Minnesota: the fraudster’s haven
This is just extraordinary:
One wonders how much of the social welfare money handed out all over the country has been to perpetrators of fraud. We’ve always known fraud existed in such programs, but the scope of the fraud being uncovered seems mind-boggling even to many people already cynical about the subject.
The Brown killer and the Brookline killer were the same Portuguese ex-student in physics, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente
And now he’s dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Salem, NH.
Oh, and it was a homeless ex-student in physics, who lives in the classroom building in which the Brown murders took place, who broke the case – posting on Reddit, among other things – and gets the money reward, which at $50K doesn’t seem like nearly enough. Perhaps he should receive a portion of the hefty salary of the president of Brown, whom just about everyone agrees is a nincompoop at best.
Truth really is stranger than fiction. If you wrote a script, would you choose that description of the case and the killer? You can find details of the story here as well as here. From the latter:
[The Brown homeless man] John, it’s been revealed, was the second person of interest whose image was put out earlier this week, and he was onto the suspect way before anyone else. According to a Fox News report, John became suspicious of Neves-Valente after the two “locked eyes” in a campus bathroom hours before the shooting. John then followed the gunman around the campus and eventually confronted him about his weird behavior.
Dead men tell no tales, and unless Claudio Manuel Neves Valente left one of those manifestos so popular with mass murderers, the motive may remain very obscure. It’s somewhat comforting to know it was one killer rather than two, but it’s terrible to think that the second murder might have been avoided if he could he have been caught earlier.
Most people are faulting the lack of good security camera video at Brown and the failure to establish a perimeter in a timely fashion, and the school also has a university chief of security Rodney Chatman, who may be a DEI hire and had left his previous position under a cloud:
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Chatman said he faced pushback for policing reforms he tried to implement at the school. He departed for Brown in 2021.
In October, two local police unions, the Brown University Security Patrolperson’s Association and the University Police Sergeants Union, issued votes of “no confidence” in Chatman, the former expressing “deep concern among the membership regarding the direction and leadership of the Department of Public Safety,” according to the Brown Daily Herald. …
The school has faced criticism regarding the killer’s access to the building and a lack of security cameras that could have helped in identifying the shooter.
Chatman has only briefly addressed the shooting in the days since it occurred, saying that three outdoor sirens on the campus did not activate during the shooting because of how quickly the event took place, according to the Rhode Island Current.
Fox News Digital has found that diversity, equity and inclusion has been a major focus for Brown’s campus safety department and Chatman himself. …
In a prior post on LinkedIn, Chatman asked other campus police departments to refrain from posting pictures of themselves with weapons or performing tactical maneuvers, suggesting that it could make their communities anxious.
Perhaps worst of all, we have this allegation:
Stefanik shared a report that Brown University was pressured by “human rights groups” demanding that they disable their CCTVs so violent pro-Palestinian activists wouldn’t be held accountable for their actions.
I really, really hope that’s not what happened. But I fear it is.
The mis-education of generations of US students: it was actually Qatar who sold us the rope with which we’ll hang ourselves
Many long years ago – perhaps thirty-five? – I read an article describing what was being taught in schools in Palestine, and it made my blood run cold. I don’t recall what periodical it was in, but it certainly wasn’t anything on the right because back then (pre-internet) I wasn’t reading media on the right. It described students macerated in murderous hatred for Israel and Jews, and it was crystal clear that this was going to bear especially disastrous fruit some day.
And it did.
Little did I know at the time that something similar had started to happen to our own children – a bit muted, yes, but similar, although I only came to know about it later on. In America, it wasn’t just about hating Israel, although that formed a significant part of it. It was also about hating the US and western civilization.
This article (hat tip: commenter “miguel cervantes”) is an in-depth look at where this was done, how it was done, and by whom it was done:
Since 1981, American universities have accepted $13.1 billion from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait (Bard, 2024). Qatar alone contributed nearly $6 billion. Roughly 73% of these contributions are worth approximately $10.7 billion. None of these billions have any publicly stated purpose despite federal disclosure requirements (Bard, 2024). …
Here’s what we do know. Saudi Arabia gave Georgetown’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center $20 million. The funding was structured to “follow” the center’s director. This gave the Saudi government effective control over who held the position (Middle East Forum, 2020). Qatar Foundation International sponsored K-12 teacher training sessions. They covered travel and expenses for American educators attending workshops on Middle East history (Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, March 2025). At least one donation explicitly funded a Palestinian Studies professorship at Brown. The position went to someone who supports boycotting Israel (Bard, 2024).
That was Doumani. His position didn’t exist until foreign money created it. His influence shaped the curriculum materials that were used in roughly 8,000 schools. Those materials reached approximately one million students annually. Brown ended the Choices Program in 2025. The university cited financial pressures and mounting criticism over the program’s Israel-Palestine materials as reasons for shutting it down.
The pattern repeats everywhere. Foreign governments fund academic positions. Universities fill those positions with scholars who share the donors’ worldviews. Those scholars create curriculum materials. The materials reach thousands of schools nationwide. Teachers trust them because they bear prestigious university names. Parents never question them because they don’t know the funding sources. Students absorb frameworks that were designed by foreign governments to advance foreign interests.
And it works. Research examining the years 2015 to 2020 found something striking. Institutions that accepted Middle Eastern funding experienced 300% more antisemitic incidents than institutions that didn’t accept such funding (Network Contagion Research Institute, 2024). Separate studies reached the same conclusion.
Seeds are dropped, and it spreads and spreads.
More:
The scholars it trained, the frameworks it promoted, the orthodoxy it enforced are now embedded throughout American academia. They’re training the next generation. It’s a self-perpetuating system that grows more extreme with each cycle.
These scholars don’t stay confined to Middle East Studies departments. They spread to Education departments where they train future K-12 teachers. They move into Schools of Social Work. They populate Ethnic Studies programs where they apply Middle East frameworks to American history. The infection metastasizes. Then it flows downstream to every institution these graduates enter.
Much much more at the link, including the influence of China.
We’ve seen the results. The generational aspect of the problem has been especially apparent after 10/7.
The author continues:
The few states that tried to implement reforms discovered they were attempting to drain an ocean with a bucket. The system is too large. Too interconnected. Too self-reinforcing for any incremental reform to work. It requires comprehensive action at the federal level. It requires sustained political will across multiple administrations. Anything less than that will fail.
The author goes on to recommend a comprehensive 10-point plan to reverse the course of this multi-faceted titanic perversion of US education. It’s hard to imagine we’ll muster the political will to do this, but something extremely drastic is necessary – long past necessary.
Open thread 12/19/2025
You can now buy INTO THE SMOKE OF THE WORLD, the book of Gerard Van der Leun’s poetry [scroll down for new posts, because I’ve pinned this one]
I’m extremely pleased to announce that Gerard Van der Leun’s poetry book, Into the Smoke of the World and other poems, is ready for purchase. Poetry was very dear to Gerard’s heart, and this beautiful book features almost all of his poems that survived the Paradise fire, plus many full color photographs and cover artwork by wonderful pastel artist (and Van der Leun reader) Casey Klahn. Please go to the Vanderleunbooks.com website and order. Continue reading →
Roundup
(1) RIP, neocon extraordinaire Norman Podhoretz, dead at 95. Here’s his son’s loving tribute.
(2) The GOP health plan passes in the House. The claim is that it lowers premiums by 11%. Will it pass the Senate? And if so, will it actually do what the GOP says it will?
(3) The police have seemed clueless in the investigation of the killings at Brown. But there may be a breakthrough, or at least the possibility of a breakthrough, because the police supposedly have found DNA evidence on shell casings.
(4) Trump wraps up the year by telling the nation of his accomplishments in his second term so far. I would think they wouldn’t need reminding, but people are often very “what have you done for me lately, like in the last two minutes?” Just closing the border and putting some brakes on DEI is impressive, but the old blowhard has done a great deal more.
And there was good news on inflation.
It seems so very obvious to me that Trump has done so many good things in his second term, and the contrast with Biden couldn’t be greater. But if people don’t perceive this, it doesn’t matter.
(5) Israel claims that MIT’s nuclear scientist Nuno Loureiro was murdered by Iran:
Married father-of-three Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 47, was gunned down in the leafy Boston suburb of Brookline at 8.30pm on Monday by an unknown shooter who is still on the loose.
Loureiro specialized in nuclear science, engineering and physics and he had previously spoken out in favor of Israel, a mortal enemy of Iran.
Now, Israeli officials have said Iranian operatives targeted the leading nuclear fusion researcher, according to the Jerusalem Post.
It makes a certain amount of sense, unfortunately. Are many sleeper cells waking up?
(6) Remember Fulton County, 2020? See this:
Earlier this month, Fulton County admitted that approximately 315,000 early votes from the 2020 election were illegally certified but were nonetheless still included in the final results of that election.
The admission came during a Dec. 9 hearing before the Georgia State Election Board (SEB) stemming from a challenge filed by David Cross, a local election integrity activist. Cross filed a challenge with the SEB in March 2022. Cross alleged that Fulton County violated Georgia statute in the handling of advanced voting ahead of the November 2020 election, counting hundreds of thousands of votes even though polling workers failed to sign off on the vote tabulation “tapes” critical to the certification process.
And Fulton County admitted to it. …
“These signed tapes are the sole legal certification that the reported totals are authentic,” Cross told the SEB at the Dec. 9 hearing. “Fulton County produced zero signed tabulator tapes in early voting.” …
“These are not clerical errors. They are catastrophic breaks in chain of custody and certification,” Cross said.
“Because no tape was ever legally certified, Fulton County had no lawful authority to certify its advanced voting results to the secretary of state. Yet it did,” Cross said. “And Secretary Raffensperger accepted and folded those uncertified numbers into Georgia’s official total without questioning them.”
But everything in that election was just fine, peachy-keen, A-ok.
(7) This article on DEI and how it has harmed white male millennials has gone viral.
Aiding Israel aids the US
Tucker Carlson doesn’t see it (no surprise there):
Carlson did not merely argue that the Gulf states matter more. He went further, portraying Israel itself as a net burden on the United States. He described Israel as “a completely insignificant country,” with “no resources” and a population of just nine million, arguing that it has relevance only because Washington provides it with a security guarantee. Carlson claimed the US has “no overriding strategic interest” in Israel and dismissed the relationship in blunt terms: “What are we getting out of this? Nothing. It’s only cost.”
This is a striking assertion about a state that has just signed a $32 billion gas deal with Egypt, sits atop vast offshore energy reserves, and possesses one of the most formidable concentrations of human capital on the planet as a global high-tech and defence power.
By the very structure of the agreement (between the US and Israel), most of the money returns to American industry through the procurement of US equipment and weapons. But beyond that, the true value of the assistance is not merely economic. Israel has turned the assistance into an engine of operational development, field testing, and technological upgrading whose impact extends far beyond the Middle East. Israel is not merely a “customer” of American weapons systems. It is a living laboratory, under real conditions, for the American military. …
In Israeli military culture, no foreign equipment remains foreign. Every platform undergoes “sovereign integration” – modification, adaptation, and transformation into a fully Israeli system. The same is true of the F-35. When Israel was required to prepare the aircraft for a strike scenario against Iran – a distance of approximately 1,700 kilometres – it encountered a critical limitation: range. The solution did not come from the United States but from Israel. Unique external fuel tanks were developed, attached to the sides of the aircraft’s fuselage, enabling extended range without the use of refuelling aircraft. This is precisely the solution that Washington itself needs in much more distant theatres – foremost among them China.
Israel also added an advanced layer of electronic warfare to the aircraft, focused on detecting and disrupting the Russian S-300 and S-400 air defense systems. As a result, Israeli aircraft were able, for the first time, to conduct deep-penetration missions without the enemy systems even detecting that they had entered hostile airspace. this capability was a very important component of the strike. The Chinese air defense systems are indeed different from the Russian ones, but the engineering similarities between them render the Israeli lesson relevant to the Pacific theatre as well.
Another upgrade implemented by Israel concerns the ability to carry heavy external ordnance.
This is by no means the first time I’ve read of the help Israel gives to our military, and there’s much more where that came from. It’s basic information, readily available. Carlson is almost certainly aware of it, but he’s become a mendacious Israel-hater (and Jew-hater, which we can infer from his nasty obsession and lies). Perhaps he should register as a lobbyist for Qatar.
The problem is that there is general public ignorance on this score, and Carlson plays on that ignorance and takes advantage of it. Ignorance is fertile ground for sowing lies, not just in the arena of Israel but in general.
A while back I watched a VDH video in which he spoke on the subject of the benefits to the US of its relationship with Israel in terms of aid and military intelligence. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find that video at the moment. So this will have to do:
Susie Wiles, naif?
Susie Wiles is supposed to be a savvy and hyper-knowledgeable political advisor. And yet she gave an interview to Vanity Fair and apparently thought the periodical would treat her – fairly? What planet does she live on?:
Wiles is featured in a VF cover article by Chris Whipple, after the White House gave the outlet access to the West Wing for the better part of the year. In the piece, the Chief of Staff opens up about the last 11 months on the job under Trump at each “moment of crisis.”
Most of the article is very negative, down to even the awful photos that were selected, featuring people like Wiles, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Deputy chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy chief of Staff Dan Scavino. Miller, Scavino and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair are even described as the “pit bulls.”
Wiles herself wrote on X:
The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.
Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.
The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade.
I’m sorry, but what on earth did Wiles think would happen? I am actually very perplexed by this. Either the periodical distorted what she said in order to make the administration look bad, or she really did say things that made the administration look bad. Why the own goal?
Open thread 12/18/2025
There was no lack of heroes at Bondi Beach. Unfortunately, some of them are now dead.
This is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve ever seen. There was a couple at Bondi Beach who saw one of the gunmen early on, realized the danger, and tried to thwart him. This couple – Boris and Sofia Gurman – were not young; they were 69 and 61 years old. And yet Boris somehow managed to wrest away the gun from one of the terrorists. Here’s the story (there are some still photos at the link):
The dramatic dashcam footage shows Boris courageously tackling the terrorist, Sajid Akram [the 50-year-old father], on the street and wrestling away the gun as Sofia runs to help.
Boris is then filmed pointing the rifle at the mass killer in a frantic attempt to make him retreat — only for the terrorist to grab another rifle.
The couple, who lived in Bondi and had been married 34 years, were ultimately executed at close range.
A separate drone video showed the couple tragically clutching each other where they died.
The latter photo is also at the link.
When I read that story, many things came to mind. The first is their incredible heroism, and the horrific ending as well as the tremendously touching photo. The second was the thought: if only they’d had a weapon! The third was: wait a minute, they did have a weapon and – much like another hero that day, Ahmed al Ahmed – they used it only to threaten the terrorist rather than shoot him. Unlike Ahmed, who only ended up wounded, they ended up dead.
I don’t know why they didn’t use the gun. Perhaps neither had ever fired one before and didn’t really know what to do. A worse possibility is that perhaps they thought that by firing, they’d be the ones arrested or even killed by police. They almost certainly only had at most a few seconds to think what to do, and I’m not faulting them in the least. I’m just both sad and angry that it came to this.
At first I thought maybe neither fired the gun at the terrorist because he hadn’t yet shot anyone and they weren’t sure how dangerous he was, but I learned from this article that that was not the case:
“My dashcam accidentally captured this shocking scene,” the user who posted the video, who told NBC News she wanted to go by the name Jenny, said in the caption to her post.
“One terrorist on the bridge fired the first shot, then the second, then the third. Meanwhile, the other terrorist had just gotten out of the car when an elderly man by the roadside didn’t run away. Instead, he charged toward danger, fought desperately to grab the gun, and held on tightly! Watching through the lens as the old man was finally shot and fell to the ground — my heart was torn apart,” she said.
From their first names, it seemed to me that this couple had probably emigrated to Australia, and it turns out they were Jewish and had come from Russia.
Another person who tried to fight was killed as well:
Reuven Morrison, 62, was killed when he physically confronted one of the gunmen, according to his daughter, Sheina Gutnick.
“He managed to throw bricks at the terrorist,” she told CBS News.
Also not a young person.
There were many civilian heroes at Bondi Beach that day. All of them were extraordinarily brave, but unfortunately all of them were unarmed. RIP.
Fiddling with DC crime statistics
The police chief of Washington DC recently resigned. She’s come under suspicion of falsifying crime data in DC – or rather, ordering her underlings to do it, in order to make the situation look better than it actually was.
Remember when many people on the left said it was an outrage that Trump sent the National Guard to the city to restore order? Well:
The House Oversight Republicans released a preliminary report accusing Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Chief Pamela A. Smith of manipulating crime data to make the city appear safer.
Smith resigned last week, citing “family, and also being more present with loved ones” after two years.
Sure thing.
More:
The Committee interviewed commanders:
“The Committee’s ongoing investigation has heard testimonies from commanders that there are clear pressures placed on MPD personnel to lower the classifications of crime to present to the public the perception of low crime in the District. Specifically, there was an emphasis on the daily crime report (DCR), a public-facing dataset that only includes nine categories of felony offenses, above all other crimes discussed within the highest levels of the MPD. Chief Smith, the commanders testified, was so preoccupied with the statistics of the select crimes that were made public that she incentivized her subordinates to lower those crimes by whatever means necessary.”
By whatever means necessary.
One of the results of all this was that many experienced police left, morale had become so low.
And yes, Smith was not only a DEI hire (second female head and first black female head) but a DEI administrator:
Smith joined the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) in May 2022 as the chief equity officer, assigned to the executive office of the chief of police. She led the department’s efforts on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). She developed an organizational channel for department-wide accountability by providing strategic advice to the MPD chief of police, executive leadership, and senior management officials within the department. In addition to her DEI focus, she supervised the directorates for employee well-being and support unit and equal employment opportunity office.
A side note of possible interest is that she is an ordained Baptist minister.
As far as I can see, Smith’s Wiki page says absolutely nothing about her manipulation of statistics – or even about accusations that she manipulated statistics.