Newly obtained emails confirm that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed its definition for both “vaccine” and “vaccinated” because people were pointing out that definitions didn’t seem to apply to the COVID-19 vaccines.

“The definition of vaccine we have posted is problematic and people are using it to claim the COVID-19 vaccine is not a vaccine based on our own definition,” Alycia Downs, a CDC official, wrote in an email on Aug. 25, 2021, to a colleague.

The definition is located on a page titled Immunization Basics.

“Vaccine” was defined since at least 2011 by the CDC as a product that triggers immunity, while “vaccination” was described as an injection that prevents a disease, according to archived versions of the page. However, a flood of inquiries on the definitions was triggered by the fact that the COVID-19 vaccines have been increasingly ineffective against infection by the virus that causes COVID-19, the emails show.

“Our question is how is the CDC and the rest of the world allowed to call the shot a vaccination when it doesn’t even meet your own definition,” one person wrote to the CDC.

“Right-wing covid-19 pandemic deniers are using your ‘vaccine’ definition to argue that mRNA vaccines are not vaccines,” another said.

The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are both built on messenger RNA technology. They are two of the three COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States.

Downs and colleagues Allison Michelle Fisher, Cynthia Jorgensen, Valerie Morelli, and Andrew (no last name given) worked on changing the definitions for “vaccine” and “vaccination,” according to the emails.

The changes were pushed through on Aug. 31, 2021, and Sept. 1, 2021, respectively.

Changing Definitions

“Vaccine” is now defined as “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but some can be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.”

The previous definition was “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease. Vaccines are usually administered through needle injections, but can also be administered by mouth or sprayed into the nose.”

“Vaccination” was changed to “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease” from “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.”

Attorney Travis Miller obtained some of the missives in 2021 and published screenshots of them. At the time, the CDC didn’t dispute their authenticity. The Epoch Times has obtained the emails, and additional messages concerning the changes, and has published all 67 pages of them.

The batch of emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, also shows that Andrew, a CDC employee on the agency’s Vaccine Task Force, boosted a Washington Post article that downplayed criticism of the change.

“I’ve only seen a couple of inquiries about the change to this page. I think the WaPo article explains the problem well—that people are misinterpreting ‘immunity’ to mean 100% protection,” Andrew wrote.

“Thank you, Andrew! I really appreciate your response,” Downs replied.

A CDC spokesperson has told The Epoch Times that the “slight changes in wording” haven’t altered “the overall definition,” of “vaccine,” adding, “the previous definition at Immunization Basics | CDC could be interpreted to mean that vaccines were 100% effective, which has never been the case for any vaccine, so the current definition is more transparent, and also describes the ways in which vaccines can be administered.”

Some other portions of the CDC website still say COVID-19 vaccines confer immunity. One page, for instance, says that “getting a COVID-19 vaccination is a safer and more dependable way to build immunity to COVID-19 than getting sick with COVID-19.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Americans’ confidence in major U.S. institutions—including government and the media—is in a state of collapse, falling to an average of just 27 percent across all categories, according to the latest national poll released by the Gallup Organization.

Only the military and small businesses still enjoy the confidence of a majority of Americans.

Although public belief in institutions has been weak for most of the past 15 years, the 27 percent average for all categories is the lowest recorded by Gallup.

The company began measuring confidence in institutions in 1973 and has done so each year since 1993.

The survey figures came after Gallup delivered sobering news on June 22. At that time the company said confidence in the overall direction of the country fell to 13 percent that month, down 3 percentage points from May and 11 points since March when the figure was 24 percent.

It also reported at that time that despite ongoing economic malaise, resident Joe Biden’s job approval rating held steady at 41 percent between May and June.

Gallup’s finding on the issue was called into question by the Civiqs Poll’s daily tracking survey of registered voters which found Biden’s approval rating has sunk to a new record low of just 30 percent, the New York Post reported July 9.

Only in two states, the Democratic strongholds of Vermont and Hawaii, are the president’s supporters more numerous than his detractors.

Gallup also reported on June 29 that although 96 percent of U.S. adults expressed pride in varying degrees about being American, that figure includes a record low of 38 percent who consider themselves “extremely proud” to be Americans, the lowest figure for that description since the company began tracking the issue in 2001.

Another 27 percent of Americans said they were “very proud,” while 22 percent said they were “moderately proud,” and 9 percent described themselves as “only a little proud.”

Four percent said they were “not at all” proud to be Americans.

In the new Gallup survey, Americans expressed less confidence in institutions than they did a year ago, with significant declines in 11 of the 16 examined—and no improvements for any of the institutions.

The biggest drops were regarding the presidency as an institution—as opposed to the job performance of the current president—and the Supreme Court.

Confidence in the presidency is now at 23 percent, which is 15 percentage points lower than 2021.

The Supreme Court came in at 25 percent, down 11 points since 2021. The survey was completed before the court rendered landmark rulings on gun rights and abortion, decisions that have proven controversial.

Confidence in Congress came in at just 7 percent, down from 12 percent a year ago.

The figures for the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court were record Gallup lows.

Five other institutions’ ratings plunged to record lows.

The church and organized religion weighed in at 31 percent, down from 37 percent. Newspapers scored 16 percent, falling from 21 percent. The criminal justice system got 14 percent, after rating 20 percent. Big business came in at 14 percent, falling from 18 percent. The police garnered 45 percent after the 51 percent figure a year ago.

Large technology companies weighed in at 26 percent, down from 29 percent. Gallup has only been measuring confidence in the category for three years.

Small business and the military still enjoy the confidence of a majority of Americans, despite slipping support. Small business came in at 68 percent, down from 70 percent in 2021. The military had a confidence level of 64 percent, which is lower than the previous 69 percent figure.

Confidence in the medical system is at 38 percent, down from 44 percent. The figure for public schools is 28 percent, down from 32 percent. Banks scored 27 percent, a drop from 33 percent. Confidence in organized labor remained steady at 28 percent.

Confidence in television news is down to 11 percent from 16 percent in the 2021 survey.

The new annual survey was carried out by telephone in the first three weeks of June. The respondents were 1,015 adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/confidence-in-us-media-government-and-justice-system-collapsing_4589439.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-07-11-2&utm_medium=email&est=WQ7IxDJu41RqYANJ%2Fie16XB%2BXk6DnxEZqS9ppCdU1MliBuh5UAG6oFEh8n69f%2FYwhg%3D%3D

Decision to not get COVID-19 vaccine comes with consequences, but maybe not for the health care system

A large-scale international study of those unvaccinated against COVID-19 finds a pattern of discrimination—and a relatively low hospitalization rate.

While the study’s findings are limited by the nature of the selection process, in which unvaccinated people opted in to participate, the new study suggests that those who declined the vaccine may not be the burden to the health care system many have claimed them to be. The study is now available as a preprint (which means it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed). It was uploaded to ResearchGate earlier this month.

The findings hold significant importance to policymakers. According to Our World in Data, 60 percent of the world is fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The 40 percent who aren’t vaccinated against the virus have been frequently blamed for the duration and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as vaccination rates reached up to 90 percent in many jurisdictions.

With government agencies, news media, and social media algorithms ignoring or misrepresenting the contending science around COVID-19, the unvaccinated have faced often intense pressure to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

“What the survey aimed to do is gather insights about health outcomes, choices, and discrimination experienced by the marginalized subpopulation of people from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures who have elected to exercise their right of refusal of COVID-19 injections,” the study authors said.

In many places in the United States, those who declined the COVID-19 vaccines have been discriminated against, stigmatized, and marginalized from society. Nurses and health care workers were fired, Air Force cadets were denied commissions, and family members found themselves ostracized within some of their most intimate and important relationships.

The vilification of the unvaccinated has come with the censorship of both science and personal experience. Many doctors, nurses, scientists, and other health care professionals who speak out about the safety and necessity of these vaccines have been threatened with the loss of their medical licenses, deleted from social media, canceled from events with their peers, and fired from their jobs.

The Control Group

The study is based on data collected from the Control Group Cooperative (CGC), which was founded in July 2021 by a citizens group in the UK to represent and connect people who elected to not get the COVID-19 vaccines.

The goal of the CGC has been to analyze the long-term health outcomes and experiences of these individuals through self-reported surveys. According to their website, there are currently more than 300,000 unvaccinated participants from more than 175 countries participating in their long-term study.

The study was conducted by Robert Verkerk, founder of the Alliance for Natural Health International, an affiliate of the CGC. A team of international scientists contributed to the research. The study analyzes the data from the CGC survey from the first five months of its operation—from September 2021 through February.

The Cohort

The cohort analyzed by Verkerk consisted of 18,497 individuals out of the 297,618 people who had joined the CGC by the end of February.

A plurality of participants were from the continent of Europe (40 percent), followed by Oceania (27 percent), and North America (25 percent). Three percent of participants were from South America and Asia, while less than 1 percent were from Africa. Ages ranged anywhere from 1 to more than 90 years old, with most participants being middle-aged.

Motive for Refusal

Individuals participating in the study declined COVID-19 vaccination for various reasons. These included past vaccine injuries, preference for more natural remedies, lack of trust in pharmaceutical companies and government entities, and concerns about the validity of vaccine study results.

One-third of the individuals in the study self-reported that they received vaccinations as children. That figure may be low, as others may not have reported—or even remembered—their previous vaccinations.

While some had never been vaccinated, the cohort was mainly concerned about the safety, efficacy, and necessity of the COVID-19 vaccines, not all vaccines in general.

Discrimination Based on Vaccination

Between 20 and 50 percent of respondents, depending on where they lived, reported being personal targets of hate and discrimination. Many felt victimized for their vaccination status, especially those living in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America.

They reported that they faced discrimination in the workplace, from friends or family members, and from their respective state authorities, because of their “unvaccinated” status.

The prejudice experienced within the workplace by respondents resulted in heavy economic burdens for many. For example, 29 percent of respondents from Australia and New Zealand reported losing their jobs during the five months that the survey was administered.

These survey results dovetail with what unvaccinated individuals have been facing globally. Those who don’t succumb to peer pressure, advertising, or incentivizing are then threatened with an ultimatum: Get the vaccine or get fired.

That’s what happened to Destiny Carpenter, a former nurse at Colorado Canyons Hospital. Carpenter is among one of the hundreds of U.S. nurses who have been fired for refusing to get the vaccine, as Fox News reported in September 2021.

Carpenter was nominated for the Daisy Award for extraordinary nursing three times during her tenure at the hospital. This award is granted to the most deserving nurse for exuding compassionate care to their patients.

In February, FiercePharma reported that more than 15,500 health care workers in the United States had been fired or suspended or had chosen to resign from their hospital jobs over their decision to remain unvaccinated.

About 40 percent of respondents, regardless of age, reported that they experienced mild or moderate mental health issues during the duration of the survey, while approximately 20 percent reported experiencing severe mental health issues.

In an analysis of the mental health issues experienced by the cohort, the scientists noted that the mental health burden “may be associated more to the human response to the pandemic, rather than psychological, fear-based reactions to any threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself.”

In other words, the respondents’ mental health problems appeared to mainly be a result of being stigmatized and marginalized from society.

A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated?

While the study gives insight into the experience of the unvaccinated, it always raises questions about assertions that this group is an undue burden on the health care system.

“Only 74 respondents out of the 5,196 (1.4 percent) who reported suspected or known SARS-CoV-2 infection also reported that they were hospitalized following infection. Therefore, outpatient or inpatient hospitalization was reported in just 0.4 percent of the full survey cohort. Of these, 15 were outpatient only, another 15 were hospitalized for less than 3 days, 26 were hospitalized between 3 and 7 days, 11 for between 7 and 14 days and only 10 for more than 14 days,” the study reads.

While the study is potentially prone to bias because of the selection pool for the survey, an infection-hospitalization ratio of 0.4 percent would certainly challenge many assertions about the burden of the unvaccinated.

A study published in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice in May 2021 found an overall infection-hospitalization ratio of 2.1 percent that varied more by age than by race or sex.

“Infection-hospitalization ratio estimates ranged from 0.4 percent for those younger than 40 years to 9.2 percent for those older than 60 years.”

The study also found that hospitalization rates based on case counts overestimated the IHR by a factor of 10, “but this overestimation differed by demographic groups, especially age.”

Most of the CGC respondents who reported that they had caught COVID-19 had only mild symptoms and were sick for less than a week. Fatigue and coughing were the most common symptoms recorded.

Beyond the fact that they were unvaccinated, another unique trait of the CGC cohort may also be their propensity to try various therapeutics to treat their COVID-19 infections.

Against the Grain

Participants reported that they didn’t need a vaccine to lessen their symptoms: Most infections were mild to begin with, and many respondents said they turned to natural remedies when they did get sick.

Participants reported that they opted to support their immune systems naturally by taking preventative vitamins such as zinc, vitamin C, vitamin D, and quercetin.

A study published in June 2021 in the journal Inflammopharmacology by an international team of researchers from India, Italy, and the United States, shows that using natural remedies is a scientifically sound choice.

This study explored the immune-boosting properties of vitamins and minerals in combating COVID-19 infections. The scientists found that if administered at higher-than-recommended daily doses, many vitamins had the potential to reduce viral load and risk of hospitalization from COVID-19.

The decision to combat COVID-19 with non-pharmacological immune-enhancing interventions may also help explain why the hospitalization rates of the unvaccinated in the study were so low.

What About Ivermectin?

A portion of the participants reported that they also took ivermectin, an anti-parasitical that has been both promoted and hotly criticized as a treatment for COVID-19, as The Epoch Times has reported.

While ivermectin remains controversial, a meta-analysis published in June 2021 in the American Journal of Therapeutics states: “Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin. Using ivermectin early in the clinical course may reduce numbers progressing to severe disease. The apparent safety and low cost suggest that ivermectin is likely to have a significant impact on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic globally.”

Injecting Infants

On June 18, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that it was authorizing the emergency use of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for babies 6 months and older. About 20 million U.S. children are in this age bracket.

The announcement has raised concerns that side effects from the vaccine aren’t being weighed against potential benefits.

As of June 12, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) indicated that there have been 1,301,354 adverse events and 28,859 deaths from COVID-19 vaccines. A recent analysis of VAERS reports done by two journalists in Israel revealed that there were 58 serious adverse effects in babies prior to the rollout of the vaccine authorization for those aged 6 months and older. The reports failed to indicate if these infants and toddlers were involved in the Pfizer clinical trial or why they received vaccination.

Verkerk is deeply concerned about the CDC vaccine authorization for children younger than 5. He holds master’s and doctorate degrees from Imperial College London and is co-author of more than 60 peer-reviewed journal articles in the areas of health, agriculture, and environment. He’s also the co-chair of the World Council of Health’s Health & Humanity Committee. He told The Epoch Times via email that many parents want this vaccine for their children because, like every parent, they want what’s best for their child.

“However, they’ve been misled as to the known science on both the benefits and the risks,” he wrote. “There could be disastrous long-term consequences for some children if they are exposed to the spike protein via the vaccine before they are exposed to circulating coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which would otherwise result in broader-based, more robust, naturally-acquired immunity.”

For Verkerk, it’s about choice. We shouldn’t vilify those who rely on natural immunity or refuse the vaccines for religious, medical, or ethical reasons, he said.

“We have seen a dramatic erosion of the principles of medical ethics,” he wrote.

We need to respect autonomy (the right of competent adults to make individualized and informed decisions about their own medical care) and adhere to the principle of first doing no harm, as well as to the principles of beneficence and justice, according to Verkerk.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has drawn criticism for transforming Thomas Jefferson’s Charlottesville, Virginia, home into an exhibit on slavery.

The foundation manages Monticello — the primary plantation and residence of the founding father and third president of the United States.

Monticello was once a tribute to a man who helped draft the Declaration of Independence — the founding document of the U.S.

Now, the plantation’s management has transformed it into a site that emphasizes the fact that Jefferson enslaved people, the New York Post reported.

As the New York Post puts it, Monticello “offers visitors a harangue on the horrors of slavery.”

According to Monticello’s website, one of the ticketed tours on schedule for the plantation is the “Slavery at Monticello Tour.”

This tour highlights the “experiences of the enslaved people who lived and labored on the Monticello plantation,” the website stated.

Monticello also offers a free mobile guide app on slavery at the plantation. Monticello’s website has an entire section dedicated to slamming the founding father for slavery.

“Thomas Jefferson wrote that ‘all men are created equal,’ and yet enslaved more than 600 people over the course of his life,” the section stated.

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Although the section conceded that Jefferson “made some legislative attempts against slavery and at times bemoaned its existence, Jefferson also profited directly from the institution of slavery.”

Monticello’s slamming of Jefferson also extended to how history was framed at the physical site, with boards at the various locations on the plantation trying to connect a part of Jefferson’s life with slavery.

“Interpretive signage throughout the estate places slavery at the forefront of each historical feature by adding the word ‘enslaved’ before every possible job description, often multiple times: ‘an enslaved cook,’ ‘enslaved postilions,’ ‘Jefferson’s enslaved valet, Burwell Colbert,’” New York Post reporters Mary Kay Linge and Jon Levine noted.

According to the New York Post, one of the first paintings visitors to Monticello would see when they enter the home is a work depicting Jefferson’s slaves weeping.

One sign at the site questions the meaning of the Declaration of Independence.

Related:

‘It Can’t Be Replaced’: Historic Church Burns to the Ground in Suspected Arson

“Is ‘all men created equal’ being lived up to in our country today? When will we know when it is,” it stated, according to a photograph shared by the Post.

“The whole thing has the feel of propaganda and manipulation,” Brownstone Institute founder Jeffrey Tucker said. “People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized.”

In a Facebook comment, one visitor to Monticello wrote that he did not enjoy his visit because “the tour guides play ‘besmirchment derby,’ never missing a chance to defame this brilliant, complex man.”

“Always enjoyed visiting Monticello in the past. The workers are super friendly and helpful,” another visitor named William Bailes wrote in a review of the tour.

“Unfortunately, on this guided tour, we were lectured more on slaves and Sally Hemmings than the man himself. Half of the comments on Jefferson were critical,” Bailes wrote, adding, “Even my 11-year-old daughter noticed the bias.”

“Our goal is to present an honest, inclusive history of Monticello in all its aspects as well as Jefferson’s contributions to the founding of the country,” Monticello spokeswoman Jenn Lyon said, according to the Post.

We spend a good deal of time on this Substack articulating the vast array of negative consequences of lockdowns on society. As I note in my upcoming book:

The Radical Left is Trying to Pressure the Supreme Court – Fight Back Here!

Many of those who joined Rational Ground and what we came to call Team Reality had similar experiences. Life isn’t always fair, and we adults are willing to bear with the challenges foisted on us, but when the government’s insane rules harm our children, watch out.

Below are links to some of the more prominent impacts we’ve cataloged against children from the egregious policies foisted on families during the pandemic. We’ll be discussing these and other items today at noon on our Rational Ground podcast.

Listen to the podcast live on the Callin website, or later on Apple iTunes or Spotify.

Stringency Measures and Their Impact on Children

This week a new study scanned the literature to determine what countries across the world are experiencing because of the pandemic and stringency measures. Here’s a thread on that:

Meta-study:
“… anxiety, depression, [PTSD], and sleep disorders.”
“… measures such as quarantine and isolation for infection prevention may have immediate and prolonged mental health impacts.”

The kids are not all righthttps://t.co/umGo0uWBZp
1/July 7, 2022

From RationalGround.com

• Our 4-part series by Emily Burns published last year is a tremendous overview about masking kids.
• Screamed for Mom to “Make it Stop”
• Ridiculous mandates, over-testing, unreasonable quarantines, illogical masking policies… the list goes on. This next generation is going to have a tough time grappling with concepts like “reason” and “logic.” One mom emailed us her letter to the school board. See below… feel free to re-use it.
• Our illustrious overlords of health determined it was better for kids that they be banished from school and locked indoors eating takeout. The result? BMI rate of change for 2 to 19 year olds DOUBLED! COVID didn’t do this. OUR POLICIES DID.

• A group of parents in Gainesville, FL, sent 6 face masks to a lab at the University of Florida, requesting an analysis of contaminants found on the masks after they had been worn. The resulting report found that five masks were contaminated with bacteria, parasites, and fungi, including three with dangerous pathogenic and pneumonia-causing bacteria.

Our friends at the Brownstone Institute have compiled a tremendous list of resources, analysis and commentary on this subject:

• What Covid Containment Has Done to Our Children
• A Partial List of the Myriad Abuses That Facemasks Inflict on Our Children
• More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid Interventions (Lockdowns, Restrictions, Closures)
• 75 Studies and Articles Against COVID-19 School Closures
• Hurting Children to Protect Them
• Human Shields: The Public-Health War on Children
• What Will We Tell Our Children?
• Why Have They Done This to the Children?
• Lockdowns Might Have Contributed to Myopia In Children
• More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms

Articles From Our Substack:

• Masking Children is an Ineffective Policy and Not Supported by Research or Data
• Saving Children and Mental Health
• Low, Low, Low
• 16 States Where Kids Breathe Freely!
• Kids and Masks: A Review of the Insanity
• The List: Lockdown Impact

This article originally appeared in Rational Ground. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News. Republished with permission.

Social media companies gear their platforms towards inciting conflict [US Patriot]

Warren Farrell, author of the book “The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It,” has found that being “dad deprived” is a leading factor in males’ increased mental illness, addiction, and suicide.

He links the mass shootings in 53 developed countries to boys and men who lacked a father figure, and he specifically mentioned six mass shootings that have occurred in the United States in the 21st century.

“All six of those mass school shootings that have killed more than 10 people have been done by boys, and all six of them have been done by boys who have been ‘dad deprived,’ from Sandy Hook right on through to the Texas shooting,” Farrell said during a recent interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.

Related Coverage

Warren Farrell: Absent Fathers Big Factor in Mass Shootings

Farrell was referring to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

He said that girls are growing up in the same environment as boys, with access to the same media, video games, and guns and dealing with the same mental health issues, but they aren’t committing any of the shootings.

Farrell has made it a part of his mission to educate lawmakers about the importance of fathers in the lives of children, especially young boys. His efforts have resulted in Florida and Kentucky enacting laws that acknowledge the crucial role of the father, especially in the case of divorce.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a single mother living with her child or children is the second most common living arrangement in the United States, a number that has doubled in the past 50 years.

As of 2020, 21 percent of children, or about 15.3 million, lived with their mother only, compared to 11 percent, or 7.6 million, in 1968.

States Taking Action

The Florida Legislature recently passed HB 7065, which allocated $70 million in funding to provide a wide array of family and youth support through the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) and the Department of Children and Families (DCF).

“There are more than 18 million children in our country who live without a father in their home,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis when he signed the bill into law on April 22. “This has a severe impact on children and often leads to dropping out of school, crime, and substance abuse. Incredibly, there are those who diminish the importance of fatherhood and the nuclear family—we will not let that happen in our state. I am proud to say we are doing everything we can to support involved fatherhood in Florida.”

In 2018, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin signed a bill into law that automatically presumes both parents will share equal custody of children in the case of divorce, while still providing judges with the discretion to limit shared custody if one of the parents is unfit.

Farrell said it’s good that Florida and Kentucky have taken these steps, but that by and large, the crisis of fatherlessness is still being avoided.

Farrell mentioned the work of psychologist Richard Warshak, who found that children who spend time with both mothers and fathers after divorce had better outcomes later in life, and that the presence of the father was more important than economic variables.

Farrell said Warshak’s study found that 100 percent of academics agreed that children who were raised without a father had the biggest problems.

Farrell said he served on the board of the National Organization for Woman (NOW) in New York City and has spoken all around the world about women’s issues, so he tends to be in line with Democratic thinking on such issues.

When he went to Iowa during the 2020 presidential election to speak with the Democratic candidates, Farrell said candidates John Hickenlooper and Andrew Yang both agreed with him about the epidemic of fatherlessness.

“Their campaign managers, when they started to see that their candidates were agreeing with me, both of their campaign managers came up to me and said, ‘Warren, we can’t afford to have our candidates speak out on the importance of boys having fathers and a lot of father involvement, because we’re afraid to alienate our feminist base.’”

This was not a surprise to Farrell who, having worked in a leadership role of a feminist organization, had seen this type of thinking and the marginalizing of fathers before. These organizations do not put the interests of the children first, but rather the mother, Farrell said.

After the Divorce

Farrell said children do better after a divorce when they spend an equal amount of time with both the mother and father, and especially when there is communication and balanced input from both parents. Each parent brings strengths to the raising of a child: mothers tend to set boundaries and praise their children while dads enforce boundaries and allow children to take risks, said Farrell.

“In their enforcement of the boundaries, [dads] build the discipline for the child to accomplish the postponed gratification and the focus on the attention to detail,” he said. “Children raised predominately by dads are far less likely to have ADHD because they’re required to focus on the actual thing that they’re doing.”

The boys that committed these mass shootings at schools suffered from not having a caring, strong male role model. In addition to that, boys are often told their feelings don’t matter, which leads to emotional toxicity, said Farrell.

“Boys who are fatherless, very frequently they are not likely to have that postponed gratification that emanates from boundary enforcement. Therefore they start not doing as well in school,” said Farrell.

He said he’s talked to boys in high school, and the boys said what they learn about in school when it comes to male–female issues is toxic masculinity, without any understanding of the sacrifices that males made that led to that toxicity, as well as the concept of “the patriarchy,” said Farrell.

Modern Feminist Ideology Hurting Boys

Farrell said boys are suffering because they are being told that their masculinity is bad.

“The world was not dominated by a patriarchy. It was dominated by the need to survive, and in order to survive, both males and females were restricted in their roles,” said Farrell, adding that feminism blames men for societal problems and does not take into account the sacrifices they make for their families.

“We are constantly giving boys a negative image of themselves that is leading to a low self-esteem, that is leading to their needing compensations,” he said.

Farrell said that while trying to do good, he also blames himself for being on the board of directors of the NOW for three years, where these detrimental feminist ideas that hurt boys, and ultimately girls, were spread.

Farrell began his work for equal rights of women because he believed in the credo, “I am woman, I am strong,” but now he said he doesn’t support feminism because the feminist movement has changed to, “I am woman, I’ve been wronged.”

This type of thinking is hurting boys, he said, and it needs to change so both boys and girls can benefit from a father’s full input in their lives.

Advice for Single Mothers

Farrell advises all single mothers to let the biological father know he is very much needed, and he will respond well.

“When you say, ‘I see now what the positive value of your roughhousing, you’re teasing, you’re allowing our son or daughter to take a risk of walking into a lake and maybe getting lost,’ and what that does, then, the dad will say, ‘Alright, if I can be appreciated, now I’ll be back,” said Farrell

If the biological dad is not able to be involved, Farrell suggests enrolling boys in groups or team sports, where other male role models can help shape their character.

He advises parents to connect with their children, to listen instead of trying to fix their children’s problems, and to have family dinner nights free of media so they can practice these listening skills and deepen the relationship.

“Empathetic parents who are only empathetic create children who are self-centered, thinking that only their needs are being paid attention to,” he said. “So you have to both be empathetic and require of your children that they also listen to your perspective.”

Based on his work with counseling couples, Farrell said that listening needs to extend beyond children to the spouse or former spouse so there is respectful, healthy communication.

Co-parenting couples must realize that no parent intends to harm their child, said Farrell.

Adults must “learn how to hear those that we are not initially inclined to hear and to know how to be criticized by the people we love without becoming defensive,” said Farrell.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Biden administration spent nearly $1.5 million to produce a “transgender programming curriculum” for inmates held in the nation’s 122 federal prisons.

The Justice Department disbursed the funds for a consulting firm to develop a program to help transgender inmates “manage identity concerns during incarceration” and advocate for their “sexual health and safety,” according to a government summary of the contract. The contract also asks the firm to develop a program to help transgender inmates access hormone treatment after they are released.

There are only about 1,200 transgender individuals serving sentences in federal prisons, according to a 2021 Department of Justice estimate, meaning the Biden administration spent roughly $1,250 per transgender prisoner. That is more than the $1,200 checks Americans received during the first round of COVID-19 stimulus payments.

The Justice Department’s $1,496,500 contract is part of resident Joe Biden’s larger, controversial effort to promote transgenderism—even among minors. The Justice Department in March sent a letter to all state attorneys general warning them against restricting transgender hormone treatment for children. That same month, Biden’s State Department announced it would allow individuals to select “X” as their gender when completing passport applications. The administration also released updated guidelines in January that make it easier for transgender inmates to be placed in facilities that match their “gender identity.”

Following a district court ruling last month, a convicted terrorist is set to become the first transgender inmate to receive federally funded sex-reassignment surgery, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The American Civil Liberties Union, a Biden administration ally, waged the successful legal battle on behalf of Cristina Iglesias, who in 2005 mailed fake anthrax to British government office buildings.

The Biden administration’s push for transgender accommodations in federal prisons comes amid a spike in sexual assaults committed by biologically male inmates in women’s prisons. Female prisoners have sued state governments, citing sexual assault concerns, in an attempt to keep male-to-female transgender inmates in men’s prisons.

The funds were first disbursed in 2021 to Nevada-based consulting firm Change Companies, and the contract runs through September of this year. The firm, which creates educational materials for correctional facilities, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department told the Free Beacon it “recognizes the importance of appropriate gender-affirming management and treatment of transgender individuals in its custody.” The department did not respond to a request for comment on whether any of the programs have been implemented in federal prisons.

Justice Department officials recommended that the firm draw on research from left-wing advocacy groups, such as the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), to guide its work. The NCTE dubbed former president Donald Trump’s White House the “Discrimination Administration” and supports Democrats’ Equality Act, which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity.” The organization also launched a politically oriented “action fund” in 2017, which has exclusively endorsed Democratic candidates.

The Justice Department programs appear to align with the agency’s most recent guidelines on transgender prisoners. The guidelines, released earlier this year, prohibit prison staff from referring to inmates by biologically accurate pronouns if they identify as transgender. The document defines gender as “a construct” based on “social identity, psychological identity, and human behavior.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A second professor from Laval University in Quebec City has been suspended for questioning the need to vaccinate children against COVID-19.

Nicolas Derome, a professor of molecular biology, was suspended for the same reason and under similar circumstances as his colleague Patrick Provost, a professor of microbiology, infectious diseases, and immunology.

Derome and Provost both participated in activities organized by Réinfo COVID, which describes itself as a collective of nurses, physicians, scientists, and citizens seeking to generate debate about how the pandemic has been handled by the government.

Derome gave an online presentation organized by the collective in late November 2021, in which he said children were not at high risk for complications from COVID-19.

He said there had been “zero” serious cases among the 0 to 17 age bracket, with or without comorbidity, with his presentation slide indicating the data came from Quebec’s public health institute (INSPQ) and expert assessments.

A review of the INSPQ data for the first four waves, covering Feb. 23, 2020, to Dec. 4, 2021, reveals there were 73 ICU admissions for individuals between age 0 and 19. The data does not indicate if the admissions were “because of COVID” or “with COVID.”

These 73 ICU admissions represent an average of 1.6 percent of total ICU admissions across age groups during the four waves covered.

Derome also said children between 1 and 14 years old were 15 times more likely to die from a road accident than from COVID, and noted there had been no deaths for the 5 to 19 years olds.

“This information is very important to have in order to make a free and informed choice regarding this vaccination campaign for kids 5 to 11,” he said at the start of his presentation.

A current review of data for the first four waves shows one death occurred for the 10–19 age group during the third wave. A separate INSPQ chart reviewed on deaths and presence of comorbidities shows no deaths reported for the 19 and under category with the mention that percentages are not reported when the total number is less than 5.

Derome said, quoting published literature, that children have a better innate response to defend against COVID, which explains why they suffer less serious outcomes.

The professor also quoted from the U.N. children agency UNICEF, which said at the time that the World Health Organization (WHO) did not recommend COVID vaccines for children, due to lack of trials and little to no safety data for that age group.

Since then, the WHO has said that the Pfizer vaccine can be safely administered to children from 5 years of age and that both Pfizer and Moderna are licensed for use in children above 12.

The professor also raised the issue of the waning efficacy of vaccines—not only against infection, but hospitalizations—by quoting White House COVID adviser Anthony Fauci.

Derome gave his presentation when Quebec had just started its vaccination campaign for 5- to 11-year-olds.

Derome was contacted by The Epoch Times but was not available to comment.

Laval University said when contacted that it would not comment on the “personal situation of its employees.”

At the time Derome’s video was published, Laval spokesperson Andrée-Anne Stewart told Radio-Canada that his remarks “in no way reflect the stance of Laval University and its faculty of science and engineering regarding the health crisis.”

“Like all members of the teaching staff, professor Derome is held to all the rigour and scientific integrity required by this function,” Stewart said.

‘Sliding Into Dictatorship’

On Dec. 7, 2021, Derome’s colleague, Patrick Provost, said in a scientific panel organized by Réinfo COVID that, based on provincial data, there is more risk of hospitalization for children from the vaccines than from COVID-19 itself, in addition to not having a portrait of mid- to long-term side effects.

Provost was suspended for eight weeks without pay in mid-June for his comments. It’s likely that Derome received a similar penalty.

Réinfo COVID posted a letter on its website presumably from Provost asking, on behalf of Laval University, that the video of the panel he participated in be taken down, or else he could face further sanctions, including being fired.

The collective refused, citing the need for the public to be aware of the “utility, efficacy, risks, and ethics of vaccinating children.”

Réinfo said it would try to help the professors, noting: “If universities gag their professors, as do different professional orders, we’re sliding into dictatorship.”

Academic Freedom

The suspensions of Derome and Provost have added fuel to the debate about academic freedom in Quebec, which just last month adopted a law to protect it.

“Those situations at Laval University confirm that it was necessary to legislate on this issue and the law stipulates that every university must, within a year, write a policy and put in place a committee to monitor the implementation of the policy and review the complaints related to academic freedom in universities,” Higher Education Minister Danielle McCann said in a statement to The Epoch Times.

“The law also emphasizes that academic freedom must be practiced in conformity with norms of scientific rigour.”

The professors have the support of their union, which has filed a grievance, and of the larger union federation it’s affiliated to.

“Independently of what we can think of comments or statements made by a colleague, heads of the university have no legitimacy to intervene in the content of comments made by those colleagues,” says an email sent by the Laval teacher’s union (SPUL) to its members.

“The leadership of Laval University made a wrong call and hurts the principles guaranteeing the functioning of the University and academic freedom,” SPUL president Louis-Philippe Lampron said in a tweet.

The Epoch Times reached out to SPUL but didn’t hear back by publication time.

A provincial university professor’s labour union federation to which the SPUL is attached, the FQPPU, said the suspension of the two professors was even more “serious and surprising” since it occurred after the province passed the law on academic freedom.

“The conformity to the consensus of a scientific community is in itself not a sufficiently precise norm to justify a disciplinary sanction against a professor who exercises his academic freedom,” the FQPPU said in a statement.

It said it’s the duty of colleagues and other academics to refute or point out weaknesses in remarks or works presented.

“In an institution that respects academic freedom, it’s by refutation that professors and others participating in teaching and research must push back against comments which drift away from the knowledge validated by proven methods.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Robert Crimo Jr. sponsored son’s application for a firearm owners card

The man accused of carrying out a mass shooting in Illinois on July 4 discussed a shooting the night prior, his father said in a new interview after authorities said they’re opening a criminal investigation into the father.

Robert Crimo Jr., the father, told The New York Post that he and his son, Robert Crimo III, spoke the evening before the Independence Day shooting about the mass shooting in Denmark that had just taken place.

“He goes, ‘Yeah, that guy is an idiot.’ That’s what he said!” Crimo Jr. said.

“People like that … [commit mass shootings] to amp up the people that want to ban all guns,” Crimo III also said, according to his father.

Crimo Jr. said he was shocked that his son apparently killed seven people and injured others by firing on a parade in Highland Park, just outside Chicago, speculating that Crimo III had “a psychiatric break or something.”

“I had not an inkling, warning, that this was going to happen,” Crimo Jr. told ABC News. He said his son seemed to be in a “great mood” the night before the attack.

Crimo III, 21, was taken into custody in Lake Forest, Illinois, hours after the shooting. He was charged with seven counts of murder, and he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. Crimo III, who hasn’t yet entered a plea, was ordered held without bond in a hearing on July 6.

The Lake County Public Defender’s Office, which is representing the accused, referred a request to comment to Lake County, which didn’t respond to a query.

Law enforcement authorities have said little about the accused shooter’s motivation for carrying out the attack. But they said he confessed to the crime, and that an investigation showed he drove to Madison, Wisconsin, after the shooting and contemplated another attack before driving back to Illinois.

Father Under Scrutiny

Crimo III obtained five firearms legally after turning 18, officials have said. Crimo Jr. passed a background check each time he went to get a weapon, according to the Illinois State Police (ISP).

Crimo III obtained a Firearm Owners Identification Card despite being the subject of a Clear and Present Danger report in 2019. Officers were told that Crimo III “stated that he was going to kill everyone” and had a collection of 16 knives, a dagger, and a samurai sword in his closet.

But officers couldn’t find evidence to substantiate the report and no one, including family members, was willing to provide information “on threats or mental health that would have allowed law enforcement to take additional action,” according to the ISP, which was informed of the interaction with the Crimo family.

The process “is so dependent upon the people that may be closest around the individual of concern,” ISP Director Brendan Kelly said at a July 6 news conference.

Crimo Jr. claimed the knives were his and were being stored in his son’s closet for safekeeping.

Crimo Jr. told ABC that the situation was “taken out of context,” describing his son’s language at the time as “a child’s outburst” and identifying the person who alerted law enforcement as the suspect’s sister.

State law requires parental consent for a person under the age of 21 to obtain a card. Crimo Jr., several months after the law enforcement visit to the family’s home, sponsored his son’s application for the firearm owner’s card. Each sponsor must sign a form saying they understand they “shall be liable for any damages resulting from the minor applicant’s use of firearms or firearm ammunition.”

While Lake County State Attorney Eric Rinehart, a prosecutor, declined on July 6 to say whether relatives of Crimo III could face charges, Kelly indicated hours later that he may be prosecuted, depending on what the investigation uncovers.

Crimo Jr. told ABC he doesn’t regret sponsoring his son, and Steve Greenberg, a lawyer representing Crimo Jr. and Crimo III’s mother, has attempted to shift blame to the police, questioning why the application was approved.

“The ‘system’ is trying to make this about parenting,” Greenberg said on Twitter. It is “up to ISP to decide if the individual is competent to own a gun.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

State senator Tiara Mack says she’s shaking her butt for ‘black girl magic’

Democratic Rhode Island state senator Tiara Mack on Thursday posted a series of flyers saying she will “twerk for trans rights,” among other reasons.

Mack was responding to a video posted on Monday by influential Twitter account “Libs of TikTok” that shows the state senator “twerking”—dancing in a provocative manner that involves shaking her butt and thrusting her hips. Mack in response blasted “the media” for “trying not to cover the real issues.”

“Not on MY watch,” she wrote. “I #TwerkFor joy, abortion justice, body autonomy, trans rights, and intersex rights.” She then posted the flyers.

While Mack will likely win reelection in her heavily Democratic state Senate district, Democrats face a surprisingly tough race in one of the deep-blue state’s congressional districts. Republican Allan Fung is polling ahead of all potential Democratic nominees in Rhode Island’s Second Congressional District, a seat the GOP has not held for 30 years. The Rhode Island Republican Party is using the Mack controversy to fundraise.

Other causes for which Mack shakes her butt include “the human right to safe housing” and “black girl magic.”

Links to donate to Mack’s reelection campaign accompany the flyers.

Mack faced extensive backlash for the twerking video, with user @nikki_1968, who describes herself as “an admirer of Michelle and Barack,” writing, “I’m not a conservative and I’m disappointed. Where do we draw the line on the behavior of public figures?”

“Girl,” Mack responded. “I have an Ivy League degree and am a state senator.”

This is not the first time the senator has tried to combine politics and sex. Mack, who calls herself a “Queer Educator,” this year pushed a state bill to teach 11-year-olds about “pleasure-based sexual relations.” Rhode Island parents spoke in “overwhelming opposition” to the bill, which one mother told the Providence Journal was “disgusting and inappropriate.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Column: Five easy steps to becoming well-read

This is a column for someone who wants to enter the world of ideas but doesn’t know where to start. Recently I’ve received emails from readers, young people in particular, who have read my book or heard me on a podcast and want to learn more about the personalities and principles behind the American right and conservative movement. They want to know how past intellectuals studied, wrote, argued, and worked.

Young people have many ways to engage in politics and debate—there is social media, of course, as well as newsletters and audio and video interviews—but not as many ways to acquire the historical and intellectual background that informs our politics and frames our debates. And though I have recommended books before, a reading list isn’t enough. Here are a few other lifehacks and resources that I rely on. They may help you too.

Hug a Generalist. The New York Intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century—a tradition that extends from Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling to Norman Podhoretz and Susan Sontag—operated from a base of general knowledge about literature, philosophy, and politics. They were familiar with the Western canon even when they disagreed with its authors or, in the case of Sontag, tried to subvert it. Today that foundation is gone.

Not everyone has the chance to study a core curriculum in places such as Columbia or St. John’s College. But a familiarity with the basic concepts, insights, and divisions within Western thought is essential to figuring out where our global civilization might go next. If you want to obtain your own set of intellectual building blocks, try reading David Denby’s Great Books, Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, and Judy Jones and William Wilson’s An Incomplete Education.

You can also use the writing of critics such as Michael Dirda and Joseph Epstein as intellectual springboards. Over the years Dirda and Epstein have taught me as much as, if not more than, my best teachers. Start with Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure and Epstein’s A Literary Education and underline the names of unfamiliar authors and titles as you go along. By reading Dirda and Epstein, you will build up a library of cultural references that is essential for any aspiring wordsmith. The best part is that Dirda and Epstein are not only enlightening. They are also enjoyable.

Other resources for general knowledge include the Foundation for Constitutional Government’s websites TheGreatThinkers.org and ContemporaryThinkers.org, the huge video libraries available at C-SPAN.org and CharlieRose.com, Michael and Genevieve Sugrue’s excellent Idea Store podcast, and Aaron MacLean’s gripping School of War.

Don’t Skip the Notes. “It is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography,” writes Robert D. Kaplan in his engrossing new travelogue Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age. Reading Kaplan, I am reminded that the most important pages of any volume are found in the bibliography. For someone interested in ideas, one book ought to lead to several others.

Endnotes point you in the direction of further study. They reveal the influences behind an author. The best way to learn about a subject is to identify its major text—in my field, for example, George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945—and then, after you finish it, read each of the books and articles it cites. It won’t be long before you are an expert. The only downside is that books will take over your house.

Explore the Archives. I spent hours as a young journalist reading the back issues of the Weekly Standard. I was on a mission: I wanted to know how the authors I admired structured their articles. How did they begin a story, how did they transition from paragraph to paragraph, how did they build to a climax or conclusion? I also wanted to figure out what sort of pieces made it into the magazine. An unexpected benefit was that I ended up learning a lot about American politics in the 1990s.

If a young writer wants an editor to take his ideas seriously, he ought to demonstrate familiarity with the content and style of the editor’s publication. The only way to acquire such knowledge is through reading the archives. The good news is that the archives of many intellectual and political journals are online. (You may have to spend money on a subscription.) Here, for instance, is the Standard’s archive. Here is Commentary’s. The complete Public Interest and National Affairs can be found here. All of Partisan Review—the flagship publication of the New York Intellectuals and my standard for literary journalism—is available here. And, lest I come across as favoring one side of the political spectrum, here is the New York Review of Books.

Keep a Commonplace Book. A commonplace book is a journal in which a writer transcribes quotations from his reading. It becomes a source of reflection and inspiration and a handy resource while writing. Some commonplace books are in print—my favorites are W.H. Auden’s, E.M. Forster’s, and Dwight Garner’s. There are also volumes that are essentially commonplace books published under different guises: Both Cyril Connolly’s Unquiet Grave and David Markson’s Reader’s Block are worth obtaining.

Since 2012, I have used a Google doc as my own commonplace book. Looking over it now, I see that I haven’t added to it in a while, though it is 279 pages long. (I read a lot.) It contains quotations from Kenneth Minogue, Yuval Levin, Nathan Glazer, Robert Nisbet, and a whole lot of James Burnham and Irving Kristol.

Here, for instance, is a random entry from Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence: “In public controversies the side that is always giving you reasons why something can’t be done, and endlessly telling you that the popular view isn’t sufficiently ‘subtle,’ ‘complex,’ ‘sophisticated,’ or ‘nuanced’—that is the side that doesn’t want you to know what it is doing, and is not to be trusted.” It’s what Mead would call a “Jacksonian” sentiment. And a true one.

Seek Opportunity. There are plenty of summer programs, as well as post-graduate fellowships, that may be of interest to students on the center-right. At the American Enterprise Institute, where I work, there is the Summer Honors Program. The other day I spoke to the Hudson Political Studies program. And I teach for the Hertog Foundation, which offers programming throughout the year. For recent graduates and young professionals, there is also The Public Interest Fellowship and its wide range of instructional, employment, and networking opportunities.

All these programs look to fill the gaps in a student’s college education. All of them combine theory and practice in the study of politics and government. All of them are filled with energetic and impressive young people. I wish they had been around twenty years ago when I was in school. They weren’t, though, and in the years since graduation I assembled the grab-bag of resources and techniques described here. They have worked for me. Now it’s your turn.

Matthew Continetti is a senior fellow and the Patrick and Charlene Neal Chair in American Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Maine’s Biden-funded lesson described transgender person as ‘someone who the doctors made a mistake about when they’re born’

The Maine Department of Education cited George Floyd’s death to defend its Biden-funded sex education lesson that taught kindergartners about transgenderism, according to internal documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Facing criticism from parents, the department in May scrubbed a lesson plan from its website that described a transgender person as “someone who the doctors made a mistake about when they’re born.” But privately, the department dismissed opposition to the lesson plan, which received funding through resident Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Rescue Plan, as a “political disparaging of our education system” and insisted that teaching elementary-age students about transgenderism “is more important than ever to end this cycle of violence and hate.”

“We have to stand firm against hate,” Kelli Deveaux, then-associate commissioner of public education, wrote to all department employees in a May email that was obtained through a public information request. “Two years ago we were all shocked to witness the murder of George Floyd, this weekend 10 people were murdered in Buffalo because of their race.”

The Maine sex education debate is the latest in a series of fights nationwide over whether public schools should teach children about LGBT issues. Liberal advocacy groups funded by top Democratic Party donors have pushed school districts across the country to teach gender identity and transgenderism to elementary students, the Free Beacon reported last year. A group of Nebraska parents last year discovered through public information requests that their children’s sex education curriculum was secretly reviewed by a Planned Parenthood activist and excluded religious groups, the Free Beacon reported.

The state’s transgender lesson was a part of an online module, Maine Opportunities for Online Sustained Education (MOOSE), which the Maine Department of Education established in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic as students transitioned to remote learning. The module, which the state spent $2.8 million to develop, contains optional online lesson plans that are written by teachers for students. Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which Congress passed in March 2021, funneled additional funds to the MOOSE program.

The Maine Education Department removed the LGBT lesson and placed it under review, Deveaux said in the internal email to employees, due to “one inartful sentence in which the teacher is explaining what LGBT stands for.” The department faced public pushback after the lesson plan was the subject of a Maine GOP ad launched in opposition to Democratic governor Janet Mills, who campaigned on her pro-LGBT record in a tight race for reelection this year. Clips of the lesson also went viral on Twitter.

“Some people, when they get a little bit older, realize what the doctors said was not right,” Maine kindergarten teacher Kailina Mills, who is not related to the governor, said in one now-deleted video lesson. “They might say the doctors told me I’m a man, but I’m really a woman.”

In another section, transgender activist Jazz Jennings read from her children’s book, I Am Jazz, which details how she transitioned from male to female starting at five years old.

“I have a girl brain, but a boy body,” Jennings read. “This is called transgender. I was born this way.”

Shawn McBreairty, a Maine father of twin daughters who has campaigned against critical race theory and sexualized lesson plans in public schools, said the Maine Department of Education is pushing radical gender ideology on young students.

“We shouldn’t be spending taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate kids through the hypersexualization of minors,” McBreairty told the Free Beacon.

The Maine Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment about the internal emails. Deveaux, the associate commissioner who sent the emails, left the Maine Department of Education this month. The department did not respond to questions on whether Deveaux was fired.

The department designed the lesson plan to teach kindergartners that people “want to be free to love whoever they want—whether that’s men, women, non-binary people, transgender people, or anyone else they choose.” Among other activities, kindergarten students were instructed to advocate for LGBT causes through artwork.

“Even though some people refuse to let LGBT+ people love freely, LGBT+ activists have used their voices, their art, and their bodies to fight for their freedom,” the lesson stated. “Today, you’re going to do the same thing. You are going to write and/or make art to show what love means to you. For people in the LGBT+ community, love means freedom. What does it mean to you?”

The lesson linked to two videos that promote pride parades as a “party” and “celebration,” including the Blues Clues Pride Parade episode that shows a cartoon drag queen singing about animal families with gay, nonbinary, transgender, asexual, bisexual, and pansexual members. Students were then told to design their own pride parade float.

The lesson recommended LGBT-themed literature for young readers, including My Princess Boy, a story of a boy who likes to wear princess dresses, and Pride Puppy, which follows a “protagonist of ambiguous gender” through a Pride parade. Another recommendation, Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity, teaches there is a difference between children’s bodies and gender identity.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether it supports Maine’s decision to pull the lesson plan.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a Nobel prize-nominated physician who famously discovered and distributed an early treatment protocol for COVID, dubbed the “Zelenko Protocol,” passed away from cancer on June 30, 2022.

The next day, some Twitter users started taking note of the suspension of the account of the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, a group dedicated “to provide funding to social entities and social activities surrounding education, leadership development, health literacy, advocacy, public policy, social, health and community development,” according to their website.

UPDATE on why the account was banned: pic.twitter.com/cTl4F1IHbC

— TexasLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay) July 1, 2022

“It is no secret that big tech abhors free speech and instead worships at the altar of Marxist collectivism and group-think. The Silicon Valley speech cartel has sunk to new lows when twitter suspended the Zelenko Freedom Foundation account less than 24 hours after the passing of Dr. Vladimir Zelenko,” co-chair of the Zelenko Freedom Foundation, Ann Vandersteel, told The Epoch Times.

She maintains that no one from Twitter reached out to verify who was managing the account.

“If they had bothered to do even the most basic of inquiries they would have learned that the account was run by the foundation, not by Dr. Zelenko. The account wasn’t established for some end around their ridiculous ban of Dr. Zelekno, the account was established to represent the interests of the Foundation, which is committed to investing in individuals and technologies that will save and extend the lives of people all across the globe,” she said.

Vandersteel thinks that the suspension of the foundation’s account was done for “no reason other than petty vindictiveness.”

“The question is, what does Elon Musk think? Does he believe in saving lives or does he want those lifesaving technologies silenced?”

Zelenko had been practicing in Monroe, New York, in 2020 during the outbreak of COVID-19, and is credited with having treated about 7,500 patients with his method.

Zelenko could not sit back and wait for politicians and health officials to agree on prescribed treatments, so he came up with the “Zelenko Protocol”—a combination of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), zinc, azithromycin, and other drugs, including steroids, and later informed then-President Donald Trump about it via a letter.

The other co-chair of the foundation, Kevin Jenkins, told The Epoch Times that the suspension reminded him of a Martin Luther King quote:

“All we say to America is ‘be true to what’s on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privilege, because they haven’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so, just as I say, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around; we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around.”

“When Ann and I spoke with Dr. Zelenko, regarding the mission of this Foundation he said, ‘I want the truth to spread like a mantra!’” Jenkins said.

“Our team at the Zelenko Freedom Foundation will stay true to Dr. Zelenko and Dr. King! We will fight to the end to save humanity! Come join us Zfreedomfoundation.com. Dr. Zelenko’s dream will not be deferred!” he added.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Chinese regime’s sexual abuse of Uyghurs has been widely reported in recent years as more victims of this Muslim minority have stepped forward to expose the ongoing persecution in the Xinjiang region. The mass rape and torture of female Falun Gong practitioners have been extensively reported by Minghui.org in the last two decades.

Tibetan nuns also have been subjected to sexual torture at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but their stories are still lesser known. In 2018, the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) published a firsthand account of a monk witnessing nuns being sexually abused by the communist officials in the re-education center in Sog County, Nagchu prefecture, Tibet region.

Tenzin Sangmo, a researcher with the TCHRD, told The Epoch Times in an email that their 25 years of research have provided them with “anecdotal evidence of sexual abuse” suffered by Tibetan women and nuns.

“This eyewitness account by the monk was obtained with great difficulty,” she said. “It is understood that the monk was detained in one of the many extra-legal political re-education centers with other monks and nuns.”

Sangmo added that gathering such information from inside Tibet has become “increasingly difficult” after 2008, and even more so from 2016 to 2017 because of the “massive ramping up of censorship and surveillance.”

“Contacting those inside Tibet is an exercise ridden with unbounded risk,” she added.

Sangmo said that the mass surveillance and censorship (pdf) methods like the “Grid Management” and “Double-Linked Household” systems threaten Chinese people to report on and betray one another. To add to the difficulty, the CCP’s tool of “collective punishment” has forced Tibetans who were earlier willing to speak up to instead “practice self-censorship” to avoid endangering those around them.

The anonymous Tibetan monk, who was held in the political re-education center for four months, was studying in Qinghai Province. The communist officials forcibly took him back to his hometown in Sog County, and if he had refused, his family could have been arrested, according to a TCHRD report. He was then taken to a re-education center, where almost all detainees were monks or nuns.

Though an officer informed him that the center “is a school, not a prison,” the monk said in his personal account that he soon realized that place was nothing but a prison meant to brainwash and coerce Tibetan Buddhists.

The center’s “teaching” style reminded him of the Cultural Revolution where people were forced to constantly criticize themselves. The detainees were also tortured and beaten with electric batons until some of them fainted. Every one of them, regardless of age, had to participate in military drills. During one of the drills, the monk witnessed the harassment and abuse of nuns.

“Many nuns would lose consciousness during the [military] drills,” the monk wrote, according to the TCHRD report. “Sometimes officers would take unconscious nuns inside where I saw them fondle the nuns’ breasts and grope all over their body. … I have heard about some officers lying in the nuns’ bedroom pressing unconscious nuns underneath.”

Sexual abuse is not the only method used to “transform” the Tibetans nuns. The TCHRD’s 2016 Special Report on “Prisoners of Conscience in Tibet” detailed other torture methods like inflicting shocks with electric batons; deprivation of food, water, and sleep; pouring boiling water over prisoners; setting dogs onto prisoners; and branding with red-hot shovels, etc.

These methods are but a few of the over-100 routine torture methods employed by the Chinese communist regime to persecute prisoners of all faiths.

Sangmo said thousands of monks and nuns have been evicted from renowned Tibetan academies like Larung Gar and Yarchen Gar in Kardze, Tibet region, and then rounded up for political re-education to “steer them away from spiritual pursuit as their path is deemed incompatible with the characteristics of a model Chinese citizen.”

Like other monks and nuns who were forced out of their monasteries, the anonymous monk detained at the Sog County re-education center couldn’t return to his monastery or continue with his monastic education after his release.

“He was forced to disrobe after his release from the political re-education center,” Sangmo said. “Most of the monks and nuns evicted from these two prominent Tibetan Buddhist academies are subjected to similar restrictions.”

According to an International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) report, a Tibetan former nun, Tenzin, was raped by the Chinese armed police officers after she was arrested while trying to escape from Tibet in 2005. Tenzin, who was studying in India in a school run by the Tibetan government in exile, had gone back to Tibet to visit her ailing father. She eventually returned to India in early 2009 after enduring year-long detention and torture.

Tenzin recounted how the local authorities repeatedly visited her, asking her what she had been doing in India. “The Chinese authorities are increasingly suspicious of Tibetans who attend Tibetan government in exile-run schools and religious institutes, as they consider them to have been influenced by ideas of separatism,” she said, according to the ICT report.

Unable to “stay in peace,” Tenzin decided to leave home together with a group of Tibetans, including two children. However, five soldiers stopped her at a checkpoint and later took them to a military building where a Tibetan soldier asked if she is a nun, having seen her shaved head. When Tenzin said yes, the Tibetan soldier cursed at her and the rest of them hit her with batons and belts.

For the next few days, Tenzin’s arms and feet were cuffed to a wooden bed and she was locked in a room. One night, two prison guards came in and forced her to swallow some medicine, before raping her.

“I sensed something bad was going to happen, I screamed as loud as I could in the hope that someone would come to stop them. But all was in vain,” she said. “Later I fell unconscious. I don’t know if that was because of the medicine they gave me or out of fear. I could not feel anything, especially the lower part of my body.”

Back in 1988, the BBC broadcasted a documentary of 12 Tibetans in which a nun turned emotional as she recounted how she was sexually abused at a police station, according to a UCA News report. “They stepped on my face, tasered my chest, and kicked me,” the nun said. “Then they took off our clothes and three or four people raped us with a baton.”

Another nun confirmed that they were “constantly raped by seven or eight people” and “left naked” after the ordeal.

Sangmo told The Epoch Times that nuns are subjected to the “same level of torture” as others, and physical torture is “accompanied by psychological torture.” She confirmed that there is no sign of relaxation in restrictions or persecution faced by the Tibetan people, rather the repression has only worsened.

“It has worsened since 2008 and more so after the coming of Xi Jinping to power,” she said. “His consolidation of power and implementation of his vision of socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era has meant more repression of Tibetans.”

She added that the situation in Tibet cannot be assessed based on statistics alone because “there is no research environment.”

“Information trickles out of Tibet, and statistics need a sufficient pool of information to support it. Therefore, any change in statistics is not indicative of a change in the situation. Using statistics in cases like this could deny the complexity surrounding the issue,” Sangmo said.

Arshdeep Sarao contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A plan to mandate COVID-19 vaccine shots for hundreds of thousands of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will remain on pause after a Los Angeles County judge ruled on July 5 that the district lacks the authority to do so.

In his ruling, Judge Mitchell Beckloff of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County sided with a parent, whose 12-year-old son attends a public magnet school in North Hollywood. The parent filed the complaint in October 2021, about a month after the LAUSD announced its vaccination mandate.

Under the district’s mandate, all eligible students aged 12 and above must show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, or get approved for exemptions by Jan. 10 in order to attend school in person. Those who don’t comply would be transferred into the district’s remote learning program, City of Angels, which offers a mixture of live instruction and self-study.

The suing parent, identified as G.F., argued that it is unfair and unlawful for the child, identified as D.F., to have to lose his hard-earned place at a competitive school just because he and his parent have chosen to not get vaccinated on the basis of personal beliefs.

According to G.F., his son had acquired natural immunity after recovering from COVID-19. He also said he worried that vaccinating the child would put the child’s health in jeopardy.

“Either I get him a vaccine that I fear could harm him, or I send him to a virtual school that I know from experience and LAUSD’s own data would prove academically vastly inferior,” the father said earlier this year in a sworn declaration, reported City News Service. “The idea of dumping him into an online school, free of a rigorous academic program and torn away from his like-minded classmates, breaks my heart.”

Beckloff, who wrote in March in a tentative opinion that he might dismiss the case, agreed with the father in his final ruling, acknowledging that if D.F. refuses to comply with the mandate, he will be forced to accept a very different education.

“The [mandate] is not merely about how education is delivered or who may be physically present on campus as the court previously viewed it. Instead, the [mandate] dictates which school the student may attend, and the curriculum he may continue to receive,” the judge wrote, reported the Los Angeles Times.

The judge also noted that the LAUSD mandate is in conflict with California’s public health law, which allows personal beliefs-based vaccination exemptions.

“Judge Beckloff’s ruling confirms that individual school districts do not have the authority to impose local vaccination requirements in excess of statewide requirements,” Arie Spangler, an attorney for G.F., said in a statement. “We are very pleased with the ruling, as it ensures that no child will be forced out of the classroom due to their COVID-19 vaccination status.”

The decision doesn’t have an immediate impact on LAUSD, since the mandate has already been placed on hold after California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in April that the state would wait for the federal government to give full approval to the COVID-19 vaccine for young children. The Newsom administration and school district have both said they won’t pursue the pediatric vaccine mandate until at least the summer of 2023.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Catherine Cortez Masto presents award to self-described ‘faglicious homo’ for hosting ‘Drag Queen Story Time’

Nevada Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto quietly honored a drag queen and self-described “faglicious homo” for his years of work with children at a local library.

During a June 26 “Drag Queen Story Time” event in Reno, Masto’s office presented a “certificate of commemoration” to drag queen Miss Ginger Devine, a Washoe County Library tweet shows. Devine, who also goes by Reverend Divine and whose real name is Christopher Daniels, has performed as a drag queen in the Reno area for more than a decade and has read to children at local libraries since at least 2019. In a 2010 blog post, Daniels described himself as a “Broadway loving, Project Runway watching, rainbow scarf wearing, footlong Subway sandwich eating faglicious homo.”

Cortez Masto has yet to publicly promote her award to Daniels and did not interact with the library’s tweet that revealed the honor, suggesting the Democrat is hesitant to weigh in on the controversial “Drag Queen Story Time” program as she faces a difficult reelection bid against Republican Adam Laxalt.

On the same day as the library’s event with Daniels, for example, Cortez Masto accused Republicans of working to end same-sex marriage and pledged to stand with “LGBTQ communities.” But the senator has refrained from discussing more hot-button, “culture war” issues such as drag queen story hours and critical race and gender theory, even as she praises far-left activists who say Nevada “should be teaching” critical race theory in public schools. Laxalt, meanwhile, has called to keep critical race theory out of the state’s schools and “protect students and teachers from indoctrinated bigotry.”

Cortez Masto did not return a request for comment.

Prior to his drag career, Daniels attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he minored in LGBT Studies and Women’s Studies and worked for Sex Out Loud, a campus organization that teaches students “all about the world of kink, including role play, kinky toys, and bondage.”

For years, Daniels wrote and managed a “Confessions of a Drag Queen” blog that detailed his experiences as a performer in Reno. In one post, Daniels discussed how he “get[s] so much more action as a drag queen” than he does “as a guy.” In another, Daniels wrote that he “almost got into a fight with a 10 year old” at a Reno roller rink and arcade—where he said the “average individual in the establishment was 8″—because a “band of stupid 10 year old boys” objected to his song request of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

“Now … I am not entirely sure what happened next. I think it was the combination of flashing strobe lights, the pain in my calves from bracing myself on the floor, or perhaps Mars was in retrograde but I basically went off on this ten year [sic] and started screaming and ranting while skating around the rink. From what I remember it went something like this,” Daniels recalled.

“‘Uh excuse me you prepubescent choir boy. What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck can you do?'” Daniels asked the child. “‘I can buy porn, cigarettes, and liquor and enjoy them at my leisure if I desire. I can drive, vote, and gamble if I want to. Join the 21st century you 8 year old Justin Bieber worshiping wannabe. Cyndi Lauper is TIMELESS so shut the fuck up and sit down.”

In addition to his rousing roller rink stories, Daniels has dismissed concerns from the “parental units of America” that sexually explicit materials are “influencing the young impressionable minds of the youth.” Daniels called the complaint “bullshit.”

“I would really like the parents of America who are outraged to remove the pole from your sphincter and get the fuck over it,” Daniels said in 2010. “Are you kidding me with all of this? Take a look around. Television shows are increasingly featuring more violence, more sex, and more foul language; a reflection of our society which as of late has more violence, more sex, and swears a hell of a lot more.”

Daniels has also delivered “sermons” as “Reverend Divine” at Reno’s Center for Spiritual Living, a religious science group that believes “in the healing of the sick through the power of this Mind.” In a 2017 appearance at the center, Daniels called drag queens “God’s sacred messengers on this earth.” The comment came after Daniels retired from performing as a drag queen in 2014—roughly five years later, he returned as Miss Ginger Devine in a show he called “The Come On Her Back Tour.”

“When all of a sudden, God parts the clouds and he shines a light and tells you to take your wig off the shelf, don your best hooker heels, and go to church, you don’t question the good Lord, you just do,” Daniels said in 2017.

Daniels did not return a request for comment on his award from Cortez Masto. The incumbent Democrat will face Laxalt in November after both candidates handily won their June primary elections.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A Virginia school district is prohibiting teachers from consulting parents when students as young as kindergarten-age switch genders at school.

Fairfax County Public Schools is instructing teachers and administrators to forgo parents’ permission when a student requests to use a bathroom or locker room associated with his or her so-called gender identity, according to screenshots of a mandatory faculty training module obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The district will also allow schoolchildren without parental consent to change their names and on its virtual learning portal “identify as male, female, or nonbinary.” Teachers could not proceed with the “Supporting Gender-Expansive and Transgender Youth” training until they checked the correct boxes, regardless of their personal beliefs.

Fairfax County Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment. A county teacher said it was unclear what penalties teachers face for refusing to comply.

The teacher training module is the latest instance in which a public school board has implemented controversial policies without parental consent. A New Jersey public middle school forced students to watch a video about hormone treatment without notifying parents beforehand, the Free Beacon reported in March. Parents have informed the Free Beacon their children “socially transitioned” to another gender at school without their knowledge.

The news comes as parents nationwide have agitated for more oversight of public education. A Fairfax County School Board meeting in June saw dozens of parents turn out to oppose handbook rules that suspend students starting in fourth grade for using the wrong pronouns to refer to gender-nonconforming classmates. The school board adopted the handbook amid parents’ objections that the rules violate the First Amendment by compelling speech.

Three parents with children in the school district have formed an ad hoc “shadow board” to monitor and rebut the Fairfax County School Board. Its first meeting, which was held opposite the county school board’s own meeting on Thursday, discussed recent lawsuits the district faces for sexual assault accusations, the prospect of sex education becoming co-ed to accommodate transgender students, and pushback by left-leaning education groups after Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) initiated a tip line to report “divisive practices” in public schools. The Virginia Association of School Superintendents, which is now headed by Fairfax superintendent Scott Brabrand, called in a March 10 letter for the tip line to be “terminated.”

Members of the so-called shadow board say the current school board is out of step with parents’ demands for quality education for their children.

“It is unconscionable that even with plummeting standardized test scores and record-level teacher vacancies in Fairfax County Public Schools, board members remain hyper-focused on politicizing education,” Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a Fairfax mom of three and shadow board member, told the Free Beacon. “This recent ‘gender-inclusive’ training, meant to indoctrinate teachers and keep parents from knowing critical information about their own children, is irresponsible and borderline criminal.”

Luke Berg, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, told the Free Beacon the teacher training is also unconstitutional.

“Policies like this violate parents’ constitutional right to raise their kids,” Berg said. “We are currently suing two Wisconsin school districts over similar policies, and I’m aware of roughly 10 other lawsuits around the country on the same topic, including two in Virginia—one against the Harrisonburg City school district and another against Loudoun County Public Schools.”

Republican members of Congress including Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.) have written companion pieces of legislation to stop such policies. The Empower Parents To Protect Their Kids Act, which was introduced in the Senate in October and in the House in June, cuts federal funding for schools that conceal information about students’ gender identity from parents or pressure students to go through with a gender transition.

“Schools should never be allowed to impose radical, harmful gender ideology on children—especially without parents’ knowledge and consent,” Cotton said.

“Our schools are a place for math and history education, not gender theory indoctrination,” Banks said. “No parent should have to worry that their child’s school is enabling, promoting, or facilitating a child’s ‘gender transition’ behind their back.”

Fairfax County Public Schools lists hundreds of job vacancies on its website. Pass rates for reading, science, and math students in the county are down by around 10 percent or more as of the 2020-2021 school year, according to Virginia Department of Education data. This year’s pass rates have not yet been listed.

“These board members’ overt negligence—including the prolonged exclusion of our children from in-person learning—is not a partisan issue, it is a parents’ issue,” Lundquist-Arora added. “We need to vote them out in November 2023.”

Fairfax County’s transgender youth training module follows model policies for the treatment of transgender students disseminated in 2020 by Virginia’s Department of Education. In that document, school districts were encouraged “to communicate openly” with parents about their child’s gender identity, except when those parents do not approve of their child transitioning.

“When a student informs the school about their transition or requests a change to their name and gender, it is recommended that a point-of-contact, or a multi-disciplinary school team if needed, meet with the student (and parents/guardians if the parents/guardians are affirming of the student’s gender identity) to develop a plan to accommodate the student’s needs and requests,” the model policy states. “There are no regulations requiring school staff to notify a parent or guardian of a student’s request to affirm their gender identity, and school staff should work with students to help them share the information with their family when they are ready to do so.”

The state education department policy supports concealing the students’ gender switch at school, citing privacy and safety concerns. “Privacy and confidentiality are critical for transgender students who do not have supportive families,” the policy says. “If a student is not ready or able to safely share with their family about their gender identity, this should be respected.”

Update 7/6/2022 at 11:26 a.m.: This piece has been update with additional comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Major cities across the United States saw a violent Fourth of July weekend, with reports saying that at least 50 people were shot in Chicago, children being shot in Houston, and more in Baltimore.

Authorities told NBC Chicago on Monday that nine people died and another 48 were shot across Chicago over the weekend. Last year, more than 19 were shot and killed and 100 more were injured during the same time period.

That included a mass shooting in Chicago’s Parkway Gardens on the 6500 block of South Martin Luther King Drive Monday morning, according to officials. A 17-year-old was counted among those who were shot, authorities said.

Authorities in Indianapolis, Indiana, told WISH-TV said that 11 people were shot in 10 incidents over the Fourth of July weekend.

And the Baltimore Police Department said it is investigating separate shootings in the city that left nine people shot and two dead over the weekend, according to WBAL.

A 14-year-old boy was injured in one of the shootings, officials told the Baltimore Sun. Police say the boy, who was not named, was shot in his hip at around 4 p.m. while he was in the backyard of a home.

In Houston, a 5-year-old was killed in a drive-by shooting that also left an 8-year-old injured in the Greenspoint neighborhood, police told ABC13.

From Friday night through Sunday night, there were 24 shooting incidents across New York City, officials told PIX11. That’s a 60 percent increase over last year’s numbers, where there were 19 victims shot.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said that at least 16 people were shot and five were killed since Friday, according to KMOV.

2 More Kids Shot

Two children were among six people who were wounded Saturday night in an apparent drive-by shooting, police in eastern North Carolina said.

Officers responded to a home for a report of shots fired around 9:30 p.m. Saturday, the Clinton Police Department said in a news release. They found six people suffering from apparent gunshot wounds.

A preliminary investigation suggests the suspects arrived in a car and drove past the home, where people were gathered outside. They circled the block and then opened fire toward the home, striking the victims in what appeared to be a targeted attack, according to the news release.

Last year, the FBI said that homicides in the United States in 2020 increased nearly 30 percent over the previous year, representing the largest single-year jump since the agency started keeping track of statistics.

Homicides and non-negligent manslaughters climbed an estimated 29.4 percent to 21,570, an increase of 4,901 over 2019, FBI data showed. It is the highest estimated total since the early 1990s, when homicides stayed above 23,000 a year as drug wars played out in many places in the United States.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Your gift will help protect parents and teachers, and stop discrimination against children!

After working for more than a decade in schools outside of Washington, D.C., Emily Mais and her family moved to Albemarle County in Virginia in search of a simpler life and a close-knit community.

The public schools in Albemarle had an excellent reputation. And that made it a perfect fit for Emily because she was a teacher and administrator. In fact, for as long as she can remember, all Emily wanted to be was an elementary school teacher.

In October 2018, she began working as Assistant Principal of Agnor-Hurt Elementary School in Charlottesville, Virginia.

She had no idea that she’d be turning to Alliance Defending Freedom three short years later. She’s filed a lawsuit after being forced out of her job because she questioned the school district’s program, rooted in critical race theory (CRT), that scapegoats, stereotypes, and divides people based on race.

Emily is one of a growing number of teachers across the nation who are finding themselves harassed and punished because they dissent from radical CRT-based policies.

Will you help defend Emily and others like her by giving $25, $50, $75, $150, or more today?

Are you on the bus?

In 2019 and 2020, the Albemarle County School District introduced a controversial policy and mandatory teacher training based on critical race theory.

The goal was laudable-to eliminate “all forms of racism.”

But it produced the opposite result. And what happened to Emily is exhibit A.

The school district introduced this policy and training just as public schools returned to in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers and administrators were balancing a whole host of new challenges, including adhering to health and safety rules and helping students who had fallen behind during virtual learning.

Not only could the policy and training have not come at a worse time, but Emily had massive concerns with what they taught.

Emily witnessed firsthand how the training actually instructed teachers to be racist. It taught them to view each other and their students solely through the lens of race.

Emily believes that every person is made in the image of God, deserving to be treated equally and with respect.

During the teacher trainings, she also saw how white staff members who wanted to participate were shut down or dismissed. In fact, all staff members were encouraged to “speak their truth.” But when white staff members did speak up, they were told by facilitators that they couldn’t possibly understand the topic because of the color of their skin.

They were dismissed and harassed based on their race.

During the trainings, it was suggested that anyone who opposed the new policy was racist. One administrator said teachers needed to consider whether they were on the “antiracism school bus, or if you need help finding your seat and keeping your seat, or if it’s time for you to just get off the bus.”

Even more disturbing: When parents expressed concerns about the curriculum at a school board meeting, an assistant superintendent said in a meeting the next day that he received the parents’ comments as if they were slave owners who had raped his mother and sister, beaten him, and were now telling him not to talk about it.

Emily could not believe the growing hostility of the culture within the school system. But when she made one small slip of the tongue, she found out just how nasty things could get.

When that happened, Emily turned to ADF for help. Will you stand with her by making a gift right now to help fuel her legal defense-and the defense of other Americans like her?

The shaming of Emily Mais

The group discussed the school district’s race-related hiring practices during one training session.

Emily made a comment on the topic, intending to use the phrase “people of color.” But, she accidentally said “colored” instead. She immediately apologized-profusely and repeatedly-but one staff member wouldn’t accept her apology and proceeded to berate her in front of the entire group.

After this, abuse rained down on Emily for months.

Again and again, she was accused of being a racist for this slip of the tongue. No apology would ever satisfy. Other employees openly cursed about her and called her vulgar names at work, including “white racist b-ch.”

Some coworkers came to Emily in tears about what was happening to her. But they dared not support her in public for fear of what would happen to themselves.

When Emily had simply had enough and was not willing to endure the abuse any longer, she left her job-a job that she loved.

But before she could leave, administrators orchestrated a final apology meeting to further humiliate, shame, and traumatize Emily for her slip of the tongue.

The message was clear for other employees: This is the type of punishment you can expect if you dare question the new radical, CRT-based training program-which is racist at its core.

With a gift today, you can help defend people like Emily and empower others to stand up to speech-squelching, racist policies like the one in Albemarle County.

Make a difference for Emily today

Emily was retaliated against for her speech, discriminated against for her point of view, and subjected to a work environment bitterly divided by race.

Teachers like her don’t surrender their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse doors-or when schools adopt radical, racist policies.

But this is happening to a growing number of teachers and other Americans across the country.

That’s why your gift today of $25, $50, $75, or even $150 is so important.

Emily is taking a stand to not only correct the injustice against her, but to encourage the other teachers and parents who have been vilified for speaking the truth.

She loved her job and received glowing review after glowing review. She believed in fairness for everyone. She took great pride in serving families.

It wasn’t enough.

Your gift today will take a stand against the indoctrination of our public school students in critical race theory and other divisive ideologies-and for the teachers like Emily who dissent, only wanting to do what’s best for her students.

Every child deserves to be treated equally and fairly.

Students in some public schools are being indoctrinated in the teachings of a radical ideology sometimes called “critical theory” or “critical race theory.”

Children are being told that:

• They are “oppressed” or an “oppressor””—good or bad—based solely on the color of their skin.
   
• Their race determines their outcome in life.
   
• The American system of government must be replaced.

CRT, an offshoot of Critical Theory, cynically views rights and freedoms—like free speech—as mere tools for the “powerful” to control the “oppressed.”

Students and teachers who dissent from these race-based indoctrination programs are threatened with punishment..

This isn’t just happening in big-city schools. It’s not just in certain states. It’s all over the nation. And it’s a problem that should concern us all.

Schools shouldn’t be ideological battlegrounds. No child should be indoctrinated. Especially not in theories that tell them should be treated differently because of the color of their skin.

Racism is wrong. Every person is created in the image of God and deserving of equal treatment and respect.

But the solution to racism isn’t more (or different) racism.

The U.S. Constitution forbids racially discriminatory treatment of students, as do state constitutions and state laws. Schools with policies that promote racism are in direct violation of the law.

With the help of Ministry Friends like you, Alliance Defending Freedom is challenging these tools of indoctrination in public schools, including by:

• Filing a lawsuit against the Albemarle County School Board in Virginia on behalf of multiple families for its racist and discriminatory policy.
   
• Filing a second lawsuit against the Albemarle School Board for creating a racially hostile work environment that forced an assistant principal to leave her job.

More lawsuits are on their way to fight this problem that students nationwide are facing.

But this is no small undertaking. We need your help to fight these crucial cases to victory.

With a gift today, you can help fund this multi-pronged legal strategy designed to stop the indoctrination of kids in radical ideologies and protect the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their religious freedom, free speech, and the rights of parents..

Please give today!

SOURCE: ADF Legal

Iowa’s Mike Franken says cabal will use schools to win elections for Republicans

Iowa Democratic Senate candidate Mike Franken says there’s a Republican-led, capitalist-evangelical plot to “dumb down” youth through “a war on education,” designed to gain an electoral advantage in the years to come.

During a campaign event in Red Oak last week, Franken told voters Republicans are uniting “the über-capitalists … and the ultra-right evangelicals” on educational issues to “make people dumb and lemmings.”

“Is this what Newt Gingrich wanted everybody to do in the ’90s?” Franken said, according to a video of the event obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. “Dumb down America as much as we can because the demographics are working against the Republican Party? It’s true. It appears so.”

Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told the Free Beacon he found Franken’s remarks “laughable” and that the Senate candidate “is falling for the teachers’ union line.”

“As a Ph.D. in European history and author of more than 40 books, I find it laughable that Franken thinks I could be anti-learning. I participated in the launch of President Reagan’s dramatic report A Nation at Risk in 1983,” Gingrich said. “The teachers’ unions and their Democratic Party loyalists have fought against reform every step of the way. Children should not be trapped in terrible schools that cripple their future. Parents have the right to know what is being taught to their children.”

Franken did not respond to a request for comment.

The retired Navy vice admiral, who served under former president Barack Obama and as a military adviser to former senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), has no stance on public education listed on his campaign website. He has, however, taken strong stances on increasing abortion access, expanding Medicare, and combating climate change. The Iowa Unity Coalition, which has endorsed Franken, supports tuition-free college education for all state residents. A Harvard University study in 2014 found that a Massachusetts tuition-free program lessened students’ college completion rate.

Republicans have made education a significant election issue, as parents have expressed concerns over a public education system they believe has abandoned the teaching of core academic subjects and doubled down on racially divisive rhetoric and courses. The Republican National Committee in 2021 adopted a resolution that condemned critical race theory and “antiracist” school curricula. Congressional Republicans in January put forth as part of their midterm platform a Parents’ Bill of Rights, which would publicly disclose state education budgets and curricula.

Franken did not elaborate on his opposition to Republicans’ education platform, which could potentially alienate some Iowa voters concerned with radical teachings about America’s history in schools. The state House in 2021 entertained a bill that would have banned the New York Times‘s 1619 Project from public education.

Franken’s Democratic nomination this year was unexpected. In 2020, he lost a primary race to Theresa Greenfield, who would go on to lose her election to Sen. Joni Ernst (R.). Franken in June bested Democratic candidate Abby Finkenauer to win the party’s nomination for 2022.

Having raised nearly $3 million thus far for his campaign, Franken will face Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.) in November.

A Grassley campaign spokeswoman said Franken’s comments were “lockstep with the Biden White House,” which in 2021 “orchestrated a memo from the National School Board Association in an effort to intimidate parents by unleashing federal antiterrorism surveillance tools on them at school board meetings.”

“Mike Franken didn’t read the memo from last November’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, the near upset gubernatorial race in New Jersey or the school board recall election in his dream state of California,” Michaela Sundermann told the Free Beacon. “Waging a war on parents is not a winning strategy. Chuck Grassley fights for the fundamental right of parents to have a say in their child’s education.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

How much student loan debt would Americans hold in three years if rresident Joe Biden instituted his forgiveness plan today? The exact same amount they hold today.

The reason is simple: Forgiveness does nothing to address the structural causes of the $1.6 trillion in student debt held by the public, according to economists and education experts who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon. Canceling debt won’t stop future students from borrowing tomorrow, nor can Biden wave a wand and make college cheaper.

The White House is considering forgiving up to $10,000 of student loan debt per person, according to multiple reports. Should Biden follow through with the plan, a reduction in outstanding student loan debt wouldn’t last long. Economists say the total amount owed to the U.S. government would return to $1.6 trillion by 2026 under a $10,000 forgiveness program.

Biden’s consideration of loan forgiveness comes as his administration has seen approval ratings plummet, with younger voters increasingly losing trust in his presidency just months before the midterm elections. No matter what Biden’s rationale for the move may be, economists say any forgiveness scheme could actually exacerbate the problem for current and future students by incentivizing schools to raise tuition.

“Here’s the basic situation, the most charitable explanation is that student loan debt forgiveness is a Band-Aid,” said economist Marc Goldwein. “This is a one-time gift.”

Even if Biden were to capitulate to the demands of Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and cancel all outstanding student loan debt, Goldwein finds, outstanding student debt would return to $1.6 trillion in under 15 years. If Biden were to cancel $50,000, student debt would return to that level in under a decade.

There are several explanations for why student debt would continue rapidly increasing after cancellation. For one, partial student loan forgiveness would make the total debt held much younger. Older college graduates have less debt to pay, whereas younger Americans on average have much larger outstanding balances that continue to accrue interest.

The cost of higher education has skyrocketed over the past decades. In fact, few goods or services have risen faster. Some studies find college tuition has increased in price at a faster rate than health care, child care, and housing.

Between 1980 and 2020, the price of an undergraduate education has increased nearly 170 percent, according to a report from Georgetown University. But that fact hasn’t deterred Americans from attending college. In 1980, 16.2 percent of Americans held a college degree or more, compared with just under 38 percent in 2021.

Why the cost of college has risen so sharply is a matter of ongoing debate among economists. Whatever the reason, few would say student debt relief does anything to address the underlying problem.

“Executive authority on student debt relief only works with a certain king on the throne. That doesn’t sound like good economic policy,” said education economist Carlo Salerno. “Student debt relief is just mopping the floor while the faucet still runs. We’re adding student debt faster than we’re paying it off.”

Worse, some economists say, student debt relief could actually encourage colleges and universities to raise tuition prices further. Consider the hypothetical of a college administrator deciding tuition costs for the 2023-2024 school year. Biden just declared a $10,000 student loan bailout and promised future relief. A college administrator could rationally consider it a safe bet to significantly hike tuition costs if the government might cover the increase in a few years.

“You could argue that student debt relief is worse than a Band-Aid. It’ll infect the wound,” Goldwein said. “This is going to worsen the problem.”

Economists and education experts who spoke with the Free Beacon said student debt relief could also provide perverse incentives for future undergraduates. A student deciding between a more costly private education versus a local state school may opt for the former if he believes another round of student debt cancellation is down the road. Moreover, a student may opt to pay back his outstanding debt at a slower pace if he expects further cancellation under a different Democratic administration or a second Biden term.

One individual who works in private lending told the Free Beacon that his advice to students today is to take out as much debt as you can. Interest rates remain relatively low, he said, and there is a good chance it may all be forgiven by the time the student graduates.

Young people considering a gap year before enrolling in college may want to reconsider their plans as well. Biden announcing student debt relief in the fall will not do much good for the 18-year-old who decided to postpone college to volunteer for a year.

Although a vast majority of Americans—roughly 87 percent—do not hold any student loan debt, there may never be a better time to go back to school. Biden’s plan could be the deal of a lifetime.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

States will not prevent life-saving treatment for pregnant women post-Roe v. Wade, contrary to claims from liberal media outlets and politicians.

Democratic politicians including Resident Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with left-leaning media outlets like the New York Times, have said the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe may endanger or kill pregnant mothers. “I don’t mean to sound alarmist, I mean this: Women will die,” Harris said in a recent interview. Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali said women will have to ask themselves, “Do I abort this ectopic pregnancy to literally save my life or do I go to jail?”

While the overturn of Roe has either outlawed or severely restricted abortion in at least 11 states, each include exceptions to save the life of the mother in medical emergencies. Nevertheless, Democrats are hyping these concerns over pregnant mothers’ safety, and abortion advocates are spending millions of dollars to rally supporters before the 2022 midterms. Biden reminded his party last week before the Dobbs decision that “Roe is on the ballot“

The Texas “heart beat” bill, which prohibits abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, states that removal of an ectopic pregnancy does not constitute an abortion. Louisiana’s law prohibiting abortion after 15 weeks includes exceptions for ectopic pregnancies and other medical emergencies, along with the Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and Wisconsin abortion bills.

Treatment for ectopic pregnancies, where the unborn baby develops outside the uterus, is not abortion, said Dr. Christina Francis, a board-certified OB-GYN and associate scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute. She said women will receive the same treatment for life-threatening conditions as when Roe was in effect.

“The intent of an abortion is to end the life of the developing fetal human being, while our intent when we treat an ectopic pregnancy is to save the life of the mother,” Francis told the Washington Free Beacon. “We do a very different procedure than what’s done for an induced abortion.”

In Oklahoma, the state with the strictest abortion laws in the country, abortion is allowed when the doctor’s “reasonable medical judgment” determines it is necessary to save the mother’s life. Alabama allows abortions if the mother has a medical condition that requires “the termination of her pregnancy to avert her death or to avert serious risk of substantial physical impairment of a major bodily function.” West Virginia, which criminalizes abortion, also allows exceptions with the “intention of saving the life of such woman or child.” South Dakota’s 2022 abortion bill says a “procedure for the management of a miscarriage” is not an abortion.

Claims that the overturn of Roe will harm mothers who have miscarriages are also unfounded, according to Francis. If the unborn baby has died, “abortion laws, statutes, and even discussions don’t apply,” she said.

“There is intentional fear mongering being done,” Francis said. “I think people who know better are trying to scare women and physicians in the general public into supporting abortion laws.”

https://freebeacon.com/politics/liberals-are-wrong-emergency-pregnancy-treatments-remain-legal-after-roe/

Newt talks with former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, about her new book, “Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.”  

Audio Conversation

From coronavirus lockdowns to critical race theory in the classroom, it has become clear that America’s schools aren’t working for America’s students and parents. Newt’s guest has been fighting to improve education for every American student for nearly 40 years. Betsy DeVos spent four years serving as Secretary of Education under President Donald Trump.  Her new book, “Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child” is out now.

https://www.gingrich360.com/2022/06/28/newts-world-episode-427-betsy-devos-on-hostages-no-more/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=June%2027%20-%20Newt%20Hero%20%20General&utm_content=June%2027%20-%20Newt%20Hero%20%20General+CID_385012a4b008206fe666746640e5d362&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Click%20Here

State bill is ‘the most robust expansion of educational freedom in the nation,’ says think tank

Arizona will enact the nation’s most expansive school voucher bill, allowing all parents to decide where their children will attend school.

The bill, which allows Arizona families to take their children out of public school and puts public funds into Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, also known as education savings accounts (ESAs), that families can use for homeschooling or private-school tuition, last week passed the state House and Senate. Governor Doug Ducey (R.) has said he will sign the bill, which will expand the number of students who can use savings accounts from 10,000 to more than 1 million. As the program stands now, only students who are disabled, in failing schools, or in military families can access the savings accounts.

“This legislation is the most robust expansion of educational freedom in the nation,” Goldwater Institute director of education policy Matt Beienburg told the Washington Free Beacon. “It guarantees every Arizona student, whether they are coming from public school, private school, or homeschooling, the opportunity to join the ESA program and receive their share of state funding to pursue any educational opportunity that best needs their needs.”

The bill passed the Arizona Legislature during the same week that the Supreme Court extended school-choice eligibility nationwide by prohibiting states from discriminating against religious institutions in school-voucher programs.

Arizona families in the ESA program will receive more than $6,500 per year for their children for private school, homeschooling, or other educational services. The program does not drain money from public schools, however, a Goldwater Institute analysis found.

In fact, a public-school system usually gets back around $600 when a student leaves in favor of an ESA, increasing per-pupil funding, according to the Goldwater Institute analysis.

Arizona in 2011 became the first state to enact education savings accounts. Seven other states now have similar voucher programs.

Close to 1.2 million students have left the public-school system since COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures began, according to the American Enterprise Institute.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/arizona-opens-up-school-choice-to-all-children/

As more students fail to meet academic standards in Seattle, public education officials in the city are proposing that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs receive more funding than core academic subjects.

Seattle Public Schools would spend more than $5 million on so-called DEI initiatives, including a “racial equity analysis tool” and an after-school program for black male students who are “referred to as kings,” according to a district budget proposal for the 2022-23 school year. The budget allots a little more than $4.5 million for core academic subjects, such as math, science, and literacy. More than half-a-million dollars would be cut from the science budget as well. The school district lists “racial equity,” “engaging students of color,” and ensuring disciplinary policies are not used “as a substitute for culturally responsive behavioral and social emotional supports,” among its guiding principles for the budget.

The decision to prioritize DEI programs comes as students’ proficiency in reading and math has fallen 6 percentage points and 16 percentage points, respectively, since 2019. Test scores from last year found nearly 56 percent of Seattle students are not competent in science and about 57 percent are not competent in math. Just 30 percent of black students and 18 percent of Native American students are meeting grade-level standards. Public school officials in the region have blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for learning losses.

The Seattle school district’s budget recommends around $1.3 million for scholarships and programs in “Native Education,” about $1.5 million for “African American Male Achievement,” and nearly $1.3 million for the “Department of Racial Equity Advancement.” Another $600,000 would be set aside for “Ethnic Studies and Black Studies,” a district representative told the Washington Free Beacon, as well as $650,000 for a Latino academic support and cultural studies program. In addition, each of the district’s three budgetary goals has to do with improving educational outcomes just for black students.

Under the proposed budget, however, math and literacy courses receive around $1.6 million each, and science courses get $1.3 million—around $850,00 less than the district’s DEI programs.

When asked why the “Native Education” would receive more funding than science classes, a spokesman told the Free Beacon budget allocation is “a complex process that involves community input, stakeholders, students, etc.” The total Seattle school district’s budget is around $1.14 billion.

Parents across the nation in recent months have agitated against the rise of race-based educational movements like critical race theory and “antiracist” instruction in public schools. Some have gone as far as to sue school districts, alleging the movement’s are fomenting a new form of racial discrimination. The issue became particularly salient during last year’s Virginia gubernatorial election, with Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin pledging to ban critical race theory being taught in public schools.

School districts as far away as Madison, Wis., are pursuing similar budgetary initiatives to Seattle, allocating tens of thousands of dollars a year for a Native American land-acknowledgment plan, among other measures.

Seattle Public Schools’ budget, as recommended by the school board, was introduced in June and will be voted on in July.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/seattle-public-schools-plan-to-spend-more-on-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-than-core-academic-subjects/

It’s part of the whole college experience. Eager young minds, animated in discussion, engaging in robust classroom debate.

It got lively, boisterous—even explosive at times—as bright pupils with great expectations shared, tested, and contested ideas about the world. This was the university, the crucible of learning, the engine of ideas.

How times have changed.

Today, that experience has turned heavy (the crucible cold and unyielding) in many colleges and universities, where discussions are dampened by theories like postmodernism, putting a chill on that wistful classroom experience.

Few know this better than those who’ve been silenced.

The schools themselves are doing the silencing.

Michiganite Maggie DeJong, 26, now graduated, studied art therapy counseling at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where postmodernism was taught as part of its curriculum.

Because of her viewpoints on contentious issues facing America today, ones impacting the lives, livelihoods, rights, and security of countless individuals—such as abortion, defunding the police, and Black Lives Matter—the school took administrative steps to bring her bright mind to heel.

They slapped DeJong with a “no contact order,” the college’s equivalent of a restraining order, usually reserved for those threatening violence.

“There is a view that is becoming more prominent on campuses, that speech is ‘violence,’” DeJong’s attorney Gregg Walters told The Epoch Times. “You cannot issue an order saying your protected speech is a violation of some code of conduct.”

DeJong, along with the Alliance Defending Freedom, is now suing the school for violating her First Amendment rights to free speech and religious belief. Her Christian beliefs are part of what shape her worldview. DeJong is seeking a change in the school’s policy, vindication from the no contact order, and remediation for damages.

She was also denied due process.

“Even in the legal system, you get a chance to defend yourself,” added Walters. “She wasn’t given any type of hearing date to defend us, they were just issued.”

DeJong engaged in discussions in classroom settings, which was expected of her, in ways that were topically appropriate, discussions about “race relations,” “religion,” and “the postmodern theoretical framework,” she said. Until a student who didn’t like what she was saying made a formal complaint.

And her views were collected from social media for over a year. Classmates took screenshots from her Instagram as “evidence.”

“I was participating in these discussions, but they found views offensive that were from my Instagram that regarded pro-life discussions,” she told the newspaper, adding that those views were “conservative views that millions of Americans hold that are being discussed right now.”

She defended Kyle Rittenhouse and denounced critical race theory on social media, drawing the ire of fellow students.

“Proof” of ideological impiety in hand, administrators issued DeJong no contact orders preventing her from having any contact, direct or indirect, with three students, on or off campus.

“It’s the university’s version of a restraining order,” said Walters, adding that schools are not allowed to issue them. “Not in these circumstances. In other circumstances [it may be allowed], perhaps for protection against physical violence, threats of violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment, but when it comes to protected speech, absolutely not.”

Adding insult to injury, DeJong’s teacher followed up by sending an email to some 30 of her classmates, informing them she was being investigated.

This pressure successfully chilled her speaking, effectively silencing her from further discussion, even in the classroom.

“I was living in fear with my speech and so I was very scared to even defend myself, and so I remained very quiet,” she said, adding that she felt “sadness for what was going on.”

Punishment with such impunity flies in the face of university tradition: to seek truth. Now, the prevailing postmodern ideology holds that truth is relative; all discourses are constructs, tools of power; logic itself is a construct, a construct of the West, so logical debate can’t reach fruitful conclusions but can only serve the powerful, the privileged.

Only power struggles exist, between oppressor and oppressed.

Hence, speech equals violence when uttered from people like DeJong—so the postmodern mantra goes.

Not all agree.

“The more we talk about speech being ‘violence,’ the more we see extreme reactions to legal speech,” said Walters. “And in case of Maggie’s speech, there are millions of people that would agree with the positions that she took.

“To treat that as if it were something worthy of a no contact order is just absolutely wrong. It was protected speech, and universities cannot censor speech based on religious and political viewpoints.”

The university’s punitive approach to learning, he added, reinforces victimhood behavior rather than encouraging civil discourse.

“I went in with the mindset that it’s university, so diversity of thought should be welcomed,” DeJong added. “It should be a marketplace of ideas where you can engage in dialogue … where you’re truly picking things apart and learning, and learning from other people.

“Freedom of speech, the First Amendment, needs to be upheld within university systems so that students can fully engage in the marketplace of ideas.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/student-slapped-with-no-contact-order-by-university-for-speaking-christian-values-in-class-discussions_4551426.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-27-3&utm_medium=email&est=r%2F%2B5qeFcfa6uJjDsD4wh9zRUP9d%2BocbSI%2BTH1orFc7iBY1HZcd6mtwaJd%2FSInijDaQ%3D%3D

Radical pro-abortion activists are reportedly using an interactive map developed by two University of Georgia professors to plan their violent attacks on pregnancy resource centers.

These centers, which typically offer pregnancy tests and counseling services from a pro-life perspective, have been vandalized, smashed, and set on fire in growing numbers across the country in the weeks leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

While these centers’ locations are public knowledge, perpetrators have been using online tools that collect and organize this information in a way that makes it easier for them to find the next target.

One of such tools is the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, a project led by Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert, both professors at the Epidemiology and Biostatistics Department at the University of Georgia. The interactive map identifies the exact street addresses of over 2,500 pro-life clinics.

The stated purpose of the map is “to provide location information about all of the crisis pregnancy centers operating in the U.S.” The website also refers to these centers as “fake women’s health centers” primarily aimed to “prevent people from having abortions.”

“There’s reason to think that people seeking health services may not know exactly what these centers are and the services they offer,” Swartzendruber said in 2018 when the CPC map first went online.

According to Fox News, far-left extremists are using the map to mark their next targets while trying to refrain from explicitly calling for violence.

Puget Sound Anarchists, an Antifa-affiliated group operating out of Washington state, included the CPC map in a post celebrating the vandalism of a pro-life clinic in the state by another radical group. The group itself in May publicly claimed responsibility for vandalizing four different churches in Olympia, Washington, because of their supposed ties to pregnancy resource centers.

“You can find your nearest fake abortion clinic on the Crisis Pregnancy Center Map,” the post read.

In Minnesota, left-wing anti-police group Twin Cities Encampment Responders posted a link to the map shortly after the release of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“A map of anti-abortion fake clinics, including dozens around the Twin Cities area … you know, just because information is power,” the group wrote in the post, which has since been shared hundreds of times.

Colorado Springs Antifa, a group known for doxxing people affiliated with right-wing groups, shared a Twitter post containing a link to the CPC map alongside the message, “For the night owls.”

A graphic accompanying the original post reads, “Your local crisis pregnancy center tonight. Mask up. Stay dangerous.”

One of the latest attacks on pregnancy resource centers took place on Saturday morning in Longmont, a northern suburb of Denver. According to the police, the building was set ablaze and covered with graffiti messages such as “Bans off our bodies” and “If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.”

The facility is run by Life Choices, a Christian non-profit organization that offers free services related to pregnancy and sexual health. In a statement, Life Choices Executive Director Kathy Roberts said the center is “devastated and stunned by this frightening act of vandalism.”

“What we hope the perpetrators of this act understand is that an attack on Life Choices is ultimately not an attack on a political party or act of,” Roberts said. “It is an attack on those who walk through our doors every day in need of diapers, pregnancy tests, limited ultrasounds, clothing, financial and parenting classes, support, and so much more. It is an attack on a place that is supposed to be safe for women, men, and their families.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/far-left-groups-use-map-created-by-university-professors-to-target-pregnancy-centers-report-says_4559401.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-27&utm_medium=email&est=zGa2x60dkBmse8Mb0Bdrfs9ip6SFhWDcZlestNnQk76CDEDUpQaw1I7MANQANSOtdg%3D%3D

There is no safety profile for the effects of vaccines on children

As the Biden administration rolls out vaccines for the nation’s youngest children (6 months to 5-year-olds), Dr. Jeffrey Barke, chief medical officer at the Convention of States, said there is absolutely no evidence supporting that these youngest children are at any serious risk of death from COVID-19 and should not get be broadly vaccinated.

“I think it’s important that we tell the truth first, and then let parents and adults make informed decisions about whether or not to get vaccinated,” Barke said during a recent interview with NTD’s Capitol Report. “And to recommend this product to 6-month-olds makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. So, to start with, there is no COVID emergency, especially as it relates to younger people. It simply doesn’t exist.”

Barke referenced the CDC’s own website, saying that according to the CDC’s data, just over 1,000 children have died since the beginning of the pandemic as of the interview. “While every death of course is tragic, the reality is every one of those deaths occurred in a child that had significant underlying comorbidities. Healthy children simply do not die from this illness,” said Barke.

Meanwhile, White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha made a contrary statement, saying that the infant vaccines “have been thoroughly tested. Millions of children above the age of 5 have gotten these vaccines. They’re exceedingly safe,” Jha told CBS News in a June 20 interview.

The CDC last Saturday signed off on giving both Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to infants and children between 6 months and 5 years old. It came after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory panel unanimously voted to authorize the use of the vaccines.

Jha also said while the majority of children likely have natural immunity, getting the vaccines will help keep children out of the hospital if they get it again.

The White House is echoing the FDA and CDC’s message to get young children vaccinated.

“COVID has been quite common in children actually. We think maybe almost 70 percent of kids have ended up getting infected with COVID, [but it’s] still worth getting the vaccine. It really offers an extra level of protection, an extra layer of protection,” said Jha.

Barke disagreed with Jha and said there is a risk to young children from vaccines themselves because they have no long-term safety profiles.

“It’s ridiculous what’s going on here. And the part that makes me the saddest is the FDA and the CDC already have trust issues amongst the American public, and for them now to authorize and recommend that a 6-month-old receive a COVID-19 vaccine when they’re not at risk, and there have been no long-term safety studies with these products, is going to erode whatever little trust is left in these organizations,” said Barke.

He added that if a child has an adverse reaction to the vaccine, that child’s parents could not sue for damages because the authorization prevents the companies from being held liable.

“[The vaccine] is experimental by definition. A product that’s being used under emergency use [EU] authorization definitionally is investigational, and it makes no sense whatsoever. The EU authorization gives these vaccine companies blanket liability protection,” said Barke.

In addition, the virus has mutated since the vaccines were developed, so we don’t know if these vaccines protect against strains like Omicron, Barke said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/vaccines-for-6-month-olds-makes-absolutely-no-sense-dr-jeffrey-barke_4551517.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-26-4&utm_medium=email&est=NWOkuZ7UbJPUB0NuOlRm3h1UJV%2Fw6%2BtG6rIkD4vk2gOrtT%2FguJf9opUYHQ14lP4dGA%3D%3D

A group of parents in Maryland’s largest school district have a proposal to prevent school shootings that doesn’t require banning guns.

The group, Vigilance Not Vigils, is calling on Montgomery County to lift its ban on school resource officers—law enforcement agents assigned to respond to emergencies in local schools. The district defunded its resource officer program in March 2021, following complaints that officers disproportionately arrested minority students. Montgomery County Public Schools have seen an uptick in violent incidents since the district pulled resource officers, including the county’s first school shooting in January.

Montgomery County replaced resource officers with community engagement officers, who work outside school buildings and are assigned to multiple schools. These off-site officers, whom schools contact through 911, are often delayed responding to incidents. Montgomery County parent Dana Noga told the Washington Free Beacon that engagement officers are a poor substitute for the resource officers they replaced—and that students feel their absence.

“Kids cannot learn if they don’t feel safe,” said Noga.

Montgomery County is one of the only school districts in the Washington, D.C., area without a resource officer program. All 25 district high school principals opposed County Executive Marc Elrich’s decision to pull resource officers from schools. But Elrich brushed aside their objections, claiming the move was necessary to protect minority students.

But a Montgomery County Police Department memo obtained by the Free Beacon shows that resource officers did not target black and Hispanic students. Between August and December, resource officers made just 11 arrests in Montgomery County Public Schools. Six detainees were white students, while four were black.

Don Bridges, president of the National Association of School Resource Officers, said there’s no validity to charges of racism against resource officers.

“I have been a man of color my entire life, and I can’t begin to tell you about the hundreds and maybe thousands of kids of color that I’ve had positive relationships with, how many weddings I’ve gone to, how many graduations, and how many cookouts,” Bridges told the Free Beacon.

Montgomery County lawmakers pledged to redirect resource officer funding toward new mental health programs and restorative justice training. The county said it would place 50 social workers in schools, but has only hired 33.

Bridges said preventing school shootings requires both resource officers and mental health programs.

“When we look at these parents in Texas who paid the ultimate price, the thing we should be saying is that we should be using both,” Bridges said. “Our kids are dying, and we need to look at things differently.”

Brandon Grubb, who graduated from Montgomery County’s Magruder High School in 2021, agrees that mental health and school resource officer programs are not mutually exclusive.

“There were blinders on to think that removing the resource officer program and replacing it with a mental health program was the answer, especially since the mental health program was not implemented in a timely manner,” Grubb wrote in a letter to the Montgomery County Council and the Board of Education, which was obtained by the Free Beacon.

The push to increase resource officers is gaining traction at the national level. Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) on Wednesday introduced a bill that would redirect American Rescue Plan funds to double the number of officers in schools across the country.

But Anita Cox, a Montgomery County Public Schools parent and leader of Vigilance not Vigils, says the push for resource officers needs to begin closer to home.

“Instead of trying to go to Congress to look for a way to end this, we need to go down the street,” Cox said.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/send-in-the-cops-maryland-parents-call-for-more-school-security/

The Senate voted 65-33 this evening to pass their radical gun control package, crafted in the wake of recent tragedies such as the one that took place at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas last month.

As previously reported, this legislation contains several provisions that are clear violations of law-abiding Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

While the legislation does include some rational measures, the restrictions on law-abiding citizens are too great.

The two most glaring violations of Second Amendment rights are the expanded background checks on would-be purchasers between the ages of 18 and 21 and the millions of dollars in funding that states would be provided with to enforce “red flag laws.” 

Would-be buyers in the 18-21 age group could be subject to a waiting period of up to 10 business days – potentially up to two whole calendar weeks –  before being able to purchase a firearm.

Through funding provided by Byrne JAG grants, states will be given additional dollars to support “extreme risk protection orders” (ERPO’s). Those orders – known colloquially as “red flag laws” – temporarily require a person to surrender their firearms to law enforcement officials and also do not allow individuals to purchase or possess firearms or ammunition.”

Senate Republicans who supported today’s legislation were Mitch McConnell (R-KY), John Cornyn (R-TX), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Roy Blunt (R-MO), Richard Burr (R-NC), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Todd Young (R-IN), Rob Portman (R-OH), Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Mitt Romney (R-UT).

Fox News reported earlier this week that House Republican Whip Steve Scalise is planning to do all he can to stop the legislation from making it through his chamber. However, his efforts may not go far enough as Democrats still outnumber Republicans in the House.

The House Freedom Caucus officially took a position on the legislation two days ago when it was formally introduced in the Senate. The group of conservative Republicans took issue with the bill’s provisions that would enhance the implementation of red flag laws by backing pre-existing state laws with federal dollars.

OFFICIAL POSITION: The House Freedom Caucus opposes any legislation, including the Senate framework, that implements “red flag laws” and other unconstitutional gun control provisions.

Full statement: pic.twitter.com/zqQoTFPNoL— House Freedom Caucus (@freedomcaucus) June 22, 2022

Congresswoman Lauren Bobert – another member of the House Republican Conference and a prominent gun rights defender – joined Laura Ingraham on Fox News yesterday to slam the Senate’s anti-Second Amendment bill.

It’s turns out Texas has both parties represented in the U.S. Senate!

I joined @IngrahamAngle tonight to expose the unconstitutional Senate gun grab! pic.twitter.com/CYrfx4L7Cp— Rep. Lauren Boebert (@RepBoebert) June 23, 2022

House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik has also issued a statement in opposition of the Senate’s legislative package.

In her eyes, “this bill contains unconstitutional gun control provisions and allows the implementation of red flag laws that take away due process rights. It would restrict men and women who are able to serve in our military from purchasing a firearm and would strip the Constitutional rights of gun owners by broadening the scope of punishment for even nonviolent misdemeanors. As this blatant government overreach seeks to make gun owners second-class citizens, I will continue to stand up for the Constitution and push for solutions, including advocating for increased mental health resources across the country.”

As the legislation now moves to the House, many more Republicans are sure to make their opposition to the legislation known with insiders predicting a floor vote as soon as 9:00 AM Friday morning.

https://www.americanliberty.news/capitol-hill/senate-passes-unconstitutional-gun-bill-house-republicans-pledge-to-fight-it/vsnitsar/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=8153

Send them to the Island of Misfit Toys. We’ve got bigger problems. We need not accommodate the very, very few by subjugating the many. [US Patriot]

The Biden Education Department on Thursday proposed changes to Title IX that would allow students to participate in school events based on their gender identity, regardless of biological sex.

The proposed changes will effectively abolish sex-separate activities and spaces, including bathrooms and locker rooms. They would also define misuse of gender pronouns as a form of sexual harassment. The Education Department cited the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County to justify its interpretation of Title IX, claiming schools may not discriminate against a person based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The department withheld a likely more controversial proposal that would allow transgender athletes to participate in women’s sports, saying it will provide the rule at a later date.

The hesitation signals caution on the part of the Biden administration, which had twice delayed rolling out the changes. Polls have found a majority of Americans oppose transgender athletes participation in women’s sports. Critics say the Biden administration’s changes are bad for women.

“A shift from biological sex to gender identity means that girls and women will be forced to accept the presence of biological males in what have always been single-sex spaces.” said Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for Parents Defending Education. “Dignity and respect matter for everyone but so do fairness and safety, and these proposed changes represent a total rejection of fairness and safety in the name of ideology.”

The regulations also deliver on resident Joe Biden’s campaign promise to bring about a “quick end” to the Trump administration’s Title IX ruling. The Trump-era regulations preserved due process protections for students accused of sexual misconduct, which Education Department has now reversed. The Biden-era proposal strips students of such protections and “reverts back to an ‘inquisitorial’ model,” according to Sanzi, “in which the Title IX coordinator gets to be the sole investigator as well as the judge and jury.”

“The Biden administration made the decision to deliberately target the rights of accused students,” Sanzi added.

Thursday marks the 50th anniversary of Title IX. In a press release marking the occasion, the Education Department claimed the proposed rules ensure “fairness for all parties, respect for freedom of speech and academic freedom, respect for complainants’ autonomy, and clear legal obligations that enable robust enforcement of Title IX.”

The Education Department’s proposed changes come as schools across the country grapple with policies pertaining to transgender students. The Washington Free Beacon reported last week that parents have voiced constitutional objections to a Virginia school district’s decision to suspend students who use the wrong pronouns for transgender peers.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/no-girls-allowed-biden-education-department-proposes-radical-title-ix-changes/

A New York school district is standing by a sex-ed lesson that instructed students to discuss terms such as “face fuck,” “coochie slayer,” and “professional raw dogger.”

The Croton-Harmon school district says its teachers should discuss these sexual terms, which were part of a lesson plan this month for a district high school’s 10th grade health class, so that students can learn “the importance of using respectful language” about sex. A photo of these phrases on a classroom whiteboard, which also included “ejaculate and evacuate,” “bust one in me,” and “rearrange my insides,” circulated on social media, sparking outrage from parents. The school district, however, is refusing to back down.

Look what’s being taught in 10th grade at a Westchester HS & in schools around NY, according to many concerned parents who contacted me. Inappropriate, vulgar & criminal sexual content needs to be banned from classroom. Stick to core academic subjects. #revengeofthenormalpeople pic.twitter.com/XBmYvBhQ69

— Rob Astorino (@RobAstorino) June 14, 2022

“Learning experiences such as this one are important for our students, and we trust our highly trained, dedicated, and passionate professionals in their facilitation of these experiences,” the district said in a statement last week.

Some of the phrases appear to be obscure slang for graphic descriptions of sex: One of the terms—”charzarding”—is defined only in Urban Dictionary.

The Croton-Harmon school district did not respond to a request for comment.

The incident marks the latest in a series of controversies over how sex education is taught to schoolchildren around the country. Liberal advocacy groups funded by Democratic Party donors, including the Sexuality Information and the Education Council of the United States, have pushed school districts nationwide to teach elementary school students about gender identity and transgenderism, the Washington Free Beacon reported last year.

The Westchester County school district’s sex education plan sparked heated debates at a June school board meeting. One parent whose daughter was in the classroom said, “I frankly do not see the connection of using this level of vulgarity in the classroom and teaching the concepts that the administration says are the goals.”

Some state Democrats, meanwhile, have come to the school district’s defense. Peter Harckham, a New York state senator present at the meeting, defended the school and thanked its teachers for their “sensitive conversations and professionalism.”

The health curriculum for district high schoolers includes a Planned Parenthood-produced video about consent that only portrays same-sex couples. The Trans Student Educational Resources’ popular “Gender Unicorn” graphic, which claims that “gender identity” and sexual attraction are on a spectrum, is also listed in the curriculum. The middle school curriculum, meanwhile, includes several lessons about transgenderism and an activity in which students create an exhibit on LGBT issues for the Museum of Natural History.

The New York district’s push for sexualized health lessons comes as the Biden administration advocates in favor of sex transitions for children through hormones and surgery. The White House in June released a plan to counter Republican states that attempt to ban transgender hormone treatment for minors, which have already been met with lawsuits from LGBT groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Rob Astorino, a New York Republican gubernatorial candidate who shared the photo of the vulgar terms, said he is concerned parents are unaware of the growing instances of overly sexualized lesson plans.

“Kids who can’t get into a rated-R movie are now learning about twisted and dangerous sex acts,” Astorino told the Free Beacon. “If someone was caught teaching kids this stuff in a park, he or she would be arrested as a sex offender.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/not-safe-for-school-ny-district-defends-x-rated-sex-ed/

Princeton University ignored evidence that cut against its conclusion that the tenured professor had committed fire-able offenses.

Princeton University ignored extensive exculpatory evidence in its investigation of Joshua Katz, the tenured classics professor axed last month over alleged actions related to his consensual relationship with a former student.

Announcing the unceremonious dismissal, Princeton said Katz had dissuaded the former student from participating in a 2018 probe into the affair and discouraged her from “seeking mental health care” while she was an undergraduate. Both findings were based on excerpts of a voluminous email correspondence between Katz and the alumna, exchanged over 13 years, in which she sent him professions of love, allegations of “abuse,” and threats of suicide.

This report is based on a review of all the materials Katz provided to the university, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation, including more than 3,000 emails between Katz and his former student. That broader correspondence suggests that Princeton seized on unrepresentative exchanges to make its determinations, cherry-picking Katz’s messages and ignoring inconsistencies in the alumna’s story.

In fact, their exchanges show the alumna declined to participate in the 2018 inquiry of her own volition and that Katz went out of his way to avoid pressuring her into that decision. “I honestly don’t want to put any pressure on you whatsoever to do or not do anything,” he wrote on April 11, 2018, as Princeton was investigating the affair. “The decision here has to be yours.”

Katz did admit in three 2018 emails to dissuading the former student from seeking therapy her senior year. But the emails show Katz admitted to many things he did not do when the alumna accused him of wrongdoing, casting doubt on the veracity of that admission. The emails also show that, at other times, Katz told the alumna to seek psychiatric care. “Please remember that the most important thing is that you take care of yourself,” he told her in March 2008. “I’m counting on you to do this—and if you feel you can’t, then you *must* get help immediately.”

The university’s investigative report, which formed the basis for Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber’s recommendation to dismiss Katz, ignored those emails, according to four sources who reviewed the report, one of whom provided the Washington Free Beacon with a list of the emails cited in its appendix. It also ignored a forensic evaluation of Katz by one of the most distinguished psychiatrists in the country, Frank Dattilio, who concluded that the beleaguered professor would admit to “behaviors that he never engaged in for the sake of placating” the alumna.

Katz retained Dattilio, a household name among forensic psychiatrists who has provided hundreds of psychological evaluations to federal courts and law enforcement agencies, to shed light on why he “might admit to doing things he has not done,” according to a copy of the evaluation Katz shared with the Free Beacon. That evaluation offered critical context for Katz’s apparent admission, in his email exchanges with his former student, that he had discouraged her from going to therapy.

Katz was “genuinely concerned” the alumna would harm herself, Dattilio, who holds joint appointments with Harvard Medical School and the University of Pennsylvania, told Princeton. He “does not handle intense, volatile emotions very well” and will admit “to doing or saying things he has never done in order to quell emotional upheaval.”

Princeton’s investigative report, according to the sources who reviewed it, dismissed Dattilio’s conclusions in a couple sentences, describing them as a “post-hoc, self-serving interpretation” of Katz’s emails.

The report’s omissions bolster the argument, made by liberals and conservatives alike, that Princeton’s investigation was a pretext to fire a tenured professor for political speech. The university disciplined Katz for the relationship in 2018 as a result of a third-party complaint, but decided to reopen an investigation after Katz panned the school’s racial politics in 2020, incurring the wrath of Eisgruber.

The second time around, his former student—a seasoned Democratic operative who worked for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and her local party chapter—participated in the proceedings, supplying Princeton with a handful of incriminating emails.

In response, Katz turned over every exchange he could find between himself and his former student. “Anyone who reads through all of them,” he wrote in a statement to the university in October 2021, “will see two deeply troubled people, not a saint and a psychopath.”

The emails tell a tragic tale of unrequited love and unintended consequences, sparked by Katz’s relationship with the student in 2007. The fallout of that relationship would upend her life and haunt his own, driving them both to say they were on the brink of suicide, their emails show. Then an activist bureaucracy used Katz’s decades-old mistake to push him out of his job.

The alumna did not respond to a request for comment. Instead, the Free Beacon received a veiled legal threat from her lawyer, Jennifer Salvatore, warning: “To the extent that media outlets are participating in efforts to rehabilitate [Katz’s] reputation by violating my client’s privacy and/or defaming her, she reserves all rights and will take appropriate legal action to defend herself.”

Princeton University did not respond to a request for comment.

The affair began in June 2006 and lasted until the alumna’s graduation in 2007. It was dysfunctional but unremarkable, filled with petty resentments and jejune fights: Katz did not take the alumna out for Valentine’s Day in 2007, she complained in a 2018 email. He would ignore her at events and “talk exclusively to other people.”

These slights nonetheless appear to have had a profound effect on the alumna, who said in her emails that she fantasized about killing herself during the course of the affair. “A few times I went to the CVS and stood in front of the sleeping pills for a while trying to figure out how much I’d need to buy,” she recalled in one April 2018 email. “I got really, really close.”

She would later conclude that Katz had abused her, though Princeton’s Title IX office dismissed that charge in April 2021.

During her senior year, the alumna stopped going to therapy—but her emails offer inconsistent explanations as to why. In one message, she claims Katz discouraged her from seeing a therapist because he was afraid the university would discover the affair. But in another, she indicates she stopped going of her own volition in order to protect Katz. In a third, she suggests she became so depressed that “I couldn’t even go to therapy anymore.”

Katz pointed out these inconsistencies in an April 2021 statement to the university reviewed by the Free Beacon. Princeton ignored them, according to the sources who reviewed the university’s report.

The report also ignored Katz’s persistent and passionate pleas for the alumna to see a therapist, which came in response to what Dattilio described as a “deluge” of emails that, per his evaluation, revealed “emotional volatility.” The affair ended when the alumna graduated in 2007, but her correspondence with Katz did not: She would accuse him of giving her “PTSD,” then say she missed him. She would call him a “monster,” then beg him to marry her. She would apologize for how “worthless” and “repulsive” she was, blame him for “wrecking” her life, and then ask if he was “doing OK,” sometimes within hours.

The alumna would also say she was suicidal—at times implying she was moments away from killing herself—and would grow agitated if Katz didn’t respond within minutes.

With her life seemingly on the line, Katz bent over backwards to calm her down. He would apologize profusely for his “monstrous” conduct—”I’m sorry for being a monster,” he wrote in November 2010—and beg the alumna to seek help.

Sometimes the alumna would accuse Katz of things he had not done, only for him to apologize anyway. In April 2018, for example, the alumna berated Katz for refusing to leave Princeton during class reunions, which she wanted to attend without running into him. Katz apologized immediately—even though dozens of emails show him coordinating with the alumna to ensure they were never on campus at the same time.

The alumna’s volatility reached a fever pitch when an anonymous third party reported the decades-old affair to Princeton in February 2018—the height of the MeToo movement.

The investigation came as an unwelcome surprise to the former student, who for months railed against the university for prying open a chapter in her life that she’d tried desperately to close.

“I didn’t want this,” she wrote on March 12, 2018. “I was doing better at pushing it all down and I am so angry at whoever made this complaint.”

When Princeton’s deputy dean of faculty, Toni Turano, asked the alumna if she wanted to participate in the investigation, she refused and contacted Katz to warn him it was coming. She even offered to intercede on his behalf, either by asking Princeton to call off the probe or by expressing support for “the most lenient possible penalty.”

Katz said it was up to her. “Thank you for protecting me,” he wrote on April 10, 2018. “I can’t ask you to do it, though, especially if it’s making things worse for you.” The next day, he told her that he didn’t want to say anything that might pressure her one way or the other.

The alumna ultimately decided against contacting the university. When Katz told her on April 23 he would be suspended for a year without pay, she replied: “I’m sorry I couldn’t fix it.”

At the same time she was offering to intercede on his behalf, the alumna was sending Katz messages that oscillated between pleas for love and weekly threats of suicide. Katz himself said he contemplated “jumping” after receiving dozens of emails from her in the course of a few hours.

It was during these weeks that the alumna accused Katz of talking her out of therapy, extracting several apologies from him. The investigative report described those apologies as “clear and persuasive evidence” that Katz “acted to dissuade” the alumna “from seeing a therapist,” according to Katz’s October 2021 statement. It did not address the alumna’s threats of self-harm or Katz’s pattern of false admissions.

When the alumna learned on April 30, 2018, that Katz had once attended an academic conference in the city where she lived without telling her, she changed her mind about participating in the investigation and began threatening to get him fired.

“If I can’t trust you to respect my boundaries, I’ll have to enforce them,” the alumna wrote. In another email, she told Katz she would give him “a chance” to “convince me I shouldn’t.”

“Please, please don’t,” Katz responded—a plea the university would seize on to argue he tried to discourage the former student from coming forward. Princeton ignored the context of that plea, as well as the alumna’s consistent opposition to the investigation over the preceding two months.

After the 2018 investigation, the alumna continued writing to Katz. Now, with MeToo in full swing—and with Katz becoming more vocally critical of campus progressivism—the alumna, a longtime Democratic operative, began to articulate her grievances in political terms. During the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, for example, she repeatedly likened Katz to the embattled judicial nominee. A few months later, she likened him to a Republican state defending itself against charges of racism.

“When Texas comes to you and says, of course this law that happens to disenfranchise tons of black people wasn’t *intended* to be racially discriminatory, you don’t just *believe* them,” she wrote in January 2019. “Do you understand the analogy here?”

In 2020, Katz wrote a controversial essay that attacked the notion that Princeton was systemically racist. Then in February 2021, the Daily Princetonian published a story about his decades-old affair. The story also reported, based on anonymous allegations, that Katz had “behaved inappropriately” with two other former female students.

As part of his evaluation, Dattilio administered a test to gauge Katz’s propensity for predatory behavior. Katz scored in the lowest possible percentile, Dattilio said, suggesting that “he has no antisocial traits or propensities toward sexually violent or exploitative behaviors.”

The alumna submitted her complaint on February 26, 2021, less than a month after the student newspaper painted Katz as a predator.

The resulting investigation had few due process protections for the accused. The university did not share the full complaint with Katz until it had already completed its report, sources involved in the process said, nor did it give his legal team a chance to cross-examine the alumna, as would have been required by Princeton’s Title IX procedures. Because the Title IX office dismissed the complaint, however, the investigation fell to the office of the dean of faculty, whose disciplinary process has fewer due process protections.

That lack of due process meant that investigators could introduce a new allegation whenever Katz provided evidence against an old one. An initial hearing, held in early April 2021, focused on the alumna’s claims that Katz discouraged her from seeing a therapist and dissuaded her from coming forward in 2018, Katz’s statements to the university show. But in a second hearing—held just weeks after Dattilio submitted his forensic evaluation—investigators took Katz to task for not being “forthcoming” during the 2018 inquiry.

By the final hearing, Katz said in his October 2021 statement, “I no longer had confidence that the investigators were being objective. They seemed to want me gone from the University.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/inside-the-investigation-of-joshua-katz/

“We were asked to go around the room and talk about our race/culture. … And the hired facilitators said any white person who displays discomfort or distress when asked to discuss their race is not actually feeling distress. What they’re exhibiting is a power play. And that is white fragility.”

I sit down with Jodi Shaw, who has become an influential figure in the growing movement opposing training based on critical race theory, in academia and beyond. She made waves when she started speaking out in 2019 about the increasing illiberalism she saw at her then-employer and alma mater, Smith College.

“It takes a while to build the conviction and to understand that there’s nothing actually wrong with you—that this feeling that you have, the feeling that something’s not right, is because something isn’t right.”

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Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from Jun 23, 2022. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated. 

Jan Jekielek: Jodi Shaw, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Jodi Shaw: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, so first of all, congratulations on being a Hero of Intellectual Freedom, an award given to you by ACTA. I think you’re the only nonacademic to have won this award, Dorian Abbot, Joshua Katz are co-winners with you. So congratulations.

Ms. Shaw: Thank you.

Mr. Jekielek: Why don’t we kind of go back to the beginnings where stuck your head out, so to speak, right? And then everybody noticed. I want to make sure everybody kind of knows the backstory here. So of course this is at Smith College. And you actually, you did your undergraduate studies at Smith College and loved it.

Ms. Shaw: Yeah.

Mr. Jekielek: So why don’t we start there and bring us up to the present?

Ms. Shaw: So yes, it is true I studied at Smith College and I graduated with my BA in anthropology in 1993 and I loved it. I loved Smith. It was my number one choice. I was elated to get in. And I learned a lot there. And then I left Smith and lived all over the country. I lived in Portland, Oregon for a little while and lived in New Mexico. And then I spent most of my adult life in Brooklyn, New York. I was a musician, very important to say. So I was living at a very much a hand to mouth existence for many years. And I was happy with that because I was doing something I loved.

And then I got married and had children. And then I realized very quickly that I was going to have to get a job and have some regular hours. So I became a librarian. And then my marriage ended. It’s very tough living in the city with children if you don’t have a lot of money. And so I thought, “Well, where could we go? Where could I convince my ex to move to with our kids where it’s still going to be a stimulating environment?” And I remembered North Hampton and Smith. Smith is a… You have to understand it’s a small town, so the town is heavily influenced by Smith.

I remembered North Hampton as this just very, very liberal lefty, anything goes, free speech kind of place. I’d always felt very comfortable there so I thought, “Well, let’s go back to North Hampton and raise our kids there.” So that’s what brought me back to North Hampton. And it had always been kind of a dream of mine. You know, “Well, if I have to have a job, it would be great to have a job at Smith.” So I was really excited to get a job at Smith as a temporary librarian and started working there. And there was something, it felt different. It felt it wasn’t just about the free speech. There was something that felt more corporate about Smith.

I remember when I was a student there, it felt like a real community. It felt like the faculty and the students, there’s just something more cohesive and friendly about it. And it didn’t feel the same when I went back, but I thought, “Well, I’m in a different role.” I was a staff member. I thought maybe this is how it feels. And so I began my job with much gusto. I did notice, however, there were a lot of discussions about whiteness and white privilege and systemic racism. I hadn’t been in academia for a long time, so all of these things… I mean, I’d been performing on the subway platforms. These kinds of discussions were pretty foreign to me. And I had no reason not to believe that they were necessary as being told this is necessary, this is part of fighting injustice, this is part of achieving social justice. And I thought, “Well, that sounds good. Social justice sounds good.” I think there’s few people who would hear that phrase not knowing what it is and think that it was a bad thing.

So I went along with this and participated in it. During this first year, I was tasked with giving an orientation to 600 incoming first year students. I was told I have to do something wild and crazy. And so I thought what’s the best way to transmit a lot of otherwise, very boring information? Too much of tired 18 year olds. I thought, “Well, of course a rap.” I’d had my musical background. And so I pitched this idea and it was accepted.

And so I worked on this rap over that summer. This was now summer of 2018. In the middle of that summer, towards the end, July 31st, there was an incident on campus with a student, a black student accused a white custodian of engaging in racially motivated behavior against her because he called campus police. And that was really all I heard. And as far as I can tell, anybody really knew about it. The student made a Facebook post about it, and it went viral about this massive injustice had occurred because she was black.

[Narration/ Oumou Kanoute]: My name is Oumou Kanoute and I’m an undergraduate student at Smith College. On July 31st while I was eating lunch at a common space, a Smith College employee called the police on me because I seemed out of place. I was set to be demonstrating suspicious behavior. Some might say this wasn’t such a big deal because I wasn’t touched or harmed, or physically harmed I should say, during this incident. But I want people to understand the underlying message that this caller sent by calling the police on a student for eating lunch and simply trying to enjoy the break.

Ms. Shaw: And I thought at the time, “Wow, that’s terrible. I can’t believe it.” I didn’t even bother to look into the situation that much. And neither did Smith by the way. They immediately began apologizing to the student publicly. A lot of profuse apologizing, announcing they were going to embark on a campaign of new initiatives to fight the systemic racism and the bias and mandatory anti-biased trainings for employees and all that kind of stuff. They did this before they even began an investigation into the incident. And so this was supporting my own belief that, “Yes, this is a horrible thing” because I had placed my trust in this institution, my Alma mater, my employer. I thought, “Well, surely they know what they’re doing. Surely this is a problem. We need to do better and we need to implement all these things.” It was just an assumption.

And then a month later after this incident happened, when I was about to do this orientation presentation to 600 1st year students, my supervisor approached me. It was less than a week before the event. I cannot emphasize enough how anyone who’s done event planning knows how hard it is to organize an event for 600 people, and I was the lead person. So it wasn’t just my own presentation. It was everything. So a week before the event, he approached me and he said, “You can’t do the rap.” And I said, “Why not?” And he said, “Because you’re white.” And then he went on to document this in an email. He said, “The presentation of a rap by white staff can be seen as culturally insensitive.” I don’t know if I’m getting the quote exactly right, but that’s pretty much what he said.

And I asked him, I said, “Well, if I was a person of color, could I do it?” And I didn’t specify what color. And he just said, “Yes.” And so that was it. There was no rap. I won’t go get into the nitty gritty of the library job because I ended up… I was up for a full-time position, but I ended up leaving. There’s a lot of details that I won’t get into. But I ended up leaving and taking a job in the residence life department, which is part of the administration, granted like a lower part of the administration. And I took a job that was a big pay cut, lesser responsibilities, but much more material.

As the librarian, I was doing more teaching. I was on the academic side, but I thought, “Well, if I move to the staff side where I’m helping students navigate the more material realm of their existence at Smith, like their physical wellbeing, the dormitories, ID cards, fixing locks, changing light bulbs, things like that, I thought, ‘Surely I can avoid all of this discussion about race and I won’t have to talk about my white privilege and my white fragility’.”

I think it’s important to know here that when I was told I couldn’t do the rap, something that I don’t talk about is that I was very confused, because here we had this incident on campus and everybody was very upset about it, it was a racial incident. And here I had just been told that because you’re a white person, you can’t do this professional thing that you wanted to do, which would’ve perhaps really made you a lot very competitive for this full time job you were up for.

I’m not getting too convoluted. And so I was very confused. I was like, “Well, wait a minute. That sounds like racial discrimination.” But because I was hearing this messaging that you cannot be discriminated against if you’re white, that racism is prejudice plus power and coming at you and because I’m a white person, I have power and therefore I cannot be discriminated against, I was in this like a lot of emotional turmoil about it.

I was very confused. I was like, “Maybe I should report this, but then maybe people are going to think I’m racist because I think I’ve been discriminated against and that’s impossible.” So there was a lot going on. And I also thought if I reported it, I would never get a job at Smith again, ever. So that was a reality. So I left and I took this other job that I thought I would kind of lie low and be out of this kind of discourse. And boy, was I wrong.

I went to the residence life department, and I didn’t know this but residence life departments in general are staffed with people who have received their master’s degrees in higher education, which is now very much saturated with the social justice ideology stuff, that this is their job and they have to teach these things to students. It’s kind of like they had a co-curriculum that went along with the academic curriculum, teaching students about social justice.

It was made clear to me pretty early on that part of my job was I was going to have to talk about my fixed characteristics, like race and gender. I was not happy about this. And also at the time I was still figuring this out like, “What does…” And so I started really taking a deep dive into, what do these terms mean? What does social justice mean? What does equity mean? What does diversity mean? Time went on and a lot of things happened on campus. That incident involved two innocently accused staff members who suffered. As a result, one left and never came back. Two more people were fired or terminated amicably for related reasons.

I was watching all this from my little perch in residence life. That’s when I really started questioning this ideology a lot more and started doing more research and information. It’s very hard when everyone around you is saying one thing and you’re having this feeling that something’s not right. So I really started to try to validate that feeling and find out why I was having it. And fall of 2019, I was mandated to attend a professional development training. And I asked, I remember asking, “Are we going to need to discuss our race for this training?” And I was told “Yes.” And so I went to my supervisor privately, and I said, “By then I had decided that…” My logic was, you’re not supposed to ask about somebody’s race at a job interview, so why am I being asked to do it as continued condition by employment?

So I went to my supervisor and I said, “I’m not comfortable discussing my race at work.” And she said, “No problem. Just say that when you go to the workshop.” So I went to the workshop. Lo and behold, we were asked to go around the room and talk about our race/culture in the context of our childhood, something like that. So now we have two things I’m not comfortable talking about at work. So everyone went around the room and said what they said. And it got to me. And I said, “I’m not comfortable discussing my race at work.” And the hired facilitators said, “Any white person who displays discomfort or distress when asked to discuss their race is not actually feeling distress. What they’re exhibiting is a power play, and that is white fragility.” So I was humiliated in front of my colleagues and I actually felt the humiliation.

It felt like, I don’t know, like my heart stopped. I never dreamed that that would be the response. I thought maybe people would just be kind of irked and move on, but that didn’t happen. I was singled out for my skin color and I felt ashamed. That was when I decided I’m going to have to say something about this, because now I was in a position where I couldn’t just go along, keep my head down and my mouth shut. Now you can’t just not say something.

Now, if you don’t say something, it could be construed as an act of aggression just simply by remaining silent. That that’s a symptom of white fragility and that you don’t want to talk about your race. So I felt like, “Well, my hand’s being forced here. I’m going to have to do something.”

So that’s when I began the process of filing an internal complaint. And I exhausted all my remedies at Smith. I talked to my supervisors. I filed a very lengthy internal complaint. I sent emails to administrators. I was passed off amongst administrators when I started asking questions, “What do these words mean? What does social justice mean?” I believe it was a disingenuous investigation that was conducted. It was delayed, delayed, delayed.

And then I found out I was… So a couple weeks or within a week of when I filed the internal complaint, George Floyd died. And so Smith, much of it had done after the July 31st, 2018 incident with the student, went into hyperdrive. We’re going to be doing a lot more workshops, generating justice, social justice. I was invited to white-only staff events where we could talk about supporting our colleagues. I was sent emails by the president. She sent emails to everybody saying, “We’re going to celebrate Juneteenth. This is a day for our colleagues of color to rest and rejuvenate and our white colleagues to educate themselves” something like that.

So that summer was just a barrage. This was right after I filed a complaint. I thought, “Gee, I don’t think they’re taking my complaint seriously.” But I kept going. And then when I was told I was going to have to… And you have to remember, put this in context, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. The college had just informed the staff or all of us that there were going to be furloughs. They did this in the same breath.

And by the same breath, I mean the same period of time that they announced there were going to be furloughs because there was a financial shortfall. They also said, “And we’re also going to be putting a lot of energy and resources into this thing called racial justice at Smith. And we’re going to be doing all these initiatives.” So I thought, “Wow, well, they’re putting money in that. Meanwhile, people are getting furloughed.”

After what I had seen at Smith, the hostile environment, this was just like adding more fuel to this… Not more fuel. It is a wound, and they were stabbing the wound. So finally, I was waiting for this investigation to be completed and it kept getting delayed and delayed. That summer I was informed that I would have to start going to discussions about the racial justices Smith stuff and another discussion about that and I thought, “Gee, I’m going to go to this discussion.

I’m not going to say anything. Am I going to be construed as racist?” It was really, really stressful. And I decided they’re not taking me seriously. I’m using the internal channels and they’re not responding. And so I thought, “What can I do, this regular person who has really no power?” I don’t have a PhD. I’m not a faculty member. I’m a staff member. “What can I do to get Smith to respond? How can I get them to pay attention to what I see as a real problem here? Not just for me, but for all the staff.”

And I thought, “Well, I don’t think they like publicity very much. So I thought I’ll try to make a video.” So that’s what I did. I made a video, I made a YouTube video and I had no idea what would happen with it.

“This is what I’m asking of Smith College. I ask that Smith College stop reducing my personhood to a racial category. Stop telling me what I must think and feel about myself, because I feel like you do that a lot. I know you do that a lot, and I need you to stop doing that.”

I published it. And then I sat on the couch watching a show with my kids and checking my phone and it was like, “Okay. A thousand views. Okay. Oh my God. 10,000 views.” So that’s when I knew, “Okay, this is it. They’re probably going to pay attention now.” And they did.

Mr. Jekielek: So what happened next?

Ms. Shaw: So what happened next was I went to work the next day. Not everybody had seen the video yet. And so I went about my business. And then the next day, the president released a letter on the website to everybody. I forget what the letter was called, but it was about my video. And she said, “A staff member on X date released a video.” She characterized it as “a critique of our social justice initiatives” or something like that, “a critique of our diversity and equity initiatives” or something like that.

And it wasn’t really a critique of the initiatives. It was actually, I was very specific about what you were asking me to do. I wasn’t critiquing your theory or what you think about social justice. These are things that you were doing to me. So she didn’t address that.

She did say that this individual has a right to do this under the… There’s a federal act that protects employees who want to advocate for a better working environment. And I’d mentioned that in my video, that that’s what I was doing. That was kind of… I interpreted that as her way of saying “We would fire her, but we want you to know for all of you people who are writing to us, asking us to fire her, that we can’t.” So I made a video in response to her letter.

Even at that point, it felt like she had written me off. I also noticed at the end of the letter… Because in my video, I was very specific. I said something about, “Don’t ask me to disempower students of color by sending them the message that they are somehow so oppressed or don’t have the same abilities as their white counterparts and can’t achieve the same thing as their white counterparts. Don’t ask me to do that to them. That’s extremely disempowering rhetoric.” Because I think this ideology is disempowering to any one of any skin color.

And so I noticed at the end of her letter, she said, “After she had said all this stuff about the video, we don’t stand by this. We stand by our initiatives” At the end she said, “And to our students of color, we want you to know that we stand with you” or something like that. And I thought, “Well, there it is. There’s that condescending thing as if a student who’s not white is going to watch my video.” And somehow that, “We know you can’t handle this.

You can’t handle seeing somebody talking honestly about something in a very polite, respectful way, I might add.” That there’s that condescension there as she was doing the very thing that I asked her not to try to make me do, because I think that’s disempowering. So she exhibited the behavior in her letter.

So I made a respond, a responding video to her. I said, “I’m going to take this as a dialogue because I’d never had it.” She’d never attempted to have a dialogue with me. And I responded to her letter. And then she sent a letter. Of course, by now I was in touch with a lot of people at Smith I’d never been in touch with before who’d written to me privately. And some faculty sent me an email.

Mr. Jekielek: Now they were writing to you saying, “I agree, but I’m not ready to say so publicly” or, “I support you” or this kind of thing, right?

Ms. Shaw: Yeah. Yeah. So it was good. I felt supported and I understood why they didn’t want to say anything, but I wish they did. Some of them did. Some of them spoke to the New York Times. So she sent an email out to the faculty through the provost that basically told them “Hold the party line. If you get any media requests, send them this way. We don’t want you to respond on anything, on any of your professional accounts. Please don’t respond on your own.” Something like that. Like, “We’re going to maintain a unified front here.” That was my interpretation of it.

So then as expected, there was retaliation. Yeah, I mean I filed a complaint. I ended up filing federal lawsuit. Well, I’m sure we’ll talk about that. But yeah, there was retaliation. And I was eventually… Throughout all this, I was forwarding emails to myself from my account, from my work account to my private account that had to do with my complaint because this was documentation as it’s I believe my right, because I have a legal action against the college.

And they put me under investigation for this. They said “You’ve compromised the safety or the security of student information and college information,” something like that. “And therefore we’re putting you under investigation.” So it was obviously pretextual. And so I was put on leave with pay, so that was good. My furlough… I was also furloughed. I didn’t mention that, I was the only one in my department to get. I was halftime furloughed.

And then they approached me and said, “We would like to resolve this amicably.” And at that point I said, “Well, I would like you to apologize to the staff you’ve hurt because… I didn’t get into it, but a lot of staff have been hurt at Smith since that incident at that summer. “And I would like you to stop this programming, this kind of programming stuff, because I believe it’s harmful.” And they said, “Absolutely not.” And then there were some more negotiations, which I won’t get into. But in the end I remember agonizing in front of my wood stove, it was the middle of winter and I thought, “I could take a settlement and be okay.”

Mr. Jekielek: But there’s strings attached.

Ms. Shaw: There were strings attached. Right. You can’t talk about us anymore basically. But yeah. Or I could continue along this path. In the end I decided… I thought I would regret taking a settlement. I also decided… I made a video about it. It’s a freedom versus comfort. I had to distill it down, “Okay. What are the two things…” I didn’t make a pros and cons list. It was like freedom on one side, comfort on the other. Most of us have had been lucky enough to have both for the most part. And now I was faced with the decision and I thought, “Well, I have to choose freedom. I just can’t give up my freedom.” And I had no idea what would happen.

And so they said, “Okay, well, I guess you can come back to work then.” But by then the environment was so hostile. We were getting emails, “Fire Jodi Shaw. Smith can’t support Jodi Shaw.” And I had been informed that my colleagues were very uncomfortable with what I had done. If it was hostile before, it was very hostile now to me. And I decided that there was simply no way I could continue to work there. And so it was a constructive dismissal in my mind, so I left.

Mr. Jekielek: And this is difficult because you have two boys, right?

Ms. Shaw: Yeah.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re not just thinking about yourself. How is it in the family this whole rigamarole?

Ms. Shaw: Thanks for asking that. I don’t really talk about that a lot. Well, I mean that obviously factored into my decisions. If I didn’t have a family and I happened to have still moved up there and worked at Smith and this stuff started happening, I would’ve been like, “I’m out of here.” I’m just going to go move somewhere else and get a job somewhere else. But I did have a family, so I had to stay. And then when I ended up leaving, that was a big leap.

Having a family, I didn’t know what would happen. I thought maybe I’ll do snow removal. I was thinking about, like even more removed from all of this stuff, tasks, very physical things. But luckily, I’m okay. But on my family it’s been hard on my kids. They’ve gone without the full focus and attention of their mother for over two years now. This has kind of taken over my life. And it’s distracting. We live in a small town.

I know it’s had an impact on their social life. And that when I hear them say that, when I hear like the kids at their school were watching a video of mine or something, it makes me feel bad. It makes me feel bad. And it does make me question did I do the right thing. You can never anticipate everything. I did think about all this before I made the first video. I thought it long and hard. I thought, “This will impact my family. This will impact me.

Will people be coming to my house throwing bricks at it? How am I going to deal with online harassment?” I had to really think through all of the things that might happen. And so I did go into it knowing it was most likely going to impact my children, and that we do live in a small town.

It hasn’t been as bad for me as I thought it would be, because since most of the harassment’s online. But my kids. Yeah, I try to comfort myself by telling myself that either my kids could have seen me go along with this and watched because it was eating me, it was eating me alive, and watch that. Or they could watch me tell the truth and be honest and take a risk and lose something in the process. Hopefully some of that will sink in. And when they’re older, some of that’s inside of them and that they can grow up and take some strength from that, knowing that their mother didn’t just back down because this affects them in the end.

And really, that was in there too. I didn’t mention that I don’t want my kids to inhabit a future in which they’re being told that they’re bad because of their skin color or their gender. That they’re just bad. If you boil it down, that’s pretty much what it is. Or that’s the feeling you get, you feel like you’re bad. And I didn’t want my kids feeling that. I want them to feel bad if they do something bad. If their behavior is bad, that’s an appropriate response. But not feeling bad because of their fixed characteristics that they were born with. That’s wrong.

Mr. Jekielek: I think when this history is written, I think your kids will have something to be very proud of. You described this as a kind of spiritual quest. I thought that was very interesting as opposed to a material quest.

Ms. Shaw: Well, this is where my background comes in as a musician playing on the subway. When people ask me what that was like, my response is it was one of the most spiritual experiences I’ve ever had. There’s something extremely honest about it. It’s not like you go to perform in a… When you go to perform in a club, people show up. They pay their admission, they sit down. You sing a song, they clap. But on the subway, you’re performing.

People only respond if they respond. There’s no pretense. They’re not like being polite. They’re just like, they either look at you or they don’t. And so it’s honest. If somebody approaches you and puts a dollar in your basket or looks at you or has a tear in their eye, it’s honest, it’s real. What’s more is that, I was noticing I was getting this response from people I’d never seen before, never met, didn’t even speak the same language as me, of all different races, ethnicities, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, you name it. And that was a beautiful, beautiful experience.

And so those kinds of, I guess I don’t want to use the word seeker, but I do have a hunger in me for meaning. I think most of us do. And that was my particular, how I went after it I guess, was through my music and through the connection with the audience. So I guess if somebody had asking my value, that’s a value of mine, is living my life in a manner so that I can make meaning out of it. The spiritual experience is just very, very important to me. And so I realized at Smith that that was more important to me than having the paycheck. I had to decide it was the freedom, comfort thing. The freedom to pursue the spiritual quest, I wanted that.

And then I learned quickly that there was something very spiritual about it when I publicly resigned. And kind of like what happened on the subway, thousands of people sent me emails and said, “I know how you feel.” Something in that video moved them and something in my resignation moved them so that they could tell their story to me. It felt important to me. It also felt like a huge responsibility. I couldn’t respond to everybody and I felt, “Oh gosh I want to help all these people, but…”

Mr. Jekielek: Why did you feel this sense of responsibility? What was the responsibility for exactly?

Ms. Shaw: Because I knew how it felt because people would write to me and say, “I’m working in this environment.” And it was all in different kinds of fields and discipline. It wasn’t just people working in colleges. It was doctors and psychotherapists and lawyers. People from all over. And they would say, “I haven’t told anybody else this.” It was like there was nobody else in their immediate proximity that they could talk to.

They had been harboring this feeling that something was not right, something was not right. And they felt like they were the only one kind of questioning, “Is there something wrong with me that I feel this way and nobody else seems to feel that way? Oh look, here’s somebody who has said the words the same things that I feel.” And so they would reach out to me. I know how it feels to be the only person or feel like or believe you’re the only person. All evidence tells you, “You’re the only person that’s having an issue here, that seems to be upset by this.”

So I felt like I had a responsibility to help them in some way. That is in part why I kept making videos, like walking through my process. Because that was the only thing I could really do adequately and fully, was to keep making videos, just being really honest about what was going on in my head so that people could watch them because there was just simply no way I could write back to every individual person and start talking with them. I tried that for a while. It was very exhausting, meeting with people and having Zoom sessions and trying to help them suss out what was going on. But it was unsustainable.

Mr. Jekielek: But these also these videos, they weren’t off the cuff. That sense I get is you really thought about each one before you knocked it out, right?

Ms. Shaw: Yeah.

Mr. Jekielek: Yeah.

Ms. Shaw: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so some of them are edited and some of them aren’t. Yeah, I would think through… It’s more of like I didn’t say, “I want to make a video today. What am I going to talk about?” It was more, “Another thing would come to me.” And I’d start thinking about it and say, “Yeah, I think I should make a video about this.” Outlining my process about how I’m thinking about this.

Mr. Jekielek: So you became a kind of a voice for all these people who, well at least at the time kind of we’re voiceless, right? Or just started speaking to you. And you became a kind of, I don’t even know the right term, but some kind of… offered an expression of collective angst or concern.

Ms. Shaw: Yeah. In a very non angry way more… I think the fact that I mentioned in the first video, I think I say, “And I’m a lifelong liberal,” I think that that’s important because it gave other liberals or left people, people would always associate themselves on the left, let’s put it that way. They could look at me and say, “Ah.” Because there were already a lot of people on the right talking about this.

But to see another person like me in my tribe, like the way we categorized, talking about this, it was almost like it gave them permission to be like, “Ah, yes, this is wrong. Here’s this other liberal saying it.” So I think that was part of it why it kind of was a lightning rod thing, because I was like the gateway drug to…

Mr. Jekielek: So this is now kind of coming circle to maybe why you are a Hero of Intellectual Freedom. Has there been some number of people that reached out to you that have subsequently made difficult decisions like you did because of your interaction?

Ms. Shaw: Yes. And that is very gratifying to me. Yeah, it’s been nice. I just had somebody write to me last night. I was reaching out, starting to get active again on social media. I’d taken a break for a while. I remember talking to her about a year ago, I think on the phone. She was in this terrible situation, similar situation. She’s now filed a complaint with her state office of civil rights. She would had just gone from only talking to me to now she’s filed a public complaint. And it felt really good.

And then another person, something I would tell people is you need to find one other person. You need to find another person in preferably in the same environment that you’re in, at your job or at the school, or wherever this is happening. Just one other person. I know it’s hard and it seems scary, but you suss people out. And then once that dam breaks and you start talking to each other, that it just… Just one other person can have such an impact.

And so there was somebody else who she came back and she told me, “I remember when you said that and I went out and I found one other person.” And now she has a really well functioning organization in Canada that she started for K-12 education and started with finding one other person. So one other person, that’s all it takes. So yeah, that’s gratifying. I feel like I have helped in some ways.

Mr. Jekielek: Now, you’ve said this before, and I can’t remember if it was to me or I saw it in some of the materials I was reviewing earlier, but the important thing is to somehow, in this bizarre cultural reality that we’re facing today, is to somehow have these support systems exist for people pre them, making the decision, right? To talk, right?

Ms. Shaw: Yes. Yes. A journalist asked me, “What would you say to somebody who’s just stood up? How would you support them?” or something like that. And my response was, “I think there’s actually more support needed before that happens.”

Mr. Jekielek: Right.

Ms. Shaw: Because it takes a while to build the conviction and to understand that there’s nothing actually wrong with you. That the feeling that something’s not right is because something isn’t right. And you have a right and you can stand up and say something about it. And so, I mean, a lot of people, they accidentally do something and then they find out. But for somebody who decides to stand up, it takes a long time to get to that point of understanding that not only that you’re not wrong, but that this stuff is wrong. And two, that to assess your resources, if you will, once you’ve decided you want to take action, what kind of action do I want to take?

And how am I going to handle the fallout? And kind of get your ducks in a row first. So that’s, I think when the most support is needed. Because if people don’t even know, if they’re still confused about social justice and “Am I doing the right thing and am I a bad person for questioning this?” Then you’re not even close to being able to withstand, standing up and taking action to prepare yourself.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, if there’s one thing that the last two years have taught me, it’s how incredibly strong the social pressure or social influence or something like that is on humans by other humans, right?

Ms. Shaw: Yeah.

Mr. Jekielek: I mean, I frankly did not understand this. This has been a huge lesson for me. I want to kind of follow up a little bit on something you said in your acceptance speech. It has to do with how you understand the importance or the value or the role of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world. You make this distinction between stories that are ours and stories that come from outside and and how these stories impact our emotions. This is a very interesting perspective. Tell me about this, yeah.

Ms. Shaw: Well, I was thinking. I was going to receive this award, Hero of Intellectual Freedom. So I was trying to think of, what is intellectual freedom? What does that mean really? So I started thinking about the intellect. I started thinking that the intellect is not a reliable narrator. That’s what I decided. And that intellectual freedom is only really freedom if we have ownership over our intellectual process in the first place.

So what I mean by that is, and something that’s not discussed often is, the realm of the emotions and the role that that plays in intellectual freedom. So I saw a bumper sticker one time, this just came to me before I was receiving the word, said, “Don’t believe everything you think.” And I think that’s important to remember. Something to remind ourselves.

So when I’m talking about feelings, when I have a feeling, the feeling, it’s basically alerting me something’s going on. I don’t know what it is because the feeling doesn’t have a language. It is in the thought process, just a basic feeling. It’s not good or bad. But it alerts, it calls attention to our intellect. It kind of says, “Hey, there’s something interesting happening over here. Ooh, something doesn’t feel good. Come check this out.” And then our intellect comes in and it acts as a translator and interprets that feeling and tells us what’s going on. “Oh yeah. I’m feeling jealous. Why?” And then we explain that feeling or we assign meaning to it.

Sometimes the intellect gets it right and sometimes it doesn’t. In the case of this ideology, at Smith I had a feeling something felt bad about this ideology. And my intellect was fooled because my intellect was convinced by the [inaudible 00:43:57] faculty and administrators at Smith, that the reason I was having this doubtful feeling that something was off was an evidence of implicit racial bias. That my feeling of something went not quite right with this ideology was actually evidence of the ideology itself.

And so my intellect was fooled. And I went along for a while trying to suppress the feeling therefore. After a long time of wrangling with my own mind and seeking outside sources, I came to understand that the reason I was having a bad feeling about this stuff was because this stuff was bad.

But prior to that, I thought the reason I’m having a bad feeling about this stuff is because I’m bad. It’s basically what the ideology says. And so that’s why we must be wary of the intellect. And that when our intellect interprets a feeling for us, we’re basically telling ourselves a story about that feeling. And we need to make sure that story came from us and not someone else, not Smith College. So Smith College, I had effectively allowed an outside authority to hijack my intellect and interpret a feeling for me. That was not my best interest.

And so I think many of us, this is not particular to this ideology, many of us have been telling ourselves stories that don’t belong to us since birth. And that is culture plays an influence. Like, you have these feelings, who to love and how you should love, and what’s funny and what isn’t. I mean, I think I’ve definitely had the experience where I find something funny, that’s a feeling I just laugh. And then my intellect steps in and says, “Oh, no, no, no, no. You’re not supposed to laugh at that. You’re not supposed to laugh at that. You’re not supposed to find that funny.” And then I try to suppress the laughter.

As a spiritual seeker, as an artist, as an anthropologist, as someone who’s very curious about psychology and other people and myself, I’ve worked for a long time to try to examine the stories that my intellect tells me, which are oftentimes in response to an emotion I’m having, and tried to suss out, “Did that story come from me or is that somebody else’s? Did I just unconsciously adopt somebody else’s interpretation there?” and tried to push out what’s not mine and develop my own story that works for me. And that process that I was already doing and that some of us have already been doing for a very, very long time, that is intellectual freedom, or that’s how you get to intellectual freedom.

What I learned at Smith and what I learned in thinking about intellectual freedom is that freedom is not something that somebody grants to you or gives to you. It’s something you do. And it’s something you practice over and over again until you get it right. It’s a journey that starts at birth and goes until we die. That’s freedom. Those of us who have been on this journey for a long time, we cherish the freedom because we had to work for it. It’s not easy doing that stuff.

I think these past two years have really forced our hand here because the question that has been burning in my mind for a long time is, why do some people stand up and others don’t? And this answers that question for me. Which is that some of us have been working on freedom for a long time and other people, others of us have not. And so now the time has come. You can’t just suddenly go from zero to nothing. Some of us were already free, or already working on freedom. And so when the time came, we were able to step up in a way we had already prepared for that moment.

Mr. Jekielek: Maybe freedom is like a muscle, right? You have to kind of work it, right? To…

Ms. Shaw: Yeah. Yeah.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, no. And that’s interesting because there’s all sorts of good analogies. But the other piece though that’s very interesting is of course… And I remember doing this myself, right? Of course, we hear people give their perspectives on things. Sometimes you hear a really good one and you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to take that for myself,” right? We make our choice to bring in because we find the idea intellectually attractive, or there could be many reasons. Then we make those things our own. They come from outside. As a kid, we probably do it because it’s our parents and we look up to them. But with woke ideology, it sort of just demands that it’s story be the one that’s accepted. Either you do it volitionally or it will be done against your will. It has that feeling. Is it’s like that, right? And that’s just interesting in this model that you’ve described here.

Ms. Shaw: Yeah. Well it’s almost like the woke ideology, if you don’t do it, then that’s proof of the ideology, right? If you don’t participate, you’re just proving this ideology that-

Mr. Jekielek: It’s tautological. Yes. [inaudible 00:49:30].

Ms. Shaw: It’s tautological. Right.

Mr. Jekielek: Right.

Ms. Shaw: And it’s a potentiated version of something we’ve been doing all our lives, like cultural influences, influences of teachers and adults or whatever as we’re growing up. Yeah, this is like… So in some way, we’ve been preparing for this ideology. In some way it’s like we already have that tendency in it. But you’re right. There’s something a lot more demanding about this. And the consequences are not just loss of internal freedom, but actual material fallout. You will lose your job or you will be socially censored if you do not go along with this.

Mr. Jekielek: So earlier you mentioned this lawsuit that you filed against Smith. It’s pretty fascinating because in an academic setting, typically we see lawsuits in relation to freedom of speech. But you’re doing something a little bit different. You’re kind of tackling the question of racial bias head on here. So tell me about this.

Ms. Shaw: Well, I think that has to do with the fact that I’m not an academic and most academics in the academic environment have found their freedom of speech stifled in some way. Most academic settings have a freedom of speech policy and guarantee faculty, because we hear about a lot of faculty filing suits or complaints for speaking up. They have policies guaranteeing that freedom of expression or freedom of speech, that’s a tenant of most academic settings, that faculty will have this freedom. And that’s often what we hear about from cases having to do with academia.

My case is different because I am not alleging that my freedom of speech was trampled upon. I am alleging that I was discriminated against based on my skin color, that this is racial discrimination and a racially hostile environment amongst other things. And so my case is not while the former is a constitutional violation, freedom of speech, and a violation I believe of the policy of the college too. One could say that if they state at the beginning we’re going to ensure your freedom of expression.

My case is a Title VII civil rights complaint. And it’s very different. It’s an employment matter. I was not publishing work and was canceled because they didn’t like what I was saying. What it boiled down to is adverse action was taken against me because I didn’t say something they wanted me to say because I would not utter words that I thought were discriminatory against myself or others in some way. So it’s a civil rights case.

When this happens in other work environments, as far as I know, it’s never going to be a freedom of speech issue unless it’s like a governmental agency. This kind of woke stuff is a civil rights violation. This is racial discrimination and this is a civil rights violation.

I mean, I’m sure there have been cases, but the only thing that makes this case unusual is two things. One, that I’m white, and so it’s referred to as reverse discrimination or reverse racism, which people which woke ideology would tell us does not exist. But I want to point out even the term reverse racism is not a legal term, that in and of itself implies that there’s something different about the racism committed against a certain skin color, in this case being white.

That that’s a different kind of racism than other kinds of racism. It’s not, it’s very simply racism. Racism is an adverse action taken against you and your employment because of your skin color, or you don’t get a job because of your skin color, or anything else you can prove that happened to you because of your skin color. That’s racism across the board.

Mr. Jekielek: For some of the people that are watching this, it might be like a shocking thing to hear frankly.

Ms. Shaw: Something that Eli pointed out is “I’m still operating on the fundamentals of civil rights law. I believe, and I think a lot of people would agree with me and I think the law agrees with me the way I interpret the law and many of us do, is that if you do something to somebody and say, “You have to do this or you have to do that” in an employment setting because of your skin color, that constitutes you’re singling somebody else out based on their race.

And that constitutes racial discrimination or harassment or hostility, whatever it is. Smith College, and increasingly other entities, appear to be operating in a different realm, which is, that no longer applies. That if you are that color is the basis upon which you can be singled out and told you must do this or that. And you need to believe that. If you don’t believe it, then you’re bad. And if you don’t go along with it, that we are probably going to fire you.

They do it in a sneaky way though. They don’t come out and say, “We’re firing you because you don’t go along with this ideology.” What usually happens is they try to find some other unrelated reason to fire you or put you under investigation. But they’re operating on a whole different set of assumptions now, this woke ideology. It’s a whole nother animal. And so this case really is important. Anyone else who’s bringing suit, there’s another suit coming up in Philadelphia soon I hope, this is important because now I am asking the court to decide, “Okay, which set of principles are we going by here?

Are we still interpreting civil rights law in the manner in which it was written?” which does include white people, which says, “Anybody of any skin color can be discriminated against. And if you are, you have a cause of action in court and that’s illegal”? Or is the court going to decide, “Actually we’re going to go along with this woke stuff and we’re going to reinterpret civil rights law.”

Is that possible? I think it is. Why not? I remember asking my lawyer this early on and she was like, “I don’t think that’s going to happen, but it could happen.” And that is what is so scary because that’s what’s at stake, is civil rights law and civil rights legislation. And that is why there are a lot of people who marched along with Martin Luther King, a lot of non-white people and white people alike who worked very hard to get this legislation. And it is now at stake.

This reminds me of something that happened at Smith after I left. Bob Woodson of the Woodson Institute in the 1776 Project wrote a letter to President McCartney and told her that, “We, the undersigned…” It was 44 black and scholars, intellectuals, and civil rights leaders, people who actually go in and work in black communities, on the ground, and see the issues that are affecting black Americans, wrote a letter to her saying, “Cut it out. We know what we’re talking about. We believe in civil rights law. This is not good. What are you doing?” And she wrote back essentially writing them off.

Mr. Jekielek: Just over a year ago, I had Bob Woodson on the show. He’s been on the show a number of times talking about exactly the letter that you’re describing and how egregious they felt the Smith policies in response to this incident were.

Ms. Shaw: Yeah, signed by 44 black intellectual scholars and civil rights activists. People who actually work on the ground in poor black communities and who sensibly know what they’re talking about. They address Kathy McCartney in very point blank said, “What you allowed to occur on your watch and what you helped support and promote this narrative that this had been a racial incident at the expense of working class staff members who happened to be white is egregious on your part.

We asked that you stop, that you stop this programming. Stop teaching kids that this is okay. Or to feel that everything they feel somehow has a racial tinge to it, at the expense of working class people.” And so that’s something that I liked about that letter. Because Bob, as you know, is concerned as we all should be about communities that are not functioning unlike the Smith College community that aren’t very privileged and don’t have a staff cooking meals and cleaning toilets.

But Kathy’s response was quite dismissive. I found that very telling, seeing a Smith College administration talks a lot about listening to black voices and that kind of thing and then they get a letter from a prominent black man who’s done a lot of work in civil rights and they ignore it or just kind of write it off with a few sentence response. I liked that Bob took the initiative to do that. And it meant a lot. I think it meant a lot to Jackie and Mark, the two staff who were falsely accused of this. And so I’m very glad, I feel like they felt some kind of vindication in this even though Kathy dismissed it.

I think this brings us to something interesting that I’ve thought about before, which is this notion of white privilege. Because the faculty and the administration, especially the upper administration and the faculty and some of the lower administration are recruited from all around the world. They’re recruited with diversity in mind. And because they’re recruited from all around the world, outside of North Hampton certainly, they are more diverse, at least on the surface if you look at skin tone.

We’re talking purely about skin tone. The students are more diverse. The student body at Smith last time I checked is less than 50% white. So that’s pretty diverse. And they’re also recruited from all over the world. The staff who are mowing the lawns, cooking the meals, changing the light bulbs, they are not flown in from all around the world and interviewed and wined and dined. They are pretty much come from the local area, and the local area up there is pretty white.

This is also the lowest paid group on campus if we had to divide into groups, faculty, students, and staff. That’s the lowest paid group. It also happens to be the whitest group. And yet we are teaching this concept at Smith College, the people who are getting paid the least, that they have the most privilege somehow. There was a New York Times article by Michael Powell that came out right after I resigned.

And in it, one of the custodians who was falsely accused, he wasn’t even there when the incident happened, but the student accused him anyway. He said, “I don’t know about white privilege, but I do know about money privilege.” And that was the money line in that article, because that’s something that is largely ignored by, for lack of a better word, the woke, is any discussion of class. There’s lots of talk of intersectionality, which supposedly takes into account class. But if we’re really talking about privilege here, we need to be talking about class, and I don’t think Smith College wants to have that discussion.

Mr. Jekielek: So as we finish up, what’s next for Jodi Shaw?

Ms. Shaw: Well, I am working on a book about my experience at Smith. I’m really excited about that. It’s something creative, which I really enjoy doing. And I’m working on some musical projects and I am raising my two young burgeoning men, trying to facilitate their moving into adulthood. I’m also working to try to help people more in formalizing these networks because there’s not a lot out there for people.

Aside from some good podcasts and some good films now, there’s not a lot of what we talked about earlier about helping people to build the moral conviction they need to do what they need to do, whether that’s… Not everybody might not want to file a lawsuit for some people. It’s just the moral conviction to quit their job or the moral conviction to just say something to their supervisor.

I think, as I said before, that’s really important, these networks in finding other people, finding just one other person and then another person and another person. Because if you think about it, that’s how the civil rights movement happened. And that’s how any movement happens. And people feel a lot stronger when they can find each other. And so if I can help in any way facilitate that, I think that’s really the only way we’re going to be able to do anything is if we’re able to find each other.

Mr. Jekielek: Well, Jodi Shaw, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Shaw: Thank you so much, Jan. It’s a pleasure.

[Narration/Jan Jekielek]: Smith College said it “stands by its actions and offerings in support of DEI, meaning diversity, equity, and inclusion,” that it will continue to defend against the latest version of Ms. Shaw’s claims.

Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Jodi Shaw and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/whistleblower-jodi-shaw-how-crt-training-is-a-violation-of-civil-rights-law_4554490.html?utm_source=ATLNewsletter&utm_campaign=2022-06-23&utm_medium=email&est=VoCxpgju6Pau4Vdfgx%2B6uVB%2B%2FjlbS0Y%2B16YqTL6qS8Zl2abB1hV6nWG2sr1Ltm4PVw%3D%3D

Eva Mireles was one of two teachers who lost their lives during the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

As bad as that is, the story that emerged about her death this week is even worse.

And the picture it paints of law enforcement’s bungled response to the emergency approaches the unforgivable.

According to testimony Tuesday by Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McCraw, Mireles called her husband, Ruben Ruiz, who is an officer with the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, to tell him she’d been shot.

As NBC’s “Today” show reported, McCraw said Ruiz raced to the school and made it to the hallway outside his wife’s classroom, when he was detained, his gun was taken, and he was removed from the school.

McGraw, who was testifying at a Texas state Senate hearing about the law enforcement response during the shooting, described the police actions as an “abject failure.”

McGraw told lawmakers, “one of the biggest problems that’s reflected in the timeline, to your point, is not only the lack of leadership, but also the misinformation that’s being provided.”

“What officers were being told was, ‘The subject is contained, the chief is in the classroom or the office, negotiating or talking to the subject.’ So everyone is treating it, that comes in afterwards, you’re in the hallway and you’re looking at it, and you’re being told this, there’s no reason to discount that,” McGraw said. “Now, certainly if you heard, ‘Well, wait a minute, we’re getting 911 calls from children in the classroom.’ And we didn’t know the timeline.

“We got an officer, Officer Ruiz, whose wife had called him and said she had been shot and she’s dying. What happened to him as he tried to move forward into the hallway, he was detained and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.”

Imagine Ruiz’ devastation. He was on the scene of his own wife’s killing, but was detained, and his firearm was confiscated.

After hearing his wife’s voice, calling to him on the phone in her dying moments, he was powerless to help her thanks to an obstacle, apparently of fellow law enforcement officers. It’s jaw-dropping.

As more and more information is revealed about events that took place as the shooting progressed, what’s becoming known about the actions of police, or rather their non-actions, particularly those of school district police chief and City Councilman Peter Arredondo, make them look increasingly like a bunch of cowards.

McGraw’s office is just one of several investigating the sequence of events that took place on that deadly day. Investigators are trying to determine what took the police so long to shoot the gunman.

Related:

Firefighters Grab Cameras After Discovering Cross Miraculously Preserved in Middle of Devastating Church Fire

There was a discussion on the Tuesday edition of the “Today” show about a New York Times report that said officers at the school allegedly waited over an hour for protective equipment to arrive. But surveillance video showed the officers were “heavily armed” before the additional equipment arrived and that “more than a dozen children” were still alive.

BREAKING: Multiple officers were inside Robb Elementary School with rifles and at least one ballistic shield at 11:52 a.m. the day of the shooting, new video and other evidence shows. They didn’t enter the classroom for another 58 minutes. More soon via @statesman and @KVUE. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/0BcYgq2hcQ

— Tony Plohetski (@tplohetski) June 20, 2022

“More than a dozen of the 33 children and three teachers originally in the two classrooms remained alive during the 1 hour and 17 minutes from the time the shooting began inside the classrooms to when four officers made entry, law enforcement investigators have concluded. By that time, 60 officers had assembled on scene,” the Times reported.

Austin American-Statesman reporter Tony Plohetski told NBC News correspondent Gabe Gutierrez, “Investigators really believe at this point, based on my understanding, that that was certainly enough firepower to try and take on the gunman.”

With every passing day, as stories of almost baffling incompetence come to light, it’s looking more and more like police have a lot to answer for.

And it keeps getting worse.

Val Demings hopes ‘Gamers for Demings’ posts on Chinese app TikTok will take down Marco Rubio

Florida Democratic Senate hopeful Val Demings is promoting a popular “children’s game with a sex problem” to court voters in her race against Republican incumbent Marco Rubio.

Demings in March used Chinese app TikTok to share the first installment of her “Gamers for Demings” series, which used the children’s game Roblox to depict a virtual version of the Democrat running through Florida. The post came just weeks after the BBC highlighted the game’s “sex problem.” Roblox—which two-thirds of U.S. children between the ages of 9 and 12 reportedly have played as of 2020—came under fire for hosting user-generated sex games known as “condos,” where gamers’ avatars can have virtual sex. In one instance, the BBC reported, a “naked man, wearing just a dog collar” and a leash, was “led across the floor by a woman in a bondage outfit” as a man “wearing a Nazi uniform” looked on.

Demings’s decision to use Roblox and TikTok to promote her campaign shows how Democrats are widening their political strategy to use unorthodox means of communication. Demings is far from the only Democrat on TikTok, a Chinese-owned app that has sparked bipartisan security concerns. Fellow Democratic Senate candidate Tim Ryan (Ohio) has posted videos of himself lip-syncing on the platform, and Sens. Jon Ossoff (D., Ga.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) are also active users. In February, resident Joe Biden moved to address TikTok’s security risks—but he’s also used influencers on the app to sway public opinion, even inviting some to film in the White House.

After Demings’s first Roblox-themed TikTok post, a popular Roblox news account on Twitter praised the Democrat, asking if a “Robloxian” could “be Florida’s next senator.” Demings’s communications director responded to say the campaign was “proud to launch Gamers for Demings,” and the Democrat went on to share two more Roblox posts in the following months. One, which Demings posted in April, shows her blasting off into space on a virtual rocket. Another, shared on June 11, depicts a virtual Demings dancing with LGBTQ flags under a “Happy Pride Month” banner. That post includes the hashtags “PrideMonth,” “roblox,” “LGBTQ,” “foryourpride,” “fyp,” and “valdemings.”

It’s unclear how Demings expects to use a game most popular with preteens to attract voters. Her campaign did not return a request for comment.

In addition to concerns over Roblox’s sex problem, the game has faced criticism for exploiting child labor. Roblox allows its users to create, share, and play their own games within the Roblox platform. As a result, the Guardian reported in January, Roblox has made millions off of the work of children with no formal contracts in place.  

Demings is widely favored to face Rubio in November but will first have to emerge from an August primary race. Neither candidate has a strong financial advantage—both Demings and Rubio have raised roughly $30 million and hold roughly $13 million on hand as of March 31. Rubio is polling at 49 percent, 9 points better than Demings’s 40 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/val-demings-promotes-childrens-game-with-a-sex-problem-to-court-voters/

Marginalized for far too long, attractive young women are finally getting the representation they deserve

Truth bomb: Representation matters in American politics. For too long, attractive young women and other marginalized groups have been excluded from the halls of power. Katie Britt is trying to change that.

The former chief of staff to Sen. Richard Shelby (R., Ala.) on Tuesday represented the march of history when she comfortably defeated right-wing challenger Mo Brooks in the race to succeed her old boss. Britt’s victory in the deep-red state’s Republican primary means that, in all likelihood, she will be the next U.S. senator from Alabama.

It was a landmark moment. Britt is sure to be far more than another vote protecting the American people from resident Joe Biden’s radical and unpopular agenda. She will bring much-needed diversity to the Senate, where she will embody the hopes and dreams of a community that for decades has been systematically denied the representation it deserves.

Britt, 40, would be the youngest (and arguably most attractive) woman ever elected to the esteemed deliberative body, where the median age is 65 and the median level of physical attractiveness is merely adequate. The only senator with similar attributes is Kyrsten Sinema, the 45-year-old nominal Democrat from Arizona with a well-earned reputation for being a saucy vixen who derives pleasure from owning the libs.

If Britt wins the general election in November, there will be an attractive woman under the age of 50 representing each of the major political parties in the Senate for the first time in American history. They won’t just be representing their parties, of course. Britt and Sinema will represent the millions of attractive young women throughout this great country who feel disenfranchised by a federal government dominated by ugly old men (and women). We need more diversity and inclusion.

Britt’s youth and good looks are hardly the only reasons why she will be a welcome addition to the Senate. She did not attend an Ivy League school or an overpriced private university, for example, and was actually born and raised in the state she is running to represent. Britt received her bachelor’s degree and a law degree from the University of Alabama, which is also where she met her enormous husband, Wesley Britt, a 6-foot-8-inch offensive tackle who played for the New England Patriots.

Last year, the Britts hung out with music legend Kid Rock at Talladega Superspeedway, which is more than can be said of most of the boring nerds elected to Congress.

Some crucial context regarding Britt’s attractive youth: When she was born in 1982, Joe Biden was 39 years old. She is 12 years younger than Hunter Biden, the president’s crackhead son. She is going to be a fabulous addition to the Senate, where she will serve in a Republican majority dedicated to opposing the radical Democratic agenda for the remainder of Biden’s first and only term in office. Congrats!

https://freebeacon.com/parody/katie-britt-attractive-young-woman/

Proponent says freedom in danger because Americans don’t know its value

Arizona state Rep. Quang Nguyen learned about the sorrows of communism through the eyes of a child in South Vietnam.

His final lesson came in 1975, when his family fled the country as communist North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, signifying the end of liberty as he knew it.

“I have had the unfortunate [perspective] of dealing with three invasions during my lifetime in Vietnam,” Nguyen told The Epoch Times.

“Some people argue [communism] is an economic system—no more, no less. I would argue against that. It’s a system of total control of the people—but control not because of policies. It’s control because of fear. It’s all about putting the thumb on your life.”

In America, Nguyen said his family discovered “this amazing thing called freedom.”

And it is the freedom he has lived for so many years that he sees slipping away because Americans haven’t experienced the painful lessons of communism.

For this reason, Nguyen sponsored HB2008 to make civics education a high school graduation requirement in Arizona.

On June 12, Arizona’s Senate adopted its version of the bill on a slim 16-12 vote. The House narrowly passed an amended version on Feb. 17. The vote was 31-28.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed the bill into law on June 17.

Understanding Totalitarianism

“This bill is another point for Arizona’s strong civics education,” Ducey posted June 17 on Twitter. “Students will learn about other nations’ governing philosophies and form a deeper understanding of the freedoms and rights Americans are guaranteed.”

According to the bill, the new standards will help students become “civically responsible and knowledgeable adults.”

The Arizona Board of Education (AZBOE) will work with organizations such as the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom at Arizona State University, and the Sandra Day O’Connor Institute to develop new civic education standards.

Lessons would include the original intent of America’s founding documents and principles and the “civic-minded expectations of an upright and desirable citizenry.”

In a statement, Nguyen said the bill’s intent is for Arizona high school students to graduate with a “similar appreciation for what it means to be an American.”

“This [education] is mandatory. This is not an option,” Nguyen said.

“This civics standards update will help ensure that our students are taught the brutal facts of oppressive communist systems and how they are fundamentally antithetical to America’s founding principles,” he added.

HB 2008 directs the board of education to update its high school social studies academic standards to incorporate a comparative discussion of political ideologies that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy.

The standards will include a knowledge of communism and totalitarianism as they exist today in countries such as the People’s Republic of China and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

“Having grown up in Vietnam and survived three communist invasions, I have a deep love and appreciation for the United States and its freedoms, which are guaranteed to all,” said Nguyen, a Republican.

Ignorance Is Not Bliss

As refugees worldwide flock to America, Nguyen said, young people in the United States know little about communism’s bloody past and present.

“I thought about just the next generation not being aware of what communism is doing to the world. Communism hasn’t ended. It is happening every day,” said Nguyen, citing 100 million people killed after a century of communism.

“We want to make sure you understand the difference between the policies in these countries against what makes this such a great nation. We don’t want to lose that,” Nguyen said.

He said on social media people have accused him of wanting to “dictate” what students learn. The exact opposite it true, he said.

“They don’t realize I worked with the state board of education on this bill. We’re not even going around the state board of education. I sat down with them on the bill, and they amended it.”

The BOE did not immediately respond to an email requesting a comment.

Nguyen said it could take another two years before Arizona’s civics education standards receive an overhaul to include the new civics education standards, but he’s willing to wait.

“If I don’t get it this year, I’ll get it another year. I’m all good,” Nguyen said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/arizona-makes-civics-education-a-high-school-graduation-requirement_4548630.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-22-3&utm_medium=email&est=pmyWu7YN1Xeum89CWjW02MvUxpM9DZ9fqIlFg5eJisMmyvE5IzQZ4bhY2Kjn%2Bp8lZw%3D%3D

NEWT:

Look, that bill is crazy. No Republican should be for it. And as many Republicans as necessary should guarantee it will be filibustered in the senate and never leave. That is the kind of bill which gives the Washington bureaucrats the ability to impose on local parents and local families radical values. And I’m frankly astonished that any Republican would agree to cosponsor that bill and I think it is an open invitation to further creating totalitarian left-wing mindset where they are going to tell us how we think how we behave, how does what we are allowed to do. It is totally wrong. I was shocked to discover it was introduced and I certainly hope that the handful of Republicans who are currently cosponsors will withdraw their names and I hope folks back home will call them and demand that they withdraw their names.

NEWT:

Of course, it’s racist. Most of the racism in America today is on the left and frankly replacement theories a total lie. Virtually all of us favor legal immigration. Virtually all of us agree with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who said it is the content of our character, not the color of our skin. Virtually all of us know that the bike tipping over in Delaware is a pretty good reflection of that way the entire federal government is tipping over. We just did a poll where 87 of the American people just said that they wanted to restart the America that works. And I think that is what ultimately is going to create not a red tsunami but a red, white, and blue tsunami as you see Democrats, Republicans, independents, all coming together because things simply aren’t working. You look at the price of everything. You look at the problems on the border, you look at the George Soros effort to create a pro criminal class of district attorneys. Every time you turn around, you realize the left represents an America that will fail and the only answer to that is the American people.

NEWT:

You know, Lincoln said that we wanted to preserve government of the people by the people and for the people. The elites don’t want to anything to do with that. The fact is that the rebellion you’ve seen in this country has been a rebellion against the elites and the fact is that Donald Trump was produced in part because the Washington elite failed. When he announced for president, 65% of the Republicans in the country disliked their national leadership. That is why the national leadership could not win the presidential nomination. Ron DeSantis is a great example. He’s a hard-hitting, hard-working very successful governor who is making life better for the people in Florida. Compare that to New York or Illinois or to California.

Balancing the budget, cutting bureaucracy, and eliminating unnecessary red tape could create a whole new rebirth of entrepreneurs and small businesses.

I was shocked to discover that some Republicans had cosponsored a truly radical, so-called civics bill designed to force every public school to teach racist leftwing propaganda.

As I said on “The Ingraham Angle,” the bill is totally crazy. No Republican should support it. In fact, every Republican should oppose it severely. This bill would open the door to allowing the federal bureaucracy to decide civics curriculum in states and school districts across the country. This means unelected federal employees would be able to overrule and dictate to parents, teachers, and school board members what children in their communities are learning.

Remember the fights over Common Core and CRT? This is the same fight with a different name. It is exactly the kind of thing I expect from the Big Government Socialists in Washington, who would gladly make all our decisions for us. But I was astonished that there were Republicans who cosponsored the bill.

As I said to Laura Ingraham, people should call their House and Senate members and demand that they stop this outrageous effort to undermine patriotism, divide America by race, and force children to be brainwashed into adopting leftwing values.

Don’t take my word for how bad this bill is. Here is the explanation by Stanley Kurtz, one of the leading analysts of education policy, writing in National Review:

“The misleadingly named ‘Civics Secures Democracy Act’ (CSDA) — just now reintroduced in Congress — will allow the Biden administration to push Critical Race Theory (CRT) on every public school in the country. Over a six-year period, this $6 billion pot of competitive grant money will create a de facto national curriculum — just like Common Core. States desperate to tap into the federal gravy train will have to tailor their civics and history grant proposals to the Biden administration’s liking. And abundant evidence shows that Biden’s Education Department is pushing CRT. So why are some Republican senators eager to help Biden spread CRT? I can’t think of a quicker way to devastate Republican enthusiasm just before the midterms.”

Kurtz went on to call the bill “education madness and political suicide all wrapped up in one.” He also said it was “the most pernicious federal education legislation [he’s] ever seen.”

This bill first emerged a year ago, and the National Association of Scholars, a group of leading conservative intellectuals, wrote Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Tom Cole a letter opposing the bill. They asserted:

“We urge you to withdraw your support for the Civics Secures Democracy Act. Recent actions by the Biden Administration will prevent this legislation from supporting impartial civics education and will instead direct the funds it authorizes to subsidize ideologically partisan political activism. We believe you can best achieve your original aims to support impartial civics education by rescinding your support for this legislation.”

They went on to write:

“It will provide vast federal funding for this radical program and it will impose enormous political pressure on the states to do the same. Just as the Education Department’s Race to the Top Fund gave the cash-strapped states an irresistible incentive to adopt Common Core, and thereby imposed de facto federal control on state standards and curriculum, so the Civics Secures Democracy Act will give the federal government de facto power to impose Action Civics and Critical Race Theory on the states.”

Now, as a historian – and a former professor – I completely agree that every American student should learn and understand civics and American history by the time they graduate high school. I would broadly support funding for such education legislation provided parents, teachers, and school systems could develop curriculum free of federal government overlords.

The question I have is: How could anyone possibly believe the Biden administration would permit accurate teaching of an honest account of American history?

Any senator who is in doubt should look at House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik’s report on local school indoctrination. She wrote in a recent op-ed with Christopher Rufo:

“[The Left’s] playbook is to deflect, label the existence of CRT in elementary and secondary classrooms as a right-wing conspiracy theory, and assert their denial as an unquestionable fact.”

They went on to assert:

“Yet look no further than Monroe County, where West Irondequoit Central School District students were required to participate in an anti-racist curriculum project to learn of ‘the contemporary realities of structural racism.’ Earlier this school year, students at the Lower Manhattan Community School were segregated by race in order to ‘undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts or school community.’ Make no mistake, dividing and defining students by their race is state-sanctioned racism.”

If anyone still doubts the depth of leftwing fanaticism being embedded by the Biden administration, read The Washington Times report on what’s happening at one of our premier military academies:

“West Point cadets have been taught that ‘whiteness’ connotes ‘race privilege’ and ‘structural advantage’ as part of instructions based on critical race theory, according to newly revealed documents and course materials from the military academy.

“Among the trove of documents — which were handed over to Judicial Watch after a public records lawsuit — are presentation slides instructing cadets that ‘in order to understand racial inequality and slavery, it is first necessary to address whiteness.’

“According to the course material ‘Whiteness, is a standpoint or place from which white people look at themselves and the rest of society,’ and refers to ‘a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.’

“Another slide that contains a graphic that reads: ‘MODERN DAY SLAVERY IN THE USA’ instructs students on the disparities between Black people and White people.”

This racist indoctrination is being done at our oldest military academy to young people who have signed up to defend America.

Given the Big Government Socialist values of the teachers’ unions, the schools of education, the educational bureaucracy, and the activists in the Biden administration, how could any Republican want to give them $6.1 billion to further indoctrinate young Americans?

Call your House and Senate members and demand that they oppose and stop this unbelievably destructive civics bill – before it is too late.

In a stirring and spot-on campaign email, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on the Far Left calling it a “Radical Vigilante Woke Mob.”

While I’ve seen my share of them over the years and sent out a few myself, campaign fundraising emails are notorious for appealing to the hard-core base of both parties.  

So, most of them are taken with a grain of salt by political observers.

However, the email I just received from the DeSantis re-election campaign really hit home. It accurately defined and summarized the aggressive domestic threat posed by the extreme Left to our nation’s very core:

Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.

This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.

A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.

We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”

DeSantis omitted the LGBTQ brainwashing of our young children and the collusion of major woke companies like Disney in doing so, but he has been at the forefront of battling both these evils in Florida.

The DeSantis campaign continues, noting something that impacted me directly on the huge social media platform LinkedIn: “We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.”

And of course, the last piece of the massive leftist effort: “We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.”

Referring to himself as the “Governor of the Free State of Florida,” DeSantis then goes on to make his pitch for how he will fight this grave threat to America, at least in Florida, with “faith, with reason, and with freedom.”

And of course, he asks for our financial support.

In my view, this email accurately and effectively summarizes the threat we face from the extreme Left in America today. DeSantis is on the front lines of this battle in Florida, but he also seems to be preparing to take the fight nationally as well.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

https://www.americanliberty.news/politics/florida-governor-goes-to-war-against-radical-vigilante-woke-mob/pcrespo/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=7766

The Democrat-controlled House is set to pass a bill Wednesday that bans the Biden administration from funding crack pipe distribution through mental health and substance abuse programs.

The Democrat-sponsored bill, which reauthorizes several mental health programs that were set to expire this year, includes a measure that ensures the federal funds are not used to “purchase, procure, or distribute pipes or cylindrical objects intended to be used to smoke or inhale illegal scheduled substances.” This language appears to cover crack pipes and meth pipes—drug paraphernalia the Biden administration was poised to fund through its $30 million harm reduction program, the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this year.

The bill, which passed unanimously out of committee, specifically bars the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration—the same agency that oversees the White House’s controversial harm reduction program—from using funds allocated for substance abuse and mental health programs to fund crack pipe distribution. It is scheduled to get a vote on the House floor on Wednesday afternoon.

It is unclear why Democrats believe it is necessary to ban funding for the drug paraphernalia, given resident Joe Biden’s denial that his administration ever had plans to fund crack pipe distribution. The White House said the agency would not fund “smoking kits” that contain crack pipes, so the measure may suggest the president’s congressional allies doubt the administration’s claims. Following the Free Beacon report, Republicans introduced several bills to ensure federal funds do not go toward crack pipes but were unable to advance legislation.

The New York Times reported that the “uproar” over crack pipes “derailed” the Biden administration’s drug policy. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration later listed a notice at the top of its harm reduction grant webpage that states, “No federal funding is used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to purchase pipes in safer smoking kits.”

Harm reduction organizations across the country aim to make drug use safer for abusers, rather than rehabilitating those abusers. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R., N.D.), a member of the committee that passed the bill, said the provision distances Congress from the Biden administration’s radical approach to drug policy.

“Stopping the Biden administration from using taxpayer dollars to buy crack pipes is a win for those of us working on commonsense criminal justice reform,” Armstrong told the Free Beacon. “Handing them out did nothing to make our communities safer or help people struggling with addiction and mental health.”

Syringe exchange programs are supported by a majority of state governments, but smoking kits are a less common approach to harm reduction. Crack pipe distribution efforts are prominent in deep-blue cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Boston, and Baltimore.

Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.), who as the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sponsored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022 will also reauthorize programs for mental disorder screenings, suicide prevention, and mental health awareness for children.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/the-biden-admin-says-it-never-funded-crack-pipes-house-democrats-are-set-to-ban-funding-anyway/

Spot fails to mention star witness’s work for radical group that wants to defund police, teach CRT

A new Chuck Schumer ad uses a “former Republican” to attack Nevada’s Republican U.S. Senate nominee Adam Laxalt. Unmentioned is the star witness’s work for a far-left group that supports Laxalt’s opponent and wants to defund police.

In the ad, Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC features testimony from “Patty,” a “business owner” and “former Republican” who slams Laxalt as “wrong for Nevada.” The ad does not reveal that “Patty” is former Nevada state senator Patricia Farley, who began caucusing with Democrats more than five years ago in 2016. Two years later, Farley joined Battle Born Progress, a liberal nonprofit that works closely with Laxalt’s opponent, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D.). The group under Farley has taken a number of radical liberal positions on hot-button issues—a far cry from Schumer’s portrayal of Farley as a disillusioned conservative entrepreneur.

In July 2020, for example, Battle Born Progress called to end the “school-to-prison pipeline” and “save money” by “defunding school police.” One year later, group executive director Annette Magnus said Nevada “should be teaching” critical race theory in its public schools because “young people need to know this information.” Battle Born Progress also opposes voter ID requirements and supports late-term abortion. Cortez Masto said in November that she was “so glad” to speak at the group’s annual fundraising event.

Schumer’s willingness to omit Farley’s status as a liberal activist—and his decision to criticize Laxalt using a “Republican” figure—suggests the Democratic leader is concerned by Cortez Masto’s reelection chances. Resident Joe Biden won Nevada by 3 points in 2020, but his political standing has since deteriorated in the Silver State as Democrats navigate record-high inflation, gas prices, and illegal immigrant encounters. Fifty-six percent of Nevada voters disapprove of Biden, compared with 32 percent who approve, according to Civiqs.

Senate Majority PAC spokeswoman Veronica Yoo told the Washington Free Beacon the ad identifies Farley “as a local business owner and former Republican because those are the facts.” Yoo did not answer questions about Farley’s work with Battle Born Progress.

Farley in 2014 ran for state Senate as a Republican, receiving 57 percent of the vote. Two years later, she announced she would change her party affiliation to nonpartisan and caucus with Democrats, a decision she said stemmed from her disappointment with “party politics.” Farley’s subsequent political contributions and employment history, however, tell a different story.

In May 2018, just months after declining to run for reelection, Farley made her first federal political contribution—to failed Democratic congressional candidate Pat Spearman. Three months later, Farley donated to Nevada Democratic senator Jacky Rosen.

In October 2018—one month before leaving the state Senate—Farley joined Battle Born Progress as the president of its state PAC, Nevada Values. The group quickly launched a six-figure ad attacking Republican state Senate leader Michael Roberson. Roughly one year later, in December 2019, Farley endorsed Pete Buttigieg for president, saying the former South Bend, Ind., mayor “is offering bold solutions to our nation’s biggest problems.” She went on to contribute $1,500 to Buttigieg’s PAC, and has not contributed to a Republican at the federal level.

Still, Farley told the Free Beacon she is a “current independent” who is “not interested in pushing partisan political agendas” and “only care[s] about giving Nevadans the facts they need to make an informed decision.” While Farley also claims in the ad that she “used to work with Adam Laxalt in the state government,” she later told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that she had “few personal interactions” with the Republican.

Farley still serves as president of Nevada Values as of February 2022, the PAC’s latest campaign finance disclosure states. Nevada Values is registered as a Battle Born Progress affiliate and uses the same mailing address, email address, and phone number as the liberal nonprofit.

Both Laxalt and Cortez Masto cruised to victory in Nevada’s June 14 primary elections, and the pair will now face off in November. Cortez Masto holds a strong financial advantage—she has $9 million on hand to Laxalt’s roughly $2.1 million.

https://freebeacon.com/elections/new-schumer-attack-ad-trots-out-liberal-activist-as-former-republican/

The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) said that there is evidence suggesting the police response to the mass shooting at a Uvalde school was an “abject failure.”

“However, we do know this: There’s compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre,” DPS Director Steven McCraw told a Texas Senate panel on Tuesday.

Elaborating, McCraw suggested that the officers could have stopped gunman Salvador Ramos “three minutes” after he entered the school because there “was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject.

“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” he claimed.

Eight minutes after Ramos entered, police reported that they had a crowbar that could be used to break open the classroom door, he said. Nineteen minutes after Ramos entered, officials brought their first ballistic shield into the building, he remarked.

It comes as documents obtained by local news outlets suggest that several police officers armed with rifles and at least one ballistic shield were in Robb Elementary School within minutes of the suspect entering. KVUE-TV also released an image showing several officers in the building 19 minutes later, although they did not enter the classroom Ramos was in for nearly another hour.

During his testimony, McCraw again noted that Ramos entered Robb Elementary through an unlocked door. A teacher previously told news outlets via her attorney as she went inside the building to report a car crash involving Ramos, and when she saw Ramos approaching, she kicked the door shut after propping it open with a rock.

“It was closed, but unlocked,” McCraw said, saying it allowed the gunman to “walk straight through it.”

McCraw added that regardless of whether the door was locked, the windows to the side could have been shot, which could have allowed Ramos to enter the school. But the classroom that Ramos went to could not have been locked from the inside, McCraw said, further impugning previous accounts that he was barricaded inside the room.

Since the May 24 shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead, there have been questions about the role the school police chief, Pete Arredondo, played in the response.

“It has been reported that he didn’t have a radio with him. That’s true. He did not,” McCraw said of Arredondo on Tuesday.

Arredondo later told news outlets that he didn’t consider himself the individual in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the response.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/police-could-have-stopped-uvalde-shooter-3-minutes-after-entering-school-texas-official_4547878.html?utm_source=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2022-06-21&utm_medium=email&est=E8wp%2FUJR1%2FZ9RJpO4%2BKzF09mfUEcKwjdsDY7l6cyPCGYuUITl2YVW%2Bt8%2Bh6tG0yAPQ%3D%3D

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of students’ rights in our Maine school choice case Carson v. Makin, which we brought together with the Institute for Justice.

Maine passed a law that banned families from sending their children to religious schools. Today’s Supreme Court decision held that this exclusion is unconstitutional. It affirms that states cannot discriminate in student-aid programs against parents who want to send their children to religious schools:

“The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”

In response to this important ruling, Kelly Shackelford, President, CEO, and Chief Counsel for First Liberty Institute said:

“We are thrilled that the Court affirmed once again that religious discrimination will not be tolerated in this country. Parents in Maine, and all over the country, can now choose the best education for their kids without fearing retribution from the government. This is a great day for religious liberty in America.”

Thank you for your support and prayers in this legal victory. First Liberty and the Institute for Justice are excited about this major victory as both parents’ rights and all American’s religious freedom were upheld at the highest court.

We know that we could not have won at the Supreme Court without you. But our work to defend our constitutional right to live according to our faith is far from over.

Together, we will continue to fight for every American’s right to freely live out their faith.

https://firstliberty.org/donation/maine-decision-lfn/

Corporate executives tell workers stick to business, leave politics at home

In an indication that corporate progressivism may be reaching its high-water mark, CEOs for the first time are pushing back against activist employees, in some cases going so far as to fire them rather than steer their companies into the mire of “woke” politics.

Last week, Kraken CEO Jesse Powell became the latest executive to say he has had enough. He invited employees who felt “triggered” by controversial ideas to accept a severance package and leave the company.

The cryptocurrency technology company’s new mission statement says that it “will never ask that our employees adopt any specific political ideology as a requirement for our workplace … We recognize that hurt feelings are inevitable in a global organization that is optimizing for team outcomes above individual sentiment. The ideal Krakenite is thick-skinned and well-intentioned.”

Powell told “Fox & Friends” that of the company’s 3,000 employees, about 30 have chosen to accept the four-month severance pay and leave, citing their need to express political or social beliefs in the workplace. Comments from the remaining 99 percent of Kraken employees regarding the policy to keep politics out of the workplace were “overwhelmingly positive,” he said.

“I think everyone is ready to get back to work and stop being distracted.”

“Suddenly, nobody has any interest in this anymore, and companies are responding accordingly and starting to drop ‘woke,’” said Scott Shepard, director at the National Center for Public Policy Research. “I don’t think this is the end of woke, I don’t even think it’s the beginning of the end, but to borrow from Mr. Churchill, I do think it might be the end of the beginning.”

SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space exploration company, joined the chorus on June 16. After several employees publicized a letter denouncing Musk’s campaign to acquire Twitter and steer the social media platform away from censorship, SpaceX responded by firing them.

The employees publicly criticized Musk’s efforts as “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” for SpaceX. After firing those responsible, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell emailed employees that the efforts against Musk’s Twitter acquisition “made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views. We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism.”

The Athletic, a sports news website owned by The New York Times, told its staff this week to stick to sports and drop the political activism.

“We don’t want to stop people from having a voice and expressing themselves,” Paul Fichtenbaum, the publication’s chief content officer, said in a directive. “We just need to keep it from tipping over into the political space.”

Some employees disagreed. A staffer quickly responded in protest. “What about Black Lives Matter? Is that a social cause? Who will write about athlete protests? What about trans athletes in sports?”

Political activism can take a toll on companies, both internally and externally. Walt Disney Co. has proven to be a cautionary tale for corporate leaders. In March, CEO Bob Chapek bowed to activist employees and announced that the family entertainment company would fight to support sex education for children in elementary school, while company executives revealed the intention to add LGBT content to kids’ movies and shows.

That action sparked a backlash from conservative employees and led to parents canceling subscriptions and theme park visits.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to Disney’s harsh criticism of a state law banning sex-ed in kindergarten through third grade by revoking the tax-advantaged status of the company’s theme park in Orlando. Meanwhile, shareholders watched with alarm as Disney stock fell from $130 per share in March to about $94 currently, a 28 percent drop that’s well in excess of the 18 percent decline in the S&P 500 over the same period.

Citibank’s pro-abortion and anti-gun advocacy also drew the attention of state lawmakers. Texas passed legislation in June 2021 that barred banks that discriminate against fossil fuel companies or gun makers from underwriting state bonds. And Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain threatened Citibank with similar treatment in March over its policy of paying travel expenses for employees who go out of state to circumvent Texas’s anti-abortion laws. Texas is the second-largest issuer of municipal bonds in the United States. Other states such as West Virginia have passed similar laws.

In response to employee protests over controversial programs, such as comedian Dave Chappelle’s stand-up comedy show “The Closer,” Netflix told employees in May that it would no longer tolerate efforts to censor content that staff find objectionable.

“We support the artistic expression of the creators we choose to work with; we program for a diversity of audiences and tastes; and we let viewers decide what’s appropriate for them, versus having Netflix censor specific artists or voices,” the company stated. “If you’d find it hard to support our content breadth, Netflix may not be the best place for you.”

Netflix took that action after it lost 200,000 subscribers in the first quarter of this year and projected that it would lose 2 million more in the second quarter.

“It turns out that alienating the majority of your customer base is terrible for business,” Shepard said. “You can sort of get away with that when the market is reaching new highs and interest rates are nothing, so you can borrow and make up for the lack of profits.”

But in today’s environment, with markets tumbling, interest rates rising, and a potential recession looming, “suddenly the luxury of alienating your customer base doesn’t exist anymore.”

In addition to efforts at SpaceX to refocus employees toward company business, Musk is also working to revamp his target acquisition, Twitter, into a more inclusive platform. Last week, he communicated to employees that the platform must be open to all political points of view and that conversations that represent legal free speech, however offensive, should be permitted on Twitter. He’s expected, if the sale of the company goes through, to fire many of the progressive pro-censorship executives.

Many organizations, even the most progressive ones, are finding that taking up divisive racial and gender agendas is causing employees to turn on each other. Politico reported in November 2020 that “following a botched diversity meeting, a highly critical employee survey, and the resignations of two top diversity and inclusion officials, the 600,000-member National Audubon Society is confronting allegations that it maintains a culture of retaliation, fear, and antagonism toward women and people of color, according to interviews with 13 current and former staff members.”

Left-wing internet publication The Intercept lamented that the election of resident Joe Biden was supposed to mark the start of a golden era for the progressive moment. Instead, “Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations … It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function.”

The Washington Post fired reporter Felicia Sonmez in early June for incessant public attacks on a fellow staff writer and on the paper itself, accusing them of racism and sexism. In response to Sonmez’s critical tweets, Executive Editor Sally Buzbee initially issued an advisory to all staff that “we do not tolerate colleagues attacking colleagues either face to face or online.”

When that failed to rein in Sonmez, the Post fired her for “insubordination, maligning your coworkers online and violating the Post’s standards on workplace collegiality and inclusivity.”

Companies are learning that they are often hurting their own brands and losing customers by taking up highly controversial political positions. And like Chapek, many CEOs are finding themselves unprepared for the harsh world of social-justice politics.

The executives of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Microsoft, Levi’s, and Major League Baseball chose to protest voter ID laws in Georgia, with MLB even removing its All-Star game from Atlanta. Delta CEO Ed Bastian first supported the law, then turned against it in response to left-wing threats to boycott the airline.

But few companies followed Disney into the fight over child sex education, and so far, few companies have waded into the abortion debate, despite indications that the Supreme Court could decide to overturn Roe v. Wade, sending decisions on abortion law back to state legislatures.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ceos-start-to-push-back-against-woke-employee-bullying_4545883.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-21-1&utm_medium=email&est=xguET43BDajtt3XB1NkEJYLlu6Z3uZ57CowCtKs%2BAsdhMxv62pDcrEJTfYIRIfPnyg%3D%3D

Columnist Naomi Wolf, author of “The Bodies of Others: The New Authoritarians, COVID-19 and the War Against the Human,” asserts that after two years of pandemic policies, people in free societies are behaving more like those in authoritarian societies.

Wolf maintains that America is now less free, and becoming almost unrecognizable.

“A handful of bad actors” including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Big Tech, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) used the pandemic to “exploit the crisis in such a way as to reengineer our free democratic open societies, especially in the West, especially in the United States, into a post-free society, a post-humane society,” said Wolf during a recent interview on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

Related Coverage

‘We Don’t Have America Anymore’—Dr. Naomi Wolf on CCP-Style Technocratic Authoritarianism in the US

The Biden administration in April extended the 2-year-old coronavirus public health emergency for another 90 days.

Wolf said, based on history, the ongoing lockdowns and extension of the public health emergency indicate society is in the last phase of a tyrannical takeover, because with emergency powers, laws protecting liberty can be suspended.

According to Wolf, there are 10 steps every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10, said Wolf. Some of the other steps include demonizing whistleblowers and critics, calling dissent “treason,” “espionage,” or “subversion,” and controlling the media narrative.

During the last two years of lockdowns and mandates, Big Tech and the elites have profited while the average Americans have seen the American Dream slowly “closing” on them, she said.

“And so often, when a democracy is dying, or a regime is turning the screws on freedoms to create an established new form of tyranny, it happens intentionally in a very incremental way,” said Wolf. “And you really see this from 1930 to 1933 in Germany.”

She said humanity is witnessing the formation of a two-tier society of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated, in which people who would never discriminate against others based on categories of race and sex are now discriminating against the unvaccinated.

“Suddenly, they’re happily embracing a discrimination society in which some people are cast as clean and valuable members of society and other people are ostracized and marginalized and ‘othered’ and described as sort of dirty and causing infection to others,” said Wolf.

She argues that big tech companies had an active role in creating these perceptions and in “shaping legislation and certainly in presenting the drama of COVID and lockdowns to us, and then the vaccine rollout, in such a way as to change human behavior and to change human society,” said Wolf.

Wolf cited the emails between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussing Facebook’s role in getting the right public health “messages out” during the lockdowns.

People had no choice but to rely on tech platforms while they were locked down, and Big Tech used that to manipulate the public, said Wolf.

“What I do trace in the book is how there was a vast profit that tech companies made by suppressing human assembly, by helping to message that it was unsafe or unlawful to gather in person,” she said. “And when you understand that big tech companies are competing with human beings gathering in human spaces, you understand why there was a vested interest in suppressing human assembly.”

Wolf thinks big tech companies will not stop at just harvesting data on the computer, but that they want to dominate peoples’ bodily autonomy with vaccine passports.

“What these companies want more than anything is to leave the parameters of your computer and to colonize other currently non-colonized spaces, notably the human body,” said Wolf.

This would give these companies and governments the ability to switch off peoples’ access to commerce, travel, and other goods and services if they did not comply with a particular mandate, Wolf added.

Some forms of digital tracking and surveilling are already here in the United States, she said.

“You’re now expected to swipe these QR codes just to see the menu, or just to get in. And the QR code uploads your data to a central database,” she said, adding that she’s seen the software “that maps the relationships of everyone sitting at that table, and then builds databases and networks of relationships.”

Wolf said that on a scale of one to 10 on the Chinese social credit system, the United States is currently at a three.

“There’s a change that’s happened in American cities in the last two years,” she said.

Because most people around the world, particularly in U.S. cities, use digital apps to travel, do banking, and shop, a digital social credit system similar to China’s is imminent, she said.

Our data is being harvested and used by the “global technocratic elite” to control human behavior, said Wolf.

“We’ve assumed that the worst it can be is data are harvested from us with everything that we choose to do using our free will as human beings,” said Wolf.

“But what I’ve seen is that digital technology has its own logic, and it isn’t restricted by what human beings want to do. So once digital platforms and their oligarchical masters can figure out how to change people’s behavior to suit technology, there’s nothing, moral or ethical, that will keep them from changing people’s behavior to suit their technology, and to suit their business plans,” she added.

The pandemic has revealed how this type of digital control is playing out, because humans, before the prevalence of digital technology, did not choose to “socially distance” to fight pandemics, said Wolf.

“The dream of our digital overlords is for technology to tell humans what to do, and that’s exactly where we’re at,” said Wolf.

While some people might label her a conspiracy theorist, her opinions are based on a long career as a journalist, political consultant, and now tech CEO, Wolf said. Furthermore, she has witnessed firsthand the powerful elites making historical decisions under the radar, she said.

Wolf was well acquainted with this group of powerful people until recently when she was ejected from their circles for writing oppositional pieces on lockdowns.

“But it’s really true that the global technocratic elite have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow Germans or Americans or Russians or Chinese, and they now are able to align above the level of nation-states,” she said.

For example, one of the WEF’s goals is to make nation-level decision-making less and less important, and the World Health Organization’s goal is to make public health decisions on a global scale, bypassing countries’ own authorities via the pandemic treaty, said Wolf.

“These technocratic elites really do believe that they can order the world better than you and I and that they have the right to,” she said. “That’s really scary.”

Little by little, humanity’s tolerance for cruelty and authoritarianism has grown.

“The war wasn’t just on us as a political entity, the war was on American culture, and is on American culture,” she said. “And they’ve succeeded largely, unless we wake up, because we were a kind, decent, inclusive culture that respected other people’s boundaries and freedoms. … And now a CCP-style cruelty is something that we tolerate.”

What people believe is largely determined by the news they consume, said Wolf, and many people only watch news outlets that give a skewed picture of pandemic treatments and policies, largely funded by wealthy people like Bill Gates.

“I do trace in ‘The Bodies of Others’ how millions of dollars flowed and are flowing from entities like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the BBC and the Guardian and NPR and other formerly very credible, objective news outlets.”

Because most people get slanted news coverage, the country is more divided and many people on the left refuse to consider any other narrative or look at primary source documents, because they believe only government sources are giving them “scientific” information, said Wolf.

This skewed messaging has been able to convince people that the mandates and lockdowns are more American and important than liberty or critical thinking.

Wolf said the most brilliant aspect of the pandemic messaging was that it was framed altruistically.

“You know, ‘You’ve got to exclude those people for the good of the community,’ or ‘You’ve got to mask yourself and your child to save your child,’” said Wolf. “This really brilliantly upended American culture because it cast freedom as selfish.”

Now that those in power have effectively conditioned people to be fearful and submissive, they can keep reinstituting emergency powers, she argued.

“That’s what emergency law means,” she said. “They can do whatever they want, basically. It’s a weaponization of boards of health, it’s a weaponization of the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the [Department of Health and Human Services].”

Wolf said although the situation is dire, people can do something to push back against this tyranny by being informed about what is really going on in the country, assembling in groups, and getting involved politically on the local level.

As it stands now, “I will say that each side is being fed narratives and stereotypes about the other that would persuade each side that the other is absolutely insane and dangerous, dangerously insane,” said Wolf.

“I get that conservatives think, ‘liberals don’t know what a woman is.’ That is not actually literally true, and liberals think ‘conservatives all want to torch our democratic processes, storm the Capitol, and are misogynist, racist thugs who are trigger happy,” said Wolf.

The last two years have conditioned people to fear each other and so the conversations that would have normally occurred when people gathered are not happening and keeping the country divided, said Wolf. She said she will gladly talk to people on the right.

“People I love think I’m doing something wrong in even talking to conservatives and libertarians. That’s very dangerous. The left, especially, has decided that you’re morally complicit if you have a conversation across the aisle,” Wolf said. “That is censorship, that is cancel culture, that’s un-American, that is an importation from Communism.”

She urges people to remember what makes America unique and a beacon to other nations: to remember we are the great experiment where neighbors talked to each other, listened, and didn’t “rat” each other out if they did not agree with each other, Wolf said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-dont-have-america-anymore-author-naomi-wolf_4545628.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-21-3&utm_medium=email&est=Ti3V30R3w%2F2JuDx47eYvzpeLpt8HYqj3OhnaBBsqKEGiN5KT8OMKfPTbD%2FFjf51nfw%3D%3D

NEWT:

They are not just desperate. Remember from, their standpoint, all the issues that really matter doesn’t matter what Biden is doing. They are desperate to guarantee the right to have a tax paid abortion on the last day of the birth. They’re desperate to impose radical values in second and 3rd grade. They are desperate to keep the border open. I mean, this is a very issue oriented rather than personality oriented movement. And they look at the Republican’ potential victory and it scares them. Because the Republicans are going to stand for less government. Less inflation. Controlling the border. Locking up criminals, a tragic story we just heard a few minutes ago. I think on the left, there is a sense that this could be the moment they really do start getting defeated as a force in America.

NEWT:

Politics is a tough business. People are allowed to do anything they can to win. Within the law. And, if you figure out that you can help nominate somebody that’s easier to beat, that’s, you know, that’s your right. But it’s very dangerous. Because, in fact, in a lot of these cases, they are going to nominate people who they really deeply dislike but who are going to win. And they are going to govern based on their values not based on money from the democratic party. So, I have a hunch that whether it’s Dr. Oz winning in Pennsylvania or J.D. Vance winning in Ohio, there are a whole number of places people who are really populist and really against socialist big government are going to come out on top this fall. And the left sitting there thinking what happened? How can could this have happened?

NEWT:

Well, I think they are in a different position. Every week that goes by, Donald Trump’s presidency looks better. Look at his inflation rate, look at the price of gasoline when Trump was president. People find his I think his personality too aggressive and at times too annoying. But his policies certainly had turned America around. And in Biden’s case, he doesn’t just fall off his bicycle, he takes the country him with him. And you look at Biden’s inflation record which is worse than Jimmy Carter. Look at Biden’s open door policy in the southern border. Biden’s allies releasing murderers. A lot of reasons why the country on policy grounds would favor Trump over Biden and the latest poll I link was like 6 or 8 points.

A middle school in Massachusetts has been banned from calling itself Catholic for insisting to fly gay pride and Black Lives Matter (BLM) flags, which church leaders say embody an agenda that contradicts Catholic values.

Nativity School in Worcester, Massachusetts, is no longer allowed to identify as a Catholic school, according to a decree issued by the bishop of the Diocese of Worcester. The school is also prohibited from hosting mass and sacraments on its campus or sponsoring these activities in any church building within the diocese.

“The flying of these flags in front of a Catholic school sends a mixed, confusing and scandalous message to the public about the Church’s stance on these important moral and social issues,” Robert McManus, the Bishop of the Diocese of Worcester, wrote in the order.

“It is my contention that the ‘Gay Pride’ flag represents support of gay marriage and actively living a LGBTQ+ lifestyle,” McManus explained. “This is also true of ‘Black Lives Matter.’ The Catholic Church teaches that all life is sacred and the Church certainly stands unequivocally behind the phrase ‘black lives matter’ and strongly affirms that all lives matter.”

The bishop also noted that the Black Lives Matter organization “seeks to disrupt the family structure in clear opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church.”

The BLM activist group, whose co-founders have described themselves as “trained Marxists,” initially declared on its website that it wants to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” The dismantling of traditional family structure remains a key tenet of Marxism.

Nativity has been displaying gay pride and BLM flags since early 2021, and continued to fly them after McManus was made aware of them this March and demanded their removal.

McManus wrote that as a diocesan bishop, he has the authority to determine whether a school claiming to be Catholic is acting in a way that is contrary to the Catholic teachings, and that Nativity’s defiance leaves him “no other option but to take canonical action.”

In response to the decision, Nativity claims that flying the flags is meant to show support for “marginalized people,” which is aligned with Catholic values.

“The flags simply state that all are welcome at Nativity, and this value of inclusion is rooted in Catholic teaching,” Nativity School President Thomas McKenney said in a statement. “Though any symbol or flag can be co-opted by political groups or organizations, flying our flags is not an endorsement of any organization or ideology, they fly in support of marginalized people.”

The school said it has no plan to take down the flags and may appeal the decree through “appropriate channels.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/massachusetts-school-stripped-of-catholic-status-for-refusing-to-take-down-gay-pride-blm-flags_4543193.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-20-2&utm_medium=email&est=jL1SfIIIk3AWkAz0CTlIp%2Fl2%2BK2yFqMSab8ZUcHN8GTlWw58gq5zHuH%2FCPLFqYBKjQ%3D%3D

Fox Business host Larry Kudlow didn’t hold back on a recent segment of his show and told his audience the full extent of the Biden Administration’s failing economic policies.

In part of the segment, Kudlow gives an insight into the latest Fox News poll numbers which show waning confidence in the President’s ability to lead an economic recovery.

He also refuted a common talking point the left often uses about wealthy individuals and major corporations not paying their fair share of taxes.

Notably, Kudlow actually agreed on a few observations recently made by resident Biden about issues plaguing the nation – before highlighting the fact that Biden’s own policies have led to the problems he wants to solve.

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• Democrats Push Permanent DACA Solution
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• AOC Might Not Back Biden in 2024
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https://www.americanliberty.news/economics/fox-business-host-exposes-true-impact-of-bidens-economic-policies/alnstaff/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=7381

While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out some uncomfortable truths. The ‘elephant in the room’ is being overlooked by our media, despite the fact it’s directly linked to the rise in mass shootings.

• While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems
• Gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are not the problem, because the more gun control laws that have been passed, the more mass shootings have occurred
• 97.8 percent of mass shootings occur in “gun-free zones,” as the perpetrators know legally armed citizens won’t be there to stop them
• Depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings really take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants
• Antidepressants, especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), are well-known for their ability to cause suicidal and homicidal ideation and violence

While many have bought into the simplistic idea that availability of firearms is the cause of mass shootings, a number of experts have pointed out a more uncomfortable truth, which is that mass shootings are far more likely the result of how we’ve been mistreating mental illness, depression and behavioral problems.

An article written by Molly Carter, initially published on ammo.com at an unknown date¹ and subsequently republished by The Libertarian Institute in May 2019,² and psychreg.org in late January 2021,³ noted:

“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), a mass murder occurs when at least four people are murdered, not including the shooter … during a single incident …

Seemingly every time a mass shooting occurs … the anti-gun media and politicians have a knee-jerk response — they blame the tragedy solely on the tool used, namely firearms, and focus all of their proposed ‘solutions’ on more laws, ignoring that the murderer already broke numerous laws when they committed their atrocity.

Facts matter when addressing such an emotionally charged topic, and more gun control legislation has shown that law-abiding Americans who own guns are NOT the problem. Consider the following: The more gun control laws that are passed, the more mass murders have occurred.

Whether or not this is correlation or causation is debatable. What is not debatable is that this sick phenomenon of mass murderers targeting ‘gun-free zones,’ where they know civilian carry isn’t available to law-abiding Americans, is happening.

According to the Crime Prevention Research Center,⁴ 97.8 percent of public shootings occur in ‘gun-free zones’ – and ‘gun-free zones’ are the epitome of the core philosophical tenet of gun control, that laws are all the defense one needs against violence …

This debate leads them away from the elephant in the room and one of the real issues behind mass shootings — mental health and prescription drugs.

Ignoring what’s going on in the heads of these psychopaths not only allows mass shootings to continue, it leads to misguided gun control laws that violate the Second Amendment and negate the rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens.

As Jeff Snyder put it in The Washington Times: ‘But to ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow.’”

The Elephant in the Room: Antidepressants

Thoughts, emotions and a variety of environmental factors play into the manifestation of violence, but mental illness by itself cannot account for the massive rise in mass murder — unless you include antidepressants in the equation. Yet even when mental health does enter the mass shooter discussion, the issue of antidepressants, specifically, is rarely mentioned.

The fact is, depression per se rarely results in violence. Only after antidepressants became commonplace did mass shootings take off, and many mass shooters have been shown to be on antidepressants.

Prozac, released in 1987, was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) to be approved for depression and anxiety. Only two years earlier, direct-to-consumer advertising had been legalized. In the mid-1990s, the Food and Drug Administration loosened regulations, direct-to-consumer ads for SSRIs exploded and, with it, prescriptions for SSRIs.

In 1989, just two years after Prozac came to market, Joseph Wesbecker shot 20 of his coworkers, killing nine. He had been on Prozac for one month, and the survivors of the drug-induced attack sued Eli Lilly, the maker of Prozac. Since then, antidepressant use and mass shootings have both risen, more or less in tandem.

In the two decades between 1988 and 2008, antidepressant use in the U.S. rose by 400 percent,⁵ and by 2010, 11 percent of the U.S. population over the age of 12 were on an antidepressant prescription.⁶

In 1982, pre-Prozac, there was one mass shooting in the U.S.⁷ In 1984, there were two incidents and in 1986 — the year Prozac was released — there was one. One to three mass shootings per year remained the norm up until 1999, when it jumped to five.

How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings?

Another jump took place in 2012, when there were seven mass shootings. And while the annual count has gone up and down from year to year, there’s been a clear trend of an increased number of mass shootings post-2012. Over time, mass shootings have also gotten larger, with more people getting injured or killed per incident.

How can we possibly ignore the connection between rampant use of drugs known to directly cause violent behavior and the rise in mass shootings? Suicidal ideation, violence and homicidal ideation are all known side effects of these drugs. Sometimes, the drugs disrupt brain function so dramatically the perpetrator can’t even remember what they did.

For example, in 2001, a 16-year-old high schooler was prescribed Effexor, starting off at 40 milligrams and moving up to 300 mg over the course of three weeks. On the first day of taking a 300-mg dose, the boy woke up with a headache, decided to skip school and went back to bed.

Some time later, he got up, took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage at gunpoint. He later claimed he had no recollection of anything that happened after he went back to bed that morning.⁹

The Risks Are Clear

The risks of psychiatric disturbances are so clear, ever since mid-October 2004, all antidepressants in the U.S. must include a black box warning that the drug can cause suicidal thoughts and behaviors, especially in those younger than 25, and that:¹⁰

“Anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility (aggressiveness), impulsivity, akathisia (psychomotor restlessness), hypomania, and mania have been reported in adult and pediatric patients being treated with antidepressants for major depressive disorder as well as for other indications, both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric.”

SSRIs can also cause emotional blunting and detachment, such that patients report “not feeling” or “not caring” about anything or anyone, as well as psychosis and hallucinations. All of these side effects can contribute to someone acting out an unthinkable violent crime.

In one review^11,12 of 484 drugs in the FDA’s database, 31 were found to account for 78.8 percent of all cases of violence against others, and 11 of those drugs were antidepressants.

The researchers concluded that violence against others was a “genuine and serious adverse drug event” and that of the drugs analyzed, SSRI antidepressants and the smoking cessation medication, varenicline (Chantix), had the strongest associations. The top-five most dangerous SSRIs were:¹³

• Fluoxetine (Prozac), which increased aggressive behavior 10.9 times
• Paroxetine (Paxil), which increased violent behavior 10.3 times
• Fluvoxamine (Luvox), which increased violent behavior 8.4 times
• Venlafaxine (Effexor), which increased violent behavior 8.3 times
• Desvenlafaxine (Pristiq), which increased violent behavior 7.9 times

Depression Is Vastly Overdiagnosed

In her article, Carter also reviewed the clinical determinants for a diagnosis of clinical depression warranting medication. To qualify, you must experience five or more of the following symptoms, most of the day, every day, for two weeks or more, and the symptoms must be severe enough to interfere with normal everyday functioning:¹⁴

• Sadness
• Feeling hopeless
• Feeling helpless
• Feeling guilty
• Fatigue
• Loss of interest in hobbies
• Restlessness
• Abnormal sleep patterns, whether sleeping too much or not enough
• Thoughts of death or suicide
• Anxiety
• Feeling worthless
• Feeling ’empty’
• Irritable
• Lack of energy
• Slow talking and moving
• Trouble concentrating
• Abnormal weight changes, either eating too much or having no appetite

The reality is that a majority of patients who receive a depression diagnosis and subsequent prescription for an antidepressant do not, in fact, qualify. In one study,¹⁵ only 38.4 percent actually met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) criteria, and among older adults, that ratio was even lower. Only 14.3 percent of those aged 65 and older met the diagnostic criteria. According to the authors:¹⁶

“Participants who did not meet the 12-month MDE criteria reported less distress and impairment in role functioning and used fewer services. A majority of both groups, however, were prescribed and used psychiatric medications.

Conclusion: Depression overdiagnosis and overtreatment is common in community settings in the USA. There is a need for improved targeting of diagnosis and treatments of depression and other mental disorders in these settings.”

What Role Might War Games Play?

Aside from antidepressants, another factor that gets ignored is the influence of shooting simulations, i.e., violent video games. How does the military train soldiers for war? Through simulations. With the proliferation of video games involving indiscriminate violence, should we really be surprised when this “training” is then put into practice?

As reported by World Bank Blogs, young men who experience violence “often struggle to reintegrate peacefully into their communities” when hostilities end.¹⁷ While American youth typically have little experience with real-world war, simulated war games do occupy much of their time and may over time color their everyday perceptions of life. As noted by Centrical, some of the top benefits of simulations training include:¹⁸

1. Allowing you to practice genuine real-life scenarios and responses
2. Repetition of content, which boosts knowledge retention
3. Personalization and diversification, so you can learn from your mistakes and evaluate your performance, thereby achieving a deeper level of learning

In short, violent mass shooter games are the perfect training platform for future mass shooters. Whereas a teenager without such exposure might not be very successful at carrying out a mass shooting due to inexperience with weapons and tactics, one who has spent many hours, years even, training in simulations could have knowledge akin to that of military personnel.

Add antidepressant side effects such as emotional blunting and loss of impulse control, and you have a perfect prescription for a mass casualty event.

On top of that, we, as a nation, also demonstrate the “righteousness” of war by engaging in them without end.¹⁹ When was the last time the U.S. was not at war someplace? It’s been ongoing for decades.

Even now, the United States insists on inserting itself into the dispute between Russia and Ukraine, and diplomacy isn’t the chosen conflict resolution tool. Sending weapons to Ukraine and calling for more violence against Russians are. Sen. Lindsey Graham has even called for the assassination of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Showing just how serious such a suggestion is, the White House had to publicly disavow it, stating Graham’s comment “is not the position of the U.S. government.”²⁰

Graham, meanwhile, does not appear to understand how his nonchalant call for murder might actually incite murder. In the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, he now wants to mobilize retired service members to enhance security at schools, and while that might be a good idea, how about also vowing never to call for the murder of political opponents? Don’t politicians understand that this could translate into some kid thinking it’s acceptable to murder THEIR perceived opponents?

As far as I can tell, mass shootings have far more to do with societal norms, dangerous medications, a lack of high-quality mental health services, and the normalization of violence through entertainment and in politics, than it does with gun laws per se.

There are likely many other factors as well, but these are clearly observable phenomena known to nurture violent behavior. I’m afraid Americans are in need of a far deeper and more introspective analysis of the problem than many are capable of at the moment. But those who can should try, and make an effort to affect much-needed change locally and in their own home.

Originally published June 16, 2022 on Mercola.com

Sources and References

• ^1, 9, 14 Ammo.com, Prescription for Violence
• ² Libertarian Institute May 20, 2019
• ³ Psychreg.org January 26, 2021, updated February 21, 2022
• ⁴ Crime Prevention Research Center, Mass Public Shootings Stats
• ⁵ Harvard Health October 20, 2011
• ⁶ Washington Post October 19, 2011
• ^7, 8 Time April 16, 2021
• ¹⁰ Psychiatric News November 5, 2004
• ¹¹ PLOS ONE December 15, 2010, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015337
• ¹² Psychology Today January 5, 2011
• ¹³ Live Science January 12, 2011
• ^15, 16 Psychotherapy Psychosom 2013;82(3):161-9
• ¹⁷ World Bank Blogs August 14, 2018
• ¹⁸ Centrical Benefits of Simulations Training
• ¹⁹ War and Violent Crime Research
• ²⁰ VOA Nws March 4, 2022

https://www.theepochtimes.com/97-8-of-mass-shootings-are-linked-to-this_4537542.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-19&utm_medium=email&est=yvrMHJmj5Hss79wrbiifJw5mSOGSgonG13Lyoo56LM4IIh8Gm8cFgExRwDJHUTmrvw%3D%3D

The Left is once again attacking our country’s most vulnerable – children outside the protection of their parents.

A school district in Arizona has been using a worksheet with young students that is making them question their heterosexual identity. The school program in which it is being used claims to “promote leadership and diversity,” but it is really just a cover to teach young kids gender identity and sexuality. Just take a look at this:

The students are being asked what they think “caused” their heterosexuality, whether they just need “a good gay/lesbian lover,” and whether their heterosexuality is just “a phase.” These are totally inappropriate questions for our children and an obvious attempt to push the Left’s woke gender ideology on them. These attacks on our most vulnerable must end NOW!

Parents of young children everywhere need a fighter in Congress, and you can rest assured that I will always stand up for America’s kids. I am standing up to the Radical Left trying to indoctrinate our kids, but I need to know I have YOU on my team!

https://secure.winred.com/burgessowens/this-is-what-the-left-does?recurring=true

Fairfax County Public Schools will suspend students for using wrong pronouns over parent objections

A Virginia school district will suspend students from fourth grade on up for using the wrong pronouns to designate transgender peers, igniting a fierce backlash from parents during a Thursday school board meeting.

The Fairfax County School Board voted eight to four to approve guidelines that will discipline students who engage in “malicious misgendering,” “malicious deadnaming,” or use a slur based on a classmate’s “gender identity,” “gender expression,” or “sexual orientation.” The board approved the rules as part of next year’s school handbook. Four board members who objected did so for reasons unrelated to the suspension provision, preferring to debate a run-of-the-mill cell phone policy for an hour after fielding heated questions from parents.

The meeting showcased the power liberal school boards wield in America, as the members approved the rules over strenuous objections from parents on constitutional grounds and potentially under threat of lawsuits. While one board member acknowledged the concerns, another board member, Karl Frisch, evaded questions, saying the changes had already been implemented last year, though parents pointed out the school district quietly implemented them during the pandemic. A third, Abrar Omeish, floated the idea of nixing the public question period at the next meeting.

It equally showed parents’ frustration over their lack of influence, and their willingness to pull their children out of public schools due to their ideological drift. In a charged session that stretched late into the evening, many mothers questioned the legality of the new handbook rules as well as their necessity, citing learning loss for their children during the pandemic. One father told the Washington Free Beacon he would withdraw his kids from Fairfax County Public Schools if the “misgendering” rules passed. He mentioned two other parents he knew who had said the same.

Barbara Eckman is a mother of four boys, two of whom are gay. She told the school board she will homeschool her children now to avoid “activist policies” and redress learning gaps, saying she is having to do “the job that Fairfax County couldn’t.”

“I am both a loving mother and an ally to the Pride community,” Eckman said. “The fact that I do not support overwhelming, overreaching activist policies that violate First Amendment rights has nothing to do with how I feel about the gay and transgender community. … I have liberal and conservative friends, and when I discuss your proposed policies—the co-ed family life education and transgender unit in fourth grade, the potential suspensions for misgendering and deadnaming for kids as early as fourth grade—they’re all astonished. So this leads me to one question: Who are you really representing?”

A coalition of parents, conservative grassroots groups, political actors, and one erstwhile Trump administration official rallied before the vote. Many stayed to voice concerns during the open question period, though most left by the time of the vote, expecting unfavorable results. Of the 13 who addressed the school board, 8 rose in opposition to the new handbook.

“I’m here to stop these Maoists,” former deputy assistant to Donald Trump Sebastian Gorka told the Free Beacon, before giving a speech at the parents’ rally in opposition to the school board vote.

Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, who organized the rally and is a mother of three Fairfax students, is encouraging parents to refuse to sign off on the new handbook when asked by schools.

“It is a blatant disregard for the community feedback they’ve received, for parental rights in general, and for the First Amendment,” Lundquist-Arora told the Free Beacon. “Given that only 38 percent of Virginia’s fourth graders are proficient in reading, I think the FCPS Board’s enthusiasm to improve primary school students’ reading skills and general education should exceed their ambition to pass draconian laws to suspend them and compel their speech.”

The school board’s vote was a foregone conclusion, given the long reach of the Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County. Democratic politicians including resident Joe Biden and then-Virginia governor Ralph Northam used the decision to prohibit discrimination based on “gender identity” or “sexual orientation.” State and local education bodies then implemented policies to the same end, citing the executive measures. Virginia’s Education Department in 2020 drafted a model plan for transgender students that formed the basis of the Fairfax County School Board’s eventual handbook rules. The plan recommended punishments for discrimination, harassment, or bullying, and identifying and maintaining records based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Fairfax County Public Schools has spent about $16 million in legal fees since 2020. One lawsuit involved race-based discrimination for admission to one of the nation’s top high schools, which was aimed at reducing its Asian-American student population. America First Legal, a conservative legal group, had warned board members before Thursday’s vote that the new rules suspending students for “misgendering” may be unconstitutional.

“No discernible effort is being made to improve our students’ reading, writing, and math skills,” Steve Rogers, a district Republican leader, told the Free Beacon. “That is where they should focus their time, and we need to hold them accountable in the 2023 election.”

Jeff Hoffman, a father of three Fairfax students, told the Free Beacon nearly half of the county supports candidates who may soon be announced to challenge the school board.

“We are fed up with political agendas in our common sense classrooms, which according to public statement from the FCPS most gender identity measures were passed in 2020,” Hoffman said. “The parents of this county are awake, aware, and ready to vote for change. This is just the beginning.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/tiger-moms-maul-virginia-school-board-over-misgendering-rules/

An excerpt from Matt Walsh’s new book, ‘What Is a Woman?’

The following is an excerpt from Matt Walsh’s new book, What Is a Woman? One Man’s Journey to Answer the Question of a Generation, an investigation into the radical gender ideology movement. The passage is taken from Chapter 5, “The Transgender Takeover.”

***

Transgenderism has taken the (western) world by storm, and there’s no medium where we aren’t confronted with it, often on a daily basis. While this appears to have happened rather rapidly, pressure had been building for quite some time.

In the early 1950s, a former GI from the Bronx who renamed himself Christine Jorgensen went to Copenhagen, Denmark, received a sex change surgery and massive doses of estrogen, and became the first international transgender media sensation. Three wire services together sent out a sum total of 50,000 words on the Jorgensen story in the first two weeks of coverage. While Alfred Kinsey and John Money conducted their experiments and the ideas behind sex change surgery and gender theory spread through academia, society at large took passing interest in the transgender issue after Jorgensen. One could be forgiven for living life in the mid 20th century without worrying if your daughter would come home and announce she is actually a man. It was a simpler time. Jorgensen was a media sensation, but like all media sensations, he was soon forgotten.

In the 1970s, the controversy over Renee Richards broke onto the scene, presaging debates we are still embroiled in today. Renee Richards was a tennis player who underwent a sex change and proposed that, as a result, he was a woman. As Dr. Bowers recounted to me, “Renee Richards was a competitive tennis player who was assigned male at birth, went through a transition, and when her [sic] situation was found out, the women in the U.S. tennis circuit were very upset, thinking that she [sic] had a competitive advantage, and [they] tried to block her [sic] from competing.”

Renee’s case went all the way up to the New York State Supreme Court, which ruled in his favor, writing that forcing Renee to take a Barr body test to determine his sex before being eligible to compete was “grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and violative of her [sic] rights under the Human Rights Law of this state.”

After that, it was yet again largely quiet on the western front until all of a sudden the trans movement stopped making splashes in the headlines and began to form a tidal wave that would wash over society. In 2008, the reality show “America’s Next Top Model” featured a transgender character, normalizing transgenderism with regular appearances on many Americans’ TV diets. A few years later, Bruce Jenner was reborn as “Caitlyn.” Vanity Fair ran a flattering cover story, and nearly every media outlet in America praised him as a hero. Soon after, the Obama administration lifted the ban on transgender service members in the military (a ban that President Trump reinstated and resident Biden lifted yet again).

Transgenderism was moving from sideshow to the main stage, and now it’s in absolutely every sphere of life. There’s no avoiding it. Transgenderism is the heart of the cultural conversation in America, and the only escape is death or becoming Amish.

In the movie industry, Amazon Prime produced a remake of the classic Cinderella, casting the fairy godmother as transgender. In the Marvel Universe—which produces the biggest blockbuster hits today—Disney (which owns Marvel) announced that there would soon be a transgender superhero.

Television boasts its own array of transgender characters. The hit show Glee on Fox introduced a transgender character as far back as 2012. A series called Transparent about a father of three grown children announcing he is transgender ran for five seasons until 2019. Orange is the New Black on Netflix featured a trans character played by an actual trans actor, Laverne Cox. Netflix is reportedly introducing its first non-binary (meaning not following the “binaries” of male or female) character in a series for preschool children.

The celebrity world is filling up with a sizeable collection of trans or non-binary personas from Chaz Bono to the creators of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers (now proclaimed “sisters”), to actress, singer/songwriter Demi Lovato. Lovato—a former Disney child star—is a self-anointed prophet of the sexual anarchy pioneered by Kinsey and Money. One of her Instagram posts in 2021 read, “Be a slut. Show your body. Get naked. Have all the safe, different, consensual sex you want. Be kinky. Masturbate. Make/watch porn. Make money. Just a reminder that being sexual is okay.”

Lest you worry that only adults and former Disney child stars are in on the fun, Desmond is Amazing is a prepubescent drag queen who was featured glowingly in a segment on Good Morning America. His abuse-courting parents also allowed him to dance at a Brooklyn gay club while grown men tossed dollar bills at him. Of course, no cell phones were allowed while he danced for the men at the bar.

Even if you aren’t a pop culture junky, it’s impossible to get by watching the news over the past few years without enduring a continual parade of transgender “firsts.” Rachel Levine was confirmed as the first transgender cabinet secretary, and he now runs the Department of Health and Human Services charged with managing health policies governing, among other issues, Medicare, Obamacare, and the coronavirus. We’ve had our first transgender Rhodes Scholar, our first transgender boy scout, our first transgender national political party convention speaker, and even our first high-profile transgender government leaker and whistleblower in the person of Chelsea Manning. The amount of history being made is just staggering.

Drag Queen Story Hour swept across the country as frighteningly dressed and confused men (generally) with a strange affection for young children formed chapters and invaded local libraries across the country. Human Resource specialists and allies everywhere have taken it upon themselves to announce their preferred pronouns in emails and everyday conversations at work and in social gatherings. You can be sure if you refuse to do the same, your lack of inclusivity will be noted.

Even having a baby has become another avenue for the pervasive touch of gender theory. Hardly a hospital in America has blue or pink blankets and caps for tiny newborns anymore. They are either a mixture of pink and blue—or lack the colors at all—apparently in an effort to save that puffy-eyed nugget of a baby from having a gender imposed on her at any point in time.

There is no escape. Maybe you’ve already had your kids, and you’re not having any more. Maybe you work from home or for yourself, and you even homeschool your kids. Maybe you’ve already cut the cord on the television, deleted the social media apps, and the only celebrities you can name are Elvis Presley, John Wayne, Audrey Hepburn, and Mickey Mouse. Well, that doesn’t stop the parents down the street from engaging in the hot new trend of raising their children Zyler and Kadyn as genderless or genderfluid. (Zyler and Kadyn, by the way, are actual twin children in Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose parents are raising them without gender so that the children can decide for themselves when they’re older.)

You don’t just have to worry about your kids. When was the last time you had a real conversation with your spouse about gender identity? When I spoke with Dr. Bowers, I asked him how his family dealt with his transition, seeing as he was married and had kids at the time. “If you marry someone who is your best friend, they’re likely to understand you, and they’re likely to be with you in the long run,” Dr. Bowers said. “We’re still married legally,” Dr. Bowers said of his wife, “but I wouldn’t call it a marriage. I would call it more like a modern family.”

“Is your experience typical, where the spouse is supportive?” I asked.

“Increasingly so,” he said. “I think as trans as a phenomenon has emerged and become, you know, more acceptable, spouses go along for the ride.” He continued, “If somebody is not a great spouse, whether male or female, and you add this into the mix, you’re likely to create problems. But if you have someone who you’ve been friends with and you have mutual respect for, you know, it often remains.” Got it. So if your spouse declares that he or she is the opposite sex and the marriage breaks down, it’s really your fault for not accepting it. There were probably already problems with you in the first place.

Matt Walsh is a writer at the Daily Wire. His book, What Is a Woman?, was published this month by DW Books. A companion documentary of the same title was also released in June.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/how-transgenderism-moved-from-sideshow-to-the-main-stage/

A lawsuit has been filed against a California school district and staff accused of coaching a middle school student into thinking she was transgender and secretly changing her name and pronouns at school.

The lawsuit alleges school staff manipulated the sixth-grade student into “believing she was bisexual and that her gender did not match her biological sex” and instructed her “not to tell her [mother] about the new gender identity and expression.”

Harmeet Dhillon, CEO of the Center for American Liberty, which is representing the minor student and her mother, told The Epoch Times the case could be the first of many exposing the consequences of transgender activism in schools.

The lawsuit, filed on June 14, names Spreckels Union School District, Katelyn Pagaran, the principal at Buena Vista Middle School in Salinas, Calif., and two teachers: Lori Caldeira and Kelly Baraki as defendants.

Jessica Konen, the child’s mother, came forward after a leaked audio recording revealed Caldeira and Baraki telling other teachers about how they secretly recruited students into the school’s LGBT club.

The teachers bragged about spying on students’ online searches and activity as well as eavesdropping on their conversations to identify and recruit sixth-grade students into the LGBT clubs whose membership rolls were kept hidden from parents.

“We totally stalked what they were doing on Google,” Baraki said in the recording.

The duo led a workshop called “How We Run a ‘GSA’ in Conservative Communities” at a California Teachers Association (CTA) conference billed as the “2021 LGBTQ+ Issues Conference, Beyond the Binary: Identity & Imagining Possibilities” in Palm Springs last October. They described the hurdles they encountered as teachers to conceal the activities of the GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance) “Equality Club” from parents.

New details have surfaced in the case now that Konen’s daughter, who is protected under the pseudonym “A.G.” in the lawsuit because she is a minor, is actively participating in the case, Dhillon said.

The lawsuit alleges that the teachers acted with principal Pagaran’s knowledge.

“Pagaran was aware of the Equality Club and Caldeira’s and Baraki’s tactics … and approved of them. In fact, Pagaran frequently attended Equality Club meetings,” the lawsuit states.

It also alleges that Baraki and Caldeira tried to push identities on students that they resisted.

Near the beginning of the 2018 school year, when the student was 11 years old, she was invited by a friend to attend an Equality Club meeting but was not interested in the discussion and decided not to return, according to the lawsuit.

About two weeks later, Caldeira approached Konen’s daughter and asked her to come back to the club, saying that she “fit in perfectly,” and the child obliged, the lawsuit alleges.

In the spring of 2019, Konen’s daughter told a school counselor she was depressed and began attending weekly counseling sessions, after which “Caldeira and Pagaran would often have follow-up meetings with [her] and the school counselor,” the lawsuit states. “During those meetings, the counselor and Caldeira informed [the child] that the feelings she was having were because she was ‘not being who she was’ and that if she became her ‘true self,’ her depression and stress would be better (or words to that effect).”

Caldeira encouraged Konen’s daughter to change her name to a boy’s name, and she began wearing boy’s clothing, the lawsuit further alleges.

“Sometimes, Caldeira and Baraki would introduce and push identities on students, and the students resisted,” states the lawsuit.

Before attending a school board meeting in mid-December to expose the alleged manipulation her daughter had endured, Konen went public with her story and accused school staff, including the two teachers, of “coaching” her daughter.

The Center for American Liberty filed a notice of claim under the Government Claims Act, a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit against the California government, on Jan. 19. The state had 60 days to respond, but did not do so.

“For me, as a civil rights lawyer, I think adults should be allowed to do whatever they want, and if they want to express themselves that way after full information, then that’s their right. But, people are not getting the full information about this radical transgender agenda,” Dhillon said.

“They’re not learning about the permanent effects of these changes. They’re not learning that their sadness and their depression is never going to go away. In the process, American school teachers are actively interfering with the civil rights of American families. And so, we intend through this lawsuit and others … to put a stop to this before they permanently damage and scar more children and destroy more lives.”

Dhillon disagrees with President Joe Biden’s recent push for “gender-affirming care” and state legislation proposed by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Assemblywoman Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City) to harbor transgender-affirming parents who’ve been charged with child abuse in other states.

Some treatments, such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, used to treat minors who identify as trans have not been properly medically tested for use on children, Dhillon alleged.

“The use of puberty blockers on children is not on label. It is not tested,” she said. “They’re using drugs meant for other diseases like prostate cancer. They’re using that to suppress hormones in American children.

“This is barbaric,” Dhillon continued. “When we see other countries mutilate the genitalia of girls and boys, we call that ‘barbaric.’ We call for human rights sanctions on those countries. We’re doing that in America under the guise of ‘gender affirming care.’”

Decisions on transgender medicine are best left to adults—patients who are 18 and older—and can legally make those decisions for themselves, she said.

“I think it will be sad if they do that, but I have no problem with it legally. I have a huge problem, legally, with parents being alienated from the children,” Dhillon said.

Schools hiding the gender identities of children from their parents is not only problematic, but it is illegal, “and we will show that in this lawsuit,” she said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mom-daughter-sue-school-district-in-alleged-transgender-coaching-case_4539279.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-17-3&utm_medium=email&est=QMTTgQegfsMmsyZOhKzwNvn7vOAdL5kZA44Uy3q1CJlsmUPYemWqwpAXT2%2BkH275IQ%3D%3D

Democratic Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her state’s Board of Education are opposing a ballot initiative, already passed by the state legislature, that would provide vouchers for more than one million students to attend the school of their choice.

The state education board adopted a resolution on Tuesday against the Let MI Kids Learn ballot initiative, which is similar to legislation used in dozens of other states and would allow families to use tax credits to send their children to private schools. If it receives around 340,000 signatures, the proposal will be included on the November ballot without the governor’s signature. Whitmer in October had vetoed bills containing the school choice tax credits, which had been passed by the Michigan House and Senate, saying they created “tax shelters for the wealthy.”

Democrats and members of national teachers’ union organizations have consistently opposed school choice initiatives. Resident Joe Biden’s Education Department drew fire in May when it proposed a cut to federal funding for some charter schools. School choice and educational voucher programs are supported in one form or another by more than 65 percent of public school parents. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy has also found school choice alternatives are more likely to serve poor or minority student populations in Michigan.

Michigan superintendent Michael Rice said the Michigan Student Opportunity Accounts program would “devastate” public schools and reduce state revenue by $500 million in the first year. But Mackinac Center for Public Policy director of education policy Ben DeGrow argued looking at only the revenue impact obscures the program’s overall fiscal effect.

“The State Board majority and superintendent have consistently taken the side of a broken K-12 system over the neglected needs of many students,” DeGrow said. “Looking only at the revenue side ignores the fact that the program would have a very small fiscal impact, and likely a favorable one. … The only way school systems would be devastated is if large numbers of students leave because they’re being poorly served.”

The COVID-19 pandemic took a toll on students as remote school reduced learning rates nationwide. A Harvard study released in May found K-12 students who attended school from home in the 2020-2021 school year lost 50 percent of their typical math curriculum learning.

More than 20 other states have enacted similar voucher programs. Funded by donations, the Michigan Student Opportunity Accounts would allow 90 percent of public school students to use tax credits on online classes, school supplies, tutoring and tuition, transportation, textbooks, and skilled training and CTE expenses.

“Every child deserves a fair shot to succeed, no matter their background, their family’s income, or their learning challenges,” Let MI Kids Learn’s website says.

Slack banned the immigration restrictionist group Federation for American Immigration Reform from using any of its services for allegedly violating the company’s terms of service.

A Slack employee informed FAIR of the ban on Wednesday but did not provide any rationale other than that they violated the company’s “Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy,” according to emails reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. 

The ban, imposed on one of the largest anti-immigration policy groups in the country, comes as part of a broader trend from tech companies arbitrarily censoring conservative groups and individuals. Under the guise of policing “misinformation” and “hate speech,” companies such as Twitter have barred users from sharing articles about Hunter Biden’s laptop or criticism of left-wing gender ideology. Although Slack has banned its services in countries facing U.S. sanctions such as Russia, the move appears to be the first against a domestic nonprofit.

Slack’s terms of service prohibit clients from engaging “in activity that incites or encourages violence or hatred against individuals or groups,” although the Free Beacon could not identify any incidents from FAIR that violated this policy. FAIR describes itself as a “non-partisan, public interest organization with a support base comprising nearly 50 private foundations and over 1.9 million diverse members and supporters” dedicated to reducing U.S. immigration levels.

FAIR president Dan Stein wrote to Slack on Thursday demanding the company “preserve all internal communications involving this decision in anticipation of probable litigation.” Stein also alleged that Slack violated FAIR’s contract by shutting down the account without notice or prior warning.

“You should be advised that FAIR is well aware that there are government actors who are actively trying to censor Americans’ right to freedom of speech and their use of tech platforms, including particular individuals at the Department of Homeland Security,” Stein wrote. “Evidence that there was intervention by government officials in this matter would be of supreme interest not only to FAIR but to the general public.”

A spokesman for Slack told the Free Beacon it banned FAIR because it violated the company’s policy forbidding incitement of hatred or violence and that the nonprofit is “affiliated with a known hate group.”

“When we learn of an organization using Slack for illegal, harmful or other prohibited purposes, we conduct an investigation and take appropriate action in accordance with our policy,” the spokesman said.

Slack is owned by Salesforce, a software company valued at more than $160 billion and chaired by left-wing activist Marc Benioff. Over the years, Benioff has earned the moniker “Tech’s woke CEO” by making Salesforce a champion of left-wing values.

Benioff has generously donated to various Democratic politicians such as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. In 2019, he announced that Salesforce would no longer do business with any company that sells certain types of firearms or ammunition magazines. Last September, Salesforce said it would pay to relocate any employees in Texas who feared they could not get abortions.

The move from Slack follows years of censorship campaigns against conservatives. In January, Facebook banned a conservative publisher from advertising children’s books about U.S. presidents for allegedly violating the company’s “standards.”

Many of these platforms, such as Twitter, have appointed left-wing ideologues in charge of content moderation. In May, the Free Beacon reported on Twitter’s lead censor Yoel Roth’s history of calling Trump officials “actual Nazis” and his decision to block the sharing of an October 2020 New York Post report on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop because he believed the Russian government may have been involved in its publication.

Whistleblower documents obtained earlier this month by Republican senators Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Chuck Grassley (Iowa) revealed that the Department of Homeland Security’s now-shuttered Disinformation Governance Board intended on working with such tech companies as Twitter to police content. DHS terminated the Disinformation Governance Board following bipartisan outrage amid controversy over its then-executive director Nina Jankowicz, who had spread conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden’s laptop and called for lawmakers to outlaw “awful but lawful” content on social media platforms.

Stein said Slack’s conduct should have other conservative organizations on notice going into the November midterm elections.

“You could be next,” Stein said.

https://freebeacon.com/culture/unfair-woke-tech-company-slack-bans-conservative-group-from-platform/

University’s approach to Kevin Kruse provides stark contrast to its treatment of Joshua Katz

Princeton University learned in December about plagiarism allegations against one of its star progressive professors, emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show, but it does not appear to have taken action against him in the intervening six months.

On Dec. 6, the economic historian Phillip Magness emailed Princeton’s dean of faculty, Gene Jarrett, with evidence that Princeton historian Kevin Kruse plagiarized several passages of his 2015 book One Nation Under God.

“I am sharing this information in the interest of academic integrity,” Magness wrote. The email contained detailed comparisons between Kruse’s book and a 1956 New York Times article from which Kruse appears to have lifted passages without attribution.

The university never replied to Magness’s email, Magness told the Free Beacon, and has not announced an investigation of Kruse. Jarrett did not respond to a request for comment.

The university’s treatment of Kruse—a historian known for his searing criticism of conservative media—contrasts sharply with its scorched-earth approach to Joshua Katz, the classics professor who was fired last month after raising hell over the school’s racial politics.

That contrast raises questions about political double standards at the Ivy League university, which has denied that its firing of Katz had anything to do with ideology.

Katz was a Princeton pariah: His biting criticism of the school’s political correctness drew flak from students, faculty, and staff, including Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber. The university even condemned Katz as a racist in its 2021 freshman orientation programming, doctoring one of his quotes to make him seem racially insensitive. It began investigating him within a month of receiving “new information” about a consensual relationship he had with a student in 2007, for which he had already been punished in 2018.

Kruse, on the other hand, is a darling of the online left. He frequently posts Twitter threads debunking conservative “lies” and, in 2017, mocked a member of the Trump administration for plagiarizing his master’s thesis.

“We’d expel a student who pulled this,” Kruse tweeted.

Kruse may have plagiarized his own thesis, Magness argued in a June 14 Reason article, on top of his 2015 book. Passages in Kruse’s 2000 doctoral dissertation are almost indistinguishable from those in two 1996 monographs: Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta by Ronald Bayor and The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas Sugrue.

Magness highlighted these similarities in another email to Princeton on June 7, this time addressed to the dean of research, Pablo Debenedetti. Debenedetti replied that he forwarded the email to Jarrett’s office, which never circled back to Magness.

Plagiarism is a “very serious charge at Princeton,” the school’s academic integrity policies state. “It can result in disciplinary probation, suspension, or expulsion.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/double-standards-princeton-turns-blind-eye-to-plagiarism-from-woke-professor/

The U.S. education system appears to have been hijacked by people with a specific agenda. Actual education has been replaced by indoctrination, teachers replaced by activists pushing nefarious agendas.

Young children are being exposed to provocative, highly-sexualized content. They’re also being encouraged to question their privilege and supposedly racist roots.

However, all is not lost. More and more Americans are speaking up against the madness. They have had enough. According to the latest University of Massachusetts Amherst Poll, an increasing number of Americans want the insanity, or the slide into insanity, to stop—and they want it to stop now.

The vast majority of respondents stated that teachers asking children in grades K-6 for their preferred gender pronouns was wrong. The vast majority also said they were against the idea of assigning children in grades K-6 books that discuss transgender issues. They also opposed the idea of teachers discussing their sexual orientation with young children.

Commenting on the poll, author Don Surber had this to say: “LGBT classes are indoctrination, not education.” The same could be said about CRT classes. As Surber noted, although “CRT proponents claim this is only taught in college, they should have no problem with banning teaching a racist and anti-American doctrine that seeks to discredit the Constitution.” But, for some strange reason, “proof of CRT instruction in schools keeps popping up.”

Surber finished by asking a pertinent question: “If so many people oppose teaching CRT and LGBT, why are these subjects being taught in public schools?”

He’s right. How did we get here?

I’ll tell you how. Last year, in an article for The American Mind, I discussed something called the gated institutional narrative (GIN), a concept first put forward by the polymath Eric Weinstein. The GIN perfectly encapsulates the madness that has swept, and continues to sweep, through the U.S. education system.

As I said at the time, the “GIN explains the ways in which heavily filtered information is presented to the public by the mainstream media and academics.” Take the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” for example. Although the project has been lambasted by highly-respected commentators, it still, for some unfathomable reason, carries a great deal of authority.

On closer inspection, however, the reason it carries so much authority is entirely understandable. After all, the project was initiated by the NY Times, one of the most influential papers on the planet. Additionally, its historically inaccurate narrative has been pushed by comparably powerful outlets, frequently and forcefully. Furthermore, it appeals not to facts, but to feelings. In this age of speaking “your truth” instead of the truth, the NY Times decided to tell its “truth.”

The GIN, as I said in The American Mind piece, “is like an exclusive nightclub. Only the right kind of people can enter.” Orthodox thinkers—in other words, people willing to follow the herd—are the only people permitted entry. Those who refuse to comply are quickly turned away. “Go away and sober up,” they’re told.

Bad ideas beget bad ideas—the inaccurate (often pernicious) ideas generated within the GIN bounce around in a gigantic echo chamber. Then, like a swift missile strike, they’re launched into broader society.

At the same time, good ideas—that is, ideas that counter the bad ones created within the system—are intentionally blocked from entering. With such a design, it’s easy to see how bad ideas, even wicked ones, continue to circulate and become more virulent in nature.

Bad Ideas Spread Like a Virus

In his latest book, aptly titled “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,” Dr. Gad Saad discusses how bad ideas, or “idea pathogens,” spread like a virus, killing common sense in the process. In the American education system, as you’re no doubt aware, commonsense is in short supply.

If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of a recent piece written by Jonathan Turley, one of the country’s leading legal scholars. Unlike so many involved in academia, Turley has a backbone. He has a significant voice and is not afraid to use it. Instead of echoing the narratives of the GIN, Turley exposes the absurdities occurring within the gated community.

In the insular world of academia, he noted, “there have been growing controversies over language guides and usages, including the use of pronouns that some object to as matters of religion or grammar.” Now he warned, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), “the largest association of science teachers in the world,” wants to add to the controversy.

Take a read of the NSTA’s latest guide, and you’ll quickly see that Turley’s concerns are very much warranted. The educators are now pushing for “gender-inclusive biology.” What, you’re probably wondering, could this new-age biology entail?

In short, unscientific calls to permanently abandon everyday terms like “men,” “women,” “parent,” “mother,” and “father.” Mothers, according to the guide, should only be referred to as “persons with ovaries.” Fathers, meanwhile, should be referred to as “persons with testes.”

Although tens of millions of Americans have had enough, don’t expect the GIN to stop churning out bad ideas anytime soon.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/crt-and-lgbt-in-the-classroom-americans-have-had-enough_4529306.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-17&utm_medium=email&est=8OU%2B9BaVgNnKArRXOqxqfMucj8Bx917XCFjwHHbfAVQOk1p78Q3AxLpe9z7LfUExIA%3D%3D

THE MICROSOFT NEWS WEBSITE FOUNDED BY BILL GATES HURRIEDLY DELETED THE STUDY FROM ITS PAGES.

A research paper found that people who did not receive a COVID-19 vaccine had a lower rate of suffering a severe case of the virus amidst the pandemic.

The article, which has been uploaded to the preprint server ResearchGate, relied on data from over 18,500 respondents across 175 countries. Analysis revealed that individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 reported fewer instances of hospitalization in comparison to their vaccinated counterparts.

MSN – a news website launched by vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates’s Microsoft in 1995 –  covered the study, titling its article “Severe COVID-19 ‘Rare’ In Unvaccinated People,” but appears to have taken down the story since its publication. Archived versions of the article are still available, however.

The survey – “Self-reported outcomes, choices and discrimination among a global COVID-19 unvaccinated cohort“– was conducted from September 2021 through February 2022. Data collected for the survey was analyzed by an independent, international team of scientists led by Robert Verkerk, Ph.D., the founder and executive and scientific director of Alliance for Natural Health International.

“It is important to recognize that because the cohort represents a self-selected, as opposed to randomly selected, sample, the findings cannot be directly compared with other observational studies based on self-reported data based on randomly selected subjects,” emphasized the study.

Many of the unvaccinated individuals included in the analysis opted for natural treatments such as vitamin D, zinc, quercetin, and drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

The study also found that people unvaccinated against COVID-19 faced discrimination for their decisions, with between 20 to 60 percent of people per country reporting being personal targets of “hate or victimization.”

MUST READ: Politif*cked: An Office Manager from Florida and a Gates-Funded Professor Are Censoring Studies Linking Mask Usage to Increased Deaths.

“Respondents reported feeling even more victimized by their respective states, with rates among respondents being greatest in Southern Europe (61%), Western Europe (59%), Australia and New Zealand (57%) and South America (57%),” explained the paper.

The survey follows additional studies reaching similar conclusions about the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. A Koch Institute report assessing data from the German government, for example, found that 80 percent of cases of the Omicron variant occurred in fully vaccinated people in the country.

More than half of state attorneys general rejected an “unlawful” Biden administration memorandum, which prevented students from receiving federal funding for public school lunches if their district didn’t comply with LGBT mandates.

In a letter to the president, 26 Republican attorneys general demanded the Biden administration withdraw its Department of Agriculture’s Title IX interpretation, which will take billions of dollars in National School Lunch Program funding away from schools that don’t let biological males use the girls’ bathroom or compete in girls’ sports. The department’s interpretation violated the Administrative Procedures Act, since it was issued as a memorandum rather than a proposed rule for the public to comment on, the attorneys general wrote.

The Biden administration has a history of going around the public when issuing policies, Matt Bowman, a senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Washington Free Beacon. Before the Supreme Court blocked it in January, a mandate without public comment from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration required that workers at businesses with 100 or more employees get vaccinated or submit a negative COVID test weekly.

With the exception of New Hampshire attorney general John Formella, every Republican attorney general joined the coalition, which is led by Tennessee attorney general Herbert Slatery.

The coalition is “evaluating all options to stop this federal overreach,” a spokeswoman for Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich (R.) told the Free Beacon. He said “a federal government bully is more than any child or school should have to contend with.” Florida attorney general Ashley Moody (R.) criticized the Biden administration for “using hungry children to advance a political agenda.”

Approximately 30 million students benefit from the National School Lunch Program.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-lgbt-mandates-for-school-lunch-program-unlawful-republican-attorneys-general-say/

‘Drag queens—not only are they not hurting our kids—drag queens make everything better,’ said state AG Dana Nessel

Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel (D.) said Wednesday that drag queens ought to be in every school.

Nessel, who is best known for passing out drunk in the stands after two Bloody Marys at the 2021 Michigan-Michigan State football game, admitted she did not poll-test the idea before floating it at a civil rights conference in Lansing.

“A drag queen for every school! That is what would be fun for the kids and lift them up when they are having emotional issues,” Nessel said. “Drag queens—not only are they not hurting our kids—drag queens make everything better! Drag queens are fun.”

The attorney general made the remarks by way of saying she doesn’t understand why the electorate is deeply divided over social issues. She said that state leaders should ignore “wedge issues” and come together in pursuit of common goals, such as education and health care.

Nessel’s “drag queens for any age” platform is a marked contrast with states like Texas and Florida, where exposing children to pornified dancers giving lewd performances can trigger a child abuse investigation.

Her comments also stand in contrast with her sprawling probe of sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Nessel’s long-running investigation, which covers allegations going back decades, has netted fewer than a dozen indictments. And the probe is larger than her office’s investigation of Michigan State University and Dr. Larry Nasser, the physician who assaulted over 250 young girls in his role as team doctor for the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, according to the Detroit News.

Nessel is seeking a second term this November. Her Republican challenger, Kalamazoo lawyer Matthew DePerno, said the comments show her unfitness for office.

“Students in the third grade are behind on their reading, our test scores are some of the worst in the country thanks to these disastrous COVID lockdowns, and she calls for drag shows for Kindergarteners,” DePerno said.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/michigan-dem-calls-for-a-drag-queen-for-every-school/

As parents across the nation fight to have a say in their children’s public education, more are taking things into their own hands: running for local school boards.

Sean Kaufman in Woodstock, Georgia, is one of them. And his journey began with a school assignment on the American dream.

Before that, he never felt any reason to question what schools were teaching his children, and he would always check on whether his kids had done what their teachers had asked them to do.

“It was this ultimate trust [in the school system],” said the father of three, a small business owner and part-time professor at a local university.

During the pandemic, however, the virtual learning in public schools allowed him a closer look at what his children were learning.

In November 2020, his middle child Aiden, then a junior at the Woodstock High School, got an assignment in his advanced placement (AP) English class to write a paper on whether the American dream was dead or alive. He was also assigned to peer review two other students’ essays.

“Every single child wrote the American dream was dead. And that really bothered me,” Kaufman told The Epoch Times about the three papers he read.

While Aiden wrote that the American dream was “dwindling” and “unable to be fulfilled by the current American society,” his classmates described the ideal in their essays as a “delusion,” “fallacy,” and a “broken dream.”

One cited George Floyd’s death as the reason the American dream was “an illusion” and “broken.” The 46-year-old black man died after a police officer held his knee on Floyd’s back and neck while pinned to the ground in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2020. His death prompted mass demonstrations across the globe as protestors called for racial justice.

Kaufman asked his son why wrote the essay in that way.

“Dad, it’s easier,” replied Aiden. “They [the teacher] give you argumentative papers [papers provided for background]. Three say the American dream is dead, and one says it’s kind of alive.” And according to Aiden, if he “went along” with the main theme that the American dream was dead, the teacher wouldn’t ask him to defend his position.

Kaufman thought his public health students at the Kennesaw State University might know more than high schoolers.

During the same week, he conducted an ad hoc survey in class, “How many of you believe the American dream is dead?” He asked his class of about 25 students.

“Ninety percent raised their hands,” said Kaufman. “I was just blown away.”

He asked his college students what the American dream was. Not getting an answer, he defined it for them, “The American dream is, in this country, if you work hard, you sacrifice, and you never quit, you will find some type of success in your life.”

After giving the students his definition, he tried again, “How many of you still believe the American dream is dead?”

Still, 90 percent raised their hands.

“If you believe the American dream is dead in this country, why are you sitting in a college classroom?” he asked. The class was silent. Students looked shocked, and one said he hadn’t thought about that.

To Kaufman, associating the death of George Floyd with the end of the American dream reflects a tenet of critical race theory (CRT). “CRT believes that everywhere you are, the system is rigged against persons of color.”

CRT is a quasi-Marxist framework that argues that America is systematically racist. Supporters say it’s a college-level theory course not taught in K-12 public schools, yet critics beg to differ.

Kaufman is not alone in Georgia in believing in the American dream.

In a June 2021 poll, eighty-one percent of voters in Georgia agreed with the following statement: “Children should never be taught that their destiny and inherent value depends on their skin color. Instead, American schools should be teaching American children about the American Dream that is available to them.” The Georgia statewide survey was conducted by Heritage Action for America, the grassroots and advocacy arm of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

The percentages of agreement in Democrat, independent, and Republican groups were 62, 85, and 97, respectively. The survey’s sample size was 600, with 38 percent Democrats, 15 percent independents, and 41 percent Republicans.

Running for School Board and Raising Awareness

Fast forward to this February, an 11th-grade English language arts class assignment prompted Kaufman to file a formal lesson challenge and speak at the Cherokee County School Board meeting.

The assignment asked students to read the book “Desiree’s Baby” by 19th-century American author Kate Chopin and write an extended ending. Students should “stay true to the tenet of the literary period” and write in the original third-person point of view or as any of the characters.

In the short story written in 1893, Desiree, abandoned as a baby and raised by a wealthy family in Louisiana, married Armond, a son of a plantation owner. When it turned out that their baby’s skin was black, Armond blamed Desiree for being part black and drove her away. However, when burning Desiree’s belongings, he came across a letter between his parents that revealed the secret they kept from him: he was the one who was part black.

Many students wrote from the perspective of Armond, according to Kaufman.

He quoted one such writing during his speech at the February school board meeting, “Surrounding me were the negroes fueling the fire, their skin now a reminder that I was part of who they were.  I felt a horrid disgust inside of me. Oh, how I wished my skin would melt from my bones; I could never be one of them.”

“What benefit is there, in my opinion, to make a child write as though he is a racist, bigoted slave owner hundreds of years later?” asked Kaufman.

In response to his challenge, the school’s English department formed a review committee with members from the administration, professional learning community, and instruction personnel. A month later, the committee recommended the continuation of the assignment because students could choose any character’s point of view for their writing. It also suggested offering alternative assignments and hiding students’ names on papers during peer review at parents’ request.

Kaufman didn’t think alternative assignments were the solution. And he didn’t believe the school board listened. Hence, he decided to run for the school board to become a voice for change.

And no surprise, CRT is front and center in his first attempt at public service.

Unlike in most states, some of Georgia’s school board elections are partisan. Kaufman was up against two other Republican candidates, Erin Ragsdale and Eric Richards, in the primary on May 24. The Republican incumbent didn’t run this time. None of the candidates got over half of the votes. Therefore, a runoff was scheduled for June 21, with early voting between June 13 and 17. The runoff winner will face the Democrat primary winner on Nov. 8.

Kaufman finished second at the primary last month, earning him a seat in the runoff. A total of 6,493 votes were cast in the Republican primary, compared to 1,392 votes in the Democrat primary with only one candidate.

Kaufman’s opponent Ragsdale, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, runs on “making the best [school district] even better.” She promised “continued support” of the district’s decision to ban CRT on her website.

In May 2021, the county school district passed a resolution prohibiting the implementation of CRT. Kaufman said that many voters were thus confused and didn’t know that, although banned, CRT had been integrated into the schools’ teaching.

“You integrate theory into class; you don’t teach the theory,” he said. “When people say, ‘CRT is not being taught,’ it’s a lie.”

He said Democrats voted for his opponent because she wouldn’t change the status quo much. Primaries are open in Georgia, meaning voters can cross party lines to vote. The Epoch Times has reached out to Ragsdale for comment.

“I love our children. Our children are born the way that they are born, and the way they are born is beautiful. They are perfect,” he said, explaining his determination to get CRT out of the county schools. “And to tell a child that the way they are born and the color of their skin dictates who they will be in this life, whether they will be an oppressed or an oppressor?

“It breaks my heart.”

After the primary, Richards, who ranked last, endorsed Kaufman. He had run his race on similar stances. If Kaufman can get the votes that previously supported Richards, he may reach the majority and defeat Ragsdale in the runoff. To achieve that, he has continued to post videos on social media, go door to door, and send mailers and text messages.

“Every vote in runoff counts. Every vote,” he said. “It’s going to be decided very very closely. And I’m praying that Eric Richards’ voters get behind me.”

However, losing the runoff wouldn’t mean the end of his efforts. He said he wanted to be the voice that brought about the change, “I have raised awareness in over 2,000 people in my community.”

“That’s 2,000 people that believe and have been wakened and will continue to fight beside me as we continue to try and increase awareness about what’s happening in our community,” he added.

‘Are You For or Against CRT?’

While the outcome of Kaufman’s runoff has still to be decided, halfway across the nation in the south, Stephanie Elad has won her seat in the Frisco Independent School District (Frisco ISD), an area about 30 miles north of Dallas, Texas. It was an open seat as the incumbent didn’t seek re-election. She campaigned on academic excellence and teacher retention, and ran as a conservative in the non-partisan race.

Although she didn’t run with CRT as her number one issue or mention the term CRT much, it was the number one question she was asked during door-knocking on Republican-leaning voters. The first question they often asked her was, “Are you for or against CRT?”

“Ninety-five percent of them wanted me just to say I’m against it,” she told The Epoch Times. “I would say I’m against it. And then my next statement was, ‘And we do have it here in Frisco.’”

Some people said they knew, but most were surprised. Then, Elad would provide examples of what she believed to be “CRT inspired.” “One of our high schools did a ‘privilege walk’ last fall. All you had to do is to tell people about that, and they were horrified.”

In a privilege walk, students usually stand in a straight line and step forward if they have certain privileges, such as being white and a male. It’s an activity stemming from the viewpoint that society doesn’t offer equal access to opportunities.

The school board seat is Elad’s first public service job. Her journey began in April 2021 at a school board meeting. She had signed up for public comment to talk about mask mandates but decided to change her topic after the then-board president Chad Rudy told the audience: “Please keep the discussion down. We’re trying to get through our meeting tonight. This is our discussion.”

“There was a comment made that this was your meeting. I think this is our meeting,” she told trustees on the school board. The audience applauded.

“I think the parents and the taxpayers deserve a little more respect,” she added. “This is our meeting.” The audience cheered again.

After that, people told her she should run for the school board. And she did. She announced the campaign in January and decided to “lean in” her conservative identity.

She avoided getting into the debate whether CRT was or was not taught in Frisco schools but focused on the outcomes, such as sliding academic standards. For example, to her, the Integrated Language Arts (ILA) pilot program introduced in the 2021-21 school year that combined on-level and advanced-level learning into the same classroom to promote equity and inclusivity was an outcome of a CRT-inspired approach.

The Frisco ISD serves 66,000 students and spans over two counties: Collin and Denton, which is more conservative than Collin. And all board seats are at-large, meaning they represent the entire ISD. This year’s school board election saw a big turnout of around 15,000, compared to 8,000 a year ago.

Elad said everyone told her that, like many conservative municipal candidates before her, she would lose Collin and win Denton and that she needed to make sure the margin in Denton would compensate the loss in Collin. On the contrary, she defeated the runner-up—Dustin Paschal who identified student mental health issues as the biggest challenge—by 400 in Collin County and about 800 votes in Denton.

“I have Democrats donate to me because they hate this [ILA pilot] program so much. Their kids are in it. Some of them have advanced kids, and some don’t,” she told The Epoch Times. “They just don’t like the program and the concept behind it. And they are concerned that it can spread to other subjects.”

‘Fight like Hell with a Smile on Our Faces’

While both Kaufman and Elad run for an open seat, many candidates run against incumbents.

“School boards incumbents lost at nearly twice the historical average,” Ballotpedia, a website that tracks election results, reported at the end of May. The finding was based on candidates who ran on at least one of the three “conflict issues”—identified as race in education, COVID-19 responses, or sex and gender in schools—in 141 school districts in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin’s school board elections held on April 5. And the sample size involved 334 seats in those 141 districts.

“I think this might be the first time that people are actually paying attention to school board elections,” Virginia Beach City school board member Victoria Manning told The Epoch Times.

“Often, people go to the polls, and we’re passing out our literature, and I say, ‘Do you know whom you’re voting for school board?’ And they look at me, dazed and confused, ‘What’s that?’”

Manning, a realtor, won her election in 2016 and was re-elected in 2020.

All three issues—race, COVID-19, and sex education—boiled down to parental rights to her. “Ultimately, it boils down to parents having to be the ultimate decision-makers, parents and guardians.”

According to Tiffany Justice, co-founder of advocacy group Moms for Liberty (M4L), parents are “acting preemptively at their local level” to protect their children and not waiting to fight against “harms that they see coming down the pipe.”

Founded in January 2021, M4L now has over 90,000 members in 195 chapters across 37 states, Justice said. A third of the total membership has been new since November. Hawaii, Louisiana, and Connecticut are the latest states with new chapters.

Justice said that her organization continues to grow across the country, focusing on “unifying, educating, and empowering parents to defend or protect their parental rights at all levels of government.”

The battles were not all victories. M4L supported or endorsed over 40 school board candidates who won in the state of New York but also saw losses. For example, in Dutchess County, every candidate the organization endorsed lost.

Justice described the journey as a “long road:” “We didn’t get to this place in America overnight, and it’s going to take time. But we have found that America’s government does not work without us involved.”

Moms are getting creative, she said. She gave an example: at a chapter chair meeting in mid-May, one of the mothers said she got a meeting with the superintendent in her school district. Although angry, she made sure to sandwich her concerns with positive things she could say about the school district. And slowly, she found that the division leadership began addressing her concerns.

“Our moms and dads know that we are fighting for the survival of America,” Justice told The Epoch Times. “There’s no greater national security threat to the United States than having a generation of children who are not able to read or discern [right from wrong] for themselves.”

Her and M4L members’ responses? “Fight like hell with a smile on our faces. Get as many people out and encourage many parents to go out and vote to have their voices heard.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/fight-like-hell-with-a-smile-on-our-face-crt-debate-spurs-parents-to-run-for-school-boards_4391585.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-16&utm_medium=email&est=oovSkXMh1PkeGdGBcA3uOjH6Mtjy6Hmyk%2BK3SMPuETvLuom6Rtb8VI7n4ui2S%2BMZ6g%3D%3D

The Wisconsin Association of School Boards (WASB) has terminated its membership with the National School Boards Association (NSBA) amid controversy over a letter sent to the Biden administration likening concerned parents at school board meetings to “domestic terrorists.”

WASB voted Tuesday not to renew its membership with NSBA, joining a number of states which have opted to do so since the letter came to light last year, Fox News reported.

“Actions by the NSBA’s leadership last fall needlessly harmed school board relationships and inflamed partisan tensions,” WASB said in a statement to its members. “Those actions caused more than half of the state school board organizations across the nation to distance themselves from the NSBA or drop membership entirely.”

The WASB noted that it is “encouraged by the NSBA’s new executive director Dr. John Heim,” according to Fox.

The Epoch Times has contacted the WASB for comment.

‘Angry Mobs’

It comes after the NSBA sent a letter (pdf) to resident Joe Biden on Sept. 29, 2021, asking for federal law enforcement and other assistance to “deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation,” and characterizing disruptions at school board meetings as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime.”

The letter was in response to parents at school board meetings raising issues regarding COVID-19 restrictions like mask mandates that were being imposed on their children, as well as the teaching of Marxist critical race theory.

The letter also referred to the groups of parents raising issues as “angry mobs” that had forced the meetings to “end abruptly.”

“Local school board members want to hear from their communities on important issues and that must be at the forefront of good school board governance and promotion of free speech. However, there also must be safeguards in place to protect public schools and dedicated education leaders as they do their jobs,” the letter noted.

Days after the letter was sent, on Oct. 4, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo directing federal law enforcement to meet to discuss an alleged “disturbing trend” in “violent threats against school officials and teachers.”

However, following backlash over its letter, the NSBA underwent an independent review to identify the events and procedures that led to its sending of the letter.

That review was completed in May and saw the board implement “a number of action items moving forward” based on its findings while noting that the letter had not been “widely reviewed or approved within the organization, and the finalized letter was not disclosed to the full NSBA Board of Directors or NSBA members until after it was submitted.”

The Board of Directors also apologized in October 2021 for the letter and announced new executive leadership for the organization in November 2021, with Heim replacing former Interim Executive Director and CEO, Chip Slaven.

“The letter directly contradicts our core commitments to parent engagement, local control, and nonpartisanship,” Heim said at the time. “The sentiments shared in the letter do not represent the views or position of the NSBA. The NSBA does not seek or advocate for federal law enforcement intervention at local school board meetings.”

Despite the apology and an independent review, a string of school boards have cut ties with the NSBA since 2021, including in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Missouri, Nebraska, and Minnesota.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/wisconsin-school-board-group-cuts-ties-with-nsba-over-letter-comparing-parents-to-terrorists_4534434.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-15-2&utm_medium=email&est=w2%2BSxfsWIpRcx1HW191ed9SeMDsFf1HVZ%2BADsznTRjw%2FxyBX6eB54djmkEMieY%2Btxw%3D%3D

Minority voters have turned on Joe Biden, Quinnipiac also finds

Fewer Americans support a ban on so-called assault weapons than Quinnipiac has ever recorded, the pollster reported on June 8.

Americans are about evenly divided on whether the government should ban assault weapons, the poll found, the lowest show of support for such a ban since February 2013, when Quinnipiac first started asking about it.

These results come even as mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians, including resident Joe Biden, have ramped up calls for an assault-weapon ban in light of recent mass shootings and ahead of this year’s midterm elections.

A plurality of respondents, including most Republicans and independents and 31 percent of Democrats, told Quinnipiac that mental health issues are the main cause of mass shootings committed by young people. Only 19 percent of all respondents say “the availability of guns” is the main cause. A majority of Americans, meanwhile, oppose any efforts to limit the number of firearms in the country.

Only 32 percent of respondents approve of how Biden has handled gun violence, just one aspect of Biden’s dismal approval ratings. Only 33 percent of Americans approve of the president’s performance, while 55 percent disapprove. A wide majority of independents—61 percent—frown on what the president’s doing.

Minority voters have turned on the president, the poll found, in line with previous polling. Nearly 60 percent of Hispanics disapprove of the president. Biden’s approval among blacks, meanwhile, cratered from 63 percent in May to just 49 percent this month.

A plurality of voters told Quinnipiac that they want to see the Republican Party retake control of Congress this year.

https://freebeacon.com/guns/support-for-assault-weapon-ban-is-lowest-ever-recorded-poll-shows/

Students could be suspended for using wrong pronouns for classmates

Virginia parents are holding a rally on Thursday to oppose a Fairfax County School Board vote on proposed handbook changes that could suspend students as young as fourth grade for “malicious misgendering.”

Fairfax County Public Schools would reserve the right to suspend for a week students who engage in “malicious deadnaming” or use slurs based on “gender identity,” “gender expression,” and “sexual orientation,” according to a copy of its new Student Rights and Responsibilities handbook. Parents opposed to the measure will speak out against the handbook proposals in front of the elementary school where the school board will meet to vote on Thursday evening. Many say they are motivated by a desire to put their child’s education first, rather than “gender politics.”

The “school board is prioritizing these types of initiatives versus focusing on what parents would expect: recovering from learning loss, home/virtual schooling, and getting our kids back into the classroom, post-COVID,” Jeff Hoffman, a Fairfax County father of three, told the Washington Free Beacon.

The vote is the latest political scuffle that has pitted parents against the heavy-handed tactics of public school officials. Led by teachers’ unions and left-wing activist groups, school boards across the nation have implemented policies to encourage the expression of sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom, often without parental consent. The Free Beacon reported in March on a New Jersey public middle school that forced students to watch a video about hormone treatment, without notifying parents beforehand. Other parents told the Free Beacon their child “socially transitioned” to another gender at school without their knowledge.

The new handbook also represents the lasting influence of the 2020 Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, which expanded the definition of the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against sex discrimination to include “gender identity” and “sexual orientation.” After assuming office, resident Joe Biden issued an executive order to the same effect, and Democratic governor Ralph Northam signed companion legislation in Virginia.

The initiative led to a model plan for transgender students put out by the Virginia Department of Education. Among other recommendations, the plan encouraged prohibiting discrimination, harassment, or bullying based on gender identity, as well as identifying students and maintaining their records in “compliance with applicable nondiscrimination laws.” The document cited the Civil Rights Act and Biden’s executive order to explain its reasoning.

The school board had planned in May to vote on the handbook changes. It punted on that decision after a conservative legal group sent a letter to board members and the county chairman warning that the new student rules may be unconstitutional.

America First Legal senior adviser Ian Prior in a statement said the group will monitor whether the school approves the rules on Thursday.

“Fairfax County Public Schools’ amendments increasing punishment for children as young as 8-years old for misgendering other students creates a completely subjective disciplinary regime that is vague, overbroad, and threatens the constitutional rights of students and parents,” Prior said.

The Fairfax County School Board in July 2021 unanimously voted to approve changes to its 2021-22 handbook, which allowed students to use bathrooms based on their gender identity, be referred to by their preferred pronouns, and prevent the disclosure of their gender identity or sexual orientation if they so choose.

Fairfax County parents requested the school board host an in-person townhall on the proposed handbook before the vote, but none has been organized. They have also asked that the vote be delayed until a special report is commissioned to document every “gender-expansive” provision that has followed Virginia’s model transgender student plan.

The rally will be held at 5:30 p.m. at Luther Jackson Middle School in Falls Church before the school board votes at 7 p.m.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/say-their-pronouns-virginia-parents-organize-to-stop-misgendering-rules-at-public-schools/

This episode will premiere on Tuesday, June 14, at 7:30 p.m. ET!    

“In most places, the public school system has gotten so bad, they’re doing more grooming than they are educating, grooming toward sexual chaos and leftist politics than any real educating toward truth and beauty and goodness.”

I sit down with actor Kirk Cameron, who’s most well-known for his role in the 1980s sitcom “Growing Pains.” He is the executive producer and star of the new documentary “The Homeschool Awakening.”

“History tells us that whoever controls the textbooks, controls the future,” he says.

Subscribe to the American Thought Leaders newsletter so you never miss an episode.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/kirk-cameron-public-school-system-is-grooming-children-towards-sexual-chaos_4532951.html?utm_source=ATLNewsletter&utm_campaign=2022-06-14&utm_medium=email&est=qCJ5jnEkX5fXmcOQk8WddH053QfBmXktyxhELidq9XvBZz98xsWdHkqdRqJ%2BFH1J7A%3D%3D

Dr. Reni Moon has spent her entire career as an advocate for vaccines. A pediatrician who is double board certified in pediatric hospital medicine and pediatrics, Moon said she has counseled thousands of families and always encouraged them to vaccinate.

“I’ve trusted my governmental agencies to do the studies that needed to be done and the rigorous testing to make sure that what we are injecting into our kids is not going to harm them,” she said.

Until now.

Instead of unquestionably following the CDC’s recommendations without double checking, Moon has been tracking safety data about the mRNA injections herself.

She is so concerned about the safety signals she is seeing in the pediatric population, that, she said, giving COVID-19 vaccines for children is “the most appalling thing I’ve heard in medicine. The lack of regard for safety is highly unethical. I personally put it into the arena of crimes against humanity.”

Children More Vulnerable

Children’s bodies and brains are more vulnerable than adults’ to environmental toxicants. ⁽¹⁾

Since children are smaller than adults, they are more heavily exposed to toxicants, in proportion to their body weight.

Given their unique vulnerabilities, the safety threshold to give children any medication, medical intervention, or medical recommendation must be high, higher than for adults.

Children are the future of humanity. Protecting children is the duty of society.

Mild For Kids

The SARS-CoV-2 virus has always been a threat mainly to the elderly and to adults who have underlying health issues, while younger and healthy people have generally have done well and children have hardly gotten sick at all.

In fact, COVID deaths in children are “incredibly rare,” according to an article in the peer-reviewed science journal Nature. ⁽²⁾

“All of the kids I know here at my institution had comorbidities,” explained a retired Colorado-based medical doctor and professor of ophthalmology and pediatrics who has a master’s degree in epidemiologist who worked at the state’s largest children’s hospital, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from his medical colleagues.

But Dr. Kirk Milhoan, M.D./Ph.D., a pediatric cardiologist who has had a long and successful career helping children with heart problems in both America and around the world, is speaking up.

Milhoan is the medical director of the non-profit For Hearts and Souls, which helps children with heart defects around the world. Based in Maui, he also works one week a month at the Texas Methodist Children’s Hospital in San Antonio.

Milhoan pointed out that the disease itself is mild for most children.

He cited a recent Turkish study that examined how many children were admitted for COVID versus for the flu. ⁽³⁾

“They found that kids admitted for the flu went to the ICU at rates and ended up needing breathing machines more often than children admitted for COVID,” Milhoan pointed out.

Though he, like other medical doctors we spoke with, is concerned about putting his livelihood in jeopardy by telling the truth, Milhoan feels he has a moral obligation to speak publicly about the lack of safety, efficacy, and necessity of the COVID-19 vaccines for children.

He told us, given the damage these vaccines are causing, that it is unethical for doctors to stay silent.

Vaccinating Kids Does Not Slow the Spread

“Let’s be honest,” Milhoan said. “It’s not stopping anything. Omicron is blowing through the vaccinated more so than the unvaccinated. After five months, for children, the vaccine has negative efficacy. It’s going to do more harm than good. What we’re seeing is that with those who are vaccinated they are more likely to get the infection than if they had nothing at all.”

Despite a concerted effort to massage the data to fit an orthodox narrative, high vaccination rates have not correlated in lowering COVID-19 cases or severity.

According to Milhoan, vaccinating children actually has the opposite effect: It encourages more—not less—viral spread.

But, despite this, there has been a push in the United States, Canada, and countries around the world to vaccinate even the youngest children. Even if the vaccine is not necessary or won’t protect them, parents are being told to get it for their infants, toddlers, small children, tweens, and teens for the sake of others.

Meanwhile, the country is saturated with the virus, which is quickly becoming endemic, as we have written about before. Testing reveals that COVID is everywhere, and that the vast majority of Americans and Canadians have already been exposed to it.

Vaccination rates among adults are high. The virus continues to behave like other endemic coronaviruses, mutating over time and continuing to cause milder illness and reinfections as few, if any, people are immunologically naïve to it.

The real irony is that the government had to roll back its early claim that the vaccine would prevent the spread of the virus after that was shown to be completely untrue. Yet the vaccine for kids is still being pushed for the sake of slowing the viral spread.

COVID-19 Vaccines Hurt Kids

We have spoken with over twenty-five medical doctors practicing in different states. They told us that COVID-19 vaccines side effects on children are real and very serious.

Their clinical experience is backed up by a growing body of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature that show that the vaccines can cause myocarditis (heart inflammation) and pericarditis (inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart) in all age categories, but particularly in young men. There is also evidence that the vaccines can cause clotting disorders, facial paralysis, tinnitus, and other serious side effects. ^{(4) (5) (6)}

But what about long-term side effects? Children have a longer shelf life than adults, so to speak. They have many more years of life ahead of them than we do, so early exposure to pollution or endocrine disruptors or unsafe vaccines can result in longer-term ill effects.

Milhoan wrote his doctoral thesis on cardiac inflammation. “The vaccine is dangerous for adolescent males. Absolutely without a doubt, you’re more likely to go to the hospital with a vaccine injury than from COVID,” he said. “For many kids it’s all risk and no benefit. What are we doing?”

The race to vaccinate children has not been driven by the need to protect them. It is being pushed on parents in pursuit of the goal to vaccinate everyone. Parents, bombarded with messages of fear, have been duped. Many are eagerly vaccinating their children in the hope of protecting them, without realizing that the cure is by and far more dangerous than the disease.

This Crime Against Children Must Be Stopped

We cannot assume something is safe for children without proof. We invoke the precautionary principle here—the idea that a new product (like the vaccines against COVID-19) cannot simply be assumed safe in the absence of definitive proof that they are causing harm. The precautionary principle is a modern restatement of the Hippocratic oath that all doctors must adhere to” I will keep them from harm and injustice.”

Following the precautionary principle, the burden of proof is on the manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccines. These companies have an ethical obligation to prove they are safe. But in violation of this ethical principle, the vaccines were rushed to the public without adequate testing. Now that we have ample proof that they are causing harm to children, it is time to stop using them.

Just this week Milhoan treated a 14-year-old who was perfectly healthy until getting a second COVID-19 vaccine. Now this young adolescent has a major scar on the left ventricle of the heart. Scarring like this, Milhoan said, can cause sudden death now or in the future in these children.

“I was in the military. I’ve gotten every vaccine,” Milhoan said. “I’ve had my second dose of smallpox, the whole series of anthrax. I am a scientist and a physician. I have seen the benefit that vaccines have had for children. This one has no benefit and all risk.”

References

^(1). Carroquino MJ, Posada M, Landrigan PJ. Environmental Toxicology: Children at Risk. Environmental Toxicology. 2012;239-291. Published 2012 Dec 4. doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-5764-0_11

^(2). Ledford, H. (2021). Deaths from covid ‘incredibly rare’ among children. Nature, 595(7869), 639–639. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01897-w

^(3). Yılmaz K, Şen V, Aktar F, Onder C, Yılmaz ED, Yılmaz Z. Does Covid-19 in children have a milder course than Influenza? Int J Clin Pract. 2021 Sep;75(9):e14466. doi: 10.1111/ijcp.14466. Epub 2021 Jun 27. PMID: 34107134; PMCID: PMC8237020.

^(4). Lee, Eun-Ju et al. “Thrombocytopenia following Pfizer and Moderna SARS-CoV-2 vaccination.” American journal of hematology vol. 96,5 (2021): 534-537. doi:10.1002/ajh.26132

^(5). Wan EYF, Chui CSL, Lai FTT, Chan EWY, Li X, Yan VKC, Gao L, Yu Q, Lam ICH, Chun RKC, Cowling BJ, Fong WC, Lau AYL, Mok VCT, Chan FLF, Lee CK, Chan LST, Lo D, Lau KK, Hung IFN, Leung GM, Wong ICK. Bell’s palsy following vaccination with mRNA (BNT162b2) and inactivated (CoronaVac) SARS-CoV-2 vaccines: a case series and nested case-control study. Lancet Infect Dis. 2022 Jan;22(1):64-72. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(21)00451-5. Epub 2021 Aug 16. PMID: 34411532; PMCID: PMC8367195.

^(6). “Vaccine Researcher Who Developed Tinnitus After COVID Calls for Further Study,” MedPage Today. https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/97592

Surveys in Missouri schools that collect information from students and create a perceived need for a so-called social-emotional learning curriculum have drawn the attention of state officials.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt issued subpoenas last week to seven school districts that allegedly employ student surveys—created by education companies Panorama and Project Wayfinder—that gather data about parents’ political beliefs and income levels, as well as racial identity, sexual behaviors, and mental health.

“Those same groups come in and sell that curriculum to the schools,” said Kimberly Hermann, general counsel with Southeastern Legal Foundation, a national nonprofit law firm that defends liberty.

“The contracts with these companies are public record, so they’re supposed to be approved during school board meetings, but the surveys are happening without parental consent and parental notification.”

In response, Schmitt has opened an investigation into the use of student surveys in Mehlville, Webster Groves, Jefferson City, Lee’s Summit R-7, Park Hill, Springfield, and Neosho schools—with an eye on violations of Missouri’s Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment.

“Subjecting students to personal, invasive surveys created by third-party consultants, potentially without parents’ consent, is ridiculous and does nothing to further our children’s education,” Schmitt said in a statement.

Hermann details in a May 1 letter to Schmitt that Webster Groves requires middle school students to take a survey on “LGBTQIA+ Struggles!” that asks: “What are your preferred pronouns, what struggles have you experienced related to LGBTQIA+, and what would you like to see in the school in order to be more inclusive?”

“There are federal statutes that they’re not supposed to ask these questions,” said Andy Wells, the Missouri chapter president of No Left Turn in Education, a national education advocacy organization.

“The problem is that school districts, and some of the companies that are being hired by school districts, don’t care. They just ignore it. They do it anyway and if somebody doesn’t like it, you’ll have to sue them.”

Second-graders were asked, “When is the first time you noticed that people can be different races from you, what did you notice, and do you feel more comfortable around people who look like you?”

“The goal here is to teach these kids that America is a white country of white supremacy and to destroy the nuclear family,” Hermann said. “If bad actors in the progressive left are not stopped, then we’re just going to have a further divide in this country among our kids.”

Neither Panorama nor Project Wayfinder responded by press time to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.

Schools often create partnerships with third-party vendors to secure grant money, according to Jill Carter, a candidate for the Missouri Senate’s 32nd District, and by accepting the grant, they are bound to allow the surveying.

“If it’s a platform that’s providing software or technology, especially with the technology in our school’s increasing, there’s less and less ability for the school to even really know what is being asked,” Carter told The Epoch Times.

“They are giving over that oversight, and the teachers sometimes don’t even know, because the kids are online or on a tablet, and that’s part of the software or implementation of some of these programs.”

Among the concerns identified is confidentiality.

“There’s a lot of danger by it,” Wells told The Epoch Times. “The biggest of which is who has access to the data and whether it follows students to college. How is the data being used?”

Another anxiety is whether the information gleaned is creating a profile that flags a need for intervention.

“It’s definitely a force of government and the intervention would be, ‘If we don’t like the way you respond on these surveys, we’re going to recommend intervention,’ and Panorama offers intervention activities and questions,” said Missouri-based Mary Byrne, who holds a doctorate in education from Teacher’s College in Manhattan.

“There’s a menu that you can access for teachers to implement different activities.”

The use of surveys isn’t new, according to Byrne.

“It was done years before, and that’s why the Pupil Privacy Act was put in place,” she said.

The Pupil Privacy Act, also known as the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment of 1978, prohibits children from participating in surveys and other analyses without parental consent and includes a provision for parents to opt their child out of such evaluations.

But there is no cause of action to file a lawsuit for a violation of federal privacy laws.

“The way Congress wrote the law is you can file an administrative complaint, but under the Biden administration, we know that’s not going anywhere,” Hermann said.

The subpoenas delivered by Schmitt demand documents and information to determine the extent of the surveys and whether parents consented to the surveys prior to distribution to students.

“We’d like him to obtain information regarding where these surveys are coming from and enforce federal and state privacy laws,” Hermann said.

“He has numerous different avenues that he could go based on the law and his investigatory power. So we’re going to leave it to his office to make determinations about what they think the best avenue is.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/worry-over-student-surveying-leads-missouri-attorney-general-to-subpoena-seven-school-districts_4526142.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-14-2&utm_medium=email&est=PsQH4rw7vVbFyWaQFVq4qsoOtXwcRsBYcgRQsUy%2F12xMkZI7TRhOGlCdjLa53lelFQ%3D%3D

School districts in Ohio now have the option to allow teachers and school employees to carry weapons.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine on June 13 signed a bill that would let school districts decide whether to allow teachers to be armed. Teachers in participating districts would require a minimum of 24 hours of training and eight hours of re-certification training annually.

The signing of the bill comes on the day Ohio’s “permitless carry” law takes effect.

Under the new law, school boards that allow teachers and employees to be armed have to inform the parents of the decision. The law also requires armed teachers to undergo annual criminal background checks.

Educators would receive comprehensive and quality training that also includes how to spot behavioral problems or violent tendencies in a student, DeWine said.

“This does not require school districts to arm its teachers,” DeWine said. “Every school district can make its own decision. This is a local choice not mandated by the state or governor. This bill is part of a comprehensive and layered approach to school safety and keeping kids safe in schools.”

The training would be scenario-based, including how to stop an active shooter and how to de-escalate a violent situation, crisis intervention.

“If parents hear or see something, they should say something,” DeWine said. “School safety is everyone’s business.”

The governor’s signing of the bill comes less than a month after the school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 dead.

The bill DeWine signed on Monday was in the works more than a year ago. The law will take effect in early September and would allow teachers to be armed in the 2022-2023 school year once the required training is completed.

Republican state Rep. Thomas Hall sponsored the bill to allow to arm teachers and introduced it on Feb. 9, 2021.

Hall’s father was a school resource officer on duty when a 14-year-old boy shot and injured two students at Madison High School in northeast Ohio in 2016.

“Today, Ohio is ‘doing something’ to address the issue of safety in schools,” Hall said. “Empowering districts to decide whether to allow teachers to be armed is a step in the right direction. In emergencies at our schools, seconds matter, and tragedies can be prevented.”

In addition to Democrat opposition, the Ohio Education Association which represents 121,000 educators, and the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police also opposed the bill.

The organizations were urging the governor to veto the bill and consider hiring more school resource officers.

Last year, the Ohio Supreme Court decided more than 700 hours of basic peace officer training—or 20 years of law enforcement experience—was required to carry a firearm in a school.

It later ruled that the legislature could change and clarify the law that would cover school employees, according to information from DeWine’s office.

“Our students and educators need to be in safe environments where they can focus on teaching and learning, not on the threat of having unprepared, woefully undertrained people—regardless of their good intentions—making split-second life-or-death decisions about whether to pull the trigger in a chaotic classroom full of innocent bystanders,” Ohio Education Association president Scott DeMauro said in a statement.

OFOP director of governmental affairs Michael Weinman told The Epoch Times there are major concerns with the legislation.

“We think it’s a terrible bill,” Weinman said. “The amount of training required for someone who is going to be carrying a gun in a school where there could be chaos is woefully inadequate.

“The majority of school shootings are done by a student or a former student,” Weinman added. “No. 1, schools can increase counseling and train teachers to spot red flags in these kids. Teachers have a lot on their plate already, but mental health is important. School administrators need to be able to communicate with parents about what is going on.”

Despite the opposition to the bill, some schoolteachers welcomed the opportunity to be armed.

“We are the last line of defense of protecting students and ourselves,” said a high school teacher in northeast Ohio, who didn’t want to be named. “I would be willing to go through the training to be armed, or would feel comfortable with my co-workers to be armed.”

Another teacher with more than 20 years of teaching experience in a Dayton area school district also supports the new law.

“I would be very willing to take the training, and be armed at school,” the teacher, who did not want to be named, told The Epoch Times. “Although it is an unthinkable tragedy when a shooting does happen in a school, I worry more about my family in the car being hit by a drunk driver.

“I also don’t think infringements on the Second Amendment are going to deter criminals or the mentally ill from attempting such things,” the teacher added.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ohio-governor-signs-bill-allowing-teachers-to-be-armed_4530001.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-14&utm_medium=email&est=KuXwshwrLYnDY9Ql2wj6c%2FJCndpGPXZsx12VjB1KhHFpvriekfAmB1iYeTCx9pdTBQ%3D%3D

Do you know what your children and grandchildren are being taught in school?

• One Virginia school system’s “anti-racism” policy pressured students to see them themselves as either racist or oppressed.
• A Wisconsin school was caught with secret plan to “transition” a gender-confused high schooler against her parent’s wishes.

Are you confident and equipped in your rights as a parent to face these dangerous ideologies and the threats they could present to your child’s wellbeing?

Over the past two years, parents across the nation have woken up to the threats facing their God-given, Constitutionally protected rights.

• In Albemarle County, VA, one school system’s “anti-racism” policy is indoctrinating students with anti-American history and divisive concepts regarding race. In one instance, a multi-racial student who objected to the curriculum was given the option of being segregated.
• In Wisconsin, parents were horrified to discover that their school policy called for secret plans to help “transition” gender-confused children, without parents’ knowledge or consent. School officials were instructed to use the students’ correct name and pronouns when speaking with parents, but transgender names and pronouns when parents weren’t present.

These are just two cases where parents are fighting to protect their fundamental role and authority.

But this is happening throughout the nation, and parents, you must be prepared in advance to defend your children against the impact of radical policies and harmful ideologies.

With that in mind, I am excited to invite you to join ADF for a free live event titled Parental Rights in the Face of Critical Theory, on Thursday, June 16th. This 45-minute training will feature some of our nation’s top parental rights experts and attorneys, answering pressing questions and providing real steps you can take to engage with your school board and policymakers.

During this training, you will be…

• Empowered to exercise your parental rights in the face of the increasing push for children to adhere to Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology
• Educated about the realities of Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE)
• Equipped to stand up for your child’s wellbeing if your rights are not respected
• Encouraged in your unique, God-given role as a parent or grandparent

This is a limited time offer, so make sure to register today and mark your calendars for this important opportunity.

We look forward to having you participate in this important event as we stand together to create a culture where parental rights are guaranteed.

Register today to attend Alliance Defending Freedom’s free online training, Parental Rights in the Face of Critical Theory, on Thursday, June 16th at 10am PST/1pm EST. This 45-minute, online event will feature our top-tier ADF attorneys and parental rights experts who will equip you to stand up for your children and grandchildren in a hostile culture.

REGISTER NOW

Sheriff David Clarke is working overtime to stop the left’s latest gun-grabbing plot.

Clarke partnered with The League for Law Enforcement to activate a grassroots army as election season kicks into high gear. (RELATED: Police Group Begins Airwave Bombardment Ahead of Midterms)

The objective, as outlined in his email to supporters, is two-fold:

• Fight to protect and secure our cherished, constitutionally guaranteed 2nd Amendment right to keep & bear arms, AND
• Support the brave men and women of Law Enforcement who risk their lives daily to serve and protect our families.

Radical leftists in Congress are fighting to undermine both, buoyed by progressive activists. They are determined to see gun control signed into law before a potential red tsunami crashes into Washington.

Republicans may have the edge in the race to reclaim the Legislative Branch. However, Democrats are relying on a tried and true strategy to cling to power.

Divide and conquer.

Their tactics come straight from the Saul Alinsky playbook “Rules for Radicals.”

While speaking on Saturday, gun control advocate David Hogg claimed putting more police officers in schools poses a risk to non-white children.

“Realize that putting more cops in schools actually may be a form of endangering our students as well — for the students that don’t have the privilege of having my skin color, or the fact that I am an American citizen,” Hogg proclaimed, in a lecture to the audience.

The Democratic-ruled U.S. House has already passed a bloated gun omnibus bill containing six proposals that would not have stopped the Uvalde massacre. 

These Republicans Surrendered on Gun Rights

Although the Protecting Our Kids Act faces daunting odds in the U.S. Senate, the left maintains constant pressure on Republican senators by utilizing ridicule, conflict, power and fear — all of which have a greater impact than ideas on people.

For the left, politics is a full-time profession. Make no mistake, their campaign to create a new system won’t end on Election Day 2022. Even if the GOP cruises to victory on Nov. 8.

Fortunately, Sheriff Clarke and The League know the most important lesson for fighting back: playing offense.

The League’s ads counterattacking the radical left are running on Fox News and Newsmax to act as a clarion call. Ultimately, complacency is the biggest threat right now to the conservative movement.

Resident Biden knows this. Motivating his base is the only strategy left that might save his party from a midterm thumping. That’s why he’s telling gun control advocates to keep marching. It’s also why the White House refused to condemn protests outside conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes, despite its blatant illegality — and the foreseeable assassination attempt against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. 

Enabled by Biden? – Armed Leftist Extremist Arrested at Justice Kavanaugh’s Home Was There to Kill

Biden understands that Democrats can still win this election. If they do, the far-left will continue to push for outlawing and confiscating firearms from law-abiding Americans under the guise of doing anything to protect innocent children. (RELATED: Biden’s Rhetoric on Guns is Far From ‘Reasonable’)

“They’re using … Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, to disarm responsible gun owners like me and you,” Sheriff Clarke warned American Liberty News.

“I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this is a fight we cannot afford to lose,” he stressed.

The Democrats’ war on cops and brazen disregard for the Bill of Rights may seem routine. But the reality of two more years of unchecked Democratic rule would be untenable.

And as Clarke asked in an ad for The League, “If voters don’t hold Democrats responsible for their disastrous policies, who will?”

Expect Clarke and The League’s vocal opposition to the leftist agenda to intensify through Election Day. And their commitment to liberty and law and order to continue long after.

The only question is: will you join them?

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

https://www.americanliberty.news/commentary/police-group-intensifies-ad-blitz-against-lefts-gun-grabbing-plot/phouck/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=6225

Dear Babylon Bee Supporter, 

Have you heard about “Drag Queen Story Hour” for young children being held in schools and libraries? 

How do you feel about “sex ed” lessons telling kids they can choose to be a boy or a girl-or something in between? 

What about kids reading graphically sexual books as part of required school curriculum?  It’s difficult for me to show you these images, but I think it’s important for you to know about what kids are seeing, at very young ages, in private and public schools. This is no longer extreme fringe content; this is now mainstream.

WARNING: Graphic Images Below

You might think it’s only happening in left-wing states like California or New York. That is, unfortunately, not the case. Across the country, kids from kindergarten to high school are being exposed to early sexualization. This is often at the taxpayers’ expense in publicly-funded schools!  

And, the reality is, it’s not just schools. Mainstream media networks, like Nickelodeon and Netflix, have kids shows about topics like gender fluidity and “toxic masculinity.” You’ve probably heard about the latest controversies at Disney. The Magic Kingdom wants to sexualize children. Here’s a direct quote from a recently leaked internal Disney meeting: 

“Our leadership over there has been so welcoming to my, like, not-at-all-secret gay agenda…I was just, wherever I could, just basically adding queerness…No one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.”

–Latoya Ravenaeu, executive producer at Disney Television Animation

The left unapologetically stands behind its blatant SEXUAL AGENDA for our children and is trying to erase boundaries…between families and “The State,” between men and women, and (most shocking to me) increasingly between children and adults.

Our kids are caught in the crosshairs of a political agenda to destroy the values that form the bedrock of our nation. PragerU refuses to stand idly by while the minds of our precious youth are warped and politicized to serve the goals of the left. 

That’s why we created PragerU Kids. 

PragerU Kids is PragerU’s K-12th grade educational initiative, with books, magazines, and kids shows that instill pro-America ideas and classic values. Launched just last year, PragerU Kids content has already been watched 16,000,000 times! 

PragerU has a cure for the left’s ideological sickness. Our PragerU Kids content offers penicillin to inoculate young minds from this brainwashing. 

Rest assured, we’re not alone in this fight. Over 300,000 parents and educators have already subscribed to PragerU Kids and are sharing our content far and wide-the majority are brand new to PragerU! They want to protect our children’s minds from this evil as much as we do. 

With your help, PragerU will expose what the left is actually attempting to do-turn our children into miserable, ungrateful, political activists who question their God-given nature, reject their families’ traditional values, and learn to despise America. 

Our children’s minds are at stake. Failure is not an option.

PragerU will fight for our children-and for America-but only with your help. America as we know it depends on us educating millions more parents, giving children positive alternatives, and offering kids the chance to become healthy, productive, patriotic adults. 

America’s youth needs us.

Sincerely, Marissa Streit, CEO

https://donate.prageru.com/give/408163/#!/donation/checkout?c_src=BB

Career criminal Cristina Iglesias mailed fake anthrax to British Commonwealth and Foreign Office in 2002

A transgender inmate who goes by the name Cristina Iglesias has not spent a day outside of federal prison as an adult. Iglesias was locked up in 1994 for sending death threats to federal judges and then pleaded guilty in 2005 to mailing fake anthrax to U.S. allies in the earliest days of the War on Terror. Now, thanks to a judge’s ruling, Iglesias is set to become the first transgender inmate to undergo sex-reassignment surgery—on the taxpayer dime.

Iglesias in 2020 became the poster child of the American Civil Liberties Union‘s quest to ensure even the most hardened criminals enjoy transgender rights, and the civil rights group that once focused its energies on free speech sued the government, arguing that denying the costly surgery is a violation of Iglesias’s constitutional rights. U.S. District Judge Nancy J. Rosenstengel agreed, writing in an opinion issued last month that “Iglesias suffers daily and is at risk of self-mutilation and suicide.”

Iglesias, 47, is set for release on Christmas Day, but wants the surgery before that time—and Rosentengel is ordering the Bureau of Prisons to find a surgeon to carry out the sex change. Cost estimates for the surgery itself vary widely. Some hospital estimates reach six figures, while the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery pegs the figure at about $25,000. Pricey quality-of-life care is required for years after the surgery, running about $40,000 annually in the first five years, according to a 2015 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The cost falls to $10,000 per year after a decade. The Bureau of Prisons declined to say whether taxpayers will provide that support.

New Biden administration policy requires prison officials to use a transgender inmate’s preferred name and pronouns and consider housing transgender inmates in prisons matching their “lived gender.” Federal policy doesn’t require surgery in every case, but left-wing groups like the ACLU are now using cases like Iglesias’s to make sure it is widely available for inmates. There are about 1,300 transgender inmates in federal jails, according to a Bureau of Prison spokeswoman.

Iglesias, who according to prison records is white but has used Hispanic names since 2004, is nearing the end of a 20-year bid for mailing white powder—from prison—to the British Commonwealth and Foreign Office in 2002, which prompted evacuations and street closures around London.

“I hope to see to it you people die a slow and painful death!!!” Iglesias wrote in a letter containing faux-anthrax. “This anthrax is very lethal and deadly!!!!”

Iglesias’s defense lawyers attributed those crimes to a long and clinically documented history of mental illness, which includes a pattern of compulsive and self-destructive behavior that is difficult to control.

“The subject’s history and the results of this evaluation suggest that his behavior is influenced by the existence of severe psychological deficits that are of long-standing duration,” Dr. Jethro Toomer wrote in the 2005 assessment. Defense filings from that case indicate Iglesias has from a young age been diagnosed or treated for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and alcohol addiction.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons in 2015 allowed Iglesias to begin hormone therapy. Iglesias went on to request facial laser hair removal, a transfer to a female facility, and “gender confirmation surgery.”

Iglesias in 2019 sued the Bureau of Prisons without counsel. A year and a half later, the ACLU showed up on the scene, took over the case, and filed a new complaint on Iglesias’s behalf. The Chicago legal powerhouse Winston & Strawn LLP also lent firepower to the cause. They argued, among other things, that the bureau’s “deliberate indifference” to Iglesias’s medical needs violates the Eighth Amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishments.

“To Ms. Iglesias, her genitalia feel like an abnormal and life-threatening growth on her body, like a malignant tumor from cancer that needs to be removed,” the lawsuit reads.

The Bureau of Prisons emphasized in court filings that it has never opposed those steps. It was willing, for example, to transfer Iglesias to a female prison provided that Iglesias sustained hormone levels that would make it impossible to maintain an erection—a condition essential for the safety of female inmates, according to prison authorities. And while the bureau has never categorically denied Iglesias’s requests for sex-reassignment surgery, the bureau maintained Iglesias should spend 12 months living as a woman in a female prison before undergoing the procedure.

Rosenstengel said the Bureau of Prisons violated Iglesias’s constitutional rights. Rosenstengel accused the bureau of manufacturing its prison rape rationale in response to the ACLU lawsuit. And she faulted authorities for holding Iglesias to “categorical” pre-surgery requirements, rather than individualizing medical decisions with input from LGBT medical experts.

The judge added urgency to her decision, writing that Iglesias requires the surgery but is “running out of time,” apparently referencing a government-funded sex change.

The ACLU says that Iglesias will be the first federal inmate to undergo a sex-reassignment procedure and on June 2 celebrated its victory as a legal landmark.

It’s not clear when the procedure will happen. Iglesias over the course of the case posed other problems for the bureau. Iglesias in 2021 leveled “unsubstantiated” allegations of violence and forced prostitution against another inmate, according to an affidavit from a corrections captain. And Iglesias had to be transferred to a different prison after authorities discovered Iglesias incurred “substantial debts to multiple inmates” to buy drugs. Court records are sparse on details about treatment the inmate needs ahead of release at the end of this year.

The Bureau of Prisons said it would not comment on matters subject to ongoing legal proceedings. The ACLU did not respond to a request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/courts/taxpayers-to-foot-bill-for-terrorists-sex-change/

AG Kwame Raoul says enforcement of drug crimes, truancy is discrimination

Democratic Illinois attorney general Kwame Raoul launched an investigation into the state’s largest school district for punishing minority students who commit crimes such as drug possession.

Raoul’s office on May 18 began probing Township High School District 211 for civil rights violations after ProPublica, a left-wing journalism organization bankrolled by billionaires, investigated Illinois schools’ ticketing program for students who have committed violations such as drug possession, truancy, and disorderly conduct. A student who receives a ticket usually has to pay a fine. ProPublica found that Hispanics, who make up 26 percent of the student body, have received around half of 120 truancy tickets, while blacks, who make up 6 percent of students, have received 10 percent of tickets.

Amy Meek, the head of the AG’s Civil Rights Bureau, said districts can still violate civil rights law even if they do not intentionally discriminate against “certain groups of people,” ProPublica reported.

Meek’s office may be taking its cues from university activists, who have argued that grades and enforcing school rules are racist because of disproportionate adverse effects on minority students.

District 211 superintendent Lisa Small said in a statement that punishments are “implemented regardless of the student’s race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or other factors” and that the police are involved only when an offender breaks the law or threatens school safety. Small told the Daily Herald that school disciplinary measures have been effective at mitigating drug use, boosting school attendance, and building positive relationships with law enforcement.

The Illinois attorney general’s office did not respond to a Washington Free Beacon request for comment.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/democratic-illinois-ag-targets-schools-for-punishing-drug-possession-disorderly-conduct/

Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) said he may use child safety laws to ban drag shows for kids after a “Drag Show for Kids!” event in West Palm Beach.

DeSantis said he is exploring the use of “child protective statutes” and “laws against child endangerment” to prohibit the shows. Another drag show in Dallas went viral this week, prompting one Florida lawmaker to say he will introduce legislation to criminalize bringing kids to such events. DeSantis noted there was “graphic language” used at the Dallas drag show, including a neon sign that read, “It’s not gonna lick itself.”

“You had these very young kids, and they must have been like 9, 10 years old, at a ‘drag show’ where they were putting money in the underwear of this—and that is totally inappropriate,” DeSantis said in a news conference in Fort Myers on Wednesday. “That is not something that children should be exposed to.”

The Florida governor likened his efforts to ban drag entertainment for children to his March Parental Rights in Education bill, which banned instruction of sexual orientation and gender identity for children in kindergarten through third grade. The Biden administration issued a “Fact Sheet” after the bill passed, condemning “anti-transgender legislative attacks” and supporting the Equality Act, which would allow minors to undergo gender-transition therapies without parental permission.

A California Democratic state senator in response to DeSantis suggested codifying drag shows for children at schools in his state.

“This guy just gave me a bill idea: Offering Drag Queen 101 as part of the K-12 curriculum,” Scott Wiener tweeted. “Attending Drag Queen Story Time will satisfy the requirement.”

DeSantis’s education bill, the governor said, was enacted to preserve a “normal environment” where kids “read and write and add and subtract,” instead of having leftwing teachers and administrators “shov[e] political agendas down their throats.”

“We want to have our kids be kids,” DeSantis said.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/let-kids-be-kids-desantis-may-use-child-safety-laws-to-ban-drag-shows-in-florida/

SPECIAL REPORT – The totalitarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not only engaged in global and national influence campaigns, but its corrupting tentacles also reach even down to American state and local politics. (RELATED: China’s Draconian Policies Show What Many Democrats Want for US)

Over the past 15 years, U.S. officials at local, state and federal levels have received pressure through visits, emails and phone calls from Chinese officials intent on pushing their policies in China’s favor.

As I have written about here, here and here, the CCP tends to focus its corrupting influences on currently powerful, as well as up-and-coming Democrat politicians, most vulnerable to their pitch.

Politicos such as Congressman Eric Swalwell and his Communist Chinese staffer (‘concubine’?).

However, a recent report in The Epoch Times (ET) shows how the CCP’s tentacles extend down to the state level and also target Republicans.

Usually, these efforts take the form of promoting apparently benign resolutions of friendship between U.S. states and China, or statements in support of Chinese policies.

The ET report also shows how to fight back.

In one specific case, writes The Times in “late February 2020, as the pandemic was heating up in the United States, when a request from China caught Wisconsin state Sen. Roger Roth’s attention.”

Roth is a Republican, and the request came via email from Wu Ting, wife of the Chinese consul general in Chicago. Wu wanted Roth to help pass a resolution “in support of China’s fight against the novel coronavirus.”

As ET reports:

Once Roth realized the email was legitimate, he became “downright angry.”

“I dictated a one-word response to them, and I said: Dear Consul General, Nuts. Signed respectfully, Roger Roth,” he said. “Not only do we respond to them with the word ‘nuts,’ we even drafted our own resolution on the Communist Party of China, exposing who they really are.”

That one-word reply, a nod to Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s famous response to a German surrender ultimatum during World War II, was the last communication Roth had with the Chinese consulate in Chicago. Wu later wrote an email expressing shock at his response, which he never replied to. But that interaction pushed him onto the offensive in Wisconsin.

States which have not been so staunch in their response to Chinese influence efforts include, most egregiously, the New York Senate resolution that was approved in June 2019, which appears to be the nation’s first official gesture to commemorate Oct. 1, marking the CCP’s official violent takeover of China.

The resolution’s lead sponsor, state Sen. James Sanders, didn’t respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about whether the consulate had any role in the resolution’s eventual adoption.

As ET notes though, these aren’t the only states where Beijing has tried to exert influence:

Around the same period as the emails to Roth, the state of Utah was approving a resolution expressing solidarity with the Chinese people. In language similar to what Wu had put forward, the resolution noted “a friendly relationship and strong economic, cultural, and people-to-people ties” that Utah and China share, and “the unique, 14-year legislative relationship between Utah and Liaoning.”

That Feb. 25, 2020, resolution also urged against virus restrictions that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade and raise fear and stigma.” At the time, the Trump administration had imposed a flight ban to and from China in response to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, a move that initially sparked condemnation from the Chinese regime and the World Health Organization…

States like Utah that passed such resolutions didn’t know “what was really happening and how they were being used as pawns,” Roth said.

Georgia and New York also have passed a “China Day” resolution.

The Georgia version, passed in 2020, intended to “commend the special friendship between Georgia and the People’s Republic of China” and to “recognize the Consul General Cai Wei of the Consulate General of China in Houston.”

However, Trump’s State Department ordered the closure of that consulate five months later, for being a “hub of spying and intellectual property theft.” (RELATED: Ex-Obama-Biden Aide Pushing CCP China Propaganda via Amazon – Owners of Washington Post)

So, what else can be done about this massive Chinese effort to corrupt our state politicians and institutions?

Roth, the Wisconsin senator, has some excellent ideas.

Since his encounter with the Chinese, reports The Times, he has proposed a series of measures aimed at curtailing Chinese influence in his state.

These include barring Chinese military members from working in the University of Wisconsin system and curbing Chinese recruitment or propaganda programs within the university system.

His proposals should be copied by lawmakers nationwide. (RELATED: Analyst Warns That China Could Exploit Key US Military Weakness)

As Roth stated in The Epoch Times: “As lawmakers all over the country, everything we do plays into a larger narrative,” he said. And we have an opportunity, though it be limited … we have an opportunity to make a stand for freedom, and to make a stand for the freedom-loving peoples of China right now, or who are held hostage by this brutal regime.” ALD

READ NEXT: Toomey Underscores Need for Trade Deal With Taiwan >>

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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China, COVID-19, Defense News, Democratic Party, Espionage, Republican Party

https://www.americanliberty.news/commentary/how-communist-chinas-tentacles-reach-into-us-state-politics-and-how-to-fight-back/pcrespo/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=5663

(DHG) — The liberals are back at it again… it seems like cancelling Dr. Seuss was not enough!

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) is taking out a Spanish-language radio ad to warn voters about a George Soros-backed company’s purchase of Hispanic radio stations in Miami in order to “infiltrate” the state with leftist ideology.

“Warning, voters! The Left is taking control of our local media,” reads an English translation of the DeSantis campaign’s ad, which will run on stations set to be acquired by a conglomerate financed by the left-wing billionaire. “George Soros, known for financing extreme leftist causes, is now financing the purchase of Hispanic radio stations right here in Miami.”

The Latino Media Network, backed by Soros’s Lakestar Finance, last week agreed to purchase 18 Hispanic radio stations across the country, including the conservative Radio Mambi in Miami. The acquisitions by the conglomerate, which is led by Democrats and left-wing activists, come amid increasing concerns within the Democratic Party about Republicans winning over Latino voters.

“The Soros-funded radical Left is running a scheme to manipulate local media in Florida to push their Marxist agenda on voters,” DeSantis said in a tweet promoting his ad. “In Florida, we reject the professional Left and their attempt to infiltrate our state and will always stand for truth and freedom.”

Helen Aguirre Ferré, executive director of the Republican Party of Florida, denounced the Latino Media Network’s purchase of conservative Hispanic radio stations.

“Miami’s Radio Mambi has always been a pillar for conservative discussion in Miami,” Aguirre Ferré said. “The efforts by the far left, financed by George Soros, to silence conservative voices confirms the importance of the fight Hispanics are waging against Marxist ideology in Florida. The hastily arranged takeover of Radio Mambi shines a light to what lengths socialist interests will go to advance their agenda on America.”

Hispanic voters, historically a left-leaning demographic, are moving to the right, polls show. About 750,000 fewer Hispanics voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 than for Hillary Clinton in 2016, according to the Wall Street Journal. A poll conducted in March by the Journal found Hispanics favor Republican candidates for Congress over Democrats by 9 percentage points.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/desantis-raises-alarm-over-soros-backed-buyout-of-hispanic-radio/

Pizza Hut is exposing children as young as pre-kindergartners to LGBT-themed literature as part of its annual summer reading program.

Big Wig, a book promoted by the restaurant chain as appropriate for children ages pre-K to third grade, “celebrates drag kids, individuality, and self-confidence from the perspective of a fabulous wig,” according to its publisher, Simon and Schuster. Be Amazing: A History of Pride, a book suggested by Pizza Hut for pre-K through first graders, is authored by “Desmond is Amazing,” a self-described 12-year-old “drag kid” who teaches young readers about “brave people that have paved the way for the LGBTQ+ community and encourages readers to be themselves.”

Pizza Hut joins several other corporations who have peddled leftwing ideology about sexual orientation and gender identity as children’s entertainment. State Farm had planned to distribute LGBT-themed books to children through community centers, libraries, and school teachers until a whistleblower’s efforts in May forced them to reverse course. Investigative journalist Chris Rufo revealed in April that Disney has been “adding queerness” to children’s programs. And children’s cartoon Blue’s Clues featured a song for Pride Month sung by a cartoon drag queen, celebrating families with gay, lesbian, transgender, and nonbinary members.

“This is another appalling example of a major corporation propagandizing kids on sexual matters,” Consumers’ Research executive director Will Hild told the Washington Free Beacon. “It’s vile that a pizza company would try to push transgenderism on children. And if this is the quality of their ethics and judgment, what does that say about the quality of their product?”

Consumers’ Research has announced it will post billboards at a Las Vegas conference this week hosted by State Farm as part of a national ad campaign against the insurance company for attempting to distribute the LGBT-themed books Being Transgender, Inclusive, and Non-Binary.

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/no-one-out-sleazes-the-hut-pizza-hut-peddles-books-about-drag-kids/

SIOUX FALLS, S.D.—Many politicians turn to social media platforms or television ads to get their message out. But South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and U.S. Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) decided they wanted to “take the pulse of the people” themselves, opting to travel door-to-door through a subdivision in Sioux Falls to meet their constituents on June 4 and listen to their concerns.

Noem and Johnson, both Republicans, also wanted to thwart negative ads that have recently begun airing throughout the state.

“The air war is not what wins elections in South Dakota—it’s the ground game,” Johnson told The Epoch Times during his door-to-door tour of the neighborhood. “It is going out and talking to voters and answering questions—this is how victory gets done.”

The top issue for the people of South Dakota is inflation, Noem told The Epoch Times as she walked with Johnson through the neighborhood. She said people are worried about the price of fuel and food—kitchen table issues.

“We are hearing a lot of concern about inflation,” she said. “People feel it every single day.”

Noem and Johnson agree that inflation is “higher than it should be” and blame the current administration, as “trillions of dollars have been spent unnecessarily.”

Read More

Janet Yellen: Biden’s Spending ‘Did Feed’ Inflation

“We’ve got an administration that has put trillion-dollar package after trillion-dollar package,” Johnson said of national inflation. “I voted against them [spending packages], and we need to focus on needs and not wants at the federal level—that’s what I have been focused on.”

Sioux Falls resident Sondra McFadden said she “couldn’t believe her eyes” when she answered the front door of her home and saw the governor and a congressman.

“She’s really here,” she said of the visit. “I just love her [Noem] because she stands up for what she believes, and she looks out for all of South Dakota.”

McFadden said the governor is doing a “fantastic job” in protecting the conservative values that South Dakotans have maintained for many years. She said she’s “worried about the state of the nation” but is thankful to live in the state, and she’s “thankful for her governor.”

McFadden gives the governor credit for “keeping the state open” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“She kept the state open, which helped the economy during the pandemic,” she said. “I look at other states who locked down and they are so much worse off for it—we are thriving because of the decisions the governor has made for our state.”

Noem said there’s a reason why people are “grateful to live in South Dakota.”

“Our state has the number one economy,” she said. “Everybody works—our incomes are rising faster than in any other state—so we’ve got a great story to tell. It’s a story of helping people make the best decisions for themselves and South Dakota is thriving because of that.”

Johnson agreed.

“The thing I love about South Dakotans is their optimism, and they’ll listen and ask you the tough questions,” he said of his constituents. “But they know how lucky they are to be living in South Dakota. Because of Kristi’s administration, people realize that their freedoms were not reduced here. … We did it right here.”

Neither the governor nor the congressman are fans of the policies of the Biden administration and the president’s latest move to punish states such as South Dakota with reduced funding for approving legislation that outlaws transgender males from competing in girls’ sports.

“It’s a horrific thing to take food off the plates of our children in order to push your agenda,” Noem said. “It’s a dangerous threat—a terrible threat. If he moves forward with this policy, then I will sue them in federal court. And we will win.”

Johnson echoed Noem’s sentiments.

“Biden is trying to use free and reduced school lunches as a lever to compel states to do what you want around transgendered athletes,” he said. “Biden wants to try to punish those kids because South Dakota and other states don’t fall in line with his views. I haven’t found one person in South Dakota who’s buying what he’s selling.”

On June 7, South Dakotans will go to the polls to vote in the primary elections for who they would like to see on the ballot this November. Both incumbents say they are excited to serve their constituents for another term.

“Kristi and I are wired very similarly,” he said of the Republican governor. “One of the reasons we get along so well is that she is a conservative who’s focused on actually solving problems.”

Noem said Johnson is a great advocate for South Dakota.

“He works hard and he cares about people,” she said of Johnson. “He’s doing it for the right reasons.”

Correction: Noem is traveling through Sioux Falls, not Sioux City. The Epoch Times regrets the error.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/noem-johnson-practice-old-fashioned-campaigning_4512629.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-06-07-3&utm_medium=email&est=nlgpTiRaXLj4Y1BnU5VIAsJvBl%2BX5o%2BYee31kueHYy2aszb6dPR7Ld6hsyoemCyg6A%3D%3D

Survivors of communist regimes warn that as Marxist ideology strengthens its grip on the left, Americans must defend freedom of speech and religion, or they will lose the ability to educate their children.

Marxism has gained a foothold in the American education system through the rise of cancel culture, revisionist history lessons, critical race theory, and divisive gender ideology, survivor of Albanian communism Merita McCormack said Thursday at the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C. The museum, which is organized by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and opens to the public on June 13, seeks to educate Americans on the 100 million lives taken by communism, the efforts of those who have taken a stand against the ideology, and those who resist communist regimes today. McCormack told the Washington Free Beacon she hopes to protect the next generation from the evils she was exposed to growing up in a communist nation.

“Politically and ideologically, Marxism leads to totalitarianism,” McCormack said. “Parents must teach their children what is true, right, and just, and they must be well informed and have a strong voice in what students learn at schools. Public universities must be held accountable to taxpayers for what they teach.”

The coronavirus pandemic, McCormack said, unveiled the extent of Marxist ideology in public education, which is undermining religious freedom and free speech, as well as the role of parents.

“The pandemic was a heavy cross for this nation as it was for the world, and during the pandemic parents figured out what their children were learning in school,” McCormack said. “Schools should be an extension of family education and should be in harmony with the family. Sadly, currently one can say that we have the American version of Marxism.”

The dangers of communism are self-evident, McCormack said, but the ideology has captured much of the left and forced anticommunists to live on the defensive. Members of the left increasingly support Marxist ideology, according to a Data for Progress poll conducted in January that showed Democrats prefer democratic socialism to capitalism.

Aldona Wos, a former U.S. ambassador to Estonia who immigrated to America from Poland’s communist regime as a child, said Americans must stand against Marxism just as anticommunists have in the century since Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution.

“The greatest danger of communism is that it is an ideology built on lies,” Wos said, “and you must have education to understand that it is a lie.”

https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/survivors-of-communism-warn-of-leftwing-threats-to-american-education/

Free pre-kindergarten, along with other Biden administration education proposals, could worsen inflation, which has already reached a 40-year high.

Resident Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign promise of universal free preschool would cost the nation more than $350 billion in 10 years, a June study from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School showed. The move could prove to be inflationary as well, with the Wharton School study concluding it would raise government debt by 2.4 percent in 2053 relative to baseline.

Universal free preschool is one of many Democratic education proposals that could threaten the growing national debt. The Biden administration recently forgave $5.8 billion in debt for students of Corinthian Colleges, a bankrupted for-profit chain of postsecondary-degree schools, leaving the total student debt relief extended by the administration at $25 billion. Critics fear Biden’s loan debt relief measures will worsen inflation. 

“Student debt cancellation may be an extremely appealing political talking point, but it is not good policy,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, in an April 27 statement. “It is costly, inflationary, poorly targeted, and fails to address the root problems in our higher education financing system.”

MacGuineas said forgiving $10,000 per person of debt would be as expensive as universal pre-K.

Biden’s plan to expand Pell Grants, a need-based subsidy for students from the federal government, would cost $229 billion over 10 years. Because only 38 percent of Pell Grant recipients complete degrees in eight years, two-thirds of the money could be wasted, according to the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/bidens-push-for-universal-preschool-would-hike-inflation-study-shows/

Biden DOJ asks judge to go easy on Ivy League firebombers

On the cusp of nonstop, around-the-clock (primetime!) coverage of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, a couple of domestic terrorists are actually getting their day in court, and it is informative to see how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is handling their prosecution.

Recall Garland’s breathless declaration, during his confirmation hearings, that “150 years after the Department’s founding, battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions also remains central to its mission.”

Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were arrested in the “mostly peaceful” protests following George Floyd’s murder. The two lawyers handed out Molotov cocktails to the crowd, and Rahman tossed one into a police car before fleeing the scene in Mattis’s van. They reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors in October 2020 that wiped out six of the seven charges against them. Those prosecutors, nonetheless, sought a maximum 10-year sentence and argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would turbocharge sentencing—a determination with which the U.S. Probation Office concurred.

Ginning herself up to distribute explosives to the crowd, Rahman gave a video interview in which she declared, “This shit won’t ever stop until we fuckin’ take it all down,” adding that “the only way [the police] hear us is through violence.”

Then, Garland and the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, Breon Peace, who’s handling the prosecution, took office, and you won’t believe what happened next!

In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely.

The new charge carries a five-year maximum sentence, but the prosecutors are urging the judge to go below that, asking for just 18 to 24 months on account of the “history and personal characteristics of the defendants” and the “aberrational nature of the defendants’ conduct.” Because, you know, Mattis graduated from Princeton and New York University Law School and was an attorney at the white-shoe law firm Pryor Cashman, and Rahman was a public-interest lawyer whose “best friend,” Obama administration intelligence official Salmah Rizvi, guaranteed the $250,000 required to release her on bail.

Law360, which reported on the events, calls the new deal an “unusual step.” James Trusty, a former prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, broke it down for us this way: “Swapping in a softer plea agreement after having gone through the plea hearing is an exceedingly rare event in federal court.” It can happen, he said, if there is “truly some new development or understanding about the defendants that merits a fresh look.”

In this case, the new development is the political persuasion of the folks running the Justice Department, and for them, Mattis and Rahman are the right kind of domestic terrorists—the ones whose cases and conduct will never be the subject of a congressional hearing or plastered from wall to wall on cable television.

Remember their names, and the special treatment they received at the hands of the Biden Justice Department, when the broadcasts begin on Thursday and when Garland next has the gall to feign concern about political violence directed at our democratic institutions.

Mattis and Rahman Change of Plea Hearing by Washington Free Beacon on Scribd

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/how-the-left-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-domestic-terrorism/

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has vowed to fight back in the wake of reports that President Joe Biden and his administration planned to tie school lunch program funding to policies that adhered to radical gender ideology.

Touting his state’s 2022-2023 “Freedom First Budget,” DeSantis said that he would make sure Florida was prepared to fight back if the Biden administration stripped funding for public school lunch programs over his state’s move to bar teachers from presenting classroom instruction on gender identity and sexual identity to children in kindergarten through third grade.

“In Florida, we are fighting against Biden’s intentionally destructive policies like denying school lunches for states that refuse to implement woke gender ideology in the schools,” DeSantis tweeted on Sunday.

In Florida, we are fighting against Biden’s intentionally destructive policies like denying school lunches for states that refuse to implement woke gender ideology in the schools. pic.twitter.com/YXpTky75Jn

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) June 5, 2022

“We’re prepared for what Biden throws our way,” DeSantis said. “And, you know, yes, part of it’s the inflation and the gas — part of it are intentionally destructive policies like trying to deny school lunch programs for states that don’t do transgender ideology in the schools, I mean, give me a break!”

“Totally off his rocker to be doing that,” DeSantis continued. “We’re fighting on that, don’t worry. So we’re just prepared to be able to defend the taxpayers and the hard-working people in the state of Florida, and I couldn’t be prouder for doing that.”

DeSantis was responding to reports that Biden planned to link programs that provide free or low-cost lunches to students to school and state policies, demanding that they adhere to transgender non-discrimination policies. According to the USDA, the move comes as a result of the Biden administration’s expansion — by executive order — of Title IX to include discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.

“Schools awarded money from the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), an agency within USDA, must specify in their policies that discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation is prohibited, the department announced in May. It also said allegations of such discrimination must be investigated,” Fox News reported.

Fight for Schools Executive Director Ian Prior told Fox News, “What you’re seeing here is really the Biden administration saying, ‘You’re going to do what I want or I’m going to take your lunch money.’ For the federal government to come in and really tie school nutrition and school lunch programs to this radical ideology is terrifying, and it’s appalling.”

DeSantis is not the only governor fighting back in the wake of those reports — Governor Kristi Noem (R-SD) has threatened to sue if the Biden administration withholds lunch funding over moves to protect female students in sports.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/totally-off-his-rocker-desantis-torches-biden-for-holding-school-lunches-hostage-over-gender-ideology-in-schools?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnemail&seyid=5094

The Cult of Safety Demands the Blood of Children

It has now been more than a week since a godless psychopath murdered 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The ruling regime has continued a full-court press to disarm the American people in the aftermath of the shooting. But as details of the attack continue to be released, it has become clear the very people who the regime says should be the only people with firearms, demonstrated a tremendous deficiency of courage.

Despite changing their story more than a meth-head begging for money, one thing has remained certain: the police waited nearly an hour to go into the room where a psychotic murderer unloaded on a class of fifth-graders, dooming any wounded children to bleed to death. Allegedly, the Uvalde chief of police had personally ordered his officers not to breach the door of the classroom the killer was in, due to the danger he presented to his officers—officers with shields, helmets, and body armor, no less.

This level of cowardice is astounding, even for a society that has done all that is possible to stamp out any display of courage and masculine virtue. That not one, single officer would disobey the most egregiously cowardly orders is still something truly shocking. But we have suffered under two years of Wuhan Flu biomedical tyranny. The most basic rights of Americans were flagrantly violated with almost no resistance from anyone bearing authority, and the idea that men—who occupy these positions that require courage—are instead filled by those without a single shred of it, is not something that should be difficult for us to recognize. Everyone who had the authority to say “No! You may not do this!” Is someone who lacked the masculine virtue to say “No! You may not do this!” There were no sheriffs who told their tyrannical governors to pound sand. There were no judges who had the backbone to apply the law that respects the rights of the people. There were precious few pastors who dared to declare the prerogative of the church to meet to worship in obedience to God, over and against the diktats of an authoritarian state. There were very few doctors who were willing to break protocol when doing so would mean the difference between life and death (and also quite possibly the end of their careers). Anyone who had legitimate power to wield, to tell these tyrants “NO!”, refused to wield it. I had an elderly congregant who was refused access to his wife suffering from Alzheimer’s, who, without him had no idea where she was, and because of this isolation and intense anxiety, died days later. Doctors “just following safety protocols” killed her and countless others.

Just as the phenomenon of the mass shooting demonstrates the social, cultural, and spiritual collapse that has taken place in the last two generations—these things never happened before the 1990s despite even more widespread availability of even more deadly firearms—the cowardice shown by the Uvalde Police Department is an indication of just how far we have fallen. Safety is the driving force of everything. Officer safety. Public safety. And of course, who can forget the much-maligned safe space? Everything about the life of the American is dominated by safety above all else. The German WWI veteran and author, Ernst Jünger, wrote in his essay “On Danger” that:

The bourgeois person is perhaps best characterized as one who places security among the highest of values and conducts his life accordingly. His arrangements and systems are dedicated to securing his space against the danger that at times, when scarcely a cloud appears to darken the sky, has faded into the distance. However, it is always there: it seeks with elemental constancy to break through the dams with which order has surrounded itself.

Now, it might seem like the use of the term “bourgeois” sounds like something a filthy communist swine might say, but we should understand it in the mode of the soft, pudgy, suburbanite man whose main concern in life is whether he has enough entertainment to consume in his free time. That is the man that Jünger describes. The man whose existence bears a close resemblance to the obese, androgynous humans hovering around on futuristic mobility scooters sipping on bottomless big gulps in the movie Wall-E. Such a man’s chief end is to dwell in safety. Forget the fact that an existence within the world God has created, particularly after The Fall, is an existence that must grapple with the reality of danger. The danger is inescapable. Modern materialistic, consumerist man believes our society has triumphed over danger. But no amount of technological progress is ever going to protect you from a dangerous world. You may think you have walled yourself off from danger. “Death will never enter my cul-de-sac!” But inexorably it does. It may appear in the form of evil men, hellbent upon destruction. It may appear in the form of a disease that the hubris of modern medicine can do nothing to solve. You live in a dangerous world and much wealth has been expended to make you believe that you do not.

The people who rule you want you to believe the world has no danger. They want you to be soft. They want you to believe you never will have to defend yourself. They want you to believe your safety matters more than anything else in life. They want you to be the kind of people who will rob the young of the very best years of their lives so you can hang on to a few more months of decrepitude. The demonic mantra of the worshipper of the god of safety is “you will give your life for mine”. It is the total antithesis of the most fundamental Christian ethos which is “my life for yours.” The people who demanded the country be shut down for years so they could enjoy their safety while entire school years were canceled, while there was no senior year of football, no prom, no graduation, no freshman year of college, no weddings, no funerals, and nothing but isolation and despair, these people who did this are no different from the cowardly cops of Uvalde who stood outside for an hour listening to the screams of children.

The spiritually sick society of modern America is not only a factory for psychopaths, it is also an assembly line of geldings. It was not always this way. We are within living memory of entire generations who gladly rushed into danger because duty and virtue compelled them to. There is a reason why people so often compare the soft and effeminate men today to the men who stormed the certain death of Omaha beach. There is a reason why cowboys like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood built the moral imagination of older generations of Americans. This was even the subject of a hysterical feminist screed, blaming toxic masculinity in the church for the rise of Donald Trump. Older generations valorized heroism, almost like God had created them to do so!

You may recall, that God created Adam to guard and defend the garden and everything in it. So often that verse is translated to make man’s basic God-given purpose to be a gardener. No. God created Adam to be a warrior. To face danger, to defend his domain against threats like a lying, talking serpent. Adam failed, and in his failure, we have been subjected to even greater dangers since. But this did not change what God created men to be: warriors.

But be not dismayed! Even as a sick and demented, soft culture has done all that it can to banish any semblance of masculine virtue; even as they have done all that they can to snuff out the fire inside men’s souls, they can never eradicate it any more than they can make the Mississippi flow north. No matter what they do, it is there.

I took my father, who served in the U.S. Army in the 60s, and has only gone to the movie theater once this millennium to see a movie this past weekend. I despise Hollywood and so does he, but I knew Top Gun: Maverick would be a movie we would enjoy. Yes, the plot was as predictable as it could get. Yes, the dialogue constantly skirted the border of cheese-fest like an F-18 flying in a canyon under the radar. None of that mattered. It was a celebration of masculinity (even with the token girl as the permission slip allowing for unbridled machismo). Fighter pilots, laughing in the face of stuffed-shirt authorities concerned with safety above all. Men who directly disobeyed orders to do heroic, selfless deeds. It was a celebration of all the things that made America great. A celebration of selfless Christian virtue buried beneath the veneer of hotshot womanizers. Of course, these things do not exist anymore in reality. The U.S. Navy was quick to point out:

[the U.S. Navy spokesman] said the Navy allowed the production to use planes, aircraft carriers and military bases even though he said the real Top Gun pilots aren’t the cocky rule-benders portrayed in the film, people who “would never exist in naval aviation.” Instead, they’re studious air nerds who toil away for hours in the classroom and participate in intense training flights at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada, the site of the actual Top Gun school.

No, the current U.S. military is much more concerned with conforming whatever scant remains of masculine and Christian virtue still exist in the armed forces to the rules and regulations of HR harridans. The Pentagon cares much more about whether we have enough black trans lesbians piloting fighter jets than things like winning wars.

But the fact that such a movie can be made, and that it is experienced incredible success is a testament to the fact that men willing to face danger still exist. The Border Patrol Agent who did what the Uvalde Police refused to do exists. Kyle Rittenhouse exists. And many of you reading this have the fire burning within your souls, begging for an opportunity to show valor. Take heart, as the hard times created by soft men come, such opportunities will soon abound. But in the meantime, you must reject the cult of safety. You must find even the smallest ways to prepare yourself to take up the mantle of the courageous men who preceded you. You must diligently work to become a man worthy of the honor of giving your life for others. You live in a dangerous world and you must become a good and dangerous man.

Resident Joe Biden has said he’s “taking a hard look” at canceling hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt—a decision his advisers believe would be “a complete disaster” for the Democratic Party in the midterms.

“There are a lot of people very close to the president who privately understand that this is a complete disaster for them,” the Washington Post‘s James Hohmann said on the Bulwark Podcast. The president’s aides have attributed the political misjudgment to influence from leftwing Democrats including Sen. Raphael Warnock (Ga.) and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Both are seeking high turnout from the party’s base in the Peach State, where they say an electoral block of former graduates from HBCUs could tip the scales.

“They just don’t get it because they haven’t spent time in the WOW counties or in Apple Valley, Minnesota,” Hohmann said, referring to toss-up districts on the outskirts of Milwaukee, Wis., and Minneapolis. “The president is being pulled really hard by these woke leftists who … believe it’s all about the base.”

Biden canceled $5.8 billion in student loan debt on Wednesday for former students of Corinthian Colleges, a bankrupted for-profit chain of postsecondary-degree schools. Last week, the White House also floated loan forgiveness of $10,000 per s0tudent borrower. The debt forgiveness would add $245 billion to federal government debt, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The top 40 percent of wage earners hold the majority of student debt. Of student-debt holders between the ages of 25 and 40, the top 40 percent bears half of the total debt, meaning the richest young adults carry the most.

The liberal push for student debt cancellation comes as the United States faces 40-year high inflation and record-breaking gas prices, which have doubled since Biden took office in January 2021.

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/they-just-dont-get-it-bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-push-a-complete-disaster-for-democrats-in-midterms/

First Liberty sent a demand letter to Oakland University in Michigan on behalf of Inara Ramazanova. The university wrongfully evicted the recent graduate from campus housing because she shared information on social media about how to request a COVID-19 vaccine religious accommodation. The university accused her of “conspiracy or collusion” under its code of conduct.

The eviction from campus housing forced Inara to spend her final semester at home. It placed a disciplinary record in her student file, which could potentially affect her future academic or professional pursuits.

We’re asking the university to apologize to Inara for discriminating against her, and to vindicate her record and her name. This action is critical in our ongoing fight to hold colleges and universities around the nation accountable.

We explain in our letter:

“Oakland University’s disciplining and evicting Ms. Ramazanova because she shared about her religious convictions regarding vaccination and about how she sought and received a religious accommodation from Oakland University—all in an effort to more effectively exercise her civil rights and aid others in doing the same—violated Ms. Ramazanova’s rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects free speech and religious exercise, and the federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits both religious discrimination in housing and taking actions against a person for aiding others in having their religious rights in housing respected.”

Evicted for Sharing Religious Information

Last summer, Oakland University granted Inara a religious accommodation from the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The accommodation would have allowed the Russian immigrant to reside on campus for the 2021–22 academic year.

However, Oakland University then evicted Inara from campus after she shared about her request and accommodation in a Facebook group with the hope that it would be useful to others. In fact, many members in the group had already asked questions on how to best express their sincerely held religious beliefs and obtain a religious accommodation.

Though Inara merely shared her story to lend a helping hand to others in the group, the University Conduct Committee claimed her posts amounted to “collusion or conspiracy.”

Justin Butterfield, Deputy General Counsel at First Liberty, said that’s unconstitutional and illegal:

“The university violated Inara’s Constitutional rights and the Fair Housing Act. They owe it to her to clear her record”.

Unfortunately, Inara’s case is not the first of its kind, as students, employees, and even military service members continue to be discriminated against for living out their faith and engaging in constitutionally protected speech.

That’s why our legal term is leading this crucial effort to stop discrimination against Inara and people of all faiths across the country. Religious students should not be treated as second-class citizens. It’s wrong and unlawful to punish them, threaten their careers and even tarnish their record simply because they shared their beliefs with others.

Please give now and join First Liberty in this fight. Your support is critical to help Inara vindicate her record and clear her name, so she and millions of Americans don’t have to face unjust punishment for living out their faith.

https://firstliberty.org/news/college-student-evicted/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=story-1-button&utm_campaign=fli-insider

Today, Education and Labor Committee Republican Leader Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education Subcommittee Republican Leader Burgess Owens (R-Utah) sent letters to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and NewsGuard Inc. seeking additional information on the January 25th agreement that would put NewsGuard’s ‘anti-misinformation’ product in the classrooms of AFT’s more than 1.6 million members.

The letters seek information on the agreement, the application of NewsGuard’s product in the classroom and the extent to which local officials and parents were consulted about the rollout.

“We can’t let this kind of left-wing propaganda into our schools, or let groups condemn so-called ‘misinformation’ while peddling it themselves. I’m not surprised that AFT is teaming up with an organization that ranks Chinese state-run media sites higher than American conservative sites, but I refuse to let it happen without a fight. AFT has long demonstrated that its priority is politics, not education. It is painfully clear that NewsGuard does not have the judgment necessary to teach our nation’s children how to tell truth from fiction,” Rep. Foxx said.

“The left is obsessed with indoctrinating kids. AFT has decided that NewsGuard, whose leadership falsely dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as ‘Russian disinformation,’ deserves to be empowered to tell children what is and isn’t ‘misinformation.’ Political advocacy groups should focus on people who are old enough to vote. They have no place in taxpayer funded public schools. House Republicans must use our oversight power to keep politics out of classrooms, and I am pleased to partner with Ranking Member Foxx and Rep. Owens on this important effort,” Rep. Banks stated.

“The collaboration between Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers and NewsGuard is not an honest attempt to separate fact from fiction. It’s yet another coordinated effort to politicize our academic institutions. Using biased ratings to referee free expression and opposing political viewpoints is un-American and harms the education of our children. I’m proud to work with Ranking Member Foxx and Chairman Banks to call out this alarming partnership,” said Rep. Owens.

Read the full letter to AFT here.

Read the full letter to NewsGuard here.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

With Your Help, We’ll TAKE BACK President Trump’s Majority in 2022!

American Federation of Teachers, Burgess Owens, Education, Jim Banks, NewsGuard, Virginia Foxx

https://www.americanliberty.news/commentary/congressional-leaders-expose-scheme-to-pump-liberal-misinformation-network-into-classrooms/dferguson/2022/06/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ae01&seyid=4716

‘Reparations Task Force’ recommends free health care, child support forgiveness for black residents

Black Californians could enjoy child support forgiveness, free college, free health care, fewer police, and a long-term “truth and reconciliation commission” should Golden State lawmakers pass the proposals outlined this week by the state’s Reparations Task Force.

Following a 2020 law to study the subject, a panel of left-wing academics and policymakers on Wednesday released their findings on how California can remedy the harm against the state’s black residents caused by slavery and discrimination. All black Californians are eligible for the benefits of the program if they can prove they are “descendants of African Americans enslaved in the U.S. or of free Black people living in the country before the end of the 19th century.” A new state agency, called the California African American Freedmen Affairs Agency, would provide genealogical tests for residents.

The 492-page report lists the task force’s “preliminary findings and recommendations.” The final report is scheduled to be released in July of next year.

Here are eight of the most radical proposals:

1. Child support forgiveness

The panel recommends that California eliminate overdue child support owed to the government by black parents who no longer have custody of their children. Black Californians would also no longer need to “reimburse the state for current or past government assistance” related to child support.

The panel also recommends the elimination of all interest payments on past child support owed by black Californians.

Under current California law, families that receive government assistance such as food stamps must deduct the cost of those programs from court-ordered child support payments. If an individual in California does not pay child support, he is essentially fined for forcing his child to use state services. The logic of the current law is that the state should not pay for financial support that a parent otherwise provides.

2. Establish a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission,’ destroy ‘anti-black memorials and monuments’

The task force recommends the establishment of a commission named after the 1996 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was created following the end of apartheid to identify human rights violations against the majority black population during their time living under white-only rule. The task force also recommends the state “create forms of acknowledgement and apology for acts of political disenfranchisement” and destroy all “anti-Black memorials and monuments,” presumably identified by the task force.

Pervasive “police violence against and extrajudicial killings of African Americans occur in California as they do in the rest of the country,” the panel concludes. As part of an effort to help heal the state’s black community, the panel recommends the state fund art that acknowledges the “trauma of state-sanctioned white supremacist terror.”

3. Free college education

The task force recommends the state eliminate tuition for all California colleges, as well as offer funding to create black-owned K-12 schools and colleges. Black Californians should also receive scholarships to “cover four years of undergraduate education” at presumably any university in the country, the task force finds.

The task force also recommends that the state “identify and eliminate racial bias and discriminatory practices” in standardized tests, including the SAT, LSAT, and the state Bar exam, with no elaboration on how this would be done. To further “antiracist” education in the state, all California schools must adopt a curriculum that “advances the ideology of Black liberation.”

4. Trees in black neighborhoods for ‘shade equity’

In the name of ending so-called environmental racism, the task force recommends the state fund the “planting of trees to create tree shade equity.”

5. Less McDonalds, more Whole Foods

The task force wants to “reduce the density” of fast-food restaurants, and promote the opening of “healthy retailers,” such as Whole Foods and farmer’s markets, in majority-black neighborhoods.

6. Decrease the police

The task force calls for an end to “discriminatory policing and particularly killings, use of force, and racial profiling” of black Americans. That means a review of every incarcerated black Californian “to determine whether they have been wrongfully convicted or have received longer or harsher sentences than white people convicted of the same or similar crimes.”

The task force recommends fewer police in black communities. The “scope of law enforcement jurisdiction” must be curtailed and replaced with “more funding for prevention and mental health care.” Law enforcement should also issue fewer citations at liquor and tobacco stores in black neighborhoods.

7. Free health care

Black Californians should be entitled to free health care, the task force finds. All black Californians who suffered from the country’s “anti-Black health care system” should be entitled to financial compensation as well.

To create more black doctors and health care professionals, the task force recommends that the state engage in more affirmative action programs and a “race-conscious public health policy.”

8. Cash payments to close ‘racial wealth gap’

On top of all the new forms of welfare and assistance outlined in the task force report, black Californians are entitled to cash reparations intended to shrink “the racial wealth gap.” The exact dollar amount is not specified.

The state must also provide funding and “technical assistance” to “Black-led and Black community-based land trusts to support wealth building and affordable housing,” as well as raise the minimum wage beyond the state-mandated $15 per hour. The task force also recommends the creation of a state fund “to support the development and sustainment of Black-owned businesses.”

Update 8:45 p.m.: This piece has been updated since publication.

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/california-state-panel-recommends-free-health-care-child-support-forgiveness-for-black-residents/

The Biden administration is requiring schools to comply with its LGBT policies or lose billions in federal funding for school lunches.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service announced in May it will prevent low-income students from participating in its National School Lunch Program if their public school does not adopt the administration’s interpretation of Title IX, which holds that the federal civil rights law’s provision against discrimination based on sex includes designations of sexual orientation and gender identity. The move was originally reported by The Center Square.

A spokeswoman for Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R.) said the Biden administration’s decision to “withhold food from disadvantaged children in order to advance a deranged political agenda” was “appalling.”

“We will not allow Biden to force Floridians to choose between children’s food and parents’ rights,” DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw told the Washington Free Beacon. “That is the kind of ‘decision’ that a totalitarian regime would force upon its citizenry.”

South Dakota governor Kristi Noem (R.) told the Free Beacon her state will take legal action.

“Joe Biden has threatened to take away children’s school lunch money to pursue his radical agenda,” Noem said. “He’s targeting states like ours that make it clear biological men do NOT belong in girls’ bathrooms and sports. If you act on this, Joe, we’ll see you in court and we will win.”

Joe Biden has threatened to take away children’s school lunch money to pursue his radical agenda.

He’s targeting states like ours that make it clear biological men do NOT belong in girls’ bathrooms and sports.

If you act on this, Joe, we’ll see you in court and we will win. pic.twitter.com/i8oU0aYTfL

— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) June 1, 2022

Critics of the administration’s decision said it could unnecessarily harm disadvantaged students. Christian K-12 schools that participate in the NSLP can apply for a religious exemption, but public and nonreligious private schools must follow the new rules or lose their funding.

“All people should be treated with dignity and respect, but it’s wrong for the federal government to take away free meals from economically disadvantaged students if their schools do not embrace radical gender ideology,” Greg Baylor, a senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, told the Washington Free Beacon.

The announcement builds on President Joe Biden’s Day One Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation, which permits transgender students to use male or female bathrooms and play sports with either sex. Biden’s executive order drew on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County, which altered the meaning of “sex” in Title VII to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

The Biden administration will also force schools that receive funds from FNS to investigate accusations of sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. Students at colleges and universities who reject the Biden administration’s definition of sex could also lose their Federal Student Aid. 

“Any discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in FNS programs will be handled as sex discrimination,” a USDA spokeswoman told the Free Beacon.

Baylor suspects most public schools will comply with the new interpretation as they heavily rely on federal funding. He encouraged parents to submit their concerns to the Department of Education, which is expected to issue new Title IX protections soon that could permit transgender individuals to access sex-segregated spaces.

Jonathan Butcher, a fellow in education at the Heritage Foundation, said the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX would also prohibit schools from informing parents of their child’s decision to assume a different gender.

“It is a parent’s right to know what their children are doing or what sort of health services or even counseling services are being provided to their children in a school setting,” Butcher said. 

Parents Defending Education director of outreach Erika Sanzi called the Title IX decision “preposterous.”

“The notion that schools will not receive funding for student meals if they refuse to let biological males use the girls’ bathroom and compete against girls in athletics is so preposterous, it sounds like parody,” Sanzi said.

Update June 2, 2022, at 10:15 a.m. and 2:35 p.m.: This piece has been updated with a comment from Gov. Kristi Noem (R., S.D.) and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R., Fla.).

https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/no-free-lunch-biden-admin-will-pull-meal-funding-for-schools-that-dont-comply-with-its-lgbt-agenda/

Democrat resident Joe Biden does not support “hardening schools” as a means of protecting children from mass shooters, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said on Monday.

The comments from Jean-Pierre come after an 18-year-old Latino male murdered 19 children at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last week.

“I know there’s been conversation about hardening schools,” she said. “That is not something that he believes in. He believes that we should be able to give teachers the resources to be able to do the job that they’re meant to do at schools.”

WATCH:

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says proposals that deal with “hardening schools…is not something that” President Biden “believes in” b/c “the problem is with guns” in America. pic.twitter.com/l19Mo0Yw3h

— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 31, 2022

The man who shot up the school in Uvalde “walked in unobstructed,” Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Regional Director Victor Escalon said. “So from the grandmother’s house, to the (ditch), to the school, into the school, he was not confronted by anybody.”

Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that the school resource officer was not inside the school when the attack happened.

Jean-Pierre also said during the press conference that “background checks” were needed to “make sure that our communities are protected” and to make sure “that our children are not going to school feeling unsafe.”

The man who attacked the elementary school in Texas last week passed a background when he purchased the weapons that he used.

Approximately 80 federal agents had responded to the shooting last Tuesday but were instructed by local law enforcement to wait and not go after the attacker.

“After approximately 30 minutes passed, however, the federal agents opted of their own volition to lead the ‘stack’ of officers inside the school and take down the shooter,” NBC News reported.

A source told the network that the breaking point for the federal agents was when they saw that parents were trying to get into the building themselves to pull their children out.

Latino Border Patrol agent Jacob Albarado had just sat down for a haircut when his wife, who was a teacher at Robb Elementary School, texted him and told him what was happening and asked him for help.

“There’s an active shooter,” she said. “Help. I love you.”

The New York Times reported that Albarado’s barber gave him a shotgun and that Albarado then ran out of the barbershop and sped to the school.

This report has been updated to include additional information. 

https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-biden-does-not-support-hardening-schools-to-protect-children-from-mass-shooters?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnemail&seyid=4329

Actor and outspoken Christian Kirk Cameron recently blasted America’s public school system in an interview with Fox News.

Cameron — whose new documentary “The Homeschool Awakening” premieres Monday, June 13 — told Fox News, “The problem is that public school systems have become so bad. It’s sad to say they’re doing more for grooming, for sexual chaos and the progressive Left than any real educating about the things that most of us want to teach our kids.”

Thus, as Cameron explained in the interview and in his movie, the solution to the poor quality of public education is to homeschool your kids. He also took issue with those who say only experts, or the government, should be responsible for American school children’s education.

“And that’s just a fundamental difference in the way that we look at who has been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of raising our children. … Is it the parents or is it the government?” he said to Fox.

Cameron also blasted public education for “destroying” certain institutions and patriotism in America.

“And you can take your pick. Just go down the list. The things that are destroying the family, destroying the church, destroying a love for our great country: Critical Race Theory, teaching kids to pick their pronouns and decide whether or not they want to be a boy or a girl, the 1619 Project,” he said.

“If we send our children to Rome to be educated … we shouldn’t be surprised if they come back Romans,” he added. “If we want them to love God and love their neighbor and feel gratitude and thankful that they live in the United States of America, the freest country on earth, then you’ve got to teach them those things. … I realized that there was no better way for our family to do that … than to bring them home and join in with this rich, robust community, with tons of curriculum to be able to have the flexibility and freedom to raise our kids the way we wanted them to be raised.”

The father of six admitted some days are more difficult than others, but said that it was worth it.

“Yes, there are hard days,” he explained. “Yes, there are times when you just feel like pulling your hair out. But it’s nothing compared to wanting to go back and do it all over again. If you see that your children went down a road and you can’t pull them back, [asking] … how did they lose their faith? How did they get pulled into an ideology that undermines everything that is going to lead to their success?”

“They learn to reject God … they learn to reject our country. And how did that happen? Well, that’s the kind of regret that we don’t want as parents,” Cameron added. “And so, if we’re willing to put in some extra effort and time now, we will be so glad that we did and we’ll lift our hands in gratitude and say, ‘Thank you that I woke up and I saw the light.’ And millions of parents are.”

Leftist critics of Cameron have suggested that he is allegedly taking part in a racist plot to segregate society — even if unwitting.

Sort by Best

• kmann332151 day ago: And with all the children going to private schools or being homeschooled, we probably have education budget surplus, right? So the government can offer vouchers, offer a tax cut, or even put in school security systems. Reply17
  • ShadowBaby🍩☕🎺🎵1 day ago: That’s what I’ve been saying – we’re freeing up resources, right? By removing the kinds of kids the establishment hates anyway, right?Reply4Show 1 more reply
• steve34911 day ago: What a great evening with several actors speaking out in support of America and dedication to The Lord. Thank you Kirk.Reply21
• leftistsmakemequeasy1 day ago“And that’s just a fundamental difference in the way that we look at who has been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of raising our children. … Is it the parents or is it the government?” Bingo.Reply211 reply
• CinziaV1 day ago: Kirk has been championing homeschooling for a long time and he is absolutely 💯% correct. God bless him. Keep it up Kirk!Reply22
• kgraham4606341 day ago: I home school my boys in the in the 1980’s and 1990’s because I saw what the public schools were teaching back then. My eldest went to Cal-Poly and got his Computer Engineering Degree and my middle son got his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and then received his Master also at Cal-Poly. They have g…See moreReply40
  • TheWayisNarrow1 day ago: I homeschooled my four in the 90’s and they are all successful. One is a systems manager for programming code for Comcast, one is a chiropractor, another is a paralegal soon to be court reporter and the other a CFO of family business and homeschools her children. They are all literate and patriotic…See moreReply2
  • blsinsc53721 day ago: Congratulations on your Family’s success! I would bet that with such a grounded foundation, your boys would have been equally successful had they remained in Public Schools but with YOU there to guide them. One of my college Professors said at the beginning of a semester “I can only give you the …See moreReply1

https://www.dailywire.com/news/kirk-cameron-public-school-is-destroying-the-family-destroying-the-church-destroying-love-for-our-great-country?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnemail&seyid=4329

Friend,

Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.

This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.

A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.

Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.

We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.

We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”

We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.

We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.

Well, friend, the time for listening and watching from the sidelines is over.

This enemy has taken over media, educational institutions, corporate boards, professional sports, foundations, and professional institutions. They have left no corner of our lives untouched. But all hope is not lost.

We The People still have a say. We know the truth, you and I, about America and the country she is and can be. We must fight to defeat these false pretenses and predetermined narratives.

I am choosing to counter this enemy with faith, with reason, and with freedom. As Governor of the Free State of Florida, I have chosen to lead with a vision that builds America up rather than tears it down.

Together we can ensure that our children are raised to know they live in the greatest state in the nation, the greatest country in the world and that they have an opportunity to continue making them even greater.

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to get off the sidelines and fight for the rights you know were given to man by God Himself – the time is NOW.

If you’re with me, friend, chip in any amount to help me defeat this enemy. I can’t do it without you. I promise you; I will never stop fighting.

Sincerely,

Ron DeSantis

Paid by Ron DeSantis, Republican, for Governor.

A highly disturbing video has emerged showing the man who shot up a Texas Elementary School last week holding up a bag of blood-soaked dead cats.

The video shows the 18-year-old Latino shooter who murdered 19 children smiling while holding up the bag, according to video footage obtained by the New York Post, which was so graphic that the publication had to blur out the bag.

The Daily Wire is not showing the video or using the attacker’s name due to company policy about not giving those responsible for mass casualty events the notoriety that they crave.

The attacker “is seen smiling in the undated footage while sitting in the passenger seat of a pal’s car — holding up a clear plastic bag with at least two bloodied cats visible inside,” the New York Post reported. “The sicko was previously rumored to have had a fascination with dead cats and had threatened to kidnap, kill and rape girls who shunned him online.”

David Trevino Jr., who is related to the shooter’s grandmother by marriage, told the New York Post that the attacker was known for harming animals.

“The shooter was known for hurting cats,” he said. “He liked hurting animals. I’m told he killed the cats and carried around the bag of bodies for s–ts and giggles.”

“The video shows he was not right in the head,” he continued. “He’s not all there. The video raises all sorts of red flags.”

Hurting animals in the state of Texas is a felony, a charge that would have automatically barred the attacker from being able to purchase the guns that he used during the tragedy.

“He would go to the park and try to pick on people and he loved hurting animals,” one of the attacker’s high school classmates said in an interview. “I remember there was one time we saw him beating a little dog senseless.”

“A lot of people who knew him, we knew he wasn’t mentally healthy,” he added. “And a lot of people could agree that we probably should’ve said something.”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/horrifying-video-emerges-of-man-who-attacked-texas-elementary-school?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cnemail&seyid=4140

A Feature, Not a Bug…

In the last two weeks, there have been two mass shootings in the United States, and the second took place this week at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. These shootings have reignited the regime’s already intense desire for a disarmed populace. Even before the bodies of the dead children had been removed from the school, our mentally diminished President spoke to the nation, demanding that rifles (which he is not even able to accurately describe) be confiscated across a 330 million person country spanning an entire continent. This despicable man, and the legion of sociopathic ghouls arrayed behind him, are clearly overjoyed that there is a classroom full of young children lying dead in Texas. They don’t actually care about the anguish of parents who will never see their child grow up. Their deaths are merely a political prop for the most evil people on the planet.

It is hard to fully comprehend just how totalitarian such designs are. But these are the very same sadistic freaks who successfully locked those 330 million people in their homes for weeks or months, and then (mostly successfully) restricted their ability to provide for their families if they refused to get an extremely dangerous mRNA injection that does not even accomplish its intended purpose. All you are to them is a guinea pig or a rat in a social experiment. You do not matter. Your children do not matter. You only exist to provide them with power.

You must understand that school shooters and other mass shooters are an extremely acute symptom of the disease that horribly afflicts the American nation. You live in an incredibly sick society, and since you are born into it and live in it every day, you go about your life mostly unaware of just how dreadful things really are. It is imperative for the people who manufacture the inversion of reality that you perceive everything through the lens of the now. This is why “The Current Thing” has such memetic power: it attacks reality distortion at its source, where obsession over what is, right now, cuts you off from any sense of historical perspective. In the case of mass shootings, the exclusion of historical perspective keeps the masses from noticing that mass shootings are a very recent phenomenon and that decades ago, when the United States had vastly more liberal gun laws, and anyone could even purchase fully automatic submachine guns in the mail, this never happened. The question you should ask is, why not? What exactly was different about America 90 years ago compared to today?

The answer to that question is fairly obvious. Modern American society is a factory for psychopaths. The young man in the North American Continent is planted in a field fertilized by atomization, loneliness, and hopelessness. Many have never met their father, and most do not have anything remotely close to a “good relationship” with him. Most have no meaningful connection to the community in which they live, nor even the nation they inhabit. In school, they are social outcasts, driven to niche internet communities for the only semblance of human interaction in their lives. They are marinated in hardcore pornography from before they have even reached pubescence. They know (or at least perceive) that they will never know the love of a flesh-and-blood woman. They are on the kind of pharmacological cocktail that any premodern society would only ascribe to witchcraft and demon possession. They have nothing to live for and no one who loves them. Given how many young men our nation is producing like this, the question we ought to be asking is not “why does this happen?” but rather “why does it not happen a lot more?”

America is an incredibly sick nation. There is a spiritual sickness that pervades everything like a dark cloud. The people who dominate every institution in our nation have held this power for at least sixty years. For these sixty years, they have treated this nation as a grand social experiment. They have made the natural family, the very bedrock of human civilization, an antiquated, outdated institution that we have progressed beyond. They have financialized and commodified all of human life, uprooting people from their homes and extended families, and making them mercenaries chasing after a rapidly devalued dollar. They have exported the industry of the nation impoverishing the heartland of the country and leaving them to languish in despair. They actively cheer the deaths and replacement of the hated population, while at the same time denying this was ever their intent. They have introduced racial and ethnic strife, and in the chaos actively undermined rule of law. Sixty years of full-spectrum control by utopian social engineers have transformed the most affluent society in human history into hell on earth.

This did not happen by accident. These people are motivated by a deep hatred of humanity. Like the geriatric that currently occupies the Oval Office who well represents them, they simply do not care how much people suffer. You might think the progressive is merely mistaken, deluded by ideology. This is not the case. They have had more than sixty years to see the full extent of human misery their ideology produces when applied to the healthiest and most prosperous conditions. They know what they are doing.

But what is to be done? The utopian bugmen that dominate our nation must be overcome. You must personally re-capture the same spirit of Christian America that built a great nation. You must do all within your personal sphere of influence to rebuild the things that our enemies have destroyed. You must rebuild churches dominated by liberals and weak-willed conservatives. You must rebuild neighborhoods and communities with people who, like you, love the nation that their great, great-grandparents built and who want to worship the same God who gave them such strength. You must devote your life to both retaking what institutions you can, and creating alternatives for the institutions you can’t. It is not simply enough to decry that the libs have ruined everything—of course they have, they are like cancer! You must have a vision for your people, you must provide for them the thing they have taken away: hope for the future. We can again have the world that the liberal globalist regime has destroyed. A world where the fear of the Triune God pervades the land and not hopelessness and despair. You can have a world where things like mass shootings never happen again, but you must devote yourself to a life of repentance, faith, and an unquenchable passion for the true, good, and beautiful things God has given.

Andrew Isker is the pastor of 4th Street Evangelical Church in Waseca, MN. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University and Greyfriar’s Hall Ministerial Training School, and he has served churches in Missouri, West Virginia, and Minnesota. He is the author of the forthcoming book, The Boniface Option. Andrew, his wife Kara, and their five children reside in his hometown of Waseca, MN. He can be found on Gab @BonifaceOption.

Published in Bold Christian Writing and Uncategorized

Don’t believe what you’re being told by the propaganda machine. Facts don’t lie, and it’s now clear that COVID vaccination makes it more likely you’ll die if you are 60 years old or younger, not less likely. Here’s why.

Story at-a-glance

• According to a recent modeling experiment, “Increased contact among vaccinated people can give the false impression that COVID-19 vaccines are not working”
• This rationale is dubious at best, considering the unvaccinated have continuously been accused of not taking COVID seriously and going about their lives as normal, while the “vaccinated” are, by and large, more fearful and take “authorities” advice to heart, which includes avoiding large gatherings and close one-on-one interactions without wearing a face mask
• Many data sources reveal that COVID-jabbed individuals are now getting COVID-19 at far higher rates than the unjabbed. Death rates, both for COVID and other causes, have also risen in tandem with the number of shots administered
• According to an analysis of U.S. data, in September 2021, when Delta was most prominent, 23% of those who died from COVID had received the jab. In January and February 2022, when Omicron started dominating, that percentage jumped to 42%
• Many argue that Omicron was more contagious than Delta, hence the higher death toll. But Omicron was also far milder than Delta, and there’s no reason the jabbed would die at a higher rate from a less lethal variant than a more lethal one, unless the injection made the infection worse
• A preprint study found adult participants in Moderna’s trial who got the real injection and later got a breakthrough infection did not generate antibodies against the nucleocapsid — a key component of the virus — as frequently as did those in the placebo arm. Their anti-nucleocapsid response was also lower regardless of the viral load. As a result of this reduced antibody response, those who got the jab may be more prone to repeated COVID infections

Well, the COVID jab pushers have had to resort to all sorts of obfuscation to hide the fact that the injections don’t work, and now they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel of excuses. According to a recent Reuters report,¹ “Increased contact among vaccinated people can give the false impression that COVID-19 vaccines are not working.”

This irrational explanation has been levied in response to studies showing COVID-jabbed individuals are getting infected at higher rates than the unjabbed, and there are many such studies.

“These studies are likely to involve statistical errors, particularly if they did not account for different contact patterns among vaccinated versus unvaccinated people,” Korryn Bodner, a research associate in infectious disease modeling in Toronto, told Reuters. Bodner is the first author of a preprint study² posted on medRxiv at the end of April 2022.

Are the Jabbed More Carefree Than the Unvaxxed?

Bodner’s claim is that those who got the jab may be more likely to throw caution to the wind and mingle with others, hence getting infected more frequently, while the unjabbed may be more cautious because they know they’re vulnerable. This rationale is dubious at best, considering:

a) The unvaccinated have continuously been accused of not taking COVID seriously and going about their lives as normal

b) Those who have taken the jab are, by and large, a far more fearful lot; they tend to listen to the “authorities” and take all of their advice to heart, which would include avoiding large gatherings and close one-on-one interactions without wearing a face mask

Check out the following story, reported by Anchorage Daily News:³

“Arianne Bennett recalled her husband, Scott Bennett, saying, ‘But I’m vaxxed. But I’m vaxxed,’ from the Washington hospital bed where he struggled to fight off COVID-19 this winter … Bennett went to get his booster in early December after returning to Washington from a lodge he owned in the Poconos, where he and his wife hunkered down for fall.

Just a few days after his shot, Bennett began experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, meaning he was probably exposed before the extra dose of immunity could kick in. His wife suspects he was infected at a dinner where he and his server were unmasked at times …

‘He was absolutely shocked. He did not expect to be sick. He really thought he was safe,’ Arianne Bennett recalled. ‘And I’m like, ‘But baby, you’ve got to wear the mask all the time. All the time. Up over your nose.’”

Within days of his third dose, he got a serious case of COVID. Yet they blame it on hypothetical exposure to an apparently healthy food server. This kind of irrational reasoning is prevalent among those who got the jabs and who keep going back for more as they are part of the 30% of the population that have been completely brainwashed.

To reiterate what I’ve explained since 2020, asymptomatic spread is likely to be so rare as to be nonexistent.⁴ It was a lie perpetuated to drive up fear and prop up rising “case” rates that didn’t really exist. It’s basic virology that you cannot transmit a virus unless you have a “hot” infection, and if you have an active, transmissible infection, you have symptoms. The symptoms are a sign that your body’s defenses are kicking in to rid itself of the live virus.

No symptoms, no transmission. So, unless the server was feeling sick and went to work anyway, the simplest explanation for Bennett’s demise was the shot itself. And if the server was sick, the fact that Bennett got so ill suggests the shot is ineffective, even at two doses.

The pro-pharma shills want you to believe there are so many confounding variables, we can’t possibly draw any conclusions from data showing the shots don’t work. Yet looking at data from a wide spectrum of sources, all show the same alarming trends. What “confounding factor” could possibly account for ALL of them being misinterpreted?

An Unproven Hypothesis

Reuters⁵ does note that Bodner’s simulations “do not prove that this type of bias affected studies of vaccine effectiveness versus the Omicron variant.” What it does show, according to Bodner, is that “even if vaccines work, increased contact among vaccinated persons can lead to the appearance of the vaccine not working.”

In other words, this is a hypothesis that has yet to be proven. Her modeling suggests it COULD make the jabs appear ineffective IF those who got the jab actually behave very differently from the unjabbed.

But again, it’s highly unlikely that the unvaccinated are avoiding exposure by steering clear of close contacts and crowds to a greater degree than those who got the jab. It’s far more reasonable to suspect that the shots don’t work.

On a side note, Bodner’s study was funded by the Canada COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.⁶ This task force is housed at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and McGill University is a long-term recipient of grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.^7,8,9,10

What Do the Data Say About COVID Jab Effectiveness?

Based on data from around the world, it seems clear that the COVID gene transfer injections are not working. In fact, they’re having the opposite effect of what you’d expect from a real vaccine. According to a Washington Post analysis of state and federal data,¹¹ in September 2021, when Delta was most prominent, 23% of those who died from COVID in the U.S. had received the jab.

In January and February 2022, when Omicron started dominating, that percentage jumped to 42%. In December 2021 and January 2022, just under half of all the COVID patients in intensive care at Kaiser Permanente’s hospital system in Northern California had also received one or more shots.¹²

Many argue that Omicron was more contagious than Delta, hence the higher death toll. But Omicron was also far milder than Delta, so why would the jabbed die at a higher rate from a less lethal variant than a more lethal one?

One attempt at an explanation is that the fatalities are now occurring primarily among the elderly. Nearly two-thirds of those who died from COVID during the Omicron wave were 75 and older. During the Delta wave, 75-year-olds and older accounted for just one-third of the deaths.¹³

But that was the case from the beginning, and it still doesn’t answer the question: Why would old people be more likely to die from a milder virus than a more serious one? To answer that question, the injection pushers revert back to the argument of waning potency. Two-thirds of those who died in January and February 2022 did not have a booster shot. According to Anchorage Daily News:¹⁴

“Experts say the rising number of vaccinated people dying should not cause panic in those who got shots, the vast majority of whom will survive infections. Instead, they say, these deaths serve as a reminder that vaccines are not foolproof and that those in high-risk groups should consider getting boosted and taking extra precautions during surges.”

So, in other words, the jab only works for a handful of months, and then you have to take another. And another. And another. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,¹⁵ the first two doses wear off after five months, necessitating a third dose, and the third dose wears off in just four months, at which time you’re supposed to get dose No. 4.

Israeli data¹⁶ show the effectiveness of shot No. 4 in preventing severe disease declines by 56% in just seven weeks. So, it appears the protection you get from the shots keeps getting shorter with each dose. Meanwhile, data show the shots can render you increasingly susceptible to all manner of infection and disease, through a wide variety of mechanisms.

Moderna Trial Data Reveal Repeated Infections Are Likely

Among such data is a preprint study¹⁷ posted on medRxiv April 19, 2022, which found adult participants in Moderna’s COVID jab trial who got the real injection, and later got a breakthrough infection, did not generate antibodies against the nucleocapsid — a key component of the virus — as frequently as did those in the placebo arm.

Curiously, placebo recipients produced anti-nucleocapsid antibodies twice as often as those who got the Moderna shot, and their anti-nucleocapsid response was larger regardless of the viral load. As a result of this reduced antibody response, those who got the jab may be more prone to repeated COVID infections. As reported by The Defender:¹⁸

“[T]he authors found that using the presence of anti-nucleocapsid (anti-N) antibodies to determine whether a person was exposed to SARS-CoV-2 will miss some infections. Thus, the sensitivity of this kind of test, when applied to vaccinated individuals, is not ideal.

However, there are more important implications^19,20 of these findings … Specifically, the study implies that the reduced ability of a vaccinated individual to produce antibodies to other portions of the virus may lead to a greater risk of future infections in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated.

It is important to note that this is not just another argument for the superiority of natural immunity. Rather, this is evidence suggesting that even after a vaccinated person has a breakthrough infection, that individual still does not acquire the same level of protection against subsequent exposures that an unvaccinated person acquires.

This is a troubling finding, and something investigators conducting the Moderna vaccine trial likely knew in 2020.”

UK Data Confirm Results

These findings are corroborated by data from the U.K. Health Security Agency. It publishes weekly COVID-19 vaccine surveillance data, including anti-nucleocapsid antibody levels. The report²¹ for Week 13, issued March 31, 2022, shows that COVID-jabbed individuals with breakthrough infections have lower levels of these antibodies — a finding they attributed to the protective benefit of the shot:

“These lower anti N responses in individuals with breakthrough infections (post-vaccination) compared to primary infections likely reflect the shorter and milder infections in these patients.”

However, this interpretation is likely flawed, because less severe infection is associated with lower viral load, and as the study above demonstrated, the “vaccinated” have lower anti-nucleocapsid antibody levels than the unvaccinated at all viral load levels, but especially so at the lowest viral loads. As noted by The Defender:²²

“This is one of the most significant findings of the study because it overturns the heretofore unchallenged idea that decreased seroconversion in the vaccinated is due to less severe infection in this population — which is a benefit provided by the vaccine.

However, this new study shows that even at low viral loads, the unvaccinated are more likely to seroconvert than those who are vaccinated. In fact, the difference in seroconversion rates is the greatest at lowest viral loads. The decrease in conversion rates is not a result of a benefit from the vaccine. It is a consequence of it.”

Boosted Now Have Three to Four Times Higher Case Rates

The Defender also reviews other U.K. data showing the COVID case rate is three to four times higher among those who have received a booster shot, compared to the unvaccinated. This is true for all age groups with the exception of children under 18:²³

“What could explain such a large increase in infection rates among the boosted? Interestingly, the authors … warn that the unvaccinated may have contracted COVID-19 prior to the observation period — in other words, they may have acquired natural immunity previously, giving them added protection …

But their own data tells the opposite story. The boosted are more likely to contract the disease — by a factor of 3 to 4. How do we know whether the larger infection rates in the boosted are due to more robust immunity in the unvaccinated because of prior infection or due to an immune deficiency in the boosted?

The question can be definitively answered by examining the trend of infection rates [using] … the equivalent table from two months earlier. There is still a greater infection rate among the boosted, but it is only two to three times higher. If the authors’ hypothesis was correct, the more recent data should have shown less of a difference, not more.

If anything, their data support the finding that the decreased seroconversion rates in the vaccinated may be causing a greater risk of repeated infections.”

Walgreens’ Data

Data from the pharmacy chain Walgreens in the U.S. also reveal the same trend — COVID-jabbed individuals are testing positive for COVID at higher rates than the unjabbed, and those who got their last shot five months or more ago have the highest risk.

As you can see in the screenshot from Walgreens’ COVID-19 tracker²⁴ below, during the week of May 9 through 15, 2022, 21.4% of unvaccinated individuals who got tested for COVID got a positive result. Of those who had gotten just one COVID shot, the positivity rate was 26.3%.

Of those who received two doses five months or more ago, 31.3% tested positive, and of those who received a third dose five months or more ago, the positive rate was 32.7%. So, after the first booster shot (the third dose), people are at greatest risk of testing positive for COVID.

More Jabs, More COVID Deaths

Perhaps most disturbing of all are the data showing the COVID shots are raising mortality rates, both from COVID and other causes. Above is an animated illustration²⁵ sourced from Our World In Data, first showing the vaccination rates of South America, North America, Europe and Africa, from mid-December 2020 through the third week of April 2022, followed by the cumulative confirmed COVID deaths per million in those countries during that same timeframe.

Africa has had a consistently low vaccination rate throughout, while North America, Europe and South America all have had rapidly rising vaccination rates. Africa has also had a consistently low COVID mortality rate, although a slight rise began around September 2021. Still, it’s nowhere near the COVID death rates of North America, South America and Europe, all of which saw dramatic increases.

Here’s another one,²⁶ also sourced from Our World In Data, first showing the excess death rate in the U.S. (the cumulative number of deaths from all causes compared to projections based on previous years), between January 26, 2020, and January 30, 2022, followed by an illustration of the tandem rise of vaccine doses administered and the excess mortality rate. It clearly shows that as vaccination rates rose, so did excess mortality.

Risk-Benefit Analyses

We also have the benefit of more than one risk-benefit analysis, and all show that, with very few exceptions, the COVID jabs do more harm than good. A risk-benefit analysis²⁷ by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and independent researcher Kathy Dopp, published in mid-February 2022, concluded that the COVID jab is deadlier than COVID-19 itself for anyone under the age of 80.

Another analysis,²⁸ which relied on data in the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), concluded that in those under age 18, the shots only increase the risk of death from COVID, and there’s no point at which the shot can prevent a single COVID death, no matter how many are vaccinated.If you’re under 18, you’re 51 times more likely to die from the COVID jab than you are to die from COVID if not vaccinated.

If you’re under 18, you’re a shocking 51 times more likely to die from the jab than you are to die from COVID if not vaccinated. In the 18 to 29 age range, the shot will kill 16 for every person it saves from dying from COVID, and in the 30 to 39 age range, the expected number of vaccine fatalities to prevent a single COVID death is 15. Only when you get into the 60 and older categories do the risks between the jab and COVID infection even out.

A third risk-benefit analysis by researchers in Germany and The Netherlands was published in June 2021, in the journal Vaccines.²⁹ The paper caused such an uproar, part of the editorial board resigned in protest.³⁰ The journal retracted the paper, but after a thorough re-review, it was republished in the August 2021 issue of Science, Public Health Policy and the Law.³¹

These researchers concluded that, “as we vaccinate 100 000 persons, we might save five lives but risk two to four deaths.”³² A fourth, still preliminary, analysis — based on more than 1,700 death reports collected by Steve Kirsch — shows the shots do more harm than good in anyone under age 60. Kirsch writes:³³

“Figure 1 below is an analysis of survey data I collected. The analysis shows that the vaccines are harmful to those under 60. The red dots higher than the error bar means more vaccinated people observed dead than expected based on the population of vaccinated to all people.

In other words, if we vaccinated 60% of people (middle of the grey bar) and 70% (red dot) of the deaths are vaccinated, we have a serious problem. The precautionary principle of medicine suggests if you are under 60 and thinking of taking a vaccine, you shouldn’t. These preliminary results are both statistically significant …

The conclusion is very clear: nobody under 60 years old should get the vaccine because there is no evidence of a benefit. In fact, if you are between 40-60, it’s clear that vaccination makes it more likely you’ll die, not less likely.”

Figure 1. Red dot below error bar = vax works. Red dot above error bar = vax likely causes harm. Red dot inside the error bar = Insufficient evidence to justify taking a new, unproven vaccine. Conclusion: Vaccine shouldn’t be considered unless there is a clear benefit. 60 and older seems to justify use based on the data we have so far. Limitations: we are waiting for others to confirm / challenge the analysis. See text³⁴ for more info. Joel Smalley did the analysis.

While some analyses present a direr picture than others, taken together, it’s clear that there appears to be no long term benefits to the COVID jabs. We’re consistently ending up with a higher cost than can conceivably be considered reasonable. The pro-pharma side will likely continue to lob flimsy excuses at the data, but at some point, the truth will be so clear that even the blind will see it. Until that day, continue to inform yourself and share what you find.

Originally published May 26, 2022 on Mercola.com

Sources and References

• ^1, 5 Medscape May 13, 2022
• ² medRxiv April 29, 2022 DOI: 10.1101/2022.04.25.22274266
• ^{3, 11, 12, 13, 14} Anchorage Daily News April 29, 2022
• ⁴ Nature Communications November 20, 2020; 11 Article number 5917
• ⁶ medRxiv April 29, 2022 DOI: 10.1101/2022.04.25.22274266, See funding statement
• ⁷ Gates Foundation Grant to McGill University September 2020
• ⁸ Gates Foundation Grant to McGill University April 2020
• ⁹ McGill International Funding Sources
• ¹⁰ McGill newsroom December 17, 2015
• ¹⁵ CDC COVID-19 Vaccine Booster Shots
• ¹⁶ The Defender April 7, 2022
• ¹⁷ medRxiv April 19, 2022 DOI: 10.1101/2022.04.18.22271936
• ^18, 22, 23 The Defender May 4, 2022
• ¹⁹ Igor’s Newsletter April 26, 2022
• ²⁰ Bad Cattitude Substack April 27, 2022
• ²¹ UK Health Security Agency COVID-19 Vaccine Surveillance Report Week 13
• ²⁴ Walgreens COVID-19 Index
• ²⁵ Twitter TexasLindsay April 23, 2022
• ²⁶ Twitter TexasLindsay April 25, 2022
• ²⁷ COVID-19 and All-Cause Mortality Data Analysis by Kathy Dopp and Stephanie Seneff (PDF)
• ²⁸ COVID Vaccination and Age-Stratified All-Cause Mortality Risk (PDF)
• ²⁹ Vaccines 2021; 9(7): 693
• ³⁰ Science, Public Health Policy and the Law August 2021; 3: 81-86, page 82
• ³¹ Science, Public Health Policy and the Law August 2021; 3: 87-89
• ³² Clinical and Translational Discovery February 25, 2022; 2(1): e35
• ^33, 34 Steve Kirsch Substack May 17, 2022

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-those-under-60-are-more-likely-to-die-if-jabbed_4492774.html?utm_source=News&utm_campaign=breaking-2022-05-29-3&utm_medium=email&est=m2zjwyl9FrrGyYscQa5JCNQw%2FIFtmIhClRoeuMVLbSvSkZM56JSsLFoh9UbesiKTqQ%3D%3D

No doubt that the Buffalo shooting is tragic and motivated by hate, but retired Vanderbilt University professor Carol M. Swain believes we need to address the underlying issues that create this type of hate and division. She said our leaders need to bring people together by promoting an American identity instead of pushing identity politics.

“In that book, “The New White Nationalism,” I argue that we needed to reject identity politics and multiculturalism,” Swain said during an interview with NTD’s Capitol Report. “In America, we need to focus on the American national identity. And I think that that is where we need to be.”

“I think we are responsible, that because we are not addressing issues and grievances and problems in a way that brings people together, we are creating an atmosphere where these types of incidents will continue to occur,” Swain said.

On May 14, Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old white male, shot and killed 10 at a supermarket and left three injured; 11 who were shot were black. Gendron described himself as a white supremacist.

According to the manifesto Gendron posted online, he said he chose Buffalo because of strict laws governing gun ownership there and because it has a large black population.

Swain said the Buffalo incident should be looked at in the context of broader hate crimes. She also thinks that there needs to be less focus on inclusion, equity initiatives, and the differences among groups, and a greater focus on what unites us as Americans.

“What happened was tragic. But we also need to look at the subway incident, we also need to look at the hate crimes that take place involving other groups. And we need to look at ourselves and our leaders and how they’re responding,” Swain said.

“Right now, we have the critical race theory, the diversity, equity, inclusion being pushed upon the population in a way that divides people, it creates racial animosity and hatred.”

Swain said political leaders are stoking divisions and allowing those on the left who vandalized business and federal buildings in the 2020 riots to get away with violence.

“As long as politicians see political advantage to dividing people along racial lines, I think you’re going to have young people, you know, that have grievances, and they see racial double standards, and they get angrier and angrier,” Swain said.

“What we find is that, in this environment, the political parties are divided to a large extent. The Democrats see political advantage to dividing people along racial and ethnic lines. And with the Republicans, they’re too afraid to stand up.”

A crucial step toward building unity is allowing for free speech and open dialogue, she said.

“Unfortunately, we have created a society where people can’t talk. We would be much better off if we could talk freely,” said Swain.

“If we stood up for principles, old-fashioned Judeo-Christian principles, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, if we kept taking things back to principled responses, then I think there would be less animosity,” she added.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden went to Buffalo to visit the community that lost loved ones in the shooting. In his speech, the president called the shooting in Buffalo an act of “domestic terrorism,” invoked the Jan. 6 incident, and lumped the two together under the banner of white supremacy.

Swain called Biden’s remarks “pandering” saying, “When I look at Jan. 6, [it] has nothing to do with this young man in Buffalo, absolutely nothing.”

The vast majority of Jan. 6 protesters said that they were at the Capitol to voice their objection to the 2020 election irregularities and lack of election integrity.

‘They only care about certain deaths’

The left’s push for more gun control omit the many cases that go against their narrative, such as instances where guns were used to neutralize shooters, according to Erich Pratt, the senior vice president of Gun Owners of America (GOA), a gun rights advocacy organization that represents more than 2 million Americans.

“The left is all about pushing gun control. It’s absolutely disgusting what they’re doing. They’re pushing gun control, they’re fundraising off of this within hours of the shooting,” Pratt told NTD’s Capitol Report, referring to the May 24 shooting that killed 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

“And really, it’s despicable because it becomes clear they only care about certain deaths,” he said.

Politicians and activists pushing for gun control neglect to talk about cities that already have the policies they want to implement for the entire nation, he said.

“For example, more than 40 people have been shot and killed in Chicago this month. In the last 30 days, in Baltimore, there had been 20 people shot and killed. But the left is not talking about that. They’re not fundraising off of Chicago or Baltimore because they already have very strict gun control,” Pratt noted.

“Those cities don’t serve their cause—[they] have red-flag, gun confiscation orders, they have universal background registration checks, they have so-called assault weapons bans, they have everything that the left is trying to push on us, and yet they have murders out the wazoo in those two cities that they can’t control it.

“And what that tells us, obviously, is that gun control is not the answer,” he said.

Pratt noted examples of past deadly attacks that did not involve guns, and said that blaming a certain instrument for mass attacks is “short-sighted because no law that bans a certain object is going to stop an evil-determined heart from killing.”

“What’s amazing, and this is one of the things that the anti-gun left does, is they only talk about certain uses of a firearm, which fit their narrative when they’re used in a bad way. But then they won’t talk about firearms when they’re actually used to stop mass shootings,” Pratt said.

Pratt noted how, on May 25, the day after the mass shooting in Uvalde, a woman with a concealed carry permit in West Virginia shot and killed a man who had started firing an AR-style rifle into a crowd of people at a birthday-graduation party.

He accused the left-wing media of generating opposition to people’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms “by only selectively talking about certain stories,” and neglecting stories that show how guns may be used to avert more deaths.

“A lot of times where there has been a lot of killing … they are brought to an end by a good guy with a gun,” he said.

Pratt shared the story of Stephen Willeford, who is currently GOA’s spokesperson. As an armed citizen, Willeford in November 2017 stopped a shooter at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, from potentially killing more people.

“Sadly, everyone at that church in Sutherland Springs did not have a gun on that day except for the bad guy,” Pratt said. “But when Steven Willeford, who lived down the street heard the shooting, he ran out of his house barefoot with his AR-15 [and] called the guy out of the church. That guy came out and Steven mortally wounded him.”

“I mean, the guy got in his car, drove off but eventually took his own life because he was wounded so bad,” he continued. “The FBI cited that case and many other cases as examples where armed citizens use guns to stop attempted mass murders.”

Pratt argued against the concept of gun-free zones, saying they only serve to be places where shooters seek to go. The Uvalde shooting was an example of that, he noted.

“It’s really important to point out that in most cases, these killers will try to seek out a location where it’s a gun-free zone. You know, 81 percent of police agree that teachers and staff should be armed, and with good reason because no school has ever had a mass shooting where there were armed teachers and staff,” he said.

“But tragically, that wasn’t the case at the Texas School. Police were reportedly not quick to rush in. And this Texas school didn’t take part in the program that allows teachers to be armed, so it was a gun-free zone.

“And again, that’s what killers often choose to target. And why would 94 percent of mass shooters target gun-free zones? Because they don’t want bullets being fired back at them.

“That’s why they don’t target police stations or gun shows because killers love gun control. And sadly, that’s what enabled this killer in Texas.”

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A mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers on May 24. At least 17 others, including children, sustained non-life-threatening injuries.

The massacre is the country’s second-deadliest K-12 school shooting on record, following the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.

Authorities identified Salvador Ramos, 18, as the shooter responsible for the attack. He was shot and killed about 90 minutes after he arrived at the school around 11:30 a.m. that day.

Reportedly a high school dropout, Ramos did not have any criminal or mental health history known to authorities. His motive remains unknown as authorities continue to investigate the events of the deadly shooting.

At a press conference on May 26 at Robb Elementary, an official from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), South Texas regional director Victor Escalon, said that Ramos appeared to have walked unobstructed into a school building before the attack, in contrast with previous reports that he had been confronted by a school security officer outside the school.

Below is an approximate timeline of what is known so far, including details about the events surrounding the massacre and conflicting reports.

Before May 24

Ramos turned 18 on May 16 and purchased two semi-automatic rifles separately, on May 17 and May 20, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confirmed on May 25 in a briefing to Texas state senators, reported KHOU. ATF authorities said he also bought 375 rounds of 5.56 ammunition on May 18.

Day of the Attack

On May 24, earlier in the day, students and their parents had been at Robb Elementary for an honor roll ceremony.

11:00 a.m.

Ramos posted on Facebook three times in the 30 minutes before reaching Robb Elementary school, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told a press conference on May 25. The first Facebook post indicated that he would shoot his grandmother. The second post said that he had shot his grandmother, and the third said that he would shoot an elementary school, without specifying which. The third post was published within 15 minutes before Ramos arrived at the school, Abbott said.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, has said the posts were actually messages.

“It actually on a message … to somebody else that he had had conversation with,” Texas DPS Director Steven McCraw said Friday.

Ramos, who had moved in with his grandmother in March, shot her in the face and left her in critical condition before leaving the residence and traveling about 2.29 miles to Robb Elementary, McCraw said on May 25.

The grandmother, 66, ran across the street to a neighbor to get help after she was shot. She also reported Ramos to the police department, he added. She was medevaced to a San Antonio hospital, McCraw said.

11:28 a.m.

Ramos, traveling in his grandmother’s pickup truck, crashed into a ditch near the school, according to law enforcement. He emerged from the passenger’s side of the truck and was carrying what witnesses say was a long gun and a bag that authorities later determined contained the ammunition.

Ramos shot at two witnesses outside a funeral home across the street before he continued toward the school. He then climbed a fence into a parking lot and fired shots at the school “multiple times,” Escalon said.

The two witnesses ran away uninjured.

The Texas DPS around this time received calls from local law enforcement that Ramos was making entry into the school, Texas DPS spokesman Lt. Chris Olivarez told CBS News on May 25.

11:30 a.m.

A 911 call is made about a car crash and a man with a gun.

The suspect reaches the school parking lot and begins shooting at the school, McCraw said during a briefing on May 27.

Police vehicles arrive at the funeral home.

The school resource officer—initially said to have confronted the suspect, then reported not to be on campus—actually confronted a person, but it was a teacher, not the suspect, according to McCraw. The officer drove right by the suspect.

11:33 a.m.

The 18-year-old shooter entered the west side of Robb Elementary school, McCraw said.

The door had been propped open by a teacher.

The suspect begins shooting into a room, either room 111 or room 112.

He soon enters adjoining classrooms, gunning down teachers and children.

Over 100 rounds were fired in total.

11:35 a.m.

Three police officers enter the same door Ramos used, followed by another team of police officers and a sheriff’s deputy. The first officers received wounds from bullets grazing them.

None of the officers try breaking down the door to get into the classroom.

11:44 a.m.

Other officers entered the building, Escalon said. Some evacuated people who were inside.

As many as 19 officers were in the hallway at one time.

“There was plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done with one exception: the incident commander inside believed they needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point,” McCraw said Friday. The commander “believed that, in fact, it was a barricaded subject that we had time there was no kids at risk,” he said.

While hearing the gunfire, teachers in other classrooms began “breaking windows trying to evacuate children to prevent any further loss of life,” Olivarez told CBS News.

12:03 p.m.

A 911 caller said she was in room 112, where Ramos had entered.

The call lasted one minute, 23 seconds.

12:10 p.m.

She called back, telling of multiple dead people.

12:13 p.m.

The caller called again.

12:15 p.m.

Border Patrol Tactical Unit members arrive, along with shields several minutes later.

12:16 p.m.

Same female called, saying eight or nine students were still alive.

12:19 p.m.

Another caller called 911 from the room. Three shots could be heard through the phone.

12:36 p.m.

Another 911 call. Lasted 21 seconds.

12:43 p.m.

Another 911 call.

12:47 p.m.

Another 911 call.

12:50 p.m.

Officers breach the classroom door and kill the suspect.

Aftermath

The 21 victims who perished in the attack were later all found in the same classroom. All of them were identified by May 26.

The gun used by Ramos in the shooting was a Daniel Defense DDM4 V7 rifle, the ATF confirmed on May 25, reported KHOU. On May 24, after the shooting, The Daily Dot obtained a receipt of the purchase. Daniel Defense, a gun manufacturer based in Georgia that sells guns online, appears to ship weapons to registered dealers which then complete the purchase, the outlet noted.

The other rifle, a Smith & Wesson M&P 15, was found on the ground after the shooting, outside the pickup truck, state and federal law enforcement officials said, reported NBC News.

Escalon was asked by reporters on May 26 about why officers were unable to stop Ramos sooner, and what officers were doing between 11:44 and 12:45. He responded that he had “taken all those questions into consideration” and hoped to provide updates later.

McCraw told reporters at a news conference on May 27 that it was the “wrong decision” to not engage Ramos sooner.

He said that “the on-scene commander at the time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject.”

He also revealed that Ramos entered the school through a door that was propped open by a teacher just minutes before.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

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