Why Isn’t Salman Rushdie’s Attacker a Household Name?
I have been running into people lately. Last week, I had a chance breakfast encounter with “independent” Missouri Senate candidate John Wood, a meeting that I believe led to his withdrawal on Tuesday 
from the race. On Wednesday of this week, I had a chance encounter with a fellow from the public defender’s office in Mayville, New York, the county seat of Chautauqua County. I was behind the fellow in the checkout line at the Tops supermarket in Mayville, a town of about 1,500 good souls as quaint and peaceful as Andy’s Mayberry.
The fellow and the checkout clerk were discussing the most notorious resident of the county jail in the jail’s history. I finessed my way into the conversation, working around the fact that, to my embarrassment, I did not know the man’s name. It is Hadi Matar. Two weeks earlier, the 24-year-old Matar stunned the world with his brutal attack on Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution, a historically Christian and painfully liberal summer community about five miles down the road from Mayville.
It’s About Time Liberals Apologize for Their COVID Policies
In the summer of 2020, as I have done every summer for the past 30 years, I commuted between my home in Kansas City and my cottage on Lake Erie in Chautauqua County, New York.
I was reminded of that summer when I came across a photo of a mandatory form that passengers from Missouri had to fill out before landing anywhere in New York state. At the time, Missouri was deemed a COVID “hot spot.” On the bottom of the form I wrote, “Under protest, self-destructive, wasteful, oppressive.” Walking through the Buffalo airport, form in hand, passengers heard a repeated message from Gov. Andrew Cuomo hectoring us about masks and social distancing. Before leaving the secure area of the airport, we all passed through a checkpoint manned by the men and women of the National Guard who were there to collect our forms.
Feeling more rebellious than usual — I had been rebelling since Day One of the lockdown — I chose to run the gauntlet without handing in my card. As I walked past the guardsmen, eyes straight ahead, I imagined myself an East German refugee at Checkpoint Charlie conning his way into the West and waiting to hear someone bark out the last word he would ever hear, “Achtung.” (It helped that at the time I didn’t know what Achtung meant. It just sounded right.) In any case, no one said anything. Score one for the resistance.
Has Wokism Scared Black Students Away from College?
percent in fact, from 2.5 million students in 2010 to 1.9 million in 2020.Prior to that ten-year period, argues Chronicle reporter Oyin Adedoyin, “The story of Black college students in the USA was a narrative of success.” Judging only by numbers, Adedoyin is right. Black population on campus grew nine-fold from 1966 to 2010. The decline since 2010 puzzles administrators given the thousands of DEI officers they have hired and the myriad enticements they have offered to Black students.
Although Adedoyin offers no overarching reason for the enrollment drop, the reader willing to wade through her tortured logic and butchered prose may find an explanation that Adedoyin herself did not seem to notice.
John Danforth’s Shameful Subversion of the Missouri Senate Race
Big Brother is counting.
Sometimes stories just fall into your lap. On Tuesday morning, I was having breakfast with Michael Ryan, a former Kansas City Star reporter who is now executive editor of the Heartlander, a regional online publication. While we waited for our order to arrive in this Kansas City eatery, Mike showed me a deeply researched article he had published about an independent Missouri Senate candidate headlined, “With just an apartment in KC but a multimillion-dollar home in Virginia, does Senate candidate John Wood even live in Missouri?”
As Mike reported, the nominally Republican Wood stepped down from his job as senior investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee, rented an apartment in Kansas City, and registered to vote on June 18. Ten days later, Wood announced his candidacy as an independent for the U.S. Senate. In the process, he left behind his family in their five-bedroom, seven-bath, 6,579-square-foot home in McLean, Virginia, a D.C. suburb. Wood had the home built just three years ago.
Global cooling descends on Kansas City
Unlike the rest of the word, here in the Show-Me State we are inclined to ask questions before voluntarily abandoning our cars, surrendering our farms and wrecking our economy. 
Question 1: Is our world really growing warmer? If so, show us the data, the real data, not the computer projections, not the CO2 index, not the tales of heat spells in Sri Lanka or Shangri-La, but the data that matters, the temperatures close to home that we can verify.
Here is what we know. In the past 10 years, Kansas City has not had a day that exceeded 100 degrees. This summer, a warm one, we had three days that reached 100 degrees, but with an average high of 90 in July and 89 in August, 100 is not an aberration.
Have the Cheneys Forgotten the Deep State Hit on Scooter Libby?
“I have been ashamed to hear members of my party attacking the integrity of the FBI agents involved with the recent Mar-a-Lago search,” the perversely self-righteous Liz Cheney tweeted on Thursday. “These are sickening comments that put the lives of patriotic public servants at risk. Rep. Cheney seems to have forgotten one significant event in her family’s political life: the same weaponized deep state that okayed the raid on Mar-a-Lago convicted her father’s chief-of-staff Lewis “Scooter” Libby on charges that were as manufactured as those leveled against President Trump. If Liz has forgotten, former vice president Dick Cheney surely remembers.The Tragic Irony of the Rushdie Stabbing at Chautauqua
“Salman Rushdie was stabbed at Chautauqua, flown to Erie, could not get bleeding stopped.” I know the area well. I have a summer home in Chautauqua (pronounced sha-TAWK-wa.) County, the site of my 2000 novel, the then futuristic 2006: The Chautauqua Rising. A celebrated writer, the 75-year-old Rushdie has been living under a fatwa since February 14, 1989, the day that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini decided that Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was “blasphemous against Islam.” He was a regular visitor to the Chautauqua Institution. The fact that Rushdie would be stabbed at Chautauqua is perversely and tragically ironic. In the way of background, a Methodist minister founded the institution on Chautauqua Lake in 1874. It served as a campground meeting for summer school teachers and proved popular enough that by century’s end, traveling “chautauquas” were bringing progressive enlightenment to citizens around the nation.
I set the climactic scene of 2006 at the institution itself. The book tells the tale of a grassroots “rising” that anticipated the Tea Party insurgency of 2009-10 and the MAGA movement of more recent years. When I wrote the book I was unaware that a quiet insurrection was brewing on the institution grounds. A group known as Chautauqua Christian Fellowship (CCF) had emerged to correct the Institution’s political and theological leftward drift.
The rot at DOJ runs deep
Having watched the Department of Justice in action these last 20 or so years, I see the raid on Mar-a-Lago as unprecedented only in its conspicuousness.
After Al Gore’s bitter loss in 2000, Democrats across the board have dedicated themselves to bureaucratic sedition, enabled by an equally embittered and increasingly imbalanced media. The FBI and the Department of Justice, which oversees the FBI, are riddled with leftist careerists, many of them in key positions. The symptoms of rot have been hard to avoid since at least 2004.
That was the year the exploits of former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger first surfaced. In the act of reviewing documents before his 9/11 Commission testimony, Berger did some things that would have put you or me in prison. He swiped some highly classified documents, and then, during a break, stashed them under a trailer at a construction site. He retrieved them at the end of the day and admittedly used scissors to cut the documents into little pieces before throwing them away.
Time for Florida to Host a Real Climate Summit
A recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the world is about to descend into a self-imposed dark age. More worrisome still is that Europe’s duly elected despots are dooming their 
nations to darkness without any meaningful discussion as to why. As in World Wars I and II, the New World will have to save the old, but most of our leaders are as eager to suppress dissent as are theirs — most, but not all. If there is light to be found, it will come from the Sunshine State.
In Ireland, where I spent a week, “sustainability” has replaced Roman Catholicism as the nation’s religion. “Climate,” in one manifestation or another, dominates the news. One hot topic involved carbon targets for agriculture. There was no debate as to the need for reductions. None. The only debate was about the scope: the Greens wanted 30 percent; the farmers would settle, if need be, for 22 percent. For the record, the Republic of Ireland makes up about one-ten thousandth of the world’s land mass. Other than the Irish themselves, no one will notice the nation’s perverse self-sacrifice.
The TWA 800 Whistleblower Is Legit
In the past few weeks, I have received numerous inquiries about ten-year Navy veteran William Henry Teele III. After years of quietly providing information to me and other investigators into the July 1996 destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island, Teele has gone public and is naming names.
I shared some of Teele’s information in my 2016 book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy. Teele did not claim to be on the ship that fired the missile. He was on the USS Carr, a guided missile frigate that was one of the “combatants” in the battle group that destroyed the unfortunate 747 and killed the 230 souls on board. Everything that I could verify about Teele’s account back then checked out.
In the six years since, Teele has reached out to many of his fellow sailors and fleshed out his account. Although he has appeared on several podcasts in recent weeks, his uninterrupted narrative on the Duke Report is the most compelling. I would welcome those with relevant experience to contact me through my website, cashill.com, to offer your assessment of Teele’s account or to provide additional information. My research suggests Teele is the real deal but I remain open, as all journalists should, to contrary information.
