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Conservatives Tag

It's not popular to be politically conservative at Cornell University, where I teach at the law school. A recent study by The Cornell Sun student newspaper documented that 97% of faculty donations at Cornell Univ. went to Democrats, while an analysis by The College Fix showed that eleven departments at Cornell have ZERO Republican professors. While Cornell is nowhere near as political or radical as many other Ivy League schools, such as Columbia, at the student level there is an overwhelmingly liberal and far-left bent among those students who are politically active.

Based on what we've seen in recent years, it's probably safe to say conservative students are unwelcome on many college campuses but it's worth noting documentations of this perceived bias. A new survey about student life at Yale confirms what we already knew. The Yale Daily News reports:
Election 2016: Conservative views considered unwelcome at Yale Despite ongoing campus discussions about free speech, Yale remains deeply unwelcoming to students with conservative political beliefs, according to a News survey distributed earlier this month.

Now that Donald Trump has acquired the number of delegates needed to clinch the Republican nomination, he still has another hurdle to clear. Some conservatives are still saying #NeverTrump and Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard is still pushing for another candidate. FOX News reported:
Trump slams 'spoiler' bid after Kristol says independent candidate to run Donald Trump took to Twitter Sunday night to slam fresh predictions from Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol that an independent candidate would soon be entering the race for president, warning that a 2016 “spoiler” could swing the race to the Democrats.

Cleta Mitchell is a conservative activist who has been very vocal about the IRS scandal which involved the targeting of conservative Tea Party groups in the run-up to the 2012 election. She recently appeared on C-Span and an alleged IRS employee called into the show and explained to her that he would target these groups because they want to abolish the IRS. Ali Meyer reported at the Washington Free Beacon:
IRS Employee Admits He Would Go After, Target, and Try to End Conservative Groups A self-identified IRS employee admitted he would go after, target and try to end conservative groups who wanted to abolish the IRS, to Cleta Mitchell, an attorney representing those groups, on a Washington Journal segment on C-SPAN.

Former Facebook employees have told Gizmodo that the company regularly told them to stamp out conservative news even if it trended on the website. From Gizmodo:
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module. In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

Earlier this week, we reported at College Insurrection that Virginia Tech disinvited conservative Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley over concerns about offending students and protests. Riley addressed the situation at the Wall Street Journal:
I Was Disinvited on Campus ‘Progressives rule higher education,” write political scientists Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn Sr. in “Passing on the Right,” a new book on the dearth of conservative professors. “Their rule is not absolute. But conservatives are scarcer in academia than in just about any other major profession.” Profs. Shields and Dunn aren’t exaggerating. In the humanities and social sciences, they note, surveys show that the percentage of self-described Marxist professors is around 18%, or nearly double that of self-described Republicans...

Is Donald Trump the Republican nominee? Not *technically,* but it is much, much more likely than a day ago. There is an ever so slight possibility that Trump could be denied 1237 delegates going into the convention. I hope Cruz fights on. [Update - not to be, Cruz suspends campaign.] Conservatives on Twitter wasted no time in assessing the implications of The Trumpublican Party: https://twitter.com/EWErickson/status/727634645404270596 https://twitter.com/philipaklein/status/727634781278711808

The long-running underground Hollywood conservative group, Friends of Abe, is no more. FOA announced yesterday that with the group's growth came an unsustainable infrastructure; one too cumbersome to continue without a substantive overhaul. The Guardian reported:
But on Thursday the organisation – which counts Jon Voight, Jerry Bruckheimer and Kelsey Grammer among its 1,500 members – made an abrupt announcement: it was dissolving.

One has to wonder if the increasing conservative attacks are the reason why Donald Trump dropped out of his CPAC appearance at the last minute. At least the Twitter chatter I've seen the past day from people at the conference was pretty hostile. And let's face it, Ted Cruz took him to the cleaners last night at the debate on conservative issues.

Liberal and conservative mean different things in countries outside the U.S. but in Jamaica, the only party that resembles what we would call conservative is the Jamaica Labour Party. The website Discover Jamaica describes the JLP this way:
The JLP is considered the more conservative and consistent party and has always espoused the free market system. During the 1970s and 80s it was vehemently anti-communist and pro-U.S.A.
The JLP just won control of the nation's government by running on job creation and tax cuts.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Republican side of the 2016 election has been the sharp divide among conservatives over Donald Trump. People tend to fall into one of three camps; love him, hate him or will support him if he's the nominee. On one side, you've got multiple conservative writers and thinkers who insist Trump isn't a conservative at all, as we saw with the special edition of National Review. On the other side, you have people like Sean Hannity of FOX News, Jim Hoft of the Gateway Pundit and John Nolte of Breitbart, all conservatives who appear enthusiastic about Trump's rise.

I'm so old I remember when conservative blogs and websites used to communicate with each other on email lists and by frequent linking to each other. When Legal Insurrection started in October 2008, that was how we let the world know we existed and what we were writing. So-called "blog whoring," whereby smaller blogs clogged the inboxes of people at larger websites hoping for a link, was how it was done. This website would not have thrived without the appreciated links from Instapundit, Hot Air, Michelle Malkin, and dozens of other blogs. Our Twitter page says we joined in December 2008, but I think it was another year or so before Twitter became a central communication focus for conservatives. In those "early" days I remember conservatives dominating Twitter -- the common wisdom was that liberals ruled on Facebook and conservatives ruled on Twitter. That has changed over time, and liberals are just as if not more influential on Twitter.

It started yesterday, when conservative Republicans in the House expressed strong disagreement with the GOP leadership over whether to proceed with the vote of disapproval on the Iran deal. The conservative wing aimed to force Obama to first live up to the terms of Corker-Menendez and disclose the still-secret side deals with Iran that (which are an enormously important part of the big picture.) They claimed that the clock on the Congressional review period would not start until Obama complied, and thus the disapproval vote should be delayed. The movement had the support of Ted Cruz in the Senate, and many conservatives in the House (Roskam of Illinois; Pompeo of Kansas and the rest of the House Freedom Caucus). The House doesn't have a cloture or filibuster rule, so it is much easier to bring something to a vote there over minority Democratic opposition than it is in the Senate. Later, it was leaked that Boehner had given in to House conservatives on this issue, agreeing to postpone the vote and substituting a series of votes on three other resolutions in the House:

A newly published study shows taxpayers are (still) abandoning blue states and heading to states where Republicans retain a greater level of influence. Leah Jessen of the Daily Signal reported:
Study: Taxpayers Are Leaving Democrat-Run States for States Controlled by Republicans In an analysis of Internal Revenue Service income statistics and migration data, Americans for Tax Reform—an advocacy group for lower and simpler taxes—concluded that in 2013 more than 200,000 taxpayers fled states with a Democrat governor to states with Republicans in control. The analysis shows that in 2013 states run by Democrats lost 226,763 taxpayers while Republican-run states gained about 220,000 new taxpayers. The state with the most growth in new taxpayers? Texas. The state, governed by Republican Rick Perry during the 2012-2013 year, saw a positive net migration of 152,477 people. “Texas accounted for more than half of the net migration into the South,” the IRS reports.
The IRS report can be seen here.

Those who were around during the Vietnam War protest days remember all those marches on Washington. I attended one, and it was absolutely huge and very impressive. And who can forget the photos of Martin Luther King standing in front of the Washington monument on the Mall? It's not clear how effective or important those marches were, even though they were actually dealing with administrations that appeared to care what the public thought, unlike the present administration. But visuals are powerful and they can affect some lawmakers and some of the public that hasn't made up its mind yet. They also help to rally energy on the part of those who are already aligned with the viewpoint of the demonstrators. And yes, the MSM would spin such demonstrations as it did the Tea Party demonstrations. But the MSM is not the only source of attention these days, and propaganda needs to be countered with better propaganda as well as facts. Facts all by themselves don't quite cut it, unfortunately.

I saw the film "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on TV close to 30 times when I was a child. Loved it, and in particular loved the idea that James Cagney (whom I already knew as a tough old gangster from other movies) could dance. His dancing fascinated me because it was so non-balletic and idiosyncratic---the strutting, graceful/ungraceful, artful/artless uniqueness of his movement: Cagney wasn't just an actor and hoofer, although he certainly was both. He was also a political conservative and changer. Here are some excerpts from his Wiki page:
He was sickly as a young child—so much so that his mother feared he would die before he could be baptized. He later attributed his sickness to the poverty his family had to endure... Cagney believed in hard work, later stating, "It was good for me. I feel sorry for the kid who has too cushy a time of it. Suddenly he has to come face-to-face with the realities of life without any mama or papa to do his thinking for him."

For the last several weeks, we've been living in a sort of Twilight Zone episode where many people on the left including Obama and the media haven't realized how big the midterms were for Republicans. Until now. Reid Wilson of the Washington Post has just begun to notice:
Republicans in state governments plan juggernaut of conservative legislation Legislators in the 24 states where Republicans now hold total control plan to push a series of aggressive policy initiatives in the coming year aimed at limiting the power of the federal government and rekindling the culture wars. The unprecedented breadth of the Republican majority — the party now controls 31 governorships and 68 of 98 partisan legislative chambers — all but guarantees a new tide of conservative laws. Republicans plan to launch a fresh assault on the Common Core education standards, press abortion regulations, cut personal and corporate income taxes and take up dozens of measures challenging the power of labor unions and the Environmental Protection Agency. Before Election Day, the GOP controlled 59 partisan legislative chambers across the country. The increase to 68 gives Republicans six more chambers than their previous record in the modern era, set after special elections in 2011 and 2012. Republicans also reduced the number of states where Democrats control both the governor’s office and the legislatures from 13 to seven.
Was the election yesterday? Is this new information about how many Republicans won?

PJ Media's Bill Whittle outlines his top five conservative principles in the latest edition of Afterburner. Whittle articulates the nexus of culture, politics, and American values succinctly on a regular basis. Seeing as Republicans just took control of the Senate, it's a good time to reflect on what we believe, why we believe it, and then proceed in a manner befitting that foundation. As Whittle says, "Conservatism kicks ass. You really should give it a try." Take a look: