Cross-Examination

• Woke kills Halloween: In the South Orange-Maplewood School District of New Jersey, school children will not be allowed to celebrate Halloween. This is not the 1690s, when fear of witches had the authorities banning the holiday; no, the boogeyman that Superintendent Dr. Ronald Taylor fears is that a celebration in which kids dress up in a variety of costumes and ply their neighborhood for candy won’t fully placate the tenets of wokeness. As Taylor explains it, allowing students to dress up for Halloween fails to foster “diversity, equity, and meaningful inclusion.” The lesson is that nobody is allowed to have fun if every cultural sensitivity is not fully and equally placated. In other words, if one person of minority culture is offended, then all should be offended. Sorry, kids; fun is too offensive.

• UAW strike is all but over: After six weeks of picket lines and targeted strikes, the United Auto Workers union agreed to a deal with General Motors early Monday morning. GM thus joins Ford and Stellantis in coming to terms with the 146,000-member union. Ford led the way for the Big Three with a deal that was announced Wednesday, while Stellantis followed on Saturday. The autoworkers seem to be winners here, at least initially, given the general shape of the deals. As the Detroit News reports, the deals “would deliver double-digit wage increases, add cost-of-living adjustments, secure product commitments, increase retirement contributions and offer a pathway for U.S. joint-venture electric-vehicle battery plant workers to organize and be a part of the union’s master agreement with the union.” According to the UAW: “Like the agreements with Ford and Stellantis, the GM agreement has turned record profits into a record contract. The deal … provides more in base wage increases than GM workers have received in the past 22 years.” What remains to be seen, though, are the long-term effects of the compensation packages and the electric-vehicle agreements, and whether these will put the Big Three at a competitive disadvantage with foreign car companies.

• Judge stops Biden’s border-wire cutting: U.S. District Judge Alisa Moses issued a temporary restraining order against Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Control on Monday, ordering them to stop “disassembling, degrading, [and] tampering” with the razor wire on Texas’s southern border with Mexico. Last week Texas filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration for its efforts to keep the border wide open, as federal agents were caught cutting down and removing razor wire fences on the border near Eagle Pass. Under Governor Greg Abbott, Texas has acted to secure the border despite the fact that Biden has refused to do so. Furthermore, while the Biden administration has claimed to be engaged in border enforcement, this episode of fence cutting demonstrates the exact opposite. Biden wants the border open.

• Biden may have hidden more emails than Clinton: It’s amazing what a threat of legal action can occasionally do to focus one’s powers of recollection. This seems to be the case at the National Archives and Records Administration, which has managed to locate some 82,000 pages of emails from Joe Biden under three pseudonyms he used during his eight years as Barack Obama’s veep. As Just the News’s John Solomon reports, it’s unclear whether the emails contain any classified information. And, as the Archives’ status report noted, “Given the scope of Plaintiff’s FOIA request, which seeks copies of all emails in three separate accounts over an eight-year period, the volume of potentially responsive records is necessarily large.” This “discovery” came after a civil action filed by the Southeastern Legal Foundation, which had grown impatient with the Archives’ foot-dragging on an earlier FOIA request. It’s not clear whether the number of emails found refers to separate communications or instead includes numerous multiple-page email threads. Recall, though, that Hillary Clinton’s great regard for government transparency and Rule of Law caused her to delete some 33,000 emails that were already under congressional subpoena. Then “acid washed” the incriminating hard drive with BleachBit and destroyed her team’s mobile phones with hammers.

• Fearful Dems challenge Trump via the 14th Amendment: If you can’t beat him, disqualify him. That seems to be the approach of certain fraidy-cat Democrats and lawyers in certain swing states who are feverishly trying to keep Donald Trump off their states’ 2024 presidential ballots. As Fox News reports: “Attorneys started their arguments on Monday, claiming Trump’s alleged role in the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, violated the Constitution’s insurrection clause and thus prevents him from being able to seek office. The hearing in Colorado state court on Monday marked the first of two lawsuits against Trump as the Minnesota Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a similar case on Thursday.” As we noted back in August, this desperate maneuver is unlikely to work, despite what some Trump-deranged legal eagles think. The “insurrection” argument is not only weak; it’s bogus. Trump told his supporters to “peacefully and patriotically” make their voices heard. And the 14th Amendment doesn’t even mention the presidency as a disqualified office. In any case, it’s pretty clear now that Joe Biden is in deep doo-doo politically. As we reported last week, there’s nothing like a string of indictments and gag orders to boost one’s presidential prospects. And there’s nothing like a crummy economy, an open southern border, and a feckless foreign policy to wreck one’s own reelection prospects.

• Is this manslaughter? Hockey is a violent sport, no doubt, but it’s exceedingly rare to see a player at any level die on the ice. Tragically, though, we saw just that on Saturday during an Elite Ice Hockey League game in Sheffield, England, when former NHLer Adam Johnson died following a gruesome on-ice collision with the opposing team’s Matt Petgrave. As the video shows, Petgrave’s skate came up and hit Johnson across the throat. What the video thankfully doesn’t show is that Petgrave’s skate severed Johnson’s carotid artery, causing him to essentially bleed out on the ice while players encircled him and on-location trauma personnel desperately performed CPR. One can’t help but look at the video, though, and wonder whether Petgrave raised his leg up intentionally. It sure doesn’t seem like an accident, like a natural hockey movement. An investigation is being conducted, but the mainstream media has been quick to call it an accident. Typical of the coverage is this lengthy Washington Post article, which doesn’t even mention Petgrave, nor that he’s known to be a dirty player, nor that he led his league in penalty minutes last year. Petgrave is black, and one wonders whether his race has something to do with this one-sided coverage. This wasn’t murder, of course. But could it have been manslaughter?

• Good news: ADL caves: Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, who has been the target of leftist censorship crusaders for daring to expose the extremism on the Left, had been ridiculously tagged an extremist herself by the leftist Anti-Defamation League. Moreover, the ADL had pressured Elon Musk to ban Raichik from X, formerly known as Twitter. As Musk tweeted, “ADL has pushed hard for us to shut down accounts like Chaya’s, even though it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism, which is their supposed charter!” Last month, Raichik blasted the ADL as an organization that has “completely gone off the rails.” She noted that “it seems the ADL simply attacks anyone who doesn’t go along with the far-left agenda. The ADL targeted me, a young conservative Jewish woman, for speaking out against wokeness, far-left indoctrination of children, and the medical mutilation of minors under the guise of gender ideology.” Apparently, the ADL conflates opposition to wokeness with anti-Semitism. Well, after Riachik threatened a lawsuit against the ADL, her name suddenly disappeared from its “Glossary of Extremism.”

• Iranian girl dead; where is the leftist outrage mob? A 16-year-old Iranian girl died last week after an encounter with authorities in Tehran. Video footage shows that she was abducted on a subway platform while waiting for the train. It appears that she was targeted by authorities for violating Iran’s Islamic dress code laws. Opposition leaders in Iran are claiming that she was effectively beaten to death by Iran’s morality police because she was not wearing a headscarf. The beating left her in a coma, and she was eventually declared brain-dead. U.S. special envoy to Iran Abram Paley stated that he was “shocked and concerned about reports that Iran’s so-called morality police have assaulted 16-year-old Armita Geravand.” Meanwhile, where is the leftist outrage on college campuses against Iran’s violence and injustice against women? Oh, that’s right — they are too busy protesting in support of Hamas.

Headlines

• Israeli troops fight “fierce battles” against Hamas in urban areas deep inside Gaza (Times of Israel)

• “A time for war”: Netanyahu rejects calls for ceasefire, citing U.S. response to 9/11, Pearl Harbor (National Review)

• House GOP proposes Israel aid offset by IRS budget cuts (Daily Wire)

• White House announces plan to tackle anti-Semitism on campus after outrage (New York Post)

• Over 100 Columbia professors sign letter defending students who supported Hamas’s “military action” (New York Post)

• UMass lecturer who refused to condemn terrorism promises pro-Hamas protesters legal support (Free Beacon)

• Gutless Gretchen Whitmer cancels visit to Dearborn amid threats of protest (Detroit Free Press)

• Federal contractor urges DHS to ditch term “illegal immigrant,” says “jihadist” is “racially charged” (Daily Wire)

• Maine mass shooter’s family reached out to sheriff five months before rampage (AP)

• NRCC has best fundraising day in over 18 months after Mike Johnson wins speakership (Daily Caller)

• Policy: How Gavin Newsom became China’s useful idiot (The Federalist)

• Humor: White House accidentally hands out plastic baggies of cocaine to trick-or-treaters (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.