, which will be replaced with a project celebrating America’s 250th anniversary that includes artwork by local artists.

The move comes after House Republicans pressured Mayor Muriel Bowser (D.) to remove the plaza, which features bold yellow lettering spelling “BLACK LIVES MATTER” near the White House, as part of their goal to reduce “partisan abuses.”

“The House Oversight Committee and the Trump Administration are working on delivering a number of reforms to make our nation’s capital safe and end left-wing pet projects,” the panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), told the New York Post. “This includes addressing partisan abuses by the District government such as Black Lives Matter Plaza.”

Following the announcement, Bowser signaled that she would comply.

“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” Bowser posted to X on March 4.

The plaza was created overnight in June 2020 amid that summer’s destructive riots. In October 2021, Bowser “cemented” it “into permanence.”

“When we created Black Lives Matter Plaza in June 2020, we sent a strong message that Black Lives Matter, and that power has always been and always will be with well-meaning people,” she said in a statement. “Today, we have transformed the mural into a monument.”

The announcement noted that the project cost $4.8 million and that other additions, such as reconstructed sidewalks and benches, would come from a $3 million investment. Documents show that the additional funding came from federal COVID-19 aid money.

Anti-abortion groups sued the city in 2021 after two protesters were arrested for writing “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a public sidewalk during an August 2020 demonstration. They argued that they received unfair punishment given that Black Lives Matter protesters who defaced public spaces were not also held accountable.

A federal appeals court agreed in August 2023, ruling that the D.C. government “discriminated on the basis of viewpoint in the selective enforcement of its defacement ordinance” and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

The post WATCH: DC Crew Begins Dismantling Black Lives Matter Plaza appeared first on .

Harvard University has fired an employee who was caught ripping down posters of the Bibas children, who were taken hostage by Hamas during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and later murdered by the terrorist group.

Jonathan Tuttle, formerly a cataloger of published materials at the university’s Radcliffe Institute, was filmed removing the posters during a Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine rally on March 3. The posters featured the faces of nine-month-old Kfir Bibas and four-year-old Ariel Bibas, the youngest hostages Hamas took during its October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. The Bibas children and their mother, Shiri Bibas, were later killed in Hamas captivity.

Tuttle’s dismissal, first reported by the Harvard Crimson, comes as the Trump administration investigates Harvard and nine other universities over their response to anti-Semitic protests on campus, which have spiked since the October 7 attack. The administration’s anti-Semitism task force on Friday revoked around $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia University for failing to curb anti-Semitic incidents.

Tuttle did not respond to the Crimson‘s request for comment.

Radcliffe Institute dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin condemned Tuttle’s actions, saying they are in violation of Harvard’s policies and not protected under the First Amendment.

“Disruptive behaviors—including property destruction or defacement and acts of vandalism that seek to suppress or censor the speech of others—are not protected speech,” Brown-Nagin wrote in a letter to Radcliffe affiliates. “They are behaviors that constitute misconduct; they violate multiple Harvard and Radcliffe rules and may also be punished under criminal law.”

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The Trump administration has transformed the Biden-era “CBP One” app, which allowed migrants to apply for asylum in the United States from their home countries, into “CBP Home,” a platform aimed at streamlining the self-deportation of illegal immigrants.

CBP Home will automatically replace CBP One on users’ devices, and the Department of Homeland Security can use CBP One registrations to track migrants. Those opting to self-deport can submit their biographical details—including citizenship, intended departure country, contact information, and a photo for identity verification—to Customs and Border Protection, according to Fox News’s Bill Melugin.

The move marks a major shift in policy. The Biden administration used CBP One to process migrants at ports of entry, facilitating their asylum requests and parole into the United States. By the end of Joe Biden’s term, around one million migrants had entered the country through the app, the Washington Free Beacon reported. President Donald Trump ended the program on his first day back in office.

“The CBP Home app gives aliens the option to leave now and self-deport, so they may still have the opportunity to return legally in the future and live the American dream,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said in a statement to Fox News.

“If they don’t, we will find them, we will deport them, and they will never return,” Noem warned, noting that the new platform is “restoring integrity to our immigration system.”

Self-deportation significantly reduces costs for federal immigration authorities, freeing up resources to focus on removing criminal aliens, according to the DHS.

Trump has ramped up immigration enforcement since returning to the White House. Migrant encounters at the southern border have dropped to the lowest level since 2017. A total of 42,048 illegal migrants were removed from the United States between January 21 and February 18, according to Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen.

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Last May, Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil said his status as a foreign national made him “nervous” to participate in the encampment that roiled campus. 

“Since the beginning, I decided to stay out of the public eye and away from media attention or high-risk activities,” he told Al Jazeera. He apparently did not consider blabbing to Qatar’s media mouthpiece either media attention or a high-risk activity. Oops.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked Khalil’s visa—he is a Syrian national, according to ICE—and sent immigration enforcement officials to detain him. When Khalil’s attorney said Khalil had received a green card, one of the officials told the attorney the State Department had revoked that as well. A senior State Department official told us Rubio pulled both the visa and green card.

The arrest, which came to light on Sunday, is the first high-profile action under Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” effort targeting foreign Hamasniks causing trouble on college campuses. Khalil became one of the Columbia encampment’s public faces last spring when he led negotiations with administrators and demanded they divest from Israel. Columbia suspended him shortly thereafter before dropping the disciplinary charges. Khalil pledged to secure Israeli divestment by “any available means necessary” and participated in Wednesday’s occupation of the Barnard library.

“This should serve as a warning to foreign students on temporary status in America—under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you,” a senior State Department official told us. Rubio issued a similar statement, saying he will “be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

If that seems hyperbolic, it’s not: The Columbia University Apartheid Divest group Khalil belongs to commemorated the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7 by endorsing Hamas’s “armed resistance,” lauding the “Al-Aqsa Flood” as a “moral, military and political victory,” and quoting the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

READ MORE: Columbia Student Activist in ICE Custody After Trump Admin Revokes Visa

As the Trump administration takes aim at DEI in higher education, it may have a new target: Northwestern’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH).

Founded in 2015 as “the first university-wide institute in the country focused exclusively on research to improve the health of the sexual and gender minority community,” the institute received a $1.3 million grant from Joe Biden’s NIH in 2022. At the same time, it “hosted a summer program for graduate scholars that it offered only to ‘Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and also sexual and gender minorities,” our Lexi Boccuzzi reports.

Beyond attracting the administration’s ire—the grant is active through 2027, and roughly half of the funds are yet to be distributed—the program’s racial and sexual requirements could prompt legal challenges. “Similar racial restrictions for a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Vermont prompted the school to pull the job posting amid threats from attorneys,” writes Boccuzzi. “Northwestern appears to have made a similar move—sometime between September and January, the ISGMH amended the webpage for its summer program to remove references to race, gender, and sexual orientation, archives of the site show.”

READ MORE: At Northwestern, NIH Grant Funds Gender Institute That Hosted ‘BIPOC’-Only Academic Program

Speaking of DEI, one of the Biden EPA’s first moves was the creation of an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that empowered staffers to establish equity workgroups. The result, internal agency documents and communications obtained by our Thomas Catenacci show, was the repeated use of taxpayer dollars to “de-gender” bathroom and police pronoun use.

The EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, for example, unveiled its “priority actions” during a 2023 presentation. They included the implementation of all-gender bathroom and locker rooms, the addition of “gender pronouns” in internal communications, and the adoption of a “style manual requirement for gendered honorifics in Agency Correspondence,” according to slides from the presentation.

“And the group achieved many of its objectives,” writes Catenacci. “Across the EPA’s 118 facilities, the group said the agency’s number of gender-neutral restrooms and gender-neutral locker rooms swelled to 140 and 15, respectively, as a result of its work. The Biden EPA also committed to constructing all-gender restrooms in future building renovations.”

“The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration”—efforts that “likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.”

READ MORE: Biden EPA Officials Used Government Time To ‘De-Gender’ Bathrooms and Police Pronoun Use, Internal Docs Show

Away from the Beacon:

• Israel announced it would cut off its supply of electricity to Gaza, furthering its plans—first reportedby the Free Beacon—to cut off aid and “eradicate Hamas.”
• Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D., Mich.) went on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday and things got awkward when she was pressed about boys competing in girls’ sports: “For me though, I think this issue is being brought up in order to make sparks and see sparks fly,” she said, declining to say whether she supported or opposed boys competing against girls.
• Sixty-five percent of U.S. voters agree that “no one has any idea what the Democratic Party stands for, other than opposing Donald Trump,” according to Democratic pollster Blueprint.
• Gov. Tim Walz (D.) said he and Kamala “played it too safe last year” and should have “just rolled the dice and done the town halls.” More Walz—that would’ve done the trick.

The post Trump Moves To Deport Columbia Hamasnik appeared first on .

Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency employees spent work hours implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the agency—focusing in particular on “de-gendering” bathrooms, hiring more gay and transgender employees, and introducing new gender-neutral honorifics such as “Mx.,” according to internal agency documents and communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Under the leadership of then-EPA administrator Michael Regan, in 2021, the agency created an employee-led “DEIA implementation team” that was empowered to establish workgroups and take DEI-related actions. The goal, according to the Biden EPA, was to “embed” DEI agency-wide, create “cultural change,” and establish the agency as a DEI model for the entire federal government.

The EPA documents—which were first obtained by the watchdog group Functional Government Initiative and shared with the Free Beacon—show the EPA’s DEI initiatives were largely coordinated by its LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, which reported to senior leadership. The workgroup’s members included a scientist, environmental protection specialist, engineer, plant pathologist, climate policy analyst, attorney adviser, and research ethicist among others.

The documents are the latest evidence of how ingrained DEI efforts were at the EPA and across the entire Biden administration. President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign took aim at such efforts and, on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order dismantling all existing taxpayer-funded DEI initiatives and DEI offices. “The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination,” the order stated.

The agency’s DEI initiatives likely cost taxpayers millions of dollars in man-hours. The average EPA employee’s annual salary is $102,489, 42.9 percent higher than the national average for government employees, while officials known to have been involved in the initiatives were paid as much as $168,400, according to Open Payrolls.

“In the Biden years, Americans endured crisis after crisis, many of them—rampant illegal immigration, draconian COVID-19 measures, and skyrocketing fuel costs—of the president’s own making,” the Functional Government Initiative told the Free Beacon. “What was the administration instead focused on? A phony crisis of inequity, racism, and ‘transphobia,’ which could only be met by wasting vast resources on un-American, divisive initiatives.”

“Unfortunately, the EPA wasn’t alone: the rot grew across the federal government with the encouragement of the administration,” it added. “This was not presidential leadership, but rather government dysfunction.”

The EPA’s LGBTQIA+ Workgroup, meanwhile, outlined its DEI-related activities during a summit in September 2023 hosted by the left-wing group Out and Equal.

According to slides of its presentation reviewed by the Free Beacon, the group’s top recommendations for the EPA were to “de-gender” restroom and locker room access, increase participation in voluntary self-disclosure of sexual orientation and gender identity, incorporate LGBTQIA+ prospective employees into recruiting activities, add gender pronouns on email signatures, and change internal style manual requirements for gendered honorifics.

The workgroup noted in the presentation that it met weekly to craft its recommendations and that it informed EPA leaders in 2023 that it would not sunset as originally planned, and would continue meeting.

And the group achieved many of its objectives: Across the EPA’s 118 facilities, the group said the agency’s number of gender-neutral restrooms and gender-neutral locker rooms swelled to 140 and 15, respectively, as a result of its work. The Biden EPA also committed to constructing all-gender restrooms in future building renovations, continuing to retrofit existing restrooms, and replacing male/female signage on existing single-use restrooms with signs that are more inclusive.

The EPA workgroup added that, if it felt internal resistance to the changes, it would “educate contractors and EPA employees on why these changes are needed.”

In addition, because of the workgroup’s advocacy, the EPA added pronouns to emails, targeted specific offices where people were “misgendered” with expanded trainings, and issued an October 2023 memorandum authored by then-deputy administrator Janet McCabe allowing employees to select their preferred honorifics such as “Mx.” instead of “Mr.” or “Mrs.”

“This update also includes some very important improvements that will help advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in our writing,” McCabe wrote in the memorandum.

Since Trump took office, however, the EPA has gutted DEI and related environmental justice activities. Administrator Lee Zeldin, for example, has announced that the agency has canceled millions of dollars in DEI spending and placed 171 DEI and environmental justice employees on administrative leave.

“The previous Administration used DEI and environmental justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity. This ends now,” Zeldin said last month. “We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”

The post Biden EPA Officials Spent Time ‘De-Gendering’ Bathrooms and Policing Pronoun Use, Internal Docs Show appeared first on .

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who served as lead negotiator for the student group behind the illegal encampments that plagued campus last spring, is in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after the Trump administration revoked his student visa, a senior State Department official confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon.

Khalil’s attorney said federal immigration authorities detained Khalil on Saturday night at his university-owned apartment in execution of a State Department order to revoke his student visa. A public ICE database lists Khalil as being held in an Elizabeth, N.J., detention center. A senior State Department official confirmed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed the visa revocation.

“This should serve as a warning to foreign students on temporary status in America—under this administration, if you support terror groups, we will deport you,” the official told the Free Beacon.

Khalil was one of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student leaders who organized the encampments. He led negotiations with the school as they unfolded, demanding divestment from Israel. Khalil pledged further unrest in the buildup to the spring semester, telling the Hill he would continue to push Columbia to divest from Israel by “any available means necessary.”

“And we’ve been working all this summer on our plans, on what’s next to pressure Columbia to listen to the students and to decide to be on the right side of history,” Khalil said. “We’re considering a wide range of actions throughout the semester, encampments and protests and all of that. But for us, encampment is now our new base.”

Khalil has openly discussed his student visa status and his upbringing in Syria, including in an interview with Qatar-funded network Al Jazeera.

Columbia issued a statement on Sunday that did not directly address Khalil’s detention and instead referenced “reports of ICE around campus.”

“Consistent with our longstanding practice and the practice of cities and institutions throughout the country, law enforcement must have a judicial warrant to enter non-public University areas, including University buildings,” the statement read. “Columbia is committed to complying with all legal obligations and supporting our student body and campus community.”

The news comes amid a flurry of actions from the Trump administration to deport pro-Hamas visa holders, something President Donald Trump promised to do on the campaign trail. In his second week in office, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to investigate and deport anti-Semitic resident aliens, including those on visas, who have violated U.S. law.

The State Department revoked the visa of a university student for the first time on Thursday, citing the individual’s prior involvement in criminal activity tied to Hamas-supporting campus disruptions. Khalil’s arrest came two days later and does not come as a surprise—the encampment negotiator was included on a shortlist of pro-Hamas student visa holders that anti-Semitism watchdog group Betar USA presented to the administration, the Free Beacon reported last month.

On Friday, meanwhile, Trump’s newly formed task force to combat anti-Semitism announced it had revoked approximately $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia over its failure to curb anti-Semitism in the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel. Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, issued a statement that acknowledged Columbia’s “failures and shortcomings” and pledged to work with Trump administration officials “to address their legitimate concerns.”

“Columbia is taking the government’s action very seriously. I want to assure the entire Columbia community that we are committed to working with the federal government to address their legitimate concerns,” Armstrong wrote. “To that end, Columbia can, and will, continue to take serious action toward combatting antisemitism on our campus.”

Two days earlier, Columbia student radicals stormed a Barnard College campus building for the second time in a week. During the first storming, they sent a security guard to the hospital and caused $30,000 in damages. On the second occasion, the agitators distributed Hamas propaganda meant to justify Oct. 7. Within hours of the Trump administration’s funding cut announcement, Columbia suspended its four students who had been arrested while clashing with police during the more recent incident.

The administration appears likely to pull more taxpayer funds from Columbia. The anti-Semitism task force is actively probing $5 billion worth of Columbia’s grants and contracts over the Ivy League institution’s “apparent failure” to protect Jewish students.

The post Columbia Encampment Negotiator in ICE Custody After Trump Admin Revokes His Student Visa, State Department Official Confirms appeared first on .

The Lenten season has begun, which for Catholics is a time of prayer, fasting, and abstinence. A friend suggested I give up alcohol for Lent. And maybe I can give up breathing too. I jest—people have given up far more and for a lot longer. 

Which brings me to Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik, who reviews Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig by Jordan D. Rosenblum.

“In a relatively concise work, Rosenblum takes us on a comprehensive tour, from classical sources to modern literature and movies. (Disappointingly, while Plutrach receives his due, The Simpsons is not a pop culture source cited by Rosenblum—not even a scene known to fans featuring a group styled ‘The Rapping Rabbis’ chanting, ‘Don’t eat pork/not even with a fork/can’t touch this!’) The historian introduces the reader to a veritable smorgasbord of sources that is a bona fide intellectual feast. And yet: As the book reached the modern era, Rosenblum appears to valorize, or celebrate, Jews who have embraced the tabooed animal whole hog, and who defend themselves in Judaic terms. It is here that I lose my appetite for his argument.

“Let us begin with the culinary conundrum. As described in the Bible, any number of creatures are designated as forbidden food to God’s covenant people. A kosher animal must both chew its cud and feature split hooves; this, Leviticus further explains, would prohibit creatures that have have only one of these signs (a camel is a ruminant but has no real hooves, and a pig has split hooves but is not a ruminant). Kosher fish must feature fins and scales, thereby forbidding shellfish, as well as other marine life such as shark and catfish. Nothing in sacred Scripture singles out the pig as especially forbidden, and a Jew who eats shrimp is violating Torah law as severely as one who ingests pork. Thus, there is no source in the biblical period that marks the pig as an animal that is particularly repugnant. Why, then, is abstention from pork so affiliated with Jewishness?

“The answer, Rosenblum shows, lies in history. It was only during the Second Temple period, Rosenblum notes, that the Jews became particularly known by Gentiles for their refusal to eat pork, while Jews, in turn, began to see pork as forbidden food par excellence. This began, he shows, during the persecution of Judea by the Syrio-Greek Seleucid Empire, in which the Maccabean revolt, and the story of Hanukkah, ultimately unfolded. Stories of Jewish martyrdom, described in the second Book of Maccabees, described Jews who refused to ingest pork on pain of death. Thus, for Rosenblum, ‘the particular role the pig plays in Second Temple martyrdom narratives directly leads to its outsized historical influence.’ Meanwhile, the fact that Jews refrained from enjoying what was, in Simpsonian terms, a ‘wonderful, magical, animal,’ attracted the attention and the curiosity of pagans, either because Jews were known for abhorring the animal, or because it was so strange to Romans that Jews would deny themselves this particular pleasure.

“Eventually, as Rosenblum recounts, the rabbis returned the favor by utilizing the pig as a scripturally inspired metaphor for Rome itself. Because the pig was the one animal in the ancient world that featured the more noticeable kosher sign, split hooves, but still lacked the required rumination, the Talmud depicted the animal as an embodiment of hypocrisy, and therefore comparable to the abhorrent world power that had destroyed Judean Jerusalem and turned it into a pagan city: ‘Just as the pig, when it lays down puts forth its hooves as if to say “I am clean,” so too does this Evil Empire commit robbery and violence [while] giving itself the appearance as if holding court.'”

You can always count on Peggy Noonan to bring home the bacon in her weekly Wall Street Journal column. The former Reagan speechwriter recently published a collection of essays, A Certain Idea of America: Selected Writings. Noah Gould gives us a review.

“Noonan makes arguments most compellingly by example. As in the enduring speech in response to the Challenger explosion, which she wrote for Reagan, Noonan references great men of history and poetry to help make sense of larger issues. The Challenger explosion was not an isolated moment of time, but 390 years after ‘the great explorer Sir Francis Drake’ died at sea. The comparison places what might otherwise be seen as a random tragic event within the context of the epic history of explorers reaching new horizons.

“Likewise, in this volume, historical touchpoints shed light on issues of today. Ulysses S. Grant getting arrested by a policeman instructs on the rule of law and decency. An interview with Oscar Hammerstein pleads for political restraint among cultural elites. The death of Queen Elizabeth II allows reflection on faith and tradition. Taken together, these discrete examples give a cumulative case of what Noonan values.

“A strong moral voice and clarity on tough issues is often missing in the thousands, maybe tens-of-thousands, of opinion pieces shot back and forth each day in the world of pundits and ‘thought leaders.’ The supply of easy opinion is abundant, but not clear moral reasoning. Noonan provides this repeatedly, avoiding schoolmarmy lectures and reasoning from fundamentals. Her tenure of 20-plus years at the Wall Street Journal in addition to her successes as a speechwriter lend weight to these discussions, although even her early writings contain that moral golden thread. I credit that thread in giving her the ability to cut through the noise on a busy opinion page.

“The crisis we face, Noonan argues, is a ‘fundamental confusion’ about ‘who we are’ as Americans. The little things—how senators dress or empty office buildings—are all details that matter in a much larger sense. She calls Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.) a ‘different kind of phony’ and the atmosphere reveals how Americans ‘insist on preeminence … while increasingly ignoring our responsibilities.’ Empty office buildings reveal an air of ‘post-greatness’ that threatens an America like that shown in an Edward Hopper painting, ’empty streets, tables for one, everyone at the bar drinking alone.'”

Speaking of drinking, have you read the new bio of Earl Weaver? Matt Lewis has. He reviews The Last Manager: How Earl Weaver Tricked, Tormented, and Reinvented Baseball by John W. Miller.

“Any book about Weaver is bound to be packed with stories of his legendary run-ins with umpires. He was the first manager in decades to get ejected from a World Series game, somehow managed to get tossed from both games of a doubleheader—twice—and once was even ejected mid-game for smoking in the dugout. (He subsequently had a secret cigarette pocket sewn into his jersey to skirt the rules.) Miller’s book delivers plenty of these epic umpire battles, but I’ll resist spoiling most of them here.

“Behind the theatrics, however, was a guy who viewed the game differently. While everyone else was obsessed with batting averages, Weaver cared more about on-base percentage and timely home runs. He came to despise the sacrifice bunt (why give away an out?). He turned shortstops into power hitters, moving 6’4” Cal Ripken Jr. from third to short and paving the way for future MLB stars like Derek Jeter. He platooned players before it was cool, squeezing 36 homers and 98 RBIs out of a three-man rotation in left field in 1979. This is to say, he re-created star players ‘in the aggregate.’ Billy Beane and the Moneyball crew should’ve sent him royalty checks.

“Where did this knack for data and analytics come from? Miller suggests it came from his Uncle Bud, a bookie who helped raise him in St. Louis. Whatever the inspiration, Weaver was thinking in probabilities decades before the sabermetric crowd made it standard practice. And he wasn’t just a numbers guy. He was the first manager to use a radar gun. His ingenuity even extended to the field itself. He had the Orioles’ groundskeeper doctor the field—muddying the basepaths to slow fast opponents, and hardening the infield to create tricky hops for bad defenders. It was brilliant, it was petty, and it worked.

“He even helped develop a baseball video game that eventually led to John Madden Football. Think about that: Earl Weaver is at least partially responsible for the most dominant sports video game of all time. Not bad for a guy who looked like he spent his afternoons drinking Pabst Blue Ribbons and screaming at neighborhood kids to stay off his lawn.”

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