NEW:

A seminary affiliated with Columbia University has hired two left-wing, anti-Israel academics who abruptly resigned from Harvard as they faced criticism for their anti-Israel bias and efforts to “dezionize Jewish consciousness,” @jessicaschwalb7 reports. @jessicaschwalb7 Union Theological Seminary announced that Diane Moore and Hussein Rashid, who led Harvard’s Religion and Public Life program, will lead a new program by the same name at UTS aimed at teaching students how religion “can be instrumental in just peacemaking.”

A front-page piece from veteran New York Times White House and national security correspondent David Sanger, long the enforcer of Democratic foreign policy dogma, claims that military action against Iran is “the ultimate war of choice.”

To support that claim, Sanger undercut a major report in the Times from late June (to which he “contributed reporting,” natch) that argued Operation Midnight Hammer failed to seriously set back Iran’s nuclear program.

Back then they claimed the bombing wasn’t successful, that Trump had failed to degrade Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Now, Sanger says Iran posed no imminent threat.

It’s the latest example of the Times’s vast and unwieldy White House team writing contradictory attack articles. @Ira Stoll writes: ⬇️ Sanger writes that Trump “was not driven by an immediate threat. There was no race for a bomb. Iran is further from the capability to build a nuclear weapon today than it has been in several years, thanks largely to the success of the president’s previous strike on Iranian nuclear enrichment sites, in June.”

NEW:

Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett repeatedly visited Jeffrey Epstein at the St. Thomas-based office he used to run a massive tax-fraud scheme against the Virgin Islands government, raising fresh questions as the Democrat reportedly eyes a run for governor of the territory. Emails and court filings reviewed by @ChuckRossDC show that Plaskett met Epstein at the office of the “Southern Trust Company” in August 2014, January 2019, and May 2019—just two months before Epstein was charged with trafficking dozens of underage girls for sex.

NEW:

How did disgraced Penn president Liz Magill—ousted after she laid a stink bomb in a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism—land on her feet as Georgetown Law School’s next dean?

The search committee that selected her was dominated by Democratic donors who have collectively contributed nearly $80,000 to left-wing candidates and causes, as well as by academics who study race and gender, @CAndersonMO reports. Eleven of the 14 committee members have donated to Democrats at the federal level.

Seven of them gave to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, including committee chairwoman and law professor Eloise Pasachoff. Joel Hellman, dean of Georgetown’s notoriously anti-Israel School of Foreign Service, gave to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, as did Associate Vice President Alison Spada.

NEW:

A senior Biden administration official who helped create the Department of Homeland Security’s controversial Disinformation Governance Board has been appointed to advise the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a move that is drawing sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers. The presiding judges of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review appointed Jennifer Daskal as an amicus curiae on Feb. 1.

It’s a role that allows her to advise judges on legal issues tied to foreign surveillance warrants in sensitive national security cases.

NEW:

Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper agreed to fast-track the release of 3,500 inmates as part of a racial equity settlement with the NAACP—and the list included 51 convicts serving life sentences for murder or rape, @AndrewKerrNC reports.
@AndrewKerrNC The “early release” list, obtained by Cox’s WSOC-TV as Cooper campaigns for the state’s open Senate seat, came as part of a 2021 settlement with the NAACP, which sued the state over crowded prisons during the pandemic.

NEW:

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick to run the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene comes with a controversial political résumé:

Alister Martin, the city’s new health czar, founded Vot-ER, a left-wing nonprofit that promotes voter registration in psychiatric hospitals where patients are being treated for schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, and severe addiction, @aaronsibarium reports. Some of those patients were involuntarily committed, raising serious questions about consent and the politicization of clinical care.

NEW:

When the mother of a black Texas middle schooler claimed in 2021 that a group of white students made her son drink urine, media outlets from NBC to CNN and ABC covered the story.

“Texas authorities investigating allegations of racism and bullying of a 13-year-old by his classmates during sleepover,” a CNN headline blared.

Nearly five years later, we’re learning it was a giant hoax. None of the outlets that covered the case have written follow-up stories despite the lurid (and defamatory) nature of the allegations, which included not just the urine but also that the boy was shot with a BB gun and called racial slurs. Last month, a Texas district court judge in Collin County, in suburban Dallas, ordered the “victim’s” mother, Summer Smith, and her attorney, Kim Cole, to pay $3.2 million in damages to the white student they accused of bullying. A racially diverse jury ruled that they cooked up the allegations to raise their profiles and rake in nearly $120,000 in GoFundMe donations at the height of the BLM hysteria.

WATCH:

Amherst College, founded over two centuries ago to prepare young Christian men for the ministry, has become a hotbed of administratively sanctioned sex performances and "sexual skills" programs, with a focus on "queer" and transgender students and on free-sex practices such as polyamory.

The graphic nature of school-sanctioned sex events has made many current Amherst students deeply uncomfortable, according to students who spoke to the Free Beacon. Every year, first-year students are instructed, as a part of orientation, to attend an event—dubbed "Voices of the Class"—in which they are familiarized with Amherst’s "code of conduct" through a theatrical performance scripted using out-of-context excerpts from their own admissions essays. An entire section of the performance is dedicated just to sex.

YES, ILHAN OMAR MARRIED HER BROTHER:

President Trump has drawn Rep. Ilhan Omar into his commentary on the vast fraud perpetrated by dozens of Somali immigrants in Minnesota, charging that the Somali-born congresswoman “does nothing but bitch” and “married her brother” to get into the country.

“Trump may have garbled the specifics, but he got the upshot of the story right,” says Scott Johnson, the OG reporter on the Omar marriage story, which dates back to 2016.

Johnson has been covering the sordid saga for Power Line, the Minnesota-based website he cofounded. Sources say Omar married her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, in an effort to extract him from a gay lifestyle in London, where he had been granted asylum.

EXCLUSIVE:

Maryland governor Wes Moore has a sparkling résumé that has made him a prospective 2028 presidential candidate. He’s a football player, a Rhodes scholar, and an Army veteran.

His political career began in 2006 when he won a prestigious White House fellowship. In his application, he said he earned a master’s degree from Oxford and described himself as a “foremost expert” on radical Islam.

Just one hitch.

Moore said in his application for the fellowship that he earned his master’s degree in 2003 and then, elsewhere in the application, that he earned it in 2004. Oxford says it was 2005, when Moore says he was serving in the 82nd Airborne Division in Khost, Afghanistan.
Beyond that, Moore’s thesis is nowhere to be found and there’s no evidence he was ever a doctoral student, @AndrewKerrNC exclusively reports. Oxford administrators told Kerr they couldn’t find “any trace” of Moore’s thesis because he “has not submitted” it to the library, and Moore’s office declined to provide a copy.

A former CNN producer is now a registered foreign agent for the Qatar Foundation.

Her job is to boost the regime’s profile in the American press. The revelation comes as CNN deepens its financial and editorial ties to Doha. Federal disclosures show that Monika Plocienniczak, who spent five years at CNN, registered in late 2023 to “elevate and promote” the Qatar Foundation with U.S. media.

WATCH:

Revoking deportation protections for Somali fraudsters who siphon U.S. taxpayer funds, some of which land in the hands of foreign terrorists? That’s an “Israel first” policy, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

CAIR held a press conference Monday and savaged President Donald Trump’s decision to rescind Temporary Protected Status for Somali migrants in Minnesota. The group’s top official in the state, Jaylani Hussein, decried the move as an “Israeli-first public campaign targeting a very vulnerable community—the Somali-American community—and a very vulnerable congresswoman—Ilhan Omar—as an effort to try to win back the many young Americans who believe that America should not be getting into wars for other countries.”

NEW:

New York University’s Federalist Society chapter wanted to hold an event on Oct. 7 with the conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, a critic of anti-Israel protesters and the university administrators who have coddled them.

But NYU axed the event because administrators feared that protesters would disrupt it. On September 10th, emails show, NYU asked leaders of the school’s FedSoc chapter to change the date of the event and hold it in a basement space with added security, citing “an increased likelihood of demonstrations and protests connected to the anniversary of the October 7, 2023, incidents in Gaza.”

CHECKING IN ON POLITICO:

As a master's student at Northwestern University's esteemed journalism school in 2020, Cheyanne Daniels tweeted that she cried when President Donald Trump was elected four years earlier because she knew "horrible things were to come."

She now covers the Trump presidency for Politico. In a separate social media post in Nov. 2020, Daniels—a former “race and politics reporter” for The Hill—said Trump believes black women’s lives don’t matter and that they “threaten the purity of white power.”

NEW:

"On-the-ground detail," "academic credibility," "global visibility."

That’s how leading AI chatbots describe reporting from Al Jazeera, the virulently anti-Israel news outlet controlled by the state of Qatar that has emerged as a top source in AI-generated news summaries on Israel, Gaza, and the wider Middle East. OpenAI's Chat GPT, Google Gemini, X's Grok, and Perplexity AI all list Al Jazeera as one of their most "reliable" sources on the topic.

WATCH:

The Jewish Voice for Peace chapters at Georgetown University, George Washington University, and American University are rebranding as the Anti-Zionist Jewish Student Front, a new group promising to be even more aggressive. It swears allegiance to the Palestine Liberation Organization's terrorist creed, which demands a "right to resistance.”

EXCLUSIVE:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating social media posts by at least seven different accounts that appeared to indicate foreknowledge of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, according to three people familiar with the investigation and screenshots obtained by the Free Beacon. The posts—one of which referenced the date of Kirk’s assassination, September 10, more than a month before it took place—were all deleted in the days following the killing.

RECEIPTS:

Earlier this year, Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) complained to Business Insider she's been the subject of a "coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign" claiming she's worth millions of dollars. "Maybe try checking my public financial statements," she said, "and you will see I barely have thousands let alone millions."

The Free Beacon did check Omar's latest disclosure. It shows Omar and her husband, Tim Mynett, are worth at least $6 million and as much as $30 million.
Their wealth is derived almost entirely from the value of Mynett’s ownership stake in his two companies that, together, were worth no more than $51,000 at the end of 2023.

NEW: Both Pfizer and Amazon earned perfect scores on the 2021 Corporate Equality Index, which rates how well companies treat their LGBT employees.

That same year, the companies gave at least $1 million to a nonprofit that brings U.S. officials to Qatar, "a country that criminalizes same-sex relations, bans displays of the pride flag, and has tortured LGBT people."
That money went to the Attorney General Alliance (AGA), a "bipartisan forum" for state attorneys general. Bankrolled largely by top corporations, the group pays for AGs to go on foreign trips with lobbyists from the companies they regulate.

REPORT: A government-subsidized grocery store in Kansas City is on the brink of closure amid spiraling crime, plummeting sales, and empty shelves.

Zohran Mamdani—the frontrunner in New York City's mayoral election following his upset Democratic primary win over former governor Andrew Cuomo—has campaigned on opening similar supermarkets in the Big Apple. KC Sun Fresh, which opened in 2018 inside a city-owned strip mall and was taken over by a nonprofit in 2022, is struggling to deal with spiraling crime, plummeting sales, and empty shelves, according to the Washington Post.