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The Big Story

A trove of leaked emails from the powerful Ford Foundation depict a hyperpartisan atmosphere in which Progressive political consensus is enforced and open debate is disparaged at the tax-exempt nonprofit organization dedicated to social justice causes. With its $16 billion endowment, the Ford Foundation is one of the most influential organizations in the United States. The internal emails allegedly come from a listserv used for sending mass emails that were provided by “a group of whistleblowers at the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program” to the economist Christopher Brunet, who published excerpts from them along with a strident broadside blasting the organization for promoting a communist and anti-American ideology. One whistleblower who identified themselves as a Ford fellow for over two decades and “someone who has witnessed first-hand the dialogue occurring in this listserv” wrote to Brunet to say, “There is persistent groupthink that is consistent with extreme left-wing ideologies, and anyone regardless of their ethnicity or race that dares to debate or push back on the authoritarian grip held by a few extreme members that dictate the dialogue on the listserv are attacked, ridiculous [sic], accused of ‘provocation’ or ‘racism,’ or even doxed at times.”

An excerpt from one of the emails Brunet obtained from the listserv, though lacking a broader context, appears to corroborate the whistleblower’s point: “We Fordies have no obligation AT ALL to engage in so-called ‘debate.’” While this kind of opposition to debate on core social justice orthodoxies has become increasingly common among activists in elite institutions, the Ford Foundation stands out for its exceptional power and influence in American public life, and for the general lack of transparency in how that power is used. In 2020-2021, the group has pledged $330 million to “advancing racial equity at a critical time when America is in an historic and long-needed reckoning over racism and injustice.”

Read it here: https://karlstack.substack.com/p/whistleblower-emails-reveal-partisan

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

The Rest

In a little more than a year, the COVID-19 pandemic has done more to transform U.S. education than school reform advocates did in decades. It’s driven huge increases in the number of children being homeschooled, and a new study shows that almost a quarter of a million students left standard public schools for charters between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, an increase of 7.1%.

President Biden’s approval ratings are hitting new lows driven by doubts about his competence. In a new CBS poll, 50% percent of respondents approve of Biden’s performance while 50% disapprove. In an NBC poll it’s 49-48. In some swing House districts up for grabs in the midterm elections, Biden’s support has dropped by double digits, according to Amy Walter at The Cook Political Report. Walter argues that Biden’s faltering approval actually makes it more likely that his ambitious spending plans on infrastructure and social services will succeed. “For Democrats who worry that Biden’s declining fortunes are dragging them down,” she writes, “failing to give him a victory will only make things worse.”
Read it here: https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/competency-questionN

Oakland has joined other public school districts in California, including Los Angeles, in jumping ahead of the FDA’s approval process to mandate vaccines for students 12 and older. Critics of the plan note that the FDA is still in the process of running trials to determine whether the vaccines are safe for children, and that Black and Latino students have the lowest vaccination rates in the district and so would be disproportionately impacted by the new policy.

New York is poised to enact the most comprehensive rules in the country to regulate labor conditions for app-based delivery workers at companies like Grubhub and Uber Eats. The app delivery economy currently employs more than 80,000 people in New York City alone, most of them immigrants, but like most members of the gig economy, delivery workers are independent contractors, which means they’re not entitled to benefits at the companies they work for. The new legislation, set to take effect in January, would mandate a minimum pay for the industry and allow delivery workers to set their own limits on the distances they’re willing to travel for work.

A new survey of Detroit residents’ attitudes on crime and policing shows a wide racial gap in responses—whites are almost twice as likely as blacks to say that the police make them feel unsafe. Overall, 42% of the nearly 2,000 people polled say that police presence makes them feel safer. But of those who said that police make them feel less safe, 14% were white and 8% were black. Additionally, respondents with a college degree were twice as likely as those without one to say that police made them feel less safe.
Read it here: https://detroitsurvey.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/DMACS-Detroiters-views-on-crime-and-policing_2021_09_14-1.pdf

Music writer Ted Gioia draws attention to an unaccountably overlooked episode in musical-science fiction-film history.

Today I learned. . . that Paul McCartney hired Isaac Asimov to write a screenplay about an extraterrestrial music group. https://t.co/0UtD9dj4S4 pic.twitter.com/RfTHp2E7Ku

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) September 24, 2021

The Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva is using a secretive police unit called the Civil Rights and Public Integrity Detail to go after critics and political rivals, according to an investigation by the LA Times. Multiple sources told the LA Times that within the sheriff’s department, the unit is referred to as the “secret police.”
Read it here: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/la-county-sheriffs-unit-accused-of-targeting-political-enemies-vocal-critics/

Mervyn Taylor, Ireland’s first Jewish cabinet minister, died in London Thursday at the age of 89. A member of the Irish Labour party, Taylor became a minister for the first time at the age of 61. He served as equality and law reform minister between 1993 and 1997, when he worked on reforms for women, people with disabilities, and the Roma community.

Nick Diaz is back, but does he want to be? After an absurd six-year suspension for marijuana use, the mixed martial artist returns Sunday for a rematch with the former UFC welterweight champion Robbie Lawler, who Diaz last knocked out with a crisp check hook in 2004. Nick, one half of the legendary “Diaz brothers” duo, along with his younger brother and fellow prizefighter Nate, is known for being endearingly sullen and antisocial. But the Stockton, California, native seems especially morose before his latest bout. “All the people around me and all the money and the sponsors, they won’t let me get away from fighting,” Diaz said days ago in an ESPN interview. “There’s things I could do, but that’s not gonna work out. I might as well just go and take my punches.”

If you happen to be in Poland this weekend, you can catch the last two days of the fourth annual Tish (it’s Yiddish for “table”) Jewish Food Festival. The event is put on by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews and has an online component as well.
More information about it here: https://polin.pl/en/event/tish-festival-neighbours-meeting-amsterdam-jewish-cuisin.

The Back Pages

Your Weekend Reads

—Barbara Campbell was 13 when she met Sam Cooke, then an 18-year-old gospel singer. In addition to being a great singer, Cooke was a womanizer whose own life ended abruptly at a seedy hotel when the owner shot him following a dispute between Cooke and a prostitute. And the scandal didn’t end there for his former wife. Campbell died in April at the age of 85, but it is only being reported now because she and her family requested that there be no public notice given. Campbell’s obituary contains enough tragedy, betrayal, and wasted promise to fill two hard-boiled detective novels. No wonder she wanted her privacy.

Fifteen years later, Mr. Cooke, by then a pop superstar, was dead, murdered in a motel tryst gone awry. And only three months after his death, Barbara Campbell Cooke, his widow, would marry her husband’s protégé Bobby Womack, the gravelly-voiced soul singer and guitarist. Widely publicized, their union made them pariahs in their families, to much of the music community and to Mr. Cooke’s adoring fans.

Read it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/arts/music/barbara-campbell-cooke-dead.html


—We now have rock-solid evidence from two respected reporters at prominent liberal publications showing that Hunter Biden was indeed engaged in shady business deals that traded on access to his father’s political influence. Despite being tainted as disinformation and deemed so dangerous they had to be censored instead of shown to the American public to judge for themselves, the claims that came from the infamous Biden laptop were true. Which leaves you with the rather important question: What if they were labeled disinformation because they are true?

In an alternate universe where Americans still cared about truth, freedom of the press, and the democratic process, this would be the biggest story in the country, as Congressional hearings gave way to criminal trials. Instead, we’re witnessing the people responsible for this travesty—the same ones responsible for the intelligence and media failures in 2001, and in Iraq, and for two decades in Afghanistan—doing what they’re best at and moving along as if none of it ever happened. Glenn Greenwald doesn’t want to let them off the hook so easily.

But the media disinformation about the Post’s documents—obviously designed to protect Joe Biden in the lead-up to the election—were not the worst aspect of what happened here. Far worse was the decision by Twitter to prohibit any discussion of this reporting or posting of links to the story both publicly and privately on the platform. Worse still was the immediate announcement by Facebook through its communications executive Andy Stone—a life-long Democratic Party operative—that it would algorithmically suppress the story pending a “fact check” by “Facebook’s third-party fact-check partners.” Despite multiple requests from me and others, Facebook never published the results of this alleged fact-check and still refuse to say whether it ever conducted one. Why? Because the documents they blocked millions of Americans from learning about were clearly true and authentic.

Read it here: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/new-proof-emerges-of-the-biden-family


—Inside the world of China’s massive commercial fishing fleet.

The roar of the mechanical jiggers pulling the catch from the ocean’s depths can be heard hundreds of feet away before you come upon the floating slaughterhouse. The stench too, as the highly aggressive squid blow their ink sacs in one final, futile effort to avoid their inexorable fate.
By all accounts, the Humboldt squid—named for the nutrient-rich current found off the southwest coast of South America—is one of the most abundant marine species. Some scientists believe their numbers may even be thriving as the oceans warm and their natural predators, sharks, and tuna, are fished out of existence.

But biologists say they’ve never faced a threat like the explosion of industrial Chinese fishing off South America.

Read it here: https://apnews.com/294ff1e489589b2510cc806ec898c78f


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