At a recent campaign rally in Detroit, Vice President Kamala Harris was interrupted by people chanting, “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide! We won’t vote for genocide.”  She swiftly shut the protests down: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Some Michigan voters evidently took her seriously. This week, Amer Ghalib, the Yemen-born mayor of Hamtramck, endorsed President Donald Trump less than 50 days before the election, signaling a potential opportunity for the former president to pick up votes in Michigan.  Hamtramck Mayor Endorses Trump Elected in 2021, Ghalib became the town’s first Muslim mayor. Once a majority Polish enclave of Detroit, Hamtramck became the first Muslim-majority city in the country in 2013. Ghalib’s victory against incumbent mayor Karen Majewski ended Hamtramck’s century-long streak of Polish American mayors. That same year, Muslim candidates won all six city council seats for the first time. Today, Polish Americans make up just 5 percent of the town’s population.  With 93 percent of American Muslims voting for President Joe Biden in 2020, Hamtramck should be an easy win for Democrats. But the Israel–Hamas war has made strange bedfellows for some Muslim voters in Michigan.   Trump met privately with Ghalib ahead of a rally in Flint, Michigan, on Sept. 17. A few days later, Ghalib endorsed the former president in a post on Facebook:  President Trump and I may not agree on everything, but I know he is a man of principles. Though it’s looking good, he may or may not win the election and be the 47th president of the United States, but I believe he is the right choice for this critical time. I’ll not regret my decision no matter what the outcome would be, and I’m ready to face the consequences. Trump told Breitbart that he was “very impressed” with Ghalib, who “was a very big fan of the Trump administration because he saw no wars.” Muslim Voters: Politically Homeless? The Israel–Hamas war has made for strange bedfellows — Ghalib among them. Support for Trump doesn’t always correlate with Republican policy positions. Earlier this year, Ghalib and the Hamtramck city council voted unanimously to divest from Israeli companies. “For now, the city will do its best to refrain from buying, investing or contracting with companies that support the Israeli genocide,” the mayor said.  In March, Ghalib renamed a major street in Hamtramck “Palestine Avenue” in a show of solidarity with Palestinians. Referencing the protesters’ outburst at Harris’ rally in Detroit, Ghalib posted on Facebook in August that Kamala could finish her speech when “Netanyahu finishes his genocide.”  That Trump was a close ally of Israel throughout his presidency and maintains a “good relationship” with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apparently not affected Ghalib’s support for the former president.  But Muslim Americans in Michigan aren’t a perfect ideological fit with Democrats either, despite voting nearly unanimously for progressive candidates. As a self-described “conservative Democrat,” Ghalib doesn’t agree with progressive liberal ideology. In 2023, he supported a resolution banning the display of LGBTQ flags on city property in Hamtramck. In nearby Dearborn, Muslim parents have made headlines for their opposition to sexually explicit LGBTQ books in school libraries.  “Thank you for changing the perception that all Muslim Americans are default ticket to Democratic Party,” Dearborn resident Khalil Othman said after Ghalib endorsed Trump.   A number of Muslim voters in Michigan like Ghalib are defecting because “the Biden-Harris administration is ‘directly contributing to the death and destruction of our home country and of our relatives overseas,’” says Soujoud Hamade, an Arab American living in the area.  For Hamade, Vice President Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Harris — and her embrace of his endorsement — was the last straw. “These aren’t the values that we as Democrats stood for. We were not the party of war,” she told the Midwesterner.  Similarly, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American whose district is just south of Hamtramck, has refused to endorse Harris in opposition to the vice president’s stance on Israel. Putting Michigan’s Muslim Vote in Perspective Throughout the election cycle, Muslim voters have made their discontent clear: Democrats need to earn their support. Harris has made some headway in her two months on the campaign trail, earning endorsements from far-left squad members Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the vice president hasn’t fully earned the trust of Muslim voters. In Michigan, where Biden beat Trump in 2020 by 150,000 votes, Harris can’t afford to lose the support of traditionally Democratic voters. Recent polling from the Council on American Islamic Relations found that 12 percent of Michigan Muslim American voters plan to vote for Harris, with 18 percent supporting Trump and 40 percent planning to vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.  Currently, polling shows Trump and Harris neck and neck in the state as Election Day approaches. Though the shift in support among Muslim voters is an exciting development, the population might not be big enough to truly threaten Harris’ chances at victory in the state.  Using data from the 2020 Religion census, political scientist Ryan Burge analyzed Michigan’s Muslim population and cast doubt on the hope that their votes could change the outcome of the election. Despite the high concentration of Muslims in Southeast Michigan, they make up only 2 percent of the state’s overall population. Considering immigration status and age, the population of eligible Muslim voters shrinks further, especially given the relative youth of America’s Muslim population. Burge estimates that Muslim voters will cast about 1.8 percent of all ballots in Michigan this November, or just over 100,000 votes. With those votes split between the candidates, there’s no guarantee that support for Trump among Muslim voters like Ghalib will tip the scales in the GOP’s favor. But in a two-party system, the enemy of an enemy quickly becomes a friend.  Mary Frances Myler is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.  READ MORE by Mary Frances Myler:  Can the GOP Win Back the Senate?  Harris and ABC Lied About Late-Term Abortions As Students Return, So Do Pro-Palestinian Protests The post Mayor of Majority-Muslim City in Michigan Endorses Trump appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Higher education has been a cesspool of anti-Americanism, censorious leftism, and cultural radicalism for longer than I have been alive. The moral rot is, and always has been, particularly acute at Ivy League or otherwise putatively “elite” institutions. The pro-Hamas “protests” that have rocked university campuses since Oct. 7 are indicative: One cannot help but realize that the jihadi anarchy on display at Harvard Yard hasn’t been replicated at red-state public schools such as Alabama or Ole Miss. But every so often, something happens at an “elite” university that manages to shock our already jaded consciences. For instance, there was the triumvirate of “elite” university presidents who testified before Congress last December that the permissibility of campus calls for the genocide of the Jewish people “depends on the context.” There was also Judge Kyle Duncan’s March 2023 struggle session at Stanford Law School, where a baying left-wing mob — egged on by then-“DEI” Dean Tirien Steinbach — prevented the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals jurist from delivering his remarks. But perhaps the single biggest disgrace to rock academia in recent years has been the University of Pennsylvania’s yearslong crusade against its own tenured law professor, Amy Wax. In 2017, Wax coauthored an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer that lamented the decline of traditional bourgeoisie values across American society and suggested this decline is blameworthy for many of America’s present social maladies. Almost immediately, 4,000 people signed a petition calling for Wax’s ouster; 33 of her Penn Law colleagues also condemned her instantaneously. Wax, a vocal critic of mass migration and skeptic of multiculturalism, admirably refused to be silenced. She ruffled more feathers when she observed that, in her two decades of teaching experience, Black students rarely finish in the top half of graduating law school classes. Statistics, it seems, are racist. For two and a half years, a period spanning successive Penn Law deanships, Wax has been subject to a probe into her alleged wrongthink and misdeeds. The investigation has depleted valuable funds that Penn Law could have used to foster free speech or — how’s this for an idea? — actually train students to practice law. The probe has been exorbitantly expensive, forcing Wax to retain counsel; thankfully, a GoFundMe legal defense fund for the embattled professor has raised nearly $200,000 since its July 2022 launch. The witch hunt, as Aaron Sibarium observed for the Washington Free Beacon, has also “made Penn a pariah among academic freedom advocates.” The judgment finally came this week: Penn Law suspended Wax for a year, reduced her pay for that year by 50 percent, permanently stripped her of her endowed chair and summer pay, and publicly reprimanded her. Interestingly, as Sibarium scooped, Penn Law had previously offered Wax a settlement that would have lessened her penalty on the condition that she not “disparage the University,” not sue Penn, and not publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence she had presented during the yearslong probe. Translation: Shut your mouth and this problem will go away quickly. Chairman Mao would have nodded right along. Penn Law, in the most recent version of the oft-cited U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, is tied for fourth place. High-achieving law school applicants (rightly or wrongly) seek to enroll there, and high-end law firms (rightly or wrongly) seek to recruit from there. When such an institution allocates immense time and resources to punish and humiliate one of its own faculty members, the goal is clear: to send a message. In this particular case, the message could not be clearer: You must bend the knee. Wokeism, unlike the liberalism of old, brooks no dissent. Free inquiry must yield to the stifling intellectual conformity that leftists delude themselves into thinking is “progress.” On the substance of Wax’s comments, to merely speak of race-based outcomes and speculate as to the underlying social phenomena that might have affected those outcomes is verboten. Anyone who does not toe the line, condemn America as a bastion of “systemic racism,” and endorse everything from reparations to race-conscious admissions practices is, in turn, deemed a racist him/herself. To call this spectacle “Orwellian” would risk understatement. The Amy Wax struggle session ought to be an inflection point in our higher education wars. College students should stop applying to Penn Law. Employers — from law firms to individual judges — should stop hiring from there as well. And Congress should pass a new law placing a hard condition on the disbursement of higher education funding: No private university that punishes a tenured professor for engaging in First Amendment–protected speech will receive a single penny in public funding. Wax is vowing to fight on. Perhaps she will sue Penn Law. Perhaps she will prevail in that suit. But as is so often the case, the process is the real punishment. And the indignity is the whole point. To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM READ MORE: Why Are the Nutjobs Trying to Kill Political Opponents All Left-Wingers? Do Republicans Still Buy Sneakers Too? The post The Amy Wax Inflection Point for ‘Elite’ Higher Education appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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