Here’s how.

The little-known Clery Act requires universities with private police departments to post criminal reports within 48 hours on a blotter and maintain accurate annual crime statistics. Colleges must record significant criminal incidents, as well as lesser crimes, such as intimidation and vandalism, when ethnic or religious identity was a motivating factor. Every violation of this law can cost a university about $70,000.

Even before the encampment, evidence of Northwestern’s noncompliance with the Clery Act was evident.

Here’s an easy case study. In November 2023, a group of anti-Israel protesters at its law school paraded around with “From the river to the sea” signs. After a Jewish student began filming, a protester pushed her in the back. The Jewish student filed a report of the assault to Northwestern’s police department. They recorded it as harassment, not assault. There’s $70,000.

Here’s another, more interesting example. The Clery Act also requires universities to publish annual statistics of religiously motivated hate crimes on campus and maintain three years of records for inspection. In November 2022, a Jewish student wrote an op-ed titled “I am more proud of my Jewish identity than anyone can ever hate me for it.” Anonymous vandals printed and glued together 42 copies of the op-ed and posted it on a fence overlaid with “From the river to the sea” in big red letters. Northwestern reported no incidents of antisemitic vandalism from that year.

There’s another $70,000. Or … more? 

The answer would depend on how aggressive Department of Education bureaucrats decide to get. Under a Trump administration, they could, perhaps, count each printed page as an incident and then hit the university not only for failing to log it in the blotter but failing to report it in the annual statistics twice over. Liability from this solitary incident could theoretically run to nearly $9 million.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Rigorous enforcement of the Clery Act in this case could count every single reported antisemitic poster, every single reported antisemitic chant, and every single reported physical blockade or intimidating posture as a lesser criminal offense motivated by ethnic or religious identity. 

And, of course, the Department of Education need not confine their Clery inquiry to recent student encampments. At least 50 former Northwestern football players have sued the school, alleging racial and sexual abuse; the school recently settled a lawsuit with a former cheerleader after a court accepted her allegations of sex trafficking. Who knows what else has been happening in its athletic programs … or dorm rooms?

The higher-ed industrial complex and the media would likely decry the “weaponization” of the Clery Act. But the next Republican administration would only be extending the precedent and practice established by President Joe Biden.

Last month, for example, the Biden administration forced Liberty University to settle for an unprecedented $14 million after a Clery investigation into improperly reported instances of sexual assault. If you believe Liberty is truly the only college in America with a severely sanctionable problem on this front, I have a bridge to sell you. If you’re not in the market for a new bridge, you’ll easily infer that team Biden went after Liberty because they associate the school with their political enemies.

Would a Trump administration let Liberty’s record stand when it could get twice that from Northwestern alone? 

In Trump’s last term, he ran and operated on a mandate to stop federal overreach in education. Judging by his recent campaign statements and policy proposals, Trump is running and will govern on a mandate to overreach from the right. These investigations and sanctions would be pure political gold for a President Trump.

Northwestern President Michael Schill and his team likely do not expect anything of the sort. They may have seen the growing calls to defund colleges for Title VI violations and concluded that they’re just hot air. They might think that even Trump wouldn’t push that nuclear button. Well, maybe he would! But he wouldn’t even have to.

Clery gives the next Republican administration a massive cruise missile arsenal to throw colleges into precisely as much financial disarray as the next secretary of education dictates.

Right now, Schill and his spineless counterparts at 50-some other colleges are apparently more scared of spoiled, privileged, sniveling children who call them racist. Come November, they may have far more costly problems on their hands.

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Max Eden is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Well aware that President Joe Biden’s disastrous policies have inflicted incalculable damage on the United States, that he is incapable of speaking without the aid of a teleprompter, and that his spavined physique screams weakness, party leaders made a calculated decision to use lawfare to defeat former President Donald Trump. 

They contorted the law to set a legal trap for Trump in the belief that if he is convicted of a crime, he will lose the election. He is facing 88 felony charges in two federal indictments as well as state indictments in New York and Georgia. But as the lack of substance and the legal flaws in these cases become more and more apparent to voters, they are being seen for what they are: a desperate attempt to destroy a political opponent by a party that has collectively lost all sense of decency. 

In short, their strategy appears to be backfiring — spectacularly. The Electoral College map tells the story. 

Although Trump leads Biden by a modest 1.1% in the RealClearPolitics average of head-to-head matchups and by 2.7% in five-way polls, he is ahead by an average of 3.6% in the seven battleground states. And his average lead extends beyond the margin of error in four of those states: in Arizona by plus 5.2%, Georgia by plus 4.2%, Nevada by plus 6.2%, and North Carolina by plus 5.4%. While Trump’s leads are less impressive in Michigan (plus 0.8%), Pennsylvania (2.0%), and Wisconsin (0.6%), he is nevertheless ahead, a position that eluded him throughout the 2016 and 2020 election cycles.

RealClearPolitics has assigned all “safe,” “likely” and “lean” Democratic states (and their electoral votes) to Biden, which leaves him with a total of 215 electoral votes, and the corresponding Republican states and electoral votes to Trump, bringing his total to 219. 

RealClearPolitics categorized the eight remaining states, which include the seven battlegrounds plus Minnesota (with 10 electoral votes), as well as Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District (with one electoral vote), as toss-ups. The other toss-up states where Trump leads with comfortable margins, Arizona (11 electoral votes), Georgia (16), Nevada (6), and North Carolina (16), brings Trump to 268, two votes shy of the 270 required to win the presidency. This means Trump needs to win just one of the remaining toss-ups to push him over the top: Michigan (15 electoral votes), Minnesota (10), Pennsylvania (19), or Wisconsin (10). 

Except for Minnesota, Trump narrowly won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin by razor-thin margins in 2016 and lost by similarly slim margins in 2020. But there was never a time during either election cycle that Trump was ahead of either Hillary Clinton or Biden in polls of these states.

Six months before the 2020 election, for example, polls showed Biden up by 6 points in Michigan. Biden’s lead in the final RealClearPolitics polling average prior to the election was 4.2% and he won the state by 2.8%, 1.4% lower than expectations. In 2016, the final RealClearPolitics polling average showed Clinton ahead by 3.4%. Trump won by 0.3%, outperforming the polls by 3.7%.

In May 2020, Biden led Trump in Pennsylvania by an average of 5 points, and the final RealClearPolitics polling average before the election was 1.2%. Biden won the state by 1.2%, matching expectations. The final RealClearPolitics average in 2016 showed Clinton winning by 1.9%. Instead, Trump won by 0.7%, finishing 2.6% ahead of the polls.

In Wisconsin, Biden was ahead of Trump by 2.7% in May 2020. On the eve of the election, Biden was up by 6.7% and he won the state by a mere 0.7%. The final 2016 RealClearPolitics average showed Clinton up by 6.5%. Trump won the state by 0.7%. It’s worth noting that each of these races were decided by less than 23,000 votes. 

Except for Pennsylvania in 2020, where the actual result equaled the final RealClearPolitics average, Trump outperformed the polls in each of these contests, as Republicans often do.

And now the latest New York Times-Siena College poll has Trump decisively defeating Biden in five of six battleground states. Trump led by 12 points in Nevada, 10 points in Georgia, by 7 points each in Arizona and Michigan, and by 3 points in Pennsylvania. Biden was ahead by 2 points in Wisconsin. The poll also found that participants trusted Trump over Biden on the economy by a margin of 58% to 38%. 

You may recall the utter lack of enthusiasm that greeted Trump’s campaign launch in November 2022. His announcement came just one week after an election in which the much anticipated red wave had failed to materialize and Trump-endorsed candidates in key Senate and House races had underperformed.

In fact, throughout the first quarter of 2023, Trump’s lead over his nearest competitor in the Republican primary, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), ranged between 14 and 18 points. But as word of New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s April 4 indictment spread, Trump’s lead exploded to 30 points. And it climbed with each new indictment. 

The Democrats believed that Trump’s legal woes would stir up his base and hand him the GOP nomination but that a felony conviction would prevent his victory in the general election. 

Unfortunately for them, the daily images of a former and potential future U.S. president defending himself in a courtroom on bogus charges run contrary to many people’s sense of fairness. Indeed, Trump’s growing strength in the battleground states may be a sign that independent voters are starting to catch on.

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Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner, Power Line, and AFNN, and she is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation Academy. She is a past contributor to RedState, Newsmax, the Western Journal, and Bongino.com. Her articles have appeared on RealClearPolitics, MSN, the Federalist, and many other sites. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

Bureaucrats from the Department of Labor gathered at work earlier this year to protest their “right to work remotely.” And if that isn’t rich enough, the event occurred outside of a federal building named in honor of John F. Kennedy, the president who inspired the nation with his call to public service: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

In President Joe Biden’s backward world, Kennedy’s call has been flipped upside down.

Not even the best-performing federal agency is using 50% of its office space, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

I recently asked Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Small Business Administrator Isabella Guzman about their headquarters’ utilization rates (11% and 9%, respectively, according to GAO) and what they planned to do about it. Their answers were shocking.

Vilsack said not only was GAO wrong, but so was his own employee, who wrote to me calling the Agriculture Department headquarters “a ghost town.” Guzman took the same approach, blaming GAO for saying the Small Business Administration headquarters was basically empty.

Meanwhile, the Public Buildings Reform Board, an independent agency that Congress established to address the government’s excess real estate problem, found what GAO did: These buildings are abandoned.

According to the Public Buildings Reform Board, just 456 employees showed up at Vilsack’s USDA headquarters (which can fit 7,500 employees) on any given day in 2023. 

And it’s not just USDA. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, home of the bubble bath bureaucrat, just 172 people bothered to show up at the agency’s headquarters each day in 2023.

All of this comes in spite of an April 2023 directive from the Office of Management and Budget directing agencies to get their employees back to the office. 

So why are the buildings still empty? Unions.

Federal employee unions have been fighting tooth and nail against returning to work. They’re swamping the Federal Labor Relations Authority, which resolves disputes between agencies and unions, with telework-related grievances, often forcing major agencies such as the DOL and the Federal Aviation Administration to delay their return-to-work plans. I can only hope the FAA inspector, whose job it is to make sure airplane doors don’t fly off midflight, wasn’t inspecting planes remotely.

And it’s not just federal unions. One union representing employees of the city government in Washington, D.C. (itself receiving significant federal subsidies) told reporters it opposed reducing weekly teleworking days from two to one “for several critical reasons, including safety concerns [and] environmental impact.”

Try telling a farmer or a warehouse worker in Iowa that working one more day in the office creates “safety concerns!”

If unions are going to keep working against the public’s interest, it’s time to get serious about taxpayer-funded union time, which allows federal employees to work for their union, not the agency, on the taxpayer’s dime. This is why I successfully passed a law to require all agencies to report their utilization rates, the number of employees in the office, and to give Congress copies of all agreements they’ve struck with federal employee unions related to telework. In addition, I’m working to pass my Taxpayer-Funded Union Time Transparency Act to expose exactly how much of the public’s tax money is subsidizing unions’ fight against returning to work.

Perhaps a new version of Kennedy’s inspiring quote should go something like this: “Do public servants serve the public or themselves?” I know the answer — as do America’s taxpayers.

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Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) is the junior senator from Iowa, the first female combat veteran elected to the Senate, and sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

By taking federal law into his own hands, Bragg is way out of order. What’s more, he has run afoul of a somewhat obscure but vital doctrine created by the Supreme Court specifically to prevent such prosecutorial overreach.

This rule, known as the “primary jurisdiction doctrine,” says that a court should stay or dismiss a claim when it implicates issues within the special competence of a federal administrative agency. In this case, federal campaign finance violations are within the special competence of the FEC, not the Manhattan DA. Thus, the right thing to do is for Bragg to defer to the federal government on statutes it enforces.

The Supreme Court, in first articulating the primary jurisdiction doctrine in 1950, was concerned about state courts invading the authority of the federal government. If a state court instructs a jury about a federal enforcement scheme that was never actually enforced, it not only undermines congressional authority, but also deprives a defendant of the right to have the federal government adjudicate whether a federal statute was violated. Bragg is doing exactly that by circumventing the FEC to go after Trump.

As such, Judge Juan Merchan of the Manhattan Criminal Court should immediately stay the Bragg prosecution and toss this question back to the FEC: Did Trump engage in unlawful contributions? 

If the FEC were to decide that no campaign finance violation occurred, the Manhattan Criminal Court would have to order the Bragg indictment dismissed, for there would be no underlying crime. If the FEC were to determine that Trump did commit campaign finance violations, then it would be up to the Department of Justice to determine whether to indict him in federal court. Only after exhausting the federal process could Bragg get his bite at the apple. 

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Bragg’s case in Manhattan presents a substantial risk. An individual, let alone a former president, could be convicted for an underlying federal crime that the FEC might conclude was anything but. The Bragg case threatens due process by allowing state prosecutors to enforce federal law without the procedural protections afforded by the federal government. It sends the signal that when Congress passes laws, zealous state prosecutors can enforce them at will without accountability. And if it can happen to a former commander in chief, it can happen to anyone. 

The rule of law demands that the Manhattan Criminal Court stay Bragg’s criminal proceeding and refer the allegation that Trump violated the Federal Election Campaign Act to the FEC. Any alternative is gross injustice.  

Daniel Z. Epstein is an assistant professor of law at St. Thomas University in Miami and vice president of America First Legal. Follow him @DanielZEpstein.

As a result, presidents at institutions such as Rutgers, the University of Minnesota, and Northwestern have decided to cut deals with their protesters instead. The press tends to rosily describe this approach as a win-win “de-escalation,” with higher education “experts” explaining that “such agreements can feel like victory to students, and offer a sigh of relief for administrators.”

Of course, there’s another term for these “success stories,” in which campus officials plead with disruptive, intimidating, and sometimes violent protesters to stop violating campus policies. It’s “appeasement.”

At Rutgers, the Chronicle of Higher Education judged that campus leaders acquiesced to eight out of 10 student demands. The president and the university’s investment committee chair agreed to meet with the protesters to discuss divestment from Israel. Campus leaders agreed to create an Arab cultural center and hire administrators and faculty with Palestinian “cultural competency.” They also agreed to develop “training sessions on anti-Palestinian, antiArab [sic], and anti-Muslim racism for all [Rutgers] administrators & staff.” (Tellingly, but unsurprisingly, there’s no mention of antisemitism.) And protesters were assured they would not face any university discipline or “retaliation.”  

The University of Minnesota’s interim President Jeff Ettinger agreed to five of six protester demands at his campus, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Protesters will get an audience with the Board of Regents next week. The university will not discipline any of the students and will urge the Minneapolis city attorney to be lenient with students arrested by the police. Ettinger agreed to send an apologia to the campus community that reads: “We regret that this meeting did not happen sooner, and have committed to regular meetings moving forward to continue to discuss this coalition’s concerns.”

At Northwestern, campus officials agreed that protesters could continue to monopolize Deering Meadow, two acres of campus green space, until June 1. They also agreed to create an advisory group that could give protesters a voice on university investments; erect a designated community space for Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim students; and create new Palestinian faculty slots and new scholarships for Palestinian undergraduate students, with a pledge to raise funds for the long-term sustainability of the program. In return, students agreed to dismantle most of their tents and to stop using amplifiers on Deering Meadow.

It’s worth repeating: in higher education circles, these agreements have not been depicted as campus leaders getting rolled. Rather, they’ve been widely celebrated as models to emulate.

Fortunately, that’s not universally true. There are sane and sensible voices out there, though they’re not the ones that most campus leaders are likely to heed. Earlier this week, for example, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, announced that the presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers would be testifying before Congress later this month. Her announcement pulled no punches:

Over the last several days, the presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers have made shocking concessions to the unlawful antisemitic encampments on their campuses. They have surrendered to antisemitic radicals in despicable displays of cowardice. As a result of these gravely concerning actions … it’s necessary to … bring in the presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers — along with UCLA — to testify before the Committee.

Meanwhile, at least one college president has acquitted himself with honor. University of Florida’s Ben Sasse clearly and firmly addressed a campus encampment after five days, arresting those who violated campus rules while ensuring that orderly protests could continue. Sasse explained this weekend on CNN’s State of the Union, “What we tell all of our students — protesters and not — is there are two things we’re going to affirm over and over again. We will always defend your right to free speech and free assembly, and also we have time, place, and manner restrictions.” Sasse added, “You don’t get to take over the whole university.”

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“We just don’t negotiate with people who scream the loudest, that just didn’t make any sense to me,” Sasse said. “What you see happening on so many campuses across the country is, instead of drawing the line of speech and action, a lot of universities bizarrely give the most attention and most voice to the smallest, angriest group, and it’s just not what we’re going to do here.”

Teaching students that they’ll get their way if they’re willing to be agents of chaos is a poor way to cultivate citizens, not to mention a textbook case of perverse incentives. Foxx and Sasse know that, even if too many of our feckless campus leaders don’t.

Rick Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues.

He knows that the European Union, of which Hungary is a member, will almost certainly impose large tariffs against Chinese EV imports. In turn, China will make significant new investments in Hungary. This will allow Xi to skirt tariffs by having Chinese goods shipped from Hungary to the other countries of the Union. EU states are not allowed to put tariffs on another member state’s exports. Xi will sign multiple economic agreements including funding for two electric vehicle manufacturing plants and one EV battery plant. China’s BYD, the world leader in EV production, will open its first European EV production factory this year in southern Hungary.

On Monday, it was confirmed on Hungarian state television that Xi and Orban will announce that China will build a second EV plant in Hungary. This plant will be run by China’s Great Wall Motor. Prescient Hungarian vehicle dealers are already deemphasizing European vehicles and focusing on Chinese models. In addition, China is financing an $8 billion EV battery plant that will be Hungary’s largest foreign direct investment. The goal is to make Hungary a world hub of EV battery manufacturing.

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Hungary is a small country with a population of only 10 million. By World Bank standards, it is a wealthy country. The GDP of Hungary is minuscule, totaling just over 1% of that of the U.S. Still, the economy should grow by 2.4% this year. By European standards, Hungarians are relatively prosperous. They are culturally conservative with strong family values. But as time passes, Hungary will feel the bite of being isolated from Western Europe.

Orban’s natural kinship with Communist China is unsurprising. After all, he also supports Russia in its aggression against Ukraine. Orban is illiberal and corrupt, but he’s also foolish. Russia faces a demographic and economic implosion. Orban has chosen unwisely by his embrace of authoritarianism. Hungary has chosen to be the gateway for China into Europe. He will sacrifice sovereignty in return for communist gold.

James Rogan is a former U.S. foreign service officer who later worked in finance and law for 30 years. He writes a daily note.

The motion emphasized the painstaking process the government filter team used in handling the documents. The prosecutors informed Judge Aileen Cannon, who is presiding over the case, that the “team took care to ensure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but it was not focused on maintaining the sequence of documents within each box.” 

Moreover, a footnote in the filing reads, “The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court.” Just the News Editor in Chief John Solomon put it a bit more bluntly: “Smith’s team … conceded it had misled the court about the problem by previously declaring that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized.” 

The motion explains that FBI agents were “present when an outside vendor [digitally] scanned the documents” at the time they were seized but that other people, whom they assure the judge were “appropriate personnel,” have had access to them since that time. It goes on to admit that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.”

The prosecutors offered “several possible explanations” for the movement, one being that “the boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.” 

Conspicuously missing from their list of theories was the possibility that the documents may have been put back in a different sequence after agents staged their infamous photo of classified documents spread out on the floor of Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago. 

At any rate, despite the special counsel’s effort to minimize the implications of these changes and their failure to explain why they waited so long to inform the judge, this development will surely complicate Smith’s prosecution of the case. 

Former Trump defense lawyer Tim Parlatore told Just the News that Smith’s “admission is stunning on multiple levels.” First, he said it “reinforces the incompetence” of prosecutors “in conducting basic criminal investigations and prosecutions that I observed when I was on the team.” 

“But at a deeper level, the loss of specific document locations is a destruction of exculpatory evidence,” he said. “I went through all of the boxes at NARA [National Archives and Records Administration] and the document order was important because it was clear to us that the boxes had been untouched since leaving the White House.”

“For prosecutors who are trying to prove that the defendants knowingly possessed these documents to then destroy the evidence that would undermine that claim is a very serious violation,” Parliatore added.

Friday’s filing came just days after Cannon unsealed more than 300 pages of newly unredacted documents in the case. Investigative journalist Julie Kelly reported last week that “top Biden administration officials worked with NARA to develop” what would eventually become Smith’s case against Trump. 

According to Kelly, the new materials showed that, contrary to the administration’s claims that the Department of Justice (or the White House) had no involvement in Trump’s case until NARA sent a criminal referral in February 2022, DOJ officials had been in regular contact with NARA “during much of 2021.” The records also show that Deputy White House Counsel Jonathan Su “regularly communicated with Archive officials.”

After Trump’s legal team filed the “heavily redacted” documents in January, they asked Cannon to review the redactions and remove as many as she could. For obvious reasons, Smith has been fighting to keep the redactions in place, a fight he clearly lost on April 22 when the unredacted documents were made public.

Kelly reported that “[a] comparison of the redacted and unredacted material shows the Archives acted in concert with several Biden administration agencies to build the case — coordination that included the DOJ, the Biden White House, and the intelligence community.”

These latest developments leave us wondering what else the special counsel is trying to conceal. And still unanswered is the question of why Biden, former President Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and former FBI Director James Comey were never charged for the same or more serious violations.

The entire case smacks of a set-up, which is why Trump’s legal team has rightly filed several motions to dismiss it based on “selective and vindictive prosecution.” As evidence of the special counsel’s bad-faith dealings continues to mount, it’s possible that Cannon, a Trump appointee, might just comply.

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Elizabeth Stauffer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner, Power Line, and AFNN, and she is a fellow at the Heritage Foundation Academy. She is a past contributor to RedState, Newsmax, the Western Journal, and Bongino.com. Her articles have appeared on RealClearPolitics, MSN, the Federalist, and many other sites. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.

If, repeat if, you participate in “protests” that break clear rules or laws; protests that involve trespassing, “occupations,” threats, vandalism, or violence; or protests that involve yelling for the destruction of entire nations or people or involve harassing people as if they are responsible for their own perceived “group” or nationality, then most or all of the following judgments apply to you.

First, you deserve no respect or sympathy. None. You have every right to engage in respectful discussion or debate. You have no right to break rules or laws or to threaten anybody else. If you do the latter but not the former, you deserve to have people assume that the exact opposite of your intended message is the moral and truthful position.

Second, you reveal yourself as a spoiled, adolescent brat, utterly unworthy of adult society. And you look like fools.

Third, you reveal yourself as either woefully and willfully ignorant or morally and ethically despicable — or all of the above. This is especially true if your “cause” involves denunciations of Israel without any denunciations of Hamas’s torturous and murderous terrorism on Oct. 7; of the years of rocket attacks from Gaza against Israel citizens; of Hamas’s use of women, children, and hospitals as human shields; or of Hamas’s years of redirecting humanitarian aid (much of it from Israel!) to terroristic purposes.

Fourth, you deserve to be suspended or expelled from the colleges whose ordinary functions and whose other students’ ability to study and learn you are interrupting. And if you are breaking laws, you should be arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned.

Fifth, repeat No. 4, with emphasis on “imprisoned.” Your supposed rights end when you violate the rights of others, and if you do so illegally, you should enjoy not a single expectation of leniency. If you break laws, you are by definition a criminal, and criminals deserve imprisonment.

If you yell “from the river to the sea,” you are advocating genocide. You therefore are a moral monster.

If you support “intifada,” you are advocating violence against innocents and perhaps genocide, which makes you a moral monster.

If you really do see the whole world as a division between colonialists and the colonialized, oppressors versus the oppressed, then you have too simplistic a mind to belong in college anywhere. If you see the world primarily through the lens of group “identity” rather than treating individuals as individuals, you have too simplistic a mind, or too poorly developed an ethical character, to belong in college.

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If none of the above makes any sense to you, if you don’t understand the difference between free speech and unlawful conduct, then you are doing everything wrong. Absolutely everything.

Don’t bother us again until you actually grow up.

I say this because in his 2025 budget request, Biden proposes to raise the tax rate on long-term capital gains — assets held for a year or longer — to the same level as the tax rates on ordinary income. Biden’s proposal would raise the top marginal rate on ordinary earned income from the current 37% to 39.6%, and he proposes taxing long-term capital gains income for the more successful at ordinary income rates.

Under current law, for the most affluent, long-term capital gains are taxed at 20%. Short-term capital gains are already taxed at ordinary income rates. For high earners, those with incomes above $250,000, there is already an additional tax on long-term capital gains, the so-called net investment tax which was introduced during the Obama administration to fund in part Obamacare. That additional tax is currently 3.8%. Biden wants to jump that tax up to 5%.

Put simply, capital gains which are currently taxed at 23.8% for high earners would jump to 44.6%.  That is terrible tax policy.

Investment drives productivity growth, and productivity growth is what raises the standard of living for every person. Increasing the capital gains tax by almost 100% will reduce investment, lower productivity growth, and over time make every person less well-off. Biden would reduce the post-tax return on investment. At the margin, would-be investors would thus spend their money on something else besides investment. Investors would spend more on consumption and not defer gratification through investment. Spending more on consumption would compound the existing problem of a very low personal savings rate, which is one reason why the U.S. imports capital and runs a current account deficit. 

The U.S. economy is not self-sustaining, unlike the Chinese economy. China does destroy capital through wasteful investment but at least China controls its economic fortunes. Because of its very low personal savings rate, the U.S. is beholden to foreign investors to fund the deficit and to make crucial investments in infrastructure and intellectual property. It is a terrible situation when the U.S. is forced to rely on China for capital. 

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In a perfect world, then, the U.S. would actually lower the rate on capital gains, not raise the rate. Lower capital gains tax rates increase the post-tax return on investment and encourage more investment. Greater investment leads to higher productivity growth and greater prosperity for all. If the tax rate on capital gains were lower, the U.S. trade deficit would probably be lower. Monies that were spent on consumption would be spent on investment. High earners save more than households with lower disposable income. High earners respond to higher returns. If savings were higher, it would be easier to fund the federal deficit. Interest rates would be lower. Lower interest rates drive more investment. A positive feedback loop is created when domestic savings increase. Investment is higher, productivity increases faster, and the overall standard of living improves at a more rapid rate.

From the standpoint of economic growth, the most efficient capital gains tax rate would be zero. A zero capital gains tax rate would reduce economic friction on investment to a de minimis level.

Biden’s proposal to double the capital gains tax rate is idiotic.

James Rogan is a former U.S. foreign service officer who later worked in finance and law for 30 years. He writes a daily note.

Yes, some of the protests have been peaceful, engaging in constitutionally protected speech. But, unlike the concerned parents who simply decided to get more involved in local politics, the groups behind the protests — violent and peaceful ones — want to dismantle society. And things could turn even more violent this summer.

Authorities — not just the Federal Bureau of Investigations, but law enforcement at all levels — have presumably been keeping tabs on who’s taking part, who broke the law, who are the non-students sneaking into university property to agitate, etc. If they haven’t, Congress ought to weigh in.

The arrests in New York and Los Angeles, where the LAPD entered UCLA early Wednesday, will furnish the identity of many. Other technology, such as police drones that flew over the encampments, and the geo-fencing that tells authorities who used a phone within a space, should also help.

Most importantly, law enforcement must investigate who is funding these well-organized and well-orchestrated protests. This is particularly the case if it is a foreign power such as Iran or its terrorist proxy Hamas (which, again, would mean Iran). And if the funders are domestic, aiding and abetting violence across state lines is a federal crime.

We already know that some of the street protests have been organized by the ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) Coalition, which claims credit for a march in Washington, D.C., that it says brought out 400,000 people, many of whom were bused in from other states.

ANSWER is a fiscally sponsored project of Progress Unity Fund (PUF), a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization with a long history of promoting society’s most radical causes. 

The Progress Unity Fund is closely tied with the Workers World Party, described by Discover the Networks as a “Marxist-Leninist vanguard” party. Capital Research Center says that “ANSWER’s director is Brian Becker, who is also [a] key figure within the Party for Socialism and Liberation, yet another communist group that split from the Workers World Party in 2004.” The party says U.S. democracy is a “façade.”

PUF has received money from the far left, deep-pocketed Tides Foundation, according to Influence Watch. ANSWER, according to Research Gate, also gets money from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, which is also very far left and very wealthy.

ANSWER organized the Washington, D.C., march with American Muslims for Palestine, which gives guidance and financial support to Students for Justice in Palestine. According to Columbia professor Shai Davidai and many others, AMP has strong links with Hamas.

SJP, which also has advocated for Hamas and posts poisonously antisemitic tweets regularly, has organized and led many of the campus protests.

In our recent book, NextGen Marxism, What It is and How to Combat It, Katharine Cornell Gorka and I describe the SJP as having been so vile in its support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and gang rapes of Jewish women that “Governor Ron DeSantis ordered the Florida universities to disband SJP chapters.”

SJP receives funding from AMP, but is itself a fiscally sponsored project of the Westchester People’s Action Coalition Foundation, another far left funder. When you visit WESPAC’S website, you find a photo of earnest activists holding up a sign that reads “Another World is Possible.” This is a well-known slogan used by organizations that despise capitalism but feel they must cloak their communism.

Ryan Mauro of Capital Research Center, whose work tracking these networks is invaluable, emailed me that “WESPAC funds various revolutionary far-left/anti-Western groups.” But because it acts as SJP’s fiscal sponsor, there’s no transparency. “All donations transit through WESPAC and they aren’t required to publicly reveal anything about that relationship.”

But we can get a sense, from other disclosures, of who funds WESPAC and AMP. Mauro tells me that those who have given to WESPAC include the Elias Foundation ($100,000); the Sparkplug Foundation (about $100,000); Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors ($80,000); George Soros’s Open Society ($40,000); and the Groundswell Foundation (about $32,000). The Zakat Foundation has meanwhile given $25,000 to AMP.

How influential have these groups and their NextGen Marxist ideas on decolonization, the “oppressor vs. oppressed” paradigm, and anticapitalism been on the protesters? We can get a sense from the three spokesmen who faced the media at Columbia on Tuesday, before the NYPD dislodged them from Hamilton Hall. They have been much derided, but their background is instructive.

The main one was Johannah King-Slutsky. According to Jordan Schachtel of The Dossier, Johannah is a PhD candidate at Columbia studying “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens.” She wrote on her now-deleted Columbia bio that her goal is to “write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism.”

Another was Cameron Jones, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, a virulently antisemitic far-left group. It receives funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Open Society Foundation, among others. 

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The third one was Maryam Alwan, a leader at SJP.

There has to be enough here for the FBI, Congress, and our other leaders to investigate who has been organizing and funding these protests — before they metastasize and further endanger society.

Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It.