Donald Trump pulled out all the stops during his Tuesday night congressional address. He announced the CIA had assisted Pakistan in the capture of the senior ISIS terrorist who plotted the Abbey Gate bombing. He made a young boy with brain cancer an honorary member of the Secret Service. He told a young attendee he’d been accepted into West Point. He honored the family of Laken Riley, the college student murdered by an illegal immigrant.
Through all of it—the longest speech of any president to a joint session of Congress—Democrats remained seated.
As they sat, they passed the time in different ways. Some wore “pink for power” and interrupted Trump to shout “lies.” Others held signs reading “False” and “Musk Steals,” though those in leadership notably did not. Nancy Pelosi fidgeted with an umbrella. A few of her colleagues exited the chamber after revealing black shirts that said “Resist” on the back.
“It wasn’t a great look,” writes our Andrew Stiles. “Even former Biden spokesman Ian Sams, one of the biggest failures in the history of American politics, thought the Democratic plans to disrupt Trump’s speech were some ‘dumb shit.’
“Speaking of which, a bunch of leading Democrats posted bizarrely identical videos on social media ahead of the address in which they said ‘shit that ain’t true’ and screamed into tiny microphones. Many agreed that it wasn’t any less dumb watching their protest plans come to fruition. ‘Why are democrats just sitting there?’ wrote MSNBC host and former Kamala Harris adviser Symone Sanders. ‘The signs are not landing. It is giving bingo! Sigh.’
“Trump invited Democrats to join Republicans in ‘celebrating so many incredible wins for America.’ He already knew they would decline.”
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By day, Helyeh Doutaghi is the deputy director of Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project. By night, she’s a member of Samidoun, the anti-Semitic organization described by the Treasury Department as a “sham charity” and “front organization” for the terrorist group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Biden administration placed Samidoun under U.S. sanctions in October.
Photos and online materials reviewed by Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson show that Doutaghi “delivered a speech in Iran at a Samidoun-sponsored screening of the film Fedayin: Georges Abdallah’s Fight,” which honors a Lebanese terrorist sentenced to life in French prison for aiding and abetting the murder of a U.S. military attaché. They also show that Doutaghi traveled with a Samidoun group on a 2023 “fact-finding mission” to Venezuela to observe the impact of “U.S. sanctions and coercive economic measures.”
“Doutaghi’s connection to Yale Law School is raising eyebrows on Capitol Hill and in the White House,” writes Johnson, “where lawmakers and administration officials have pledged to crack down on anti-Semitism and extremism on university campuses, which receive billions of dollars in federal funding.” Tom Cotton said Yale shouldn’t receive such funding due to its coddling of “anti-Semitic extremists.”
Yale Law School told the Free Beacon it is taking allegations against Doutaghi “extremely seriously” and “immediately opened an investigation into the matter to ascertain the facts.” In the meantime, Doutaghi “has been placed on an immediate administrative leave pending the outcome of this investigation.”
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The American Sociological Association boasts nearly 10,000 members and sets industry standards on ethical research, training, and conduct. Lately, it’s taken aim at the Trump administration’s guidance targeting DEI programs on college campuses, joining forces with disgraced Democratic superlawyer Mark Elias in a lawsuit to block its enforcement.
The organization says that guidance violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It’s an ironic claim, given that the association itself appears to be violating Title VI. The ASA, our Aaron Sibarium reports, “has a minority fellowship program that explicitly discriminates against white applicants.”
The fellowship, advertised on ASA’s website, requires applicants to meet at least two of four criteria—one of which is identifying “as a member of an underrepresented racial or ethnic group among sociology PhDs.” Those groups include “Black/African American; Latino/a/x; American Indian or Alaskan Native; Asian or Pacific Islander; and Middle Eastern and North African/Southwest Asian and North African,” according to the eligibility criteria. Fellows receive a $20,000 stipend as well as funding for travel and professional development.
President Donald Trump has promised a scorched-earth campaign against DEI in higher education. The ASA fellowship illustrates how the institutions inclined to resist that campaign could find themselves vulnerable to it, weighed down by programs and policies that would have been major liabilities even without the Dear Colleague letter.
“The Fellowship Program looks to be precisely the kind of faddish, illegal discrimination by a large association that the President has told all agencies to make sure they no longer support,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, a conservative public interest law firm. “ASA openly, currently treats applicants for its program differently because of their race.”
Away from the Beacon:
- Tim Walz is offering to step in for Republicans who decline to hold in-person town halls during the upcoming congressional recess. “If your congressman refuses to meet, I’ll come host an event in their district to help local Democrats beat ’em,” he said. We can’t imagine anything that would boost their prospects more.
- The number of migrants illegally crossing the southern border is at its “lowest level in decades,” according to internal data reported by Axios.
- Anti-Semitic group Unity of Fields released footage of Columbia University’s Hamasniks engaging in war chants while occupying Hamilton Hall—only to run away like little girls when the cops came in.
