San José State University’s mostly women’s volleyball team is beaten in conference finals

Brayden Fleming, photos by San José State University.

This site has previously reported on the forfeits that several colleges have accepted when their women’s volleyball teams refused to play against San José State University, which has Brayden Fleming, a male player pretending to be a female going by the pseudonym of “Blaire”. The credentialed media have been trying to ignore the story to death, but my good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter, William Teach, reported on Saturday how the Grey Lady finally said something . . . and tried to make it seem as though men males claiming to be women playing on women’s sports teams was no big deal.

How a Women’s College Volleyball Team Became the Center of the Transgender Athlete Debate

Not since the swimmer Lia Thomas has a college athlete or team put the fiercely contested issue of transgender rights in sports under such a bright spotlight.

by Juliet Macur | Thursday, November 28, 2024

On the court, they seem like any other college women’s volleyball team. At a recent game, the players moved around the court in staccato rhythm, setting and spiking the ball, springing into the air like pogo sticks to block attacking shots, all in their blue and gold uniforms of the San Jose State University Spartans.

Off the court, though, the team is trying its best not to crumble during an unexpected season of tension and tears, confusion and anger. The players are at the center of a drama playing out over one of the most explosive issues in American life: whether a transgender woman can play on a women’s sports team. Continue reading

The truth shall set you free, but some people want to hide the truth

One of the things that I do at The First Street Journal is to use primarily — though certainly not exclusively — liberal sites as sources, because it stifles complaints that I’m using only evil reich wing sources, which our good friends on the left will not trust. Thus, when I use LGBTQ Nation, no one can throw a hissy fit that the source is opposed to homosexuals and the ‘transgendered.

Volleyball players sue their coach for accepting a trans teammate

The player hasn’t caused any unfair advantage or injuries, but the lawsuit claims she has stifled women’s “free speech.”

Continue reading

Once again, the left want opponents to just to just shut the heck up!

It all seems so familiar. We reported, in December of 2021, how the female members of the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team were told to keep their mouths shut about Will ‘Lia’ Thomas, the mentally ill man male who claimed he was female on the team:

‘It’s bringing people to tears’: SECOND UPenn swimmer speaks out against trans Lia Thomas competing for the women’s team and says the crowd was silent when she won most recent meet

  • An second anonymous female swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania has spoken out to say she and her teammates are upset by transgender teammate
  • Lia Thomas, 22, smashed three US swimming records at an Akron, Ohio contest last weekend 
  • Thomas also gave an interview to SwimSwam touting the fairness of inclusive but controversial IOC guidelines allowing transgender athletes to compete 
  • Thomas previously competed for the school’s men’s team for three years before joining the women’s team with her last men’s competition in November 2019 

By James Gordon | Published: 18:29 EST, 10 December 2021 | Updated: 21:33 EST, 10 December 2021

A second female swimmer from the University of Pennsylvania has aired her frustrations and fury as her transgender teammate Lia Thomas continues to smash records.

The entire team has been ‘strongly advised’ not to speak to the media and the second swimmer has been granted anonymity.

Nevertheless, the teammate stepped forward to tell how UPenn swimmers are ‘angry’ over what has been perceived as a ‘lack of fairness’ as Thomas smashes record after record in the pool.

The officials at the University of Pennsylvania told the women basically to shut their mouths and swim. Another female team member said that “she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate,” a fear that the university’s officials pushed. In a letter that sixteen of Mr Thomas’ teammates anonymously released, they stated that they “have been told that if we spoke out against her inclusion into women’s competitions, that we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer.”

Well, it’s happening again, this time in Nevada: Continue reading

Waging war against Israel, from the safety of Morningside Heights

That our oh-so-noble leftists will lie through their scummy teeth whenever they think it to their advantage is of no surprise to anyone who pays attention. That The New York Times would report on it actually is at least slightly surprising.

Pro-Palestinian Group at Columbia Now Backs ‘Armed Resistance’ by Hamas

Columbia University Apartheid Divest has withdrawn an apology it made last spring for a member who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

by Sharon Otterman | Wednesday, October 9, 2024

The pro-Palestinian group that sparked the student encampment movement at Columbia University in response to the Israel-Hamas war is becoming more hard-line in its rhetoric, openly supporting militant groups fighting Israel and rescinding an apology it made after one of its members said the school was lucky he wasn’t out killing Zionists.

The ‘student’ in question is Khymani James, who, according to NBC News “uses he/she/they pronouns,” thus proving that he’s mentally ill and an idiot, was barred from Columbia’s campus on Friday, April 26th, and is now suing Columbia over his dismissal. Apparently Mr James open support of “militant groups fighting Israel” means fighting Israel in Morningside Heights, and not actually picking up a rifle and heading to Gaza to face the Israel Defense Force in real life.

“We support liberation by any means necessary, including armed resistance,” the group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, said in its statement revoking the apology.

The group marked the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by distributing a newspaper with a headline that used Hamas’s name for it: “One Year Since Al-Aqsa Flood, Revolution Until Victory,” it read, over a picture of Hamas fighters breaching the security fence to Israel. And the group posted an essay calling the attack a “moral, military and political victory” and quoting Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated former political leader of Hamas.

“The Palestinian resistance is moving their struggle to a new phase of escalation and it is our duty to meet them there,” the group wrote on Oct. 7 on Telegram. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom!”

“Apparently, to judge by their support of Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and their statement that they “support liberation by any means necessary” means that they support the rapes, murders, and kidnappings perpetrated by the attackers.

Reporter Sharon Otterman’s article noted the problems the university’s leadership have with statements made under our First Amendment protections, but which can also create a “hostile environment for Jewish students.”

Laughably, Mr James, in his lawsuit against Columbia, as reported by the Columbia Spectator, is claiming that he is the one being victimized by a ‘hostile environment’:

“The environment at Columbia, which has been rendered hostile for James, is sufficiently severe, pervasive, persistent, and offensive such that it deprives James of equal access to the opportunities and benefits that Columbia provides to other students,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit states that after James began sharing “anti-war and anti-genocide political beliefs” on their personal Instagram account, they (sic) became the target of “racist, homophobic, and physically threatening messages,” including ones that called James slurs. These messages distracted James from their (sic) schoolwork and caused them (sic) to feel “uncomfortable, anxious, and unsafe,” according to the lawsuit.

Laughing out loud! At least the Times wasn’t silly enough to use Mr James’ preferred pronouns, but the Spectator, produced by the foremost School of Journalism in the country, was. 🙂

I have to ask, are Mr James and his attorney claiming that he has “anti-war . . . political beliefs” at the same time he and his supporters are calling for war against Israel, and are actively supporting the war Hamas started against Israel? But, I can answer my own question: for the anti-Semitic left, violence in advance of their cause is perfectly acceptable; they are simply “anti-war” when it comes to other people and other people’s defense.

There have been several stories about Americans, primarily combat veterans, who have left the United States and gone to Ukraine, to fight against the Russians, and at least a few of them have been killed in action. Hey, they were vets, knew the dangers, and chose to brave them anyway!

And there have been many stories about Americans and Europeans, primarily Jews, who have gone to Israel to fight with the Israel Defense Force. Some are dual citizens, and the anti-Semitic left have been calling for them not to be allowed to return to their European countries, saying that they are “war criminals.”

But pro-‘Palestinian’ Europeans and Americans? I can’t say that none have gone to Gaza to join the fight, but if any have, there haven’t been enough of them to have merited any story that I have seen in the credentialed media about it.

When the Jew haters tell you who they are, believe them! "Students for Justice in Palestine" could have protested at Israeli consulate, but chose to protest at Jewish center

This poor site, along with literally hundreds of others, has covered the pro-‘Palestinian, really pro-Hamas ‘demonstrations’ on our college campuses last spring. I did note, with some pleasure, that at least at my alma mater, the University of Kentucky, the protests were carried out the way the First Amendment, which guarantees to all of us both the freedom of speech and the right of peaceable assembly, contemplated, peaceably.

Sadly, many of the pro-savages demonstrations at other schools were not entirely peaceable. But I did gloat report on those demonstrations fading away when school was out for the summer.

Well, it’s a new school year — though October seems like this article is a bit late — and the Usual Suspects have been up to their old tricks. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Temple suspends pro-Palestinian student group; Muslim advocates call to investigate police over alleged hijab removal during campus protest

CAIR is calling for an investigation after Temple University’s handling of a protest, where they say a Philadelphia police officer allegedly removed a Muslim protester’s hijab.

by Max Marin and Robert Moran | Wednesday, October 2, 2024 | 2:02 PM EDT | Updated: 6:37 PM EDT

Temple University has temporarily banned Students for Justice in Palestine from operating on campus, the latest in a wave of suspensions against pro-Palestinian student groups amid sustained protests against the war in Gaza.

The move comes after police detained four SJP members, including a Temple student, during a demonstration that interrupted an on-campus career fair last week.

So, the “Students for Justice in Palestine” demonstration was not peaceable in nature, but interrupted a meeting to help more sensible students at Temple who were looking to begin their professional careers after graduation. You know, the sensible thing to do after spending a boatload of money for a university education.

Muslim community leaders are calling for an investigation into the university’s handling of that protest after a Philadelphia police officer allegedly removed a Muslim protester’s hijab and detained the woman without access to her religious head covering.

If that happened, and I will never believe claims by “Muslim community leaders” without outside corroboration, it would have been because the woman was resisting arrest.

While Temple did not cite that specific incident, a university spokesperson said in a statement that the interim suspension stemmed from “recent conduct,” and the student activist group is now forbidden from holding on-campus activities, including “meetings, social and philanthropic events.” The suspension was first reported by the Temple News.

The spokesperson pointed to the university’s on-campus demonstration guidelines that are “in place to ensure the safety and well-being of community members while also encouraging and preserving freedom of expression.” . . . .

This is not the group’s first brush with university leaders. Temple president Richard Englert denounced an SJP-led demonstration in August after protesters chanted outside a Jewish student center on campus.

In a statement, Englert threatened disciplinary action against students who participated in the rally, which he described as a form of “intimidation and harassment.” The pro-Palestinian student group pushed back against Englert’s comments, arguing in a post on social media that the president “distorted our message to serve the false narrative that Temple SJP is a threat to Temple.”

No, I suppose that the pro-barbarian students wouldn’t see accosting Jewish students outside of a known Jewish student gathering place as “intimidation and harassment,” but the Jews on campus certainly would have, and did:

Temple University says it is investigating a student pro-Palestinian demonstration held outside a Jewish center on campus

“Targeting a group of individuals because of their Jewish identity is not acceptable and intimidation and harassment tactics like those seen today will not be tolerated,” Temple’s president said.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, August 29, 2024 | 10:40 PM EDT

Temple University said it is investigating for possible disciplinary action a pro-Palestinian march by students and nonstudents who demonstrated outside a Jewish center on campus Thursday.

The protest march began at the Charles Library, said Temple University president Richard Englert in a statement, then some demonstrators went to the Rosen Center, which is the home at Temple of Hillel, an international organization for Jewish students.

“While there, the demonstrators used megaphones to chant directly at the occupants within the building,” Englert said.

Emphasis mine. Using megaphones to chant directly at the people in the Hillel Center, the majority of who could be assumed to be Jewish, would constitute targeted ethnic and religious harassment.

“We are deeply saddened and concerned by these events,” Englert said. “Targeting a group of individuals because of their Jewish identity is not acceptable and intimidation and harassment tactics like those seen today will not be tolerated.”

This was clearly a protest against Jews in general, not just Israeli policy, as the “Students for Justice in Palestine” have conflated the two. Not all Jews are Israelis, and at an American college 5,774 miles away from Israel, it’s virtually certain that most of the Jews on campus at Temple are not from Israel.

There is an Israeli consulate in Philadelphia, at 1880 John F. Kennedy Blvd, which is just 2.6 miles away from the Hillel Center, at 1441 West Norris Street, pretty much of a straight march down Broad Street, though, admittedly, marching that way takes you partly into the Philadelphia Badlands. If the SJP wanted to protest Israeli government policies specifically, they could have been protesting outside the consulate; instead they were harassing people they knew to be Jooooos.

Temple’s actions won’t stop the SJP from existing; all it does is ban them as a student organization and deny them use of Temple’s facilities.

Our First Amendment was written by civilized men, with civilized behavior in mind; they cited “the right of the people peaceably to assemble”. It does not protect some right to harass others, or gather in mobs, or riot.

But the pro-‘Palestinian’ people in this country, and around the world, are not truly civilized men. They might think that they are, but they are supporting the barbarism of Hamas, they are supporting the antithesis of the Western civilization, the benefits of which they enjoy.  The “Students for Justice in Palestine” have a right to exist, and to protest peacefully; it’s only when the break the code of civilization that they become subject to arrest.

The one thing they do not have is any right to the respect of decent people, and for them, I have none. When the anti-Semites tell you who they really are, you should believe them!

More public school officials fail to meet their responsibilities

People can get angry, sometimes over stupid things. People can respond to their anger by doing stupid things. Yes, we all do it, and I will admit to having done so in the past. But the people around them, if they have any authority, ought to be held responsible for letting things get out of hand. That’s the case in this situation:

Kansas school employee locked teen with Down syndrome in closet, storage cage, lawsuit says

August 17, 2024 / 3:48 PM EDT / CBS/AP

A paraeducator of a rural Kansas school district repeatedly shoved a teenager with Down syndrome into a utility closet, hit the boy and once photographed him locked in a cage used to store athletic equipment, a lawsuit claims.

The suit filed Friday in federal court said the paraprofessional assigned to the 15-year-old sent the photo to staff in the Kaw Valley district, comparing the teen to an animal and “making light of his serious, demeaning and discriminatory conduct.”

While the CBS article does not name the “paraprofessional,” the story in the Daily Mail, which admittedly goes for the sensational, said he was Albert Bahret. The image to the right comes from the Daily Mail, and was not in the CBS story. The Kansas City Star’s story is hidden behind a McClatchy paywall, but is available without a subscription via Yahoo! News.

Let’s be clear here: these things have been alleged in a lawsuit, and allegations in a lawsuit do not constitute proof.

The teen’s parents alleged in the suit that the paraprofessional did not have a key to the cage where sports equipment was kept and had to enlist help from other district staff to open the door and release their son, who is identified in the complaint only by his initials. The suit, which includes the photo, said it was not clear how long the teen was locked in the cage.

The lawsuit names Mr Bahret, other special education staff and the district, which enrolls around 1,100 and is based in St. Marys, about 30 miles northwest of Topeka.

Let’s assume that Mr bahret lost his temper, but any, and I stress any competent school administration would have immediately taken serious action against him. If he had to get others to help him release the handicapped boy, then other people in the school knew what had been done, and any of them had to have known that Mr Bahret needed to be immediately suspended pending investigation.

The suit said some staff expressed concerns to the special education teacher who oversaw the paraprofessional, as well as the district’s special education director. But the suit said neither of them intervened, even though there had been other complaints about the paraprofessional’s treatment of disabled students in the past.

If this is true, it has to be asked: how were the school’s “special education teacher” and the “district’s special education director” so poorly trained in their jobs that they did not recognize that Mr Bahret’s behavior was wholly improper and a huge liability to the school and the district? These people are all college graduates, supposedly educated on things like this, and had to understand that the “paraprofessional” needed to be removed from the school and reported to law enforcement, as soon as they became aware of the first complaint against him.

The suit said the director instructed subordinates not to report their concerns to the state child welfare agency. However, when the parents raised concerns, a district employee reported them to the agency, citing abuse and neglect concerns, the suit said.

There seems to be some major ass-covering going on, but such would not be necessary if the responsible school authorities had properly exercised their authority, at the proper time. Yes, the ‘mainstreaming’ of handicapped students is a tough policy, and one with which I do not agree, but the policy exists, and the school officials, who are dramatically overpaid based on the median family incomes in their communities, need to meet their responsibilities, or be fired.

Hoist by their own petard

The expression “hoist by his own petard” comes from the Bard himself, in Hamlet:

There’s letters sealed; and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged,
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For ’tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard; and ‘t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ’tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.

— Prince Hamlet, in Hamlet, act 3, scene 4

Wikipedia notes:

The phrase’s meaning is that a bomb-maker is blown (“hoist”, the past tense of “hoise”) off the ground by his own bomb (“petard”), and indicates an ironic reversal or poetic justice.

A shorter version might just be one word: karma. And so we have a major dose of karma on the campus of Temple University.

A Temple student pleads to sexual abuse, burglary. Questions arise on whether Temple should let him stay

The incident occurred in October 2022 at American University and led to student protests.

by Susan Snyder | Monday, August 5, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

The 2022 case made headlines and led to student protests at American University: A male student entered two female students’ dorm rooms without permission on Oct. 31, took underwear, and touched one woman on the inner thigh while she was sleeping.

The man, David Kramer-Fried, fled the room when the woman awakened, according to court documents. Police later found a pair of women’s underwear in the front pocket of a hoodie that Kramer-Fried was seen wearing that night on security video, the documents said. The university eventually barred him from campus.

He was arrested last December and on June 14 of this year, Kramer-Fried pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary and misdemeanor sexual abuse — charges that don’t require him to register as a sex offender.

Upon reading this story, I tried several searches, but was unable to find a photo or mugshot of Mr Kramer-Fried with which to illustrate this article, and I do so love including mugshots. Even the American University notification that he had been barred from their campus didn’t include his photo, which seems odd: how can Mr Kramer-Fried be barred if other students and staffers do not know what he looks like? There’s nothing I could find which would even tell readers whether he is black or white. From his name, I suspect that he’s white, but have no way of knowing. All that left me was a stock image of crime scene tape to use to illustrate this article.

About the time of his plea, his public defender noted he was enrolled full time as a student at Temple University, while also having to regularly report electronically to the court’s pretrial services. Kramer-Fried, now 21, awaits sentencing scheduled for Aug. 23.

It’s unclear at what point after his arrest Kramer-Fried was accepted to Temple, but the situation around his case raises the question of whether, when and what kind of criminal records or activity of potential students should be considered in the college application process — a subject of intense scrutiny in recent years.

The sentencing scheduled for August 23rd might answer the question as to whether he should be allowed on Temple’s campus, as he could get several years on the burglary charge. Me? I have to wonder how anyone as boneheadedly stupid — if you break into someone’s dorm room, you are automatically stupid — as Mr Kramer-Fried could have been admitted to any college; American University is a private school which has an acceptance rate of 40.6%. Temple’s acceptance rate is much higher, in the lower 80% range, but who’d really want to go to college someplace where random bullets may fly?

The article continues to tell us that the group Student Activists Against Sexual Assault believe that Mr Kramer-Fried should not be allowed on campus, a position with which I agree. Several paragraphs follow to tell readers of the opposition to allowing him to be a student at the University.

But then we get to the “hoist by his own petard” part:

In 2019, Common App removed the criminal history questions from the “common” portion of its application “to provide members with the greatest flexibility to determine how best to comply with their local requirements and institutional policies.”

A year later, it stopped asking applicants to include school disciplinary violations after finding that Black applicants reported incidents at more than twice the rate of white students.

“Requiring students to disclose disciplinary actions has a clear and profound adverse impact,” Jenny Rickard, the group’s president and CEO, said at the time. “This is about taking a stand against practices that suppress college-going aspiration and overshadow potential.”

There’s a lot more at the original, telling us how the left pushed to not have questions about past criminal arrests and convictions become a bar to admissions, though some wanted to make an exception for sex offenses. Mr Kramer-Fried didn’t plead guilty until a couple of months ago, and his acceptance at Temple may have predated his conviction; we’re not told about that, either.

But I am amused how the attempts by the left to not penalize applicants who are black for previous criminal history — no one seems to ask why black applicants might have a higher rate of criminal accusations and convictions — might have allowed a possibly white applicant with charged sex offenses to be accepted, and now people are up in arms about it. Mr Kramer-Fried was only arrested last December, despite having been identified much earlier.

There’s a lot of fault here. Temple didn’t do enough due diligence to reveal that he’d been barred from another university, and apparently knew nothing of his at-the-time alleged offenses. Some of that stems from not wanting to spend much money on due diligence, but it also stems from the leftist mindset that such things shouldn’t be investigated because it might disproportionately affect minority applicants.

Mr Kramer-Fried might be stupid, but so are the liberals who handle cases like this.

 

This morning’s rant

Via William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove, I saw this quote:

“I never imagined seeing the flag of a terror group holding eight Americans hostage for 292 days waved in the streets of our nation’s Capitol,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) wrote alongside an image of a protester waving the Hamas flag.

I guess that he’s not old enough to remember the campus protest chant, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!”

It’s amazing to me that there are so many people in Western countries, enjoying the fruits of Western civilization and a modern economy, supporting Islamist savages who would gladly hang all of the queers and force the women back into subjugation. It’s as though they just can’t wrap their pointy heads around the notion that, if Hamas did win, and drive all of the Jooooos into the sea, this new ‘Palestine’ would not somehow be all sweetness and light, with a First World economy, liberation for queers and trannies, religious freedom, freedom of speech and of the press, and the happiness of a wealthy, Ivy League university campus, but become the same squalor that the rest of the non-oil producing Arab Middle East is.

I have to laugh at the “Queers for Palestine” signs, of (mostly) white young women taking a leadership role in these protests, when none of them would be allowed any leadership roles at all under Islam. I have to laugh at those calling the Israelis “white settler colonialists” when every white person in America is the descendant or beneficiary of white settler colonialists, only here because white settler colonialists — including my first American ancestor, Richard Warren — drove out and (mostly) killed the Indians here before them. Every black person in America is the descendant or beneficiary of the evil white slaveholders who brought their ancestors here, rather than leaving them in the undeveloped squalor that is most of sub-Saharan Africa today. Every Hispanic person in America today is the descendant or beneficiary of the white Spanish settler colonialists who drove out and (mostly) killed the Indians south of the Rio Grande.

Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday, to Congress, referring to the anti-Semitic protesters outside:

I have a message for these protesters. When the tyrants of Tehran who hang gays from cranes and murder women for not covering their hair are praising, promoting and funding you: you have officially become Iran’s useful idiots.

Absotively, posilutely right!

When the people that today’s left are supporting actually take over, all of the campus idiots are going to be utterly astonished when they are among the first to be lined up against the wall and shot.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

When he says we must listen to students, it needs to be all that the students say!

The Great Valley Middle School case in Malvern, Pennsylvania, has mostly faded from the news. As The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, some students created 22 faked TikTok accounts, “some depicting racist, homophobic, or sexually inappropriate content” that were attributed to teachers.

On Monday morning, Inquirer columnist Jonathan Zimmerman, pondered how to maintain freedom of speech for students and still avoid the ‘disruption’ student speech can sometimes cause. We need to listen to the students, he told readers, but missed an important point. Continue reading