NewsNation Chief Washington Anchor and On Balance host Leland Vittert was a foreign correspondent for four years in Jerusalem. He gives you an early look at tonight’s 7 p.m. ET show.
Author’s Note: An enormous year-end thank you to our intrepid editor Katie Oglesby. We hope love, family and good cheer fill your holidays. If the talk turns to politics, tell your friends about War Notes and NewsNation. You can still sign your relatives and friends up for free at warnotes.com and they will get a late Christmas present when they get our next note on Jan. 2.
Not Home for Christmas…Yet
Barring a last-minute action by President Biden, Navy Lt. Ridge Alkonis will spend another Christmas wrongfully held behind bars.
Watch tonight: Congressman Nick Lalota (R-NY) joins us to continue our coverage of the lieutenant’s case. In a travesty of justice, a Japanese court imprisoned Alkonis for negligent driving when a medical episode led to a car accident that killed two people. After 507 days in a Japanese prison and 318 days after Biden promised to bring him home, Alkonis arrived back in America. However, now he sits in a Los Angeles federal detention center awaiting release or the end of his sentence.
Biden’s unwillingness to act is shameful and inexplicable.
Coming Next Year: Revenge of 50-Year-Old White People
Moments accelerate trends and the Harvard President’s plagiarism scandal will only accelerate the backlash against diversity, equity and inclusion, like this new lawsuit against the University of Wisconsin Eau-Claire for firing a white woman.
- WEAU lays out the case of Rochelle Hoffman: “Despite Hoffman’s exceptional qualifications, however, students, faculty and staff opposed her appointment to Interim Director of MSS solely because she was white. It was exclusively Hoffman’s identity as white that was the issue; criticism was about her race and color, not her qualifications.”
- Next year the Supreme Court will rule on Muldrow v. City of St. Louis about the transfer of a female police sergeant.
- From the Washington Post: “The case also is being watched by employment attorneys and some conservatives who say a broad ruling for Muldrow could open the door to a flood of reverse discrimination claims against certain workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs — such as mentoring and training programs for underrepresented groups.”
Watch tonight: Attorney Gene Hamilton of America First Legal Foundation will join us about its reverse discrimination lawsuits. Jessica Guynn (@jguynn) of USA Today lays out the group’s playbook and some recent big wins in reverse discrimination cases.
- Guynn notes, “In June, a New Jersey jury ruled in favor of Starbucks regional director Shannon Philips, who claimed she was fired for being white. The court ordered Starbucks to pay an additional $2.7 million in damages. In 2021, David Duvall, an executive of the hospital operator Novant Health who claimed he was fired despite strong performance reviews and replaced by two women, one Black and one white, received a $10 million jury award. The award was later reduced to about $4 million. This month, a U.S. appeals court reviewing the case indicated it would uphold the award. Novant Health says a lack of leadership skills prompted Duvall’s termination.”
Yesterday in War Notes, we predicted it would be a lonely Christmas for Claudine Gay. It appears New York Times opinion columnist John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) won’t be dropping by for eggnog.
- McWhorter says, “If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month.”
You might remember the disaster-filled testimony from Gay and her fellow college presidents and bigots all sounded like the same lawyered-up language. We wondered who prepared them for the testimony and our conversation with Eric Dezenhall proved prophetic. Hayley Fuchs and Michael Stratford of Politico finally did a deep dive.
Thought bubble: If Gay sticks around, how can Harvard suspend or fire any professor or student for plagiarism?
Goodbye Unbiased Media
The progressive and activist media stopped even the attempted appearance of fairness this year. Hamas’s attack and Israel’s counter-offensive proved too much for a media where the inmates (reporters) now run the asylum while editors, publishers and network executives live in fear.
Look no further than the coverage of Senator John Fetterman (D-PA).
- He went from hero to zero.
- He was a hero for seeking help for depression. The New York Times lauded him as a brave trail-blazer while completely ignoring some serious questions about his ability to do the job.
- And he became a zero for supporting Israel by many of the same newspapers and TV networks that supported him.
- Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch says, “Young idealists thought Fetterman might actually be different before he turned out to be more of the same, just with funnier tweets.”
Watch tonight: The “aggressive progressive” Chris Hahn join us to discuss why Israel divides a media once so dedicated to #MeToo and victims, like Jews who survived the Holocaust and continue to face threats of annihilation.
The Border Will Be the Issue of 2024 — It Could Break Either Way
The only thing Democrats and Republicans agree on going into 2024 is that the border is a crisis.
Well, most Democrats and Republicans agree on that, but White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the record-setting and growing daily numbers is “not unusual.”
And now, the blame game…
- Speaker of the House Mike Johnson demanded President Biden take executive action, saying, “Statutory reforms designed to restore operational control at our southern border must be enacted, but the crisis at our southern border has deteriorated to such an extent that significant action can wait no longer. It must start now, and it must start with you.”
As we’ve told you in War Notes, there’s a fat chance Biden will act. The more people who come across, the more leverage Biden gets. The current immigration court backlog is three million, roughly the population of Chicago and it is growing every day. Current border crossers get court dates for 2031. It will be impossible to fix that problem without some grand bargain, and the White House and progressives would love amnesty.
Speaking of Chicago, one man addressed Chicago’s ultra-progressive mayor and demanded “Trump, come in here and clean this mess up” referring to the city’s migrant crisis. “I am strictly advocating for Black people,” he said.
Red alert: The continued closure of U.S.-Mexico railroad crossings because Customs and Border Patrol is too busy dealing with illegal immigrants will soon cause real disruptions to the American economy.
Worth a read: New statistics from the Center for Immigration Studies show 15% of those living in America were not born here…that’s the highest in history. Click through their graphs, the XY axis labels are a little unfair, but the data is important.
When both houses of Congress are back on Jan. 9, it’s only ten days until the first funding deadline to avert a potential government shutdown and the border fight will play a significant role.
Things Are Getting Stupid and 2024 Will Be Worse
The arguably well-meaning, well-funded and completely out of touch group “No Labels” is now floating “unity governments.” Vaughn Hillyard and Dan Gallo report for NBC that No Labels might work to ensure neither the Democrat nor Republican nominee get to 270 electoral college votes.
- Hillyard and Gallo note, “Officials with the group are mapping out an unlikely and largely unprecedented scenario where they could be in a position to cut deals on policy, Cabinet posts or even the vice presidency if their still-unformed ticket manages to win electoral votes and blocks a major-party nominee from winning the presidency outright.”
- Thought bubble: Political reporters love nothing more than talking about nerdy but totally unrealistic scenarios. The sun could also rise in the west tomorrow. Maybe No Labels could raise a bunch of money from donors to plan for that.
- Double thought bubble: Nobody had a pandemic on their 2020 bingo card, so who knows what 2024 will bring.
Tune into “On Balance with Leland Vittert” weeknights at 7/6C on NewsNation. Find your channel here.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily of NewsNation.
