ESPN has suspended a female show personality after she expressed political opinions the network did not agree with. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
In the latest episode of cancel culture at ESPN, 15-year-veteran Sage Steele has been suspended for recent comments regarding former President Barack Obama, vaccine mandates and certain behaviors of female sports reporters.
According to The Washington Post, Steele appeared on the “Uncut” podcast, which is hosted by former NFL quarterback Jay Cutler, last Wednesday.
In her first comments on a controversial issue, Steele addressed female reporters who claim to be mistreated by various men in the sports industry.
While she admitted some players would offer to take her to dinner or things of that nature early in her career, she said she did not take it to heart. She then explained her disappointment with the way some female sports reporters have presented themselves.
“I do think as women, we need to be responsible as well,” she said. “It isn’t just on players and athletes and coaches to act a certain way.
“I mean, I’ve had talks with young women who would come in and they’d intern with me, with our channel, or just other women who reach out to me now,” Steele continued.
“And I’ve said to a couple of them — they’re like, ‘Would you look at my tape, would you do this?” and I’ve said, ‘Listen. I would love to, but the way that you present yourself is not something I want to be associated with. So when you dress like that, I’m not saying you deserve the gross comments, but you know what you’re doing when you’re putting that outfit on, too.”
Sage Steele believes women “need to be responsible as well” for inappropriate comments directed at them.
Sage tells young women, “when you dress like that, I’m not saying you deserve the gross comments, but you know what you’re doing when you put that outfit on too.” pic.twitter.com/6CrxOoXILN
As Steele made clear, she was not saying women deserve to be mistreated or objectified under any circumstances. Rather, she was suggesting that just as men should be responsible for their words and actions, women should be responsible for their own words and actions — including their choice of clothing.
Of course, this line of thinking does not usually fly with leftists like the ones who work at ESPN. They operate under the mistaken belief that women who choose to sexualize themselves with suggestive clothing are somehow makings strides for “empowerment.”
Next, Steele touched on her life as a biracial woman. She told the story of Barbara Walters questioning her during an appearance on “The View” for how Steele presented her racial background.
“She’s like, ‘Well, what happens when you fill out your census … if they make you choose a race,’ she’s like, ‘What are you going to put?’ And I go, ‘Well, both.’ And she’s like, ‘Well you can’t … [former President] Barack Obama chose black and he’s biracial.’
“I’m like, ‘Well congratulations to the president, that’s his thing. I think that’s fascinating considering his black dad was nowhere to be found, but his white mom and grandma raised him. But okay, you do you, I’m gonna do me,’” Steele said.
“And then they put up a picture behind me of my parents and my brothers and me, and I’m like, ‘Listen, I’m pretty sure my white mom was there when I was born … my white family loves me as much as my black family.’ And I got killed for that.”
Steele was clearly saying that as a biracial woman, she does not buy into the left’s anti-white narrative. She loves both her white family and her black family, and her shot at Obama was meant to convey the hypocrisy he displays by demonizing white people despite being raised by two of them.
Once again, leftists like former ESPN employee Jemele Hill chose to misinterpret her comments to mean that Obama should not identify as black, which is not at all what she was saying.
So on top of thinking former President Obama shouldn’t identify as black because he didn’t have a relationship with his black father, Sage Steele also thinks female journalists who dress a certain way “know what you’re doing when you’re putting that outfit on.”
Finally, Steele discussed the recent vaccine mandate for all Disney employees, including those who work at ESPN.
“I respect everyone’s decision, I really do, but to mandate it is sick, and it’s scary to me in many ways,” she said. “But I have a job, a job that I love and frankly a job that I need.”
That did not fly with leftists either, because they are unable to admit the fact that mandating a vaccine as a condition of employment is grossly inappropriate. “Sick” and “scary” are actually milder than many words that could be used to describe such actions.
Despite the fact that Steele’s comments on these three issues were in some cases objectively true and others, well-substantiated opinions, ESPN took issue with them.
According to Yahoo! Sports, the network suspended Steele on Tuesday for at least a week. She also lost hosting duties for the espnW: Women + Sports Summit, which is set to take place later this month.
In an attempt to cover its bases, ESPN issued a statement ensuring viewers it encouraged differing opinions at its company.
“At ESPN, we embrace different points of view — dialogue and discussion makes this place great,” they said according to Yahoo. “That said, we expect that those points of view be expressed respectfully, in a manner consistent with our values, and in line with our internal policies.”
This is simply a lie. Steele is being lambasted as a direct result of her conservative opinions, not the manner in which she expressed them. It’s obvious to anyone who has followed ESPN for more than five minutes during the last few years.
The network did the same thing to former employee Rachel Nichols last month when she called ESPN out in a private conversation for allegedly hiring and promoting people based on skin color instead of merit.
At this point, it’s clear the network doesn’t just fail to embrace “different points of view” — it actively rejects them.
“I know my recent comments created controversy for the company, and I apologize,” Steele said in a statement on Tuesday. “We are in the midst of an extremely challenging time that impacts all of us, and it’s more critical than ever that we communicate constructively and thoughtfully.”
She did not directly apologize for what she said, and she was right not to do so. Just because ESPN does not agree with her opinions does not mean she should be barred from expressing them.
It remains to be seen whether Steele’s suspension will extend longer than a week, or if it will turn into an expulsion. ESPN has not fully “canceled” her yet as far as employment goes, but its message of disapproval is crystal clear.
President Joe Biden traveled to Michigan on Tuesday to promote his Build Back Better agenda.
He is scheduled to appear with Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, at a union training center in Howell, according to Click on Detroit.
To say that Michiganders were not happy to see the president would be a gross understatement.
The videos below will provide you with a good idea of what Biden faced upon his arrival in the state. Both sides of the highway were lined with protesters who’d come out in droves to express their dissatisfaction with the president.
A bright green John Deere bucket loader came rolling down the main road. It was decorated with a large American flag and a sign, which read, “No Biden.”
The protesters carried Trump 2020 flags, Trump 2024 flags, American flags emblazoned with “Trump,” signs that said “Trump won” and, of course, signs with the familiar chant we’ve heard in football stadiums across America for five straight weekends, “F*** Joe Biden.”
Hundreds of protesters lining M-59 ahead of Joe Biden’s visit to Howell today. pic.twitter.com/SPzeCuLqkw
Biden won the state of Michigan by 154,188 votes in November, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at these videos.
Perhaps, this is what the president expected. Ever since his disastrous exit from Afghanistan, he seems to be greeted by protesters wherever he goes.
Two weeks ago, large billboards began appearing along the thruway in central Pennsylvania. The signs depicted a smiling Biden dressed in Taliban military garb, holding a rocket launcher, with the caption: “Making the Taliban Great Again!”
His approval numbers have dived over the past six weeks although they are currently off their lows. As of Tuesday, Rasmussen Reports shows Biden’s approval at 43 percent and his disapproval at 55 percent.
RealClearPolitics average of approval polls on Tuesday shows him with approval at 45.3 percent and disapproval at 47.9 percent.
Powerline Blog has a weekly cartoon feature. On Saturday, they showed a photo of Biden and former President Barack Obama sitting in the Oval Office. Obama’s eyes are closed, and his hands are in a prayer pose in front of his face. Biden is smiling ear to ear as he tells Obama, “Isn’t it neat how they’re all chanting my name at all the football games!”
A woman in her late thirties has died in Washington state after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, according to public health officials.
The Washington State Department of Health said in a Tuesday news release that the unnamed woman had received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The shot was given in late August.
The department said the woman suffered a blood clot.
“This is the first such death in Washington State. We send our deepest condolences to her family and loved ones,” said Umair Shah, the state’s secretary of health. “Losing a loved one at any time is a tragic and difficult … pain that’s become all too familiar in the last year and a half of this pandemic.”
The woman was a resident of King County, which includes Seattle.
“[The Department of Health] will continue working closely with Public Health Seattle-King County and the CDC as more details become available,” the health department said.
A news release from King County called the complication “very rare.”
“The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported only three other confirmed deaths nationally,” the news release said.
“The resident received her vaccination on August 26, 2021 and died on September 7, 2021.
“Her cause of death was determined to be thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), a condition that has been identified as a rare but potentially serious adverse event in people who received the J&J vaccine.”
“In April of this year, the CDC paused its authorization of the J&J vaccine in order to study the risks from these rare complications,” King County officials said. “The CDC then lifted its pause after determining that the benefits of the vaccine far outweigh the risks.”
Officials did not state if the woman who died had any pre-existing conditions.
King County assured those who have not been vaccinated that the “risk of any complication is extremely low.”
Citing the CDC, the county said there have been 38 reported cases of TTS associated with the vaccine and that “the majority of these people have recovered.”
“As with many medications, the risk of serious adverse events is small, but not zero,” the county said.
“It is vital for people to have this information in order to make their own informed decisions. For this reason, it is important to provide education about the risk for TTS and availability of other COVID-19 vaccine options, particularly for women aged 18-49 years.”
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that go largely unreported by the establishment media. In the same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System, 7,439 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 20 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 652,480 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 16,101 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is a personal one, and it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note
As President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland keeps proving how right Republicans were to keep him off the Supreme Court.
Since his confirmation in March, Garland has repeatedly shown how willing he is to use the Justice Department for politically driven causes — from his handling of the fallout from the death of George Floyd, to his opposition to voter integrity laws, to his memo Monday to the FBI to crack down on parents protesting the decisions of their local school board.
If knee-jerk partisanship in the hands of a term-limited political appointee is dangerous, imagine the same man in a lifetime job on the nation’s highest court.
Most Americans should remember that Garland was the federal judge chosen in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the untimely death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
That nomination was stonewalled by the Republican Senate under then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (even McConnell’s most vicious critics on the right have to acknowledge that act of political heroism for the future of the Republic).
In an interview Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck brought up Garland’s past as a federal judge to explain why the order to the FBI on Monday was so troubling.
“Attorney General Garland was a judge, and he should know better than to try to use the FBI for political speech. So many of the courtrooms that we go into, we see this Greek goddess of Themis who had a scale on her left hand and the sword in her right hand, and she’s blindfolded,” Buck said.
“And she’s blindfolded because justice is blind. Justice is impartial — doesn’t care whether you’re white or black, man or woman, tall or short. Justice should not be used to attack a group of people expressing their opinions at school board meetings, whether they’re in favor of critical race theory or whether they’re opposed to critical race theory. Whether they’re in favor of masks or vaccines or opposed.
“That’s political speech that needs to be protected.”
Check it out here. Buck’s comments about Garland come about the 3-minute mark.
That’s all true, of course. The question is whether Garland believes it.
As conservative commentator Dennis Prager pointed out during the fight over Garland’s nomination, mainstream media outlets and liberal commentators went to huge lengths to paint Garland as the “moderate” kind of judge Americans needed on the high court, when the reality was he was a predictable liberal, likely to side predictably with the left on major issues from abortion to immigration to Second Amendment rights.
Even in an era dominated by lies from the administration — “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” of Obamacare — and lies promulgated by the mainstream media — the “hands up, don’t shoot” that helped launch Black Lives Matter as a movement — Garland’s alleged “centrism” was a major assault against verifiable truth.Is the Biden Justice Department a threat to American freedom?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
As if to prove it, the attorney general, the very same man whom luminaries at liberal outlets from coast to coast — like The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times — assured the country would be a “centrist,” has taken militantly leftists positions at every opportunity.
Instead of a moderate, Garland is revealing himself to be an attorney general firmly on the side of the progressive left, using the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against Texas over its pro-life law, for instance, or overseeing the treatment of defendants in cases stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion. (Even a liberal publication like The Daily Beast acknowledged the government’s bias, albeit from a twisted perspective.)
But with his latest move, Garland is showing himself to be the kind of AG only a progressive protofascist could dream of.
He’s openly ordering the Federal Bureau of Investigation — the FBI, for goodness’ sake — to keep tabs on the efforts of American parents who don’t want their kids subjected to critical race theory brainwashing, or requirements to keep their faces and noses covered throughout the school day on scientifically questionable grounds. (This isn’t just a view from the conservative side. If New York Media’s The Intelligencer doesn’t buy the mask argument, it’s got holes.)
With his memo on Monday, Garland proved he’s all too willing to wield the powers of the federal government to put the efforts of parents worried about their children’s education and future on a par with domestic terrorism.
At the same time, he’s part of the administration of a president whose political party took the side of actual domestic terrorism last year when mobs tore apart American cities and Democrats cheered them on (or bailed them out).
Of course, a Garland defender could make the argument that Garland the attorney general is a different creature from Garland as Supreme Court justice — that he’s only fulfilling a role and he would have fulfilled duties on the high court differently. But it’s a hollow point.
Garland clearly thinks he has a legal right to take the actions he has, which means that as a Supreme Court justice, he’d likely approve of similar high-handed tactics on the part of the government (certainly as long as it was a Democratic administration implementing them).
Every day since his inauguration in January, Joe Biden has shown he’s not at all the “centrist” that was sold to the American public by a hideously biased mainstream media during the 2020 election.
Every day since he was confirmed, Merrick Garland has shown the same about himself.
Rep. Buck was right. Garland was a judge and should know better than to give the FBI an order like the one he gave on Monday.
He clearly doesn’t, or he doesn’t care.
And he almost had a lifetime seat on the United States Supreme Court.
The purpose of the China virus narrative is psychological control
The world has been bombarded with agitprop public messaging from state-run Chinese media and “wolf warrior” diplomats, as well as Western authorities and their media sycophants, since China first reported COVID-19 cases in Wuhan city, Hubei Province to the World Health Organization on Dec. 31, 2019.
The messages were uniformly and relentlessly propagated, all without a shred of scientific and epidemiological evidence backing up the various “health directives.” The purpose of the narrative was expressly psychological in order to condition people to accept ostensible health and security measures from the government “experts” in exchange for personal freedoms. Here are the main components of the narrative:
• Wear masks everywhere, including outside (while ignoring their relative ineffectiveness and also the hazards to children of wearing them over time). • Practice social distancing everywhere (arbitrary distancing requirements). • Implement total lockdowns and stay-at-home policies to “flatten the curve”—a public relations euphemism that has magically disappeared as a stated public health goal. • Recommend vaccinations/injections to stop the spread, despite no long-term human trials or legal remedies for adverse reactions. Furthermore, Rochelle Walensky, the U.S. CDC director, has stated that “vaccines no longer prevent you from spreading COVID.” • Press vaccines for demographic groups not at risk, including children who are at virtually zero risk of death from the virus. • Suppress discussion of natural immunity in favor of vaccines/injections. This includes mandating injections for those who contracted the virus and have long-term antibodies as a result. • Suppress discussion of early treatment protocols using existing therapeutic drugs. • Suppress all public reporting of adverse reactions to vaccines/injections (one example reported here). • Insist that the zoonotic theory of the virus origins was correct (despite much contrary evidence as noted here, here, here, here, here, and here); conversely, deny the lab leak theory at all costs. • Ridicule, shame, and ostracize any and all who deviate from the above orthodoxy, especially independent doctors and physicians who have successfully saved lives using protocols associated with hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, quercetin, monoclonal antibodies, azithromycin, zinc, and other therapeutic drugs and medicines. • Most of all, propagate and reinforce fear in the minds of everyone in order to force adherence to the above messaging.
Has there been a dime’s worth of difference between the virus messaging of state-controlled Chinese media and the U.S. legacy media? Not that is discernible to careful observers. But the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) goes further in its virus-related messaging. Despite the general debunking of the points in the above media narrative, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs cleverly denies their virus agitprop: “Spreading disinformation about the epidemic is indeed spreading a ‘political virus,’” the ministry told The Associated Press. “False information is the common enemy of mankind, and China has always opposed the creation and spread of false information,” it said.
That phrase “false information is the common enemy of mankind” is the ultimate in CCP hypocrisy, as virtually everything spun by Chinese state-run media is a lie.
A man wearing protective gear walks past shops in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, on May 18, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Fear of death is the ultimate psychological leverage being exploited in the virus information war by the CCP and authoritarian governments everywhere. According to data from Worldometers, as of Oct. 5, there have been 4,819,544 deaths caused by COVID-19. The data includes the grossly under-reported total of 4,636 deaths in China, a number that has remained unchanged since May 2020—this has strengthened the false narrative that “CCP health measures defeated the virus.”
With the purposeful misreporting of COVID-19 statistics as a result of government financial incentives to attribute deaths to the virus, no one will ever know the true number of deaths directly caused by the virus. Nor, for political reasons, will we ever know how many people might have otherwise been saved had they been administered therapeutic protocols when their symptoms first manifested, instead of adhering to delayed government supportive care treatment protocols in terminal stages of the disease, especially Remdesivir, steroids, and mechanical respirators. Yet, there is ample evidence of the effectiveness of Ivermectin and other drugs in treating people early who contract the virus, especially as reported in India here and here.
Beijing’s Psychological Warfare
The CCP’s virus messaging is an element of the Chinese strategy of Three Warfares, which includes concurrent psychological, media, and legal components. The strategy was officially “endorsed by the CCP Central Committee and the Central Military Commission in 2003.” During the pandemic, there has been far too much focus on the media component of the CCP narratives when the real danger is associated with the CCP’s psychological objectives. The media agitprop objectives are fairly obvious: shift blame for the virus away from China, push false Chinese altruism and benevolence (medical supplies for modest profits), create the illusion that China has “solved the virus problem,” demand multilateral cooperation under Chinese leadership to counter the virus worldwide, “get vaccinated,” etc.
The psychological goals are hidden and much subtler. A key element of psychological warfare is the demoralization of decision makers and especially targeted populations. Fear of death, economic lockdowns, the “new normal” of masks and social distancing ad infinitum, the transition from “two shots” to periodic (and seemingly unlimited) booster injections, and arbitrary authoritarian measures that have been implemented and changed willy-nilly over time are weighing heavily on the collective psyche of populations around the world.
A demoralized world population facilitates aggressive CCP actions aimed at asserting Chinese leadership in virtual every aspect of human endeavors. Those goals were discussed at length here.
Students, some wearing protective masks, arrive for the first day of school at Sessums Elementary School in Riverview, Fla., on Aug. 10, 2021. (Chris O’Meara/AP Photo)
There are two key indicators that point to an increasing demoralization and feelings of hopelessness as fears of the virus continue to be stoked. The first is a significant rise in drug use worldwide, as noted in a U.N. report from June 2021. Drug abuse is of course a way of avoiding the difficulties of real life, and the potential for the seemingly random and uncontrollable probability of death from COVID-19. The second indicator is the increasing incidence of depression and suicide, especially among young people. Lockdowns and the associated isolation are particularly devastating on the young, and the absence of social contacts with peers leads to feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and suicide. But economic lockdowns are also devastating to small business owners who have spent their lives building their businesses only to seem them shut down by state and local governments.
The bottom line is that national governments that are focused on domestic issues associated with their demoralized citizens are less inclined to counter CCP aggression in general. The CCP wins without fighting!
Perhaps the most important psychological component of the CCP’s Three Warfares virus campaign is the conditioning of people who are otherwise unaccustomed to authoritarian measures of control, especially in their personal lives. There has long been tension between federal and state governments promising to deliver safety and security and the American people, who wish to preserve their hard-fought individual freedoms and liberties preserved by the U.S. Constitution.
Conditioning people to willingly obey the arbitrary whims of government medical “experts” and politicians in order to “combat the virus” is only one degree of separation from getting those same people to accept and obey authoritarian measures on other topics deemed important to politicians: implementation of a social credit and control system, creation of an internal passport system based on individual social credits, monitoring and reporting of individual financial transactions greater than $600, confiscation of individual firearms, suppression of free speech rights on topics deemed unfavorable by the political class, etc.
People who accept unwarranted vaccine mandates, social distancing requirements, vaccine passports, and forcing children to wear masks at school are much more willing to accept other authoritarian measures dreamt up by governments and authoritarian politicians. The psychological component of the CCP Three Warfares campaign is aimed squarely at preparing people for government control in all facets of their daily lives—just like in communist China
Conclusion
The CCP is heavily investing in a Three Warfares campaign that exploits the pandemic to achieve their objectives worldwide. The psychological “softening up” of America in particular in getting people to accept the arbitrary authoritarian dictates of an amorphous, nameless, and faceless government is a key objective of the CCP’s ongoing campaign to demoralize and condition people for future exploitation and control by the CCP.
Individual freedoms and liberties are anathema to CCP control and must be vigorously defended at all costs—or else lost possibly forever. That means fighting and defeating unconstitutional mandates and directives by governments, as well as those same governments forcing businesses to implement those mandates.
While the greens in America, including their champion zealot, President Joe Biden, howl their primal screams over climate change, the rest of the world is turning to coal. The dark stuff. The satanic fuel. But it’s back big-time across the globe.
So is old-fashioned petroleum.
Bloomberg reported last week that because of high natural gas prices due to a reduced supply from the United States, Europe is “snapping up coal.” It’s cheaper now, and compared to wind and solar it’s a much more reliable source of power.
Euroland is also starting to give up on the green energy dreams that are still alive and well in the minds of American pols in Washington, D.C. Great Britain and Germany have experienced soaring energy prices at the gas pump and in electric utility costs for homes, factories, and businesses. Some relief will come from natural gas that will eventually be supplied to Europe via a gas pipeline from Siberia. Don’t forget, Biden greenlighted that pipeline just a few weeks after killing the Keystone XL pipeline and thousands of jobs here at home.
Meanwhile, the nation with three times the population of the United States and the world’s largest energy consumer, China, is all-in on coal. The Daily Mail reported that China’s 1,000 coal plants “make a mockery” of any promises by Beijing that China will move to renewable energy. Coal is by far the largest source of energy in China, and new plants are being built every week. This is, as the Telegraph put it, “Beijing’s dirtiest little secret.”
Despite those solemn pledges for China to clean up its air, the Chinese emit three to four times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year than does the United States.
Then there is the situation with oil. The price has been rising as demand remains steady. The Wall Street Journal reported that OPEC nations predict that demand for their oil will at least double over the coming decades. That doesn’t sound like a fuel source that is going out of fashion.
This is all happening just at the very moment that Democrats in Congress are about to pass green energy bills that will cripple our fossil fuel industry. These fuels could make America the energy powerhouse of the 21st century. It’s hard to see how dismantling U.S. oil, gas, and coal will stop the rise of the oceans when the rest of the world’s addiction seems incurable.
Last month, Biden went to the United Nations and lectured the world about an international partnership to combat climate change. You could almost hear the snickering in the audience of foreign diplomats.
It is a foreign and economic policy driven not by realism, but by fantasy. Biden sees the world as he wants it to be, not as it is. He reminds me of Britain’s Neville Chamberlain circa 1939, who believed Hitler’s promises of “peace in our time,” up to the moment the bombs started falling like rain on London.
The shame of all this is that when Trump left office, America was all but energy self-sufficient and even an energy exporter. Thanks to the shale oil and gas revolution, the United States has access to more oil and gas (and coal) than any other nation. We have many hundreds of years of energy supply.
Now that the rest of the world is thirsting for U.S. oil, gas, and coal, the Left wants to shut down all domestic production by 2035, even though our fossil fuels are the cleanest.
So, instead of the world’s energy coming from the United States, it will come from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the OPEC nations.
To borrow a Trumpism: Those nations are now laughing behind our backs.
Amid much opposition, President Joe Biden continues to champion his $1 trillion infrastructure plan. His latest pitch took place in Michigan on Tuesday.
Biden won the state in the 2020 election, thanks mostly to large numbers of Democratic voters in Detroit and the surrounding area. But a large majority of counties in Michigan voted for then-President Donald Trump.
When Biden visited to make his questionable infrastructure pitch, he went to one of those pro-Trump counties. Specifically, the president visited the city of Howell in Livingston County, WXYZ-TV reported.
Biden won just 38 percent of the vote in Livingston County, compared with 61 percent for Trump.
If Howell resident Leonard Petty is any indication, the president has not won widespread support in the area during his eight-plus months in office.
“I wish he would just stay out of this state and leave us alone,” Petty said when asked about Biden’s impending visit.
Reporter: “What are your thoughts about the president visiting?” Michigan resident: “I wish he would just stay out of this state and leave us alone.” pic.twitter.com/Dc3Ylk55nt
Biden spoke at the Operating Engineers Training Center in Howell in an attempt to appeal to those who would be doing the infrastructure jobs the bill purports to address.
“We do have needs here, so I am hoping that should this pass in Washington, Howell and our surrounding community gets our fair share of those dollars,” Mayor Nick Proctor said, according to WXYZ.
He told the outlet while he didn’t vote for the president, he feels bipartisanship is necessary to get things done.
The problem is that Biden’s infrastructure bill is hardly about infrastructure. While bits and pieces of it could help blue-collar workers, it is mostly filled with progressive pork.
For example, the bill expresses a desire to advance equity in infrastructure by ensuring minority workers are given more jobs.
“The Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act addresses economic disparities in our economy and the consequences of decades of disinvestment in America’s infrastructure that have fallen most heavily on communities of color,” a White House “fact sheet” said of the bill.
In other words, contractors could be hired based on the color of their skin rather than on merit. Doesn’t that sound nice and anti-racist?
There is also a controversial clause in the bill potentially requiring businesses that receive more than $10,000 in a digital transaction to report the name, address and taxpayer ID number of the person who sent the payment. This, of course, raises massive questions about financial privacy.
In case that wasn’t invasive enough, Section 24220 of the bill states that within three years of its implementation, all passenger motor vehicles would have to be “equipped with advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”
According to the Daily Mail, every car would have to include either “a sensor testing the air within the car to detect a driver’s blood alcohol levels” or “an infrared touch sensor to detect blood alcohol level through skin that could be built into a steering wheel or start button.”
In addition to its blatantly invasive nature, there are practical issues with such a requirement. What if someone attempts to act as a designated driver but an intoxicated passenger breathes alcohol into the air, causing the sensor to restrict the car’s movement despite the driver being sober?
That question aside, the main concern is that this clause has little to nothing to do with infrastructure. That is because Biden’s “infrastructure bill” is really about expanding the power of the federal government.
This is the reason it costs $1 trillion, includes multiple provisions restricting Americans’ privacy and advocates for employment based on race.
Proctor is right — we do need bipartisanship in America.
But there is absolutely nothing bipartisan about this bill, and that is why everyday Americans are right to oppose it.
Sad to say, we keep killing each other. New FBI statistics show that, even though we practiced widespread isolation during the pandemic, the nation’s murder rate grew last year at the fastest rate ever—up 29.4 percent. There are fewer homicides now than during the peak years of the early ’90s, but not since the federal government began keeping track in the ’60s has the annual jump in homicides been as big as it was in 2020.
The Washington Post’s news alert on the bureau’s announcement carried the headline: “U.S. killings soared nearly 30 percent in 2020, FBI data shows, with more slayings caused by guns.”
Um, really? To my mind, murders don’t occur because of a gun, a knife, a bow and arrow, or any other weapon you can think of. Murders happen because someone decides to carry out a fatal attack on another. Yes, guns are frequently the weapon of choice, but it is the offending human being who causes the death.
This may seem like a language nitpick, but to someone who writes for a living, words matter. Precise words are important, especially when discussing the ultimate crime: murder.
The media’s shift away from using terms long associated with crime disturbs me. Columnist Nicole Gelinas wrote about this recently, pointing out that The New York Times routinely refers to killings caused by “stray bullets.” Murders are reported as being committed because of “botched robberies.”
“As violent crime has soared, such language has become ubiquitous in news stories,” Gelinas wrote. “It is lazily inaccurate—and absolves killers of responsibility.”
Several media outlets follow this word-bending trend, blaming the soaring murder rate on inanimate objects (stray bullets) or on criminals who meant to commit some other, lesser crime like a robbery.
Why would a journalist fail to highlight the human causation of a murder? Did they just not bother to ask police about whether the suspect was an ex-spouse, an angry next-door neighbor, or a random stranger? Or is it because so many murders occur in gang-infested inner cities, like Chicago, New York, Atlanta, or Los Angeles, and news outlets shy away from mentioning the gang connection for fear of being called “racist?” After all, they would argue, when you read about a murder committed by a suspected gangbanger, your first thought is not someone who is white.
That’s probably true, but this squishy manipulation of language makes it seem as if reporters are deliberately leaving out pertinent facts so as not to be branded bigots, when their job is to present all the details they can dig up. The truth sometimes hurts, but it is still the truth.
Here are some uncomfortable facts:
There are some 33,000 violent street gangs in the United States, mostly headed by white, black, Hispanic, and Asian people.
Gang territory wars often result in random shootouts, which injure and kill thousands of every year, including children.
There is more police presence in minority neighborhoods because those areas have the highest crime rates.
Cross-racial killings are rare. Black people most often take the lives of other black people. White people most often murder other white people.
According to Heather Mac Donald, a lawyer, crime statistician, and author, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
The media’s worry about its image and failure to use accurate language does a service to no one. Certainly not to the inner-city mother trying to keep her children safe; not to legitimate gun owners who keep their firearms locked away; and not to law enforcement who are keenly aware of local crime hot spots and want support to bring criminals to justice.
There is so much written about gun violence being at the core of this nation’s violent crime problem. The fact is, an overwhelming majority of the 425 million civilian-owned firearms are never used in the commission of a crime. It is the relatively low percentage of criminals who are at the center of the homicide problem. So why isn’t the focus on getting them off the street?
We can’t start seriously tackling the homicide problem until we have a full and honest conversation about its root causes. Are we ready?
We’re in the midst of a pandemic — one where our kids, in some states, have to be masked in school at all times. Naturally, this is a necessity, given that they’re dying in droves from a simple virus.
Well, droves might be the wrong word. And it’s worth noting that, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data from the last few years, fewer children and teens died of COVID than of drowning.
And car crashes. And gun violence. And traffic accidents. And poisoning. And suicide. In fact, the number of deaths from COVID, over the period from May 20, 2020, to Sept. 23, 2021, represented a small percentage of annual child deaths in the United States, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“Most children in the US die as a result of various accidents, including car crashes, drowning, and from being shot, the CDC says,” the Mail’s Andrea Blanco reported.
“A total of 3,343 children 19 and under lost their lives in traffic accidents in 2019, while there is an estimate of almost 4,000 children dying of fatal accidental drownings every year.
Based on 2019 statistics represented in the chart, 3,960 children died from drowning, 3,434 from car crashes, 3,285 from gun violence, 1,053 from traffic accidents, 730 from poisoning, 534 from suicide and 79 from bike accidents. Only 498 children died from COVID between 2020 and 2021 — this is compared to the 13,075 kids who have died from other unexpected causes.
In other words, your children are almost seven times more likely to die in a car than from COVID-19. They are almost eight times more likely to drown.
Furthermore, most children who contract COVID are asymptomatic or have mild cases.
But don’t worry, they’ll likely get a shot in the arm to ensure that 498 doesn’t creep up.
Last month, BioNTech and Pfizer announced they planned to seek approval for a reduced dose of their COVID vaccine for kids aged 5 to 11 years old.
“Already over the next few weeks, we will file the results of our trial in five to 11 year olds with regulators across the world and will request approval of the vaccine in this age group, also here in Europe,” Chief Medical Officer Oezlem Tuereci said, according to Reuters.
“We know that vaccination eligibility for our elementary-aged students would be a game changer,” said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, according to U.S News.
“Not only would it help us keep our schools open and have less quarantining and closures, but it would also help parents breathe a lot easier and increase confidence in communities that their schools are safe.”
And as for the 12 to 17-year-olds it’s now approved for, authorities are doing almost anything they can to ensure they get it.
In Colorado, for instance, a vaccine lottery in which high school students could win $50,000 in scholarships to get the jab has been set up.
“This scholarship sends a clear message to our state that we need you for our Colorado comeback,” said Dr. Angie Paccione, executive director of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, according to KMGH-TV.
That’s the carrot approach. In California, they’re employing the stick: All students 12 to 17 must get vaccinated once the shot receives full Food and Drug Administration approval for that age range, all thanks to a mandate from Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“CA will require our kids to get the COVID-19 vaccine to come to school. This will go into effect following full FDA approval,” Newsom tweeted on Friday.
“Our schools already require vaccines for measles, mumps and more. Why? Because vaccines work. This is about keeping our kids safe & healthy.”
BREAKING: CA will require our kids to get the COVID-19 vaccine to come to school.
This will go into effect following full FDA approval.
Our schools already require vaccines for measles, mumps and more. Why? Because vaccines work.
They are laser-focused on making sure that another 498 youngsters don’t die in the next 16 months.
Just so we’re clear, that’s a little over 31 minors a month. Meanwhile, “more than 12,000 children die every year due to injuries including drownings, falls, burns, and road traffic injuries. That equates to around 33 children a day,” according to the Mail.
Are we supposed to assume we’re going to take drastic steps to stop those deaths? There’s no vaccine for that, after all.
No, COVID-19 isn’t “just the flu.” For children and teenagers, however, it’s scarcely fatal — and, for those who end up succumbing to it, there’s likely a pre-existing condition at play.
We don’t see these kinds of precautions being taken for any of the other causes that claim the lives of many more children every year. The thing is, however, that the threat of COVID is real and raw right now. It can pump cortisol into the veins of parents and school administrators everywhere — enough of the stress hormone, in fact, that they no longer read statistics before making decisions.
When situations like that arise, however, bad decisions get made by opportunists and power-trippers. It’s time to start looking at the cold, hard statistics and stop fear-mongering.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis accused Attorney General Merrick Garland of “weaponizing” the Department of Justice by using the Federal Bureau of Investigation to intimidate and silence parents.
“Attorney General Garland is weaponizing the DOJ by using the FBI to pursue concerned parents and silence them through intimidation,” DeSantis tweeted Tuesday.
“Florida will defend the free speech rights of its citizens and will not allow federal agents to squelch dissent.”
Attorney General Garland is weaponizing the DOJ by using the FBI to pursue concerned parents and silence them through intimidation.
Florida will defend the free speech rights of its citizens and will not allow federal agents to squelch dissent.
The remarks followed a memorandum Garland sent to the FBI on Monday concerning threats against school personnel.
BREAKING: Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, citing “threats.”
The letter follows the National School Board Association’s request to classify protests as “domestic terrorism.” pic.twitter.com/NhPU03YOYq
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence among school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s schools,” Garland wrote.
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.
“In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” he continued. “Coordination and partnership with local law enforcement is critical to implementing these measures for the benefit of our nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts.”
The NSBA began by 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.”
“Now, we ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials through existing statutes, executive authority, interagency and intergovernmental task forces, and other extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of our children and educators, to protect interstate commerce, and to preserve public school infrastructure and campuses.”
The group said local and state law enforcement agencies were already working with certain public school officials to “prevent further disruptions to educational services and school district operations,” but more assistance was needed because “these threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent.”
The group also requested “the assistance of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to intervene against threatening letters and cyberbullying attacks that have been transmitted to students, school board members, district administrators, and other educators.”
The NSBA’s most concerning section noted, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
“NSBA requests that such review examine appropriate enforceable actions against these crimes and acts of violence under the Gun-Free School Zones Act, the PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, the Violent Interference with Federally Protected Rights statute, the Conspiracy Against Rights statute, an Executive Order to enforce all applicable federal laws for the protection of students and public school district personnel, and any related measure.
“As the threats grow and news of extremist hate organizations showing up at school board meetings is being reported, this is a critical time for a proactive approach to deal with this difficult issue.”
“These threats and acts of violence are affecting our nation’s democracy at the very foundational levels, causing school board members — many who are not paid — to resign immediately and/or discontinue their service after their respective terms,” the association added.
“NSBA is committed to working with you and your Administration as a partner to address this crisis affecting America’s public schools, and greatly appreciates your prompt attention to our requests.”
The World Health Organization is one of many groups that have attempted to take the moral high ground throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. A new report, however, has alleged that multiple WHO employees maliciously abused women they were supposed to be helping.
According to Reuters, a 2020 investigation from the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian saw over 50 women accuse WHO employees of propositioning them for sex in exchange for jobs from 2018-2020.
This led to an investigation from an independent commission, which found 83 aid workers who were suspected of sexual abuse and exploitation during an Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At least 21 of them were employed by the WHO, Reuters reported.
The full extent of the misconduct is unknown, but at least one of the 21 WHO employees has been accused of rape.
“The review team has established that the presumed victims were promised jobs in exchange for sexual relations or in order to keep their jobs,” commission member Malick Coulibaly said.
Further details of the abuse are even more horrifying. Reuters said many of the alleged abusers refused to wear condoms, resulting in 29 of the women becoming pregnant. At least some of the perpetrators then allegedly forced the victims to have abortions.
“What happened to you should never happen to anyone,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, addressing the victims. “It is inexcusable.”
“It is my top priority to ensure that the perpetrators are not excused but are held to account.”
According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, sexual harassment, sexual violence, rape and any gender-based violence are crimes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It is not clear whether the alleged perpetrators will face prosecution. At least one of the victims named in the report was a minor.
“One girl, a 14-year-old named as ‘Jolianne’ in the report, told the commission she was selling phone recharge cards on the side of the road in April 2019 in Mangina when a WHO driver offered her a ride home,” Reuters reported.
“Instead he took her to a hotel where she says he raped her and she later gave birth to his child.”
According to The Associated Press, four WHO employees have been fired over their alleged abuse, and two others were placed on leave. But these actions came after the WHO reportedly failed to act on its initial knowledge of the situation.
Investigation co-chair Aïchatou Mindaoudou said some higher-ups within the WHO “were aware of what was going on and did not act,” Reuters reported.
She added that the women interviewed in this investigation were separate from those interviewed in last year’s investigation by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian, which suggests the abuse could be a widespread problem.
The WHO can issue all the scripted apologies it wishes, but that will not change the fact that the organization is garnering a reputation of serial sexual abuse. Meanwhile, Tedros has taken a holier-than-thou attitude about his organization’s response to COVID-19.
On Friday, he suggested wealthier countries are being selfish by failing to produce vaccines not just for themselves but also for every country that has not been able to afford enough vaccines.
“High-income countries who are vaccinating their population significantly are starting to see COVID-19 pandemic as if it’s not their problem,” he said. “That is dangerous.”
“When they say that the problem is not affecting us anymore, meaning the rest of the world will be ignored. … If there is one word that can explain it, it’s ‘greed.’”
“Self-interest is natural, but there is enlightened self-interest. Vaccines can be produced and the world can be opened up. It’s in our hands. We can end it [#COVID19] soon”-@DrTedros#VaccinEquity
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) July 14, 2021
In Tedros’ mind, countries like America are evil for not providing the rest of the world with a vaccine we created. Meanwhile, his employees were raping African women during the last four years instead of helping fight a disease that is far more deadly than COVID-19.
According to Global Finance, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the sixth-poorest country in the entire world. If the WHO really wants to help poverty-stricken countries, it can begin by stopping its employees from exploiting some of the world’s most impoverished women instead of ignoring the scandal until it becomes public.
Tedros and the WHO as a whole are so obviously hypocritical that it is hard to imagine they cannot see it. But as is often the case, those who have the most inflated egos have become blind to their own shortcomings.
Intrusive harassment of Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona continues as she becomes the focal point for activists who want to bully her into supporting a mammoth spending bill and providing a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
On Sunday, Sinema was harangued by activists who followed her into a bathroom and filmed one of their members raging at Sinema while the senator was in a stall.
The high-pressure tactics continued Monday amid relative shrugs from President Joe Biden and liberal commentator Ana Navarro.
Biden said the non-stop confrontation Sinema is experiencing “happens to everybody,” according to Fox News.
Sinema and fellow senator Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., recently have been accosted by protesters for not supporting Biden’s massive $3.5 trillion spending bill.
Navarro, meanwhile, tweeted that Sinema basically invited her own haranguing, even if it did go over the line.
Chasing anybody -public or private- into a bathroom, to me is beyond the pail.
Maybe if @kyrstensinema spent less time in fundraisers with corporate donors and held town-halls to listen to constituents and answer their questions, they wouldn’t chase her into the damn 🚽. https://t.co/ICsloYkt1l
The stalking of the senator continued Monday when Green New Deal Network Chief of Staff Kunoor Ojha and others filmed themselves jabbing at Sinema at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C.
“Hi, Senator Sinema? I want to ask if you can explain to the American people what you’re planning on cutting from Joe Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ plan?” Ojha asked while Sinema was on her phone.
NEW: Watch as Kyrsten Sinema dodges even more questions from @kunoorojha about why she’s purposefully killing major investments in clean energy, affordable childcare, housing and more: pic.twitter.com/MCZj9ma99c
A woman labeled as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient named Karina approached Sinema about ensuring that illegal immigrants could have a pathway to citizenship.
A DACA recipient named Karina tried to ask Kyrsten Sinema if she’d support a pathway to citizenship for immigrants and Sinema refused to answer.
If Karina was a corporation and held a giant fundraiser for Sinema, maybe she’d get an answer. pic.twitter.com/DPbPuUe8yl
“I just want to know if you can commit, as my Senator, if you can commit to passing a reconciliation that could provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have been waiting for this for too long. … Can you commit to that, Senator?” Karina said.
“I don’t want disturb you, but at the same time I just want see if I can get a commitment from you, Senator,” the woman said to Sinema. “This is my life and the life of millions in the line. I just need to hear from you. Can we get a commitment from you to get a pathway to citizenship?”
After realizing Sinema would not be baited, the woman ended the encounter.
“All right, Senator, I can see that you don’t want to respond to me. Thanks for your time,” she said.
In Joe Biden’s America, the Department of Justice has decided that dissent is a danger to democracy and parents speaking their minds at local school boards are a threat to America’s core values.
In a memo to the FBI on Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote that the Justice Department will launch an effort to stop what he called called “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”
Garland’s memo comes after the National School Boards Association wrote to the White House to complain about activist parents who oppose COVID-19 policies — such as remote education, vaccine mandates and mask mandates — as well as the imposition of critical race theory in public schools.
While defending mandatory mask policies as protecting “the health and safety of students and school employees” and denying critical race theory is being taught in public schools, the association called upon Garland to look at every possible way to prosecute parents standing up for their children, including the use of domestic terrorism laws.
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” the letter stated.
Garland’s memo appeared to equate parents speaking up against White House and teacher union-backed policies with actual threats of violence.
“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” he wrote.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values. Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
According to a Justice Department news release published Monday, one goal will be training school boards in how to document threats and preserve evidence to properly punish parents speaking their minds.
However, in the memo, Garland also ordered the FBI to join with local law enforcement to discuss “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“Coordination and partnership with local law enforcement is critical to implementing these measures for the benefit of our nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts. To this end, I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district within 30 days of the issuance of this memorandum.”
The department will create a task force “to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes, and ways to assist state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement where threats of violence may not constitute federal crimes,” the release stated.
Many social media users criticized what they described as an attack on parents.
The Biden administration is rapidly repurposing federal law enforcement to target political opposition.
They want to reclassify dissent as “disinformation” and “domestic terrorism,” justifying an unprecedented intervention, both directly and in partnership with tech companies.
As opposed to actual violence by BLM and Antifa. Billions of dollars in damages. But darn those pesky school boards who want to voice an opinion the Dictator doesn’t like
DOJ launching effort to combat threats of violence against school officialshttps://t.co/vDaXmspUEo
The DOJ is sending FBI agents to destroy your life if you criticize the Dogma of Weingarten on behalf of your kids, but everything is totally fine and there’s nothing to see here.
BREAKING: Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, citing “threats.”
The letter follows the National School Board Association’s request to classify protests as “domestic terrorism.” pic.twitter.com/NhPU03YOYq
NSBA interim Executive Director and CEO Chip Slaven praised Garland’s memo, according to the New York Post.
“Over the last few weeks, school board members and other education leaders have received death threats and have been subjected to threats and harassment, both online and in-person,” Slaven said in a statement, according to the Post.
“The individuals who are intent on causing chaos and disrupting our schools—many of whom are not even connected to local schools—are drowning out the voices of parents who must be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety. These acts of intimidation are also affecting educational services and school board governance. Some have even led to school lockdowns,” the statement said.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed several GOP voting bills Sunday she says aimed to suppress the right to vote. Republicans backing the bills assert the legislation would have protected election integrity.
Republicans say the bills aimed to solidify election day training, protect machines from being hacked, and would have created more voting locations.
“This is just the latest example of Gretchen Whitmer’s politics getting in the way of actually governing,” Executive Director for Michigan Rising Action Eric Ventimiglia said in a statement. “This veto shows that Whitmer is more concerned with politics than the people they represent. If this package had four Democrat sponsors, she would hold a press conference calling it an achievement in voters rights.”
Tori Sachs, Michigan Freedom Fund executive director, concurred with Ventimiglia.
“Gretchen Whitmer vetoed common sense bills that would have made it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” Sachs said in a statement. “She blocked reforms that would have helped senior citizens cast their ballots, and legislation that would have protected both the state’s voter file and voters’ ballots on Election Day. Whitmer’s vetoes are a chilling attack on election integrity in Michigan.”
The Michigan Bureau of Elections released its report on the 250 post-election audits conducted across the state, affirming the accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s November 2020 election. Officials also conducted a statewide audit exercise, by hand-counting votes cast for president on more than 18,000 ballots randomly selected across the state, which affirmed the outcome of the presidential election. And judges appointed by both Republicans and Democrats rejected more than 60 lawsuits challenging the outcome.
Whitmer’s veto letter says House Bill (HB) 4492 would have complicated locating polling locations in senior living facilities and large apartment complexes. The letter said HB 4837 incorrectly implies that third parties have access to the Qualified Voter File (QVF), while HB 4838 claims to prohibit the electronic poll book at each election precinct or absent voter (AV) counting board from internet connection after the polls open on election day and until the results have been tabulated for that precinct and transmitted to the appropriate clerk.
Some people, including former Sen. Patrick Colbeck, have claimed the electronic poll book was connected to the internet in some Michigan precincts in the 2020 presidential election. Whitmer says no such defect exists and the bills address a non-existent problem.
Whitmer vetoed HB 4528 about election challenger training. She said it is worth further consideration but was an unfunded mandate.
“I will always protect our civil rights and stand up for our democracy that countless Americans have fought to preserve,” Whitmer said in a statement. “That’s why I vetoed legislation that would have perpetuated the ‘Big Lie’ or made it harder for Michiganders to vote. Right now, Michigan Republicans are participating in a coordinated, national attack on voting rights that is designed to undermine confidence in our election system and systematically disenfranchise Black voters, communities of color, older voters, and college students. I will have no part in any effort that grants an ounce of credence to this deception, so harmful to our democracy.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Monday that the FBI would take the lead on the law enforcement response to what Garland called “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” Garland wrote in a memo to federal prosecutors as well as FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values.
“Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety,” the AG added.
Garland fired off his memo days after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) claimed in a letter to President Biden that “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat,” as parents grow frustrated with mask mandates being imposed on their children and critical race theory being injected into their curricula.
The Sept. 29 letter cited that opposition — naming the imposition of mask mandates in schools as well as “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula” as the causes of dozens of incidents at school board meetings this year.
A Loudoun County School Board meeting was halted because the crowd refused to quiet down in Ashburn, Virginia.
“This propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class,” the letter went on, despite incidents across the country where teachers have been exposed to be racializing their curricula.
The NSBA then suggested that “[a]s these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and asked that the administration review the question.
The letter went on to cite more than 20 reported incidents in California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio and other states. In one incident from September, an Illinois man was arrested on charges of aggravated battery and disorderly conduct for allegedly striking a school official at a meeting.
“We are coming after you,” a letter mailed to an Ohio school board member said, according to the group. “You are forcing them to wear mask — for no reason in this world other than control. And for that you will pay dearly.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray was ordered to arrange meetings with federal, state, and local school officials.
In his memo, Garland ordered the FBI and US attorneys to arrange meetings with federal, state, local, tribal and territorial leaders within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” and “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
NSBA interim Executive Director and CEO Chip Slaven said in a statement that Garland’s action sent a “strong message to individuals with violent intent who are focused on causing chaos, disrupting our public schools, and driving wedges between school boards and the parents, students, and communities they serve.”
“Over the last few weeks, school board members and other education leaders have received death threats and have been subjected to threats and harassment, both online and in person,” Slaven said. “The individuals who are intent on causing chaos and disrupting our schools—many of whom are not even connected to local schools—are drowning out the voices of parents who must be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety. These acts of intimidation are also affecting educational services and school board governance. Some have even led to school lockdowns.”
“We need to get back to the work of meeting all students’ needs and making sure that each student is prepared for a successful future,” Slaven concluded. “That’s what school board members and parents care about.”
The radical left want’s to label concerned parents as ‘Domestic Terrorists’… January 6 narrative 2.0
President Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland is officially mobilizing the FBI and U.S. attorneys to “investigate and prosecute” protests by parents against things like mask mandates and critical race theory at public school board meetings and schools across the country.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland wrote in a memo that he sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Justice Department prosecutors on Monday. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate,” he added. “In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
This came after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Biden claiming that “education leaders are under an immediate threat.” The NSBA went on to ask for federal law enforcement and other assistance in combatting what it claims to be a growing threat of violence in response to mask and vaccine mandates, as well as curriculum teaching critical race theory.
“Coupled with attacks against school board members and educators for approving policies for masks to protect the health and safety of students and school employees, many public school officials are also facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula,” the NSBA said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Oct. 4 announced a concentrated effort to target any threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment by parents toward school personnel.
The announcement comes days after a national association of school boards asked the Biden administration to take “extraordinary measures” to prevent alleged threats against school staff that the association said was coming from parents who oppose mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory.
Garland directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys in the next 30 days to convene meetings with federal, state, and local leaders within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” according to a letter (pdf) the attorney general sent on Monday to all U.S. attorneys, the FBI director, the director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, and the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s criminal division.
According to the DOJ, further efforts will be rolled out in the coming days, including a task force that will determine how to use federal resources to prosecute offending parents as well as how to advise state entities on prosecutions in cases where no federal law is broken. The Justice Department will also provide training to school staff on how to report threats from parents and preserve evidence to aid in investigation and prosecution.
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools,” Garland wrote. “While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”
School boards across the nation have increasingly become an arena for heated debate over culture, politics, and health. Parents groups have ramped up pressure on boards over the teaching of critical race theory and the imposition of mask mandates. The debate is split sharply along political lines, with Democrats largely in favor of critical race theory and mask mandates, and Republicans opposing both.
Many of the meetings have turned heated. The amount and severity of the threats against officials are not known, but Garland’s letter suggests the phenomenon is widespread.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland wrote. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety. The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.”
cientists have labelled their own pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, “evil” on hidden camera footage released by Project Veritas on Monday evening. The video also reveals the scientists admitting that natural immunity rather than the vaccine is more effective against COVID-19, with one admitting: “our organization is run on COVID money now.”
Nick Karl – a scientist directly involved in the production of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine – is caught on tape admitting that natural immunity is more effective than the very vaccine he works on, and Pfizer produces.
“When somebody is naturally immune – like they got COVID – they probably have more antibodies against the virus…When you actually get the virus, you’re going to start producing antibodies against multiple pieces of the virus… So, your antibodies are probably better at that point than the [COVID] vaccination.”
– Nick Karl
He further suggests New York City is only requiring vaccine mandate cards in order to “[make] it so inconvenient for unvaccinated people to the point where they’re just like, ‘F*ck it. I’ll get it.’ You know?”
A second Pfizer official, Senior Associate Scientist, Chris Croce, corroborated Karl’s assertion about COVID immunity derivative of antibodies:
Veritas Journalist:“So, I am well-protected [with antibodies]?”
Chris Croce, Pfizer Senior Associate Scientist:“Yeah.”
Veritas Journalist:“Like as much as the vaccine?”
Croce:“Probably more.”
Veritas Journalist:“How so? Like, how much more?”
Croce:“You’re protected most likely for longer since there was a natural response.”
Croce expressed dismay with his company’s direction and moral compass:
Veritas Journalist:“So, what happened to the monoclonal antibody treatments?”
Croce:“[It got] pushed to the side.”
Veritas Journalist: “Why?”
Croce:“Money. It’s disgusting.”
…
Croce:“I still feel like I work for an evil corporation because it comes down to profits in the end. I mean, I’m there to help people, not to make millions and millions of dollars. So, I mean, that’s the moral dilemma.”
Veritas Journalist:“Isn’t it billions and billions?”
Croce:“I’m trying to be nice.”
Veritas Journalist:“No, I hear you. I hear you. I do. I mean, I’ll still give you a hard time about it.”
Croce:“Basically, our organization is run on COVID money now.”
The third Pfizer scientist, Rahul Khandke, admitted his company demands that its employees keep information from the public.
“We’re bred and taught to be like, ‘vaccine is safer than actually getting COVID.’ Honestly, we had to do so many seminars on this. You have no idea. Like, we have to sit there for hours and hours and listen to like — be like, ‘you cannot talk about this in public,’” Khandke said.
Khandke also signaled that proof of antibodies is on par with proof of vaccination.
“If you have [COVID] antibodies built up, you should be able to prove that you have those built up,” he said.
“Joe Biden just got caught in a lie about Afghanistan,” headlined the Washington Examiner on Sept. 29. I know, I know. So this is news?
What the paper was referring to was of course the testimony of two top-ranking generals and President Biden’s own Secretary of Defense to the effect that they had all recommended to the President leaving 2500 troops in Afghanistan after the American withdrawal. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Biden had denied that he had received any such recommendation.
“No. No one said that to me that I can recall,” he said.
Under normal circumstances, that would certainly seem to amount to being caught in a lie—at least if you disregard the perjurer’s life-preserver: “that I can recall.” But even allowing for the possibility of a sudden onset of dementia, I don’t think he can really have forgotten anything as important as that.
Perhaps recognizing that his having forgotten might actually look worse for him than his having lied, the White House press spokesperson, Jen Psaki, tried to explain away the lie by averring that the generals advising the President had been “split” on the question of leaving a residual force behind, and that he had gone with the recommendation of the unnamed and now absent ones who had supposedly advised against leaving such a force.
Why, then, did he not say that to George Stephanopoulos instead of saying that no one had given him such advice? Someone—three someones, as a matter of fact—definitely had.
No, it was unmistakably a lie. And then Psaki told another lie to cover it up.
But I think we have a problem with that little word “caught”—as in “caught in a lie.”
Way back in 1987 when Mr Biden first rose to national prominence, that was because he was caught in a lie.
He had appropriated a self-related episode from the life story of the then-leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, also known as the Welsh Windbag, and represented it as his own experience.
Having been caught in the lie, the then-Senator Biden still had enough of a sense of shame to have dropped out of contention in the following year’s Democratic presidential primaries. Not that he would have stood more than the slimmest of chances of winning any of them anyway.
That’s what we mean when we say that someone has been “caught in a lie.” It implies some punishment to follow, or at least some shame felt by the liar on account of his exposure as one.
Does anyone believe that either punishment or shame will follow this lie?
If a tree falls in the forest when no one is there, does it make a sound?
The national (and international) press was certainly there for the big lie of 1987. As the media were then constituted, it would have been impossible for them not to have covered extensively what became known as the Biden “plagiarism” scandal and, therefore, for everyone not to have known about it—and, therefore, for the plagiarist not to have felt sorry, if only for himself.
That’s what it meant to be “caught in a lie.”
That was then.
It’s my belief that the media culture of today, a third of a century later, and the virtual disappearance of shame from our public life—certainly of any shame for being caught in a lie—are closely related phenomena.
Just look at the lie on which Joe Biden last year claimed to have based his whole campaign—the reason, he said, why he ran for president: the lie that Donald Trump had called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, “very fine people.”
That lie had already been exposed as a lie numerous times. It was an even more obvious lie than the one about a residual American force in Afghanistan, since there was documentary evidence in a transcript of the interview in which Trump had explicitly excluded the Nazis from his designation of the “very fine people” wishing to preserve a statue of Robert E. Lee—as well as those wishing to take it down.
But that tree fell in a part of the new media forest where there was no one around to hear it. The big media, the legacy media, the mainstream media have found that their readers, watchers, and listeners don’t care if they simply ignore news from the right-wing media ghetto that they don’t want to hear.
In other words, they’re never going to catch Joe Biden in a lie. And that means that even when a publication like The Washington Examiner or The Epoch Times does catch him in a lie, it will not resonate with the public at large who, unless they are readers of those publications, will never hear of it.
It’s as if he had never lied at all! There’s nothing for him to be ashamed of, even if he were any longer capable of shame.
Small wonder then that, having gotten away with it for so long, Biden’s lies have now become so shameless that he hardly even bothers to pretend that they aren’t lies.
“My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars,” he tweeted last week. Not, that is, that it would cost the $3.5 trillion that the media were reporting at the time and that the Democrats in Congress were desperately trying to keep at that figure in spite of the doubts of a few “moderates.” Let alone the $5.5 trillion that the Wall Street Journal thought it would cost. But $0.
If ever there were a lie to catch a man in—a lie that a child could catch a man in—it was that lie. And yet the mainstream media were ready to accommodate him.
Even famed Washington Post “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler only gave him two Pinocchios—on the grounds that he must have been communicating with fellow budget-wonks in a language that only they could understand.
I’m afraid we have to accept that, since there is no more any penalty accruing to being “caught in a lie,” nor even any shame in it, there’s no more catching people in lies either—and, therefore, no more lying in our public life, at least as reported by the media. Or, to put it another way, it’s all lies. Every word. Including “and” and “the.”
Teaching critical race theory (CRT) in federally funded institutions would violate a student’s civil rights and should be punishable by law, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) told NTD.
On Sept. 30, Good introduced a bill named ‘‘Defending Students’ Civil Rights Act of 2021,’’ (pdf) outlawing teaching CRT in public educational institutions.
“One of the most dangerous things right now is our country becoming divided on race in a manufactured way,” Good told NTD, saying the left has been trying to divide the nation on race. “And one of their tools is critical race theory, … saying that our race defines us, that we’re responsible for the sins of our past, that our race determines whether or not we’re a victim or whether or not we’re an oppressor, simply based on our race, that our race determines our future.”
CRT is a quasi-Marxist ideology, redefining America’s history as a struggle between “oppressors” (white people) and the “oppressed” (everybody else), as was done with Marxism’s reduction of human history to a struggle between the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.”
The bill states that it would be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to “use critical race theory or critical race pedagogy in any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a benchmark civil rights legislation. It prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
“It is completely irresponsible for our government to violate the civil rights of our nation’s youth, and that is why I have introduced the [bill],” Good said in a statement. “The hyper-politicization of our public education system has created a trojan horse for Marxists to hide within while making a direct attack against our federalist system and foundational values.”
Good pointed out that parents and others also have an on-the-ground effort to push back against CRT.
A woman holding a sign at a rally outside the Loudoun County Public Schools administration building in Ashburn, Va., on Sept. 28, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
“Also on the ground, we want to support parents and come alongside them,” Good told NTD. “I have attended eight or nine school board meetings in my district in the last few weeks, where I’m trying to encourage those parents to be engaged, to be involved, to hold their local school board accountable.”
Good’s bill was co-sponsored by 17 House Republicans.
“Congressman Good’s bill is the next key line of attack that both Washington and the states must take in the fight against state-sanctioned racism,” said Russ Vought, former White House Office of Management and Budget director and president of Citizens for Renewing America. “It’s high time any school that behaves in this manner be held accountable.”
GOP lawmakers across the nation have introduced bills to fight against CRT. Some governors have signed laws or issued executive orders prohibiting teaching CRT in public schools or government institutions, such as in Tennessee, Idaho, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, Florida, and South Dakota.
However, thousands of people signed a petition pledging to continue teaching CRT even if their states had outlawed it. The number has recently risen to nearly 7,500.
Some educators are reported to be trying to teach others how to “back-door” CRT into the classrooms.
In April, the Biden administration proposed a rule to prioritize funding education programs that incorporate The New York Times’ 1619 Project and critical race theory ideas.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have blasted Democrats’ spending plans and asked for information on the “true cost” of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill in a letter sent to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).
Since its earliest stages, Republicans across both chambers of Congress have opposed the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, now known as the Build Back Better Act. Democrats have called the bill a “human infrastructure” package, intended to be passed alongside the bipartisan $1.2 trillion hard infrastructure bill. Both bills are part of President Joe Biden’s ambitious agenda.
To pass the bill through the Senate, Democrats are using the reconciliation process. This process, which is limited certain forms of spending and revenue bills, can pass through the upper chamber by a simple majority, avoiding the normal 60 vote threshold to end a filibuster.
Thus far, no Republicans have come out in favor of the bill.
“Democrats are in the midst of passing a partisan bill with multi-trillion dollar implications for federal spending, revenues, and deficits,” The letter, addressed to CBO Director Dr. Phillip Swagel, states. (pdf).
McConnell and Graham said that because of “the Majority’s intent to completely ignore Senate committees” as well as the “limited debate” allowed on the reconciliation bill, “it is critical that the [CBO] provide Senators and the public with information related to the fiscal consequences of the reckless changes being proposed.”
The senators also accused the House of “process[ing] legislation in a manner meant to hide the true cost to American taxpayers.”
Despite Democratic leadership’s intention to hold a vote on the bill by the end of September, continued infighting among the Democrats’ caucus forced leadership to extend a new deadline to the end of October. Though a final draft of the bill is far from ready, Democratic leaders have insisted that taxes will not increase for anyone making less than $400,000 per year.
Leaders, including the president, have been trying to navigate a path forward between progressive demands and moderate expectations. Much of this negotiating has been done behind closed-doors.
McConnell and Graham criticized this closed-door policymaking, musing that Democrats are keeping tight-lipped about the bill “in order to avoid making estimates available.”
They listed several questions for the CBO.
First, they noted that only four out of thirteen House committees had reported having received cost estimates for their reconciliation proposal, and asked Swagel when these estimates would be available for the other nine committees.
Even Democrats have noted the lack of transparency.
A proponent of the bill, Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) said during a hearing of the House Ways & Means Committee that she and other House Democrats had not received a great deal of information about the bill.
“I don’t know how much we’re spending, how much we’re raising, how we’re spending some of the money, how we’re raising any of the money,” Murphy said at the time. She added that without more information on the bill, she would be forced to hesitantly vote against it.
They also asked for information on the gross level of new spending from the bill as well as how much it is projected to raise the deficit. Both of these figures, however, remain very up in the air as Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) recently doubled down on their opposition to a $3.5 trillion bill.
This has left leaders scrambling to find a compromise price tag acceptable to all factions of the party. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that it was “self-evident” that the final bill would be less than $3.5 trillion.
The senators listed a slew of other questions, about specific components of the bill, asking for a response by Wednesday. At the time of publication, Swagel has not yet responded to this request.
A Minnesota middle school said it will no longer allow teachers to give students an “F” grade for “failure”, as part of the school’s effort to tackle “systemic racism.”
In a video shared on YouTube, Sunrise Park Middle School Principal Christina Pierre explained that the new grading system will replace the “F” with an “I,” which stands for “incomplete,” and teachers will no longer assign a letter grade to students who receive below 50 percent for their work.
Instead, students will get a percentage grade and be given an opportunity to improve if they receive 49 percent or below. Students are encouraged to retake tests, quizzes, papers, and projects, and have 10 days to do so after the date the grade is posted.
The new grading system will also end taking into consideration factors like a student’s behavior, attitude, tardiness to class, and whether the assignment is turned in on time. “There’s other ways that we can communicate those things to parents,” Sunrise Park’s Associate Principal Norman Bell said in the video, adding that this is meant to make sure that grades “focus on the process of learning.”
The changes at Sunrise Park are championed by White Bear Lake Area Schools Superintendent Wayne Kazmierczak, a long-time educator who seeks to address “grading disparities among students of color.” The school district said it “dramatically changed grading practices” last year as part of its “strategic plan and commitment to eliminating systemic racism.”
“Grading can be one of the largest areas in which systemic racism and inequities are perpetuated,” the school district’s website reads. “Grading should not be a behavior punishment and should not be a measure of how well a student can survive stress at home.”
A middle school serving the northeastern suburb of Minneapolis, Sunrise Park made national headlines earlier this year after a teacher asked 6th grade students to assess how much privilege they supposedly possess.
According to documents posted to social media, the teacher asked her class to consider whether they belonged to the “privileged group”—a collective term for those who are white, male, Christian, heterosexual, and born in the United States, or “the targeted group,” referring to those who are non-white, female, non-Christian, LGBT, and immigrants.
“It is our responsibility to ensure that each of our students’ needs are being met,” Kazmierczak said in a statement after the class activity caused controversy online. “We know from listening to our students that our continued and sustained commitment to educational equity is a critical part of how we achieve our stated district mission and close gaps that currently exist in our student outcome measures.”
It was quite rich, on multiple levels, for President Joe Biden on Monday to blame the “reckless tax and spending policies” of the Trump administration for the need to raise the debt ceiling now.
The claim came as part of a rant by the 46th president against those darn Republicans for supposedly blocking the Democrats’ plans to raise the debt ceiling through 2022.
Reminder to Joe Biden: The Democrats control the House and Senate, and he of course occupies the White House.
“The reason we have to raise the debt limit is, in part, because of the reckless tax and spending policies under the previous Trump administration,” Biden said.
“In four years, they incurred nearly $8 trillion. In four years, $8 trillion in additional debt and bills we have to now pay off. That’s more than a quarter of the entire debt incurred now outstanding after more than 200 years.”
“The reason we have to raise the debt limit is, in part, because of the reckless tax and spend policies under the previous Trump Admin,” President Biden says.
Here are a few more reminders. The national debt nearly doubled (from approximately $10 trillion to $20 trillion) under the Obama-Biden administration, while the U.S. experienced its first trillion-dollar-plus deficits ever.
In fact, the first four years of that administration saw deficits of over $1 trillion as the Obama-Biden team oversaw the worst economic recovery since World War II.
By contrast, there were no trillion-dollar or more deficits during the first three years of Trump’s presidency as the nation saw strong economic growth and the unemployment rate fell to a 50-year low.
Then of course came the pandemic and unprecedented spending by the federal government as it directed the economy to shut down for the first time in U.S. history.
Republicans were not on board, because so little of the legislation actually had to do with COVID relief.
Biden and his fellow Democrats like to harp on the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as the prime example of former President Donald Trump’s reckless tax-and-spend ways.
The nonpartisan Tax Foundation estimated that the bill would reduce federal revenues by $1.47 trillion over ten years; however, $600 billion of that would be made up due to increased economic growth, so the net cost would be about $448 billion on a dynamic scoring basis.
All this seems like peanuts compared to the Democrats’ plans. They want to roll back much of the Trump tax cuts on businesses and individuals that produced the best economy in a generation.
Instead, the Democrats seek to add vast new entitlements, starting with their $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill and an additional $1.2 trillion in more traditional infrastructure spending.
All this, mind you, as businesses are just getting back on their feet following the pandemic.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has told Biden that if he wants to raise the debt ceiling so the Democrats can go on a spending spree, they’ll have to do it on their own.
“McConnell for months has said that Democrats should use the budget reconciliation process to get around the Senate’s filibuster rule, which requires 60 of 100 members to agree to pass most legislation. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, has refused to use that approach, and Biden on Monday pleaded for Republicans not to block action with the filibuster,” Reuters reported.
Schumer could use the budget reconciliation process to vote on a debt ceiling bill and still bring the $3.5 trillion social spending bill to the floor.
McConnell noted in a Monday letter to Biden, “All year your party has chosen to pursue staggering, ‘transformational’ spending through unprecedented use of the party-line reconciliation process.”
He recounted how Democrats are looking to spend trillions more without Republican support.
“Bipartisanship is not a light switch that Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and [Senate Majority] Leader [Chuck] Schumer may flip on to borrow money and flip off to spend it,” McConnell said.
My letter to President Biden this morning on congressional Democrats’ duty to handle the debt limit: pic.twitter.com/U3G9QMPJwY
“Republicans’ position is simple. We have no list of demands. For two and a half months, we have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well.”
McConnell closed his letter calling on the president to engage directly with congressional Democrats to raise the debt ceiling because they have all the power they need to make it happen.
That’s a perfectly reasonable and appropriate position to take.
Biden and the Democrats are making the spending of the previous administration look like child’s play.
“COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective,” a page on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website reads.
No discussion. No question. No variation. If you dig around a bit, you might find the CDC saying there are some vaccine problems, but they are repeatedly linked to the word “rare.”
In fact, we’re told by the Biden administration that you need to get the shot. Or else.
But there’s a reason we refer to doctors as “practicing” medicine. Because it’s not just about science. It’s also about the personal skill and knowledge of specific medical professionals, about variations in technical applications and about some dimensions that can only be described as an art.
That’s why, when faced with a serious medical diagnosis, prudence dictates the seeking of a second opinion.
So, without advocacy one way or another about one’s decision to take the mRNA shots, here’s what we might describe as a “second opinion” to what the CDC says: reported adverse reactions.
As of the end of September, there were 569,294 reported incidents linked to the COVID shots in just the U.S., with 2,433,730 symptoms reported in total. They are in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and were compiled by Just the News.
These reported incidents did not occur to 569,294 people; these were the total number of incidents disclosed, meaning an individual may have had more than one complication and those problems were included in the total tabulation.
No matter how many symptoms occurred, there is the fact that, for whatever reason, 8,164 people died following vaccination, Just the News noted.
Among other adverse reactions reported to the CDC, here’s the Just the News analysis of some of the types and numbers:
Blood clots or bleeding, including in the heart and in the brain — 32,023
Mood or memory problems — 31,720
The analysis said irregularities occurring after receiving COVID vaccination “does not necessarily mean they were caused by the vaccine. The system is designed to collect adverse events that occur after vaccination to uncover any patterns of illnesses that were not captured during vaccine studies.”
Reports to the VAERS database are made not only by health care professionals — they are also made by patients themselves or their families. And they are subjective and not verified.
There is conflicting messaging on whether or not adverse effects are underreported. Some scientists believe they are; other individuals doubt that claim, given the attention and publicity connected with COVID, Just the News noted.
An estimated 56 percent of the U.S. population has received the mRNA shots: 391 million doses to 185 million people.
But tabulations of adverse reactions following COVID shots are not limited to the U.S., according to Just the News. It reported that in the U.S. and around the world there were “hundreds of thousands of reports” of symptoms of functional neurological disorder in women in their 30s.
“FND Symptoms can include limb weakness, paralysis, tremor, spasms, problems walking, speech problems, tingling, vision loss, seizures, fatigue, anxiety, chronic pain, memory symptoms, and blackouts,” the outlet said.
There were 16,858 reports of lymphadenopathy. “Earlier this month, the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was found to be associated with an increased risk of lymphadenopathy, swelling or inflammation of lymph nodes according to a real-world case-control study from Israel.”
There were 5,273 reports of facial paralysis, including a Hong Kong report of higher risk of Bell’s Palsy correlated with CoronoVac (Sinovac Biotech) shots, a vaccine not used in the U.S.
There have been 696 reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome paralysis. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned against the syndrome being connected to the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen shot.
The European Union has expressed similar concerns. The syndrome has a 5 percent fatality rate and the CDC says most cases have been in men over 50 years of age, according to Just the News.
There are possible links between the vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna and acute central nervous system demyelination, including multiple sclerosis, according to the Journal of Neurology.
“Demyelinating diseases damage the protective covering surrounding nerve fibers in the brain, optic nerves and spinal cord, causing neurological problems,” Just the News reported. “Ages ranged from 24 to 64 years old.
“Four patients were ultimately diagnosed with exacerbation of their stable MS. Two were diagnosed with new cases of MS. One was diagnosed with neuromyelitis optica.
“An analysis of the VAERS database shows more than 650 related reports, including MS.”
The outlet additionally reported there have been 2,810 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis heart problems, prompting a CDC investigation.
An Israeli study said the Pfizer COVID drug tripled the possibility of myocarditis and the FDA has put out a warning about the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and a possible link to heart inflammation.
By June 2020, the CDC said there had been more than 1,200 cases of heart inflammation in young people taking the Pfizer and Moderna shots. Most were men under 30 and half occurred after the second dose.
But as of August, an independent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed the heart inflammations were more than five times what the CDC said, according to blogger Sharyl Attkisson.
An Israeli study showed a threefold increase in the risk of myocarditis, according to Medpage Today.
Teenage boys are six times more likely to develop heart problems from the Pfizer and Moderna shots than they are to actually get COVID, according to the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph.
💉Teenage boys are six times more likely to suffer from heart problems from the vaccine than be hospitalised from Covid-19, a major study has found https://t.co/vFEiNfsiNb
Also, there have been more than 32,000 reports of blood clots and disorders, Just the News said.
Despite CDC assurances of the safety of the mRNA shots, a few months ago, there had been a brief suspension of the use of the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen medicine due to blood clots.
Their use was resumed in April, the CDC said, although there was a suggestion of “an increased risk of a rare adverse event called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS). Most reports of this serious condition, which involves blood clots with low platelets, have been in adult women younger than 50 years old.”
The CDC said the benefits of the shot outweighed its risk, although a CDC advisory report noted three deaths due to TTS.
A JAMA editorial recommended women under 50 avoid the J&J shot, Just the News reported, adding that “many countries have restricted vaccines in people under age 65, 60 or 50 due to reports of blood clots in young people.”
All COVID vaccine providers have developed products that are linked to menstrual cycle changes, with 10,318 such reports, according to Just the News, citing a British study last month.
While the CDC has said the mRNA shots are safe for pregnant women and their babies, the Just the News analysis of the VAERS database showed over 1,800 reports of problems.
Also, there were 1,803 reports of anaphylactic reaction or shock and, according to Israeli research, 6,339 reports of increased risk of herpes infection. There were additionally 926 reports of appendicitis following the shots, Just the News reported.
And to top it all off, despite receiving the mRNA shots, people are still getting COVID, as demonstrated by results in Israel.
Of 514 people hospitalized in Israel in mid-August, 59 percent were fully vaccinated, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.
Israel in August had two high rates: Israelis were among the most vaccinated people in the world (about 78 percent), and had the highest COVID infection rate. This disconnect was seen as declining effectiveness of the mRNA shots, Becker’s Hospital Review noted.
This is why the CDC is recommending a third booster shot, despite strong reservations by U.S. health officials who say it will have little effect.
Like many medical procedures, there are risks. Watch any television ads for pharmaceuticals and they tell you stories of a wonderful new life with their drug, although the voiceovers say it still might make you sick or kill you.
And there’s risk in surgery, even minor surgery. A prominent radio station programmer died while having his foot operated on. It stemmed from an anesthetist’s error.
Again, medicine is a practice. There are a lot of unknowns and good doctors realize this.
In consultation with our physician, we make what hopefully are rational decisions about risk and benefit before we enter a medical procedure or take a specific drug.
It’s prudent. It happens all the time.
If you are a senior citizen and possessed of certain comorbidities (obesity is a major issue), it might be in your interest to receive the COVID mRNA shot to reduce symptoms. Again, it’s a weighing of risks.
What we’ve attempted to do in this commentary is the job the American government seems reluctant to do: honestly and objectively give another opinion. Without the coercion, scolding and censorship, so you can make your own decision.
That’s important — You. Make. Your. Own. Decision.
The Western Journal has published this article in the interest of shedding light on stories about the COVID-19 vaccine that are largely unreported by the establishment media. In that same spirit, according to the most recent statistics from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Effect Reporting System, 8,164 deaths have been reported among those who received a vaccine, or 21 out of every 1,000,000. By contrast, 694,701 deaths from COVID-19 have been reported by the CDC, or 18,281 out of every 1,000,000. In addition, it must be noted that VAERS reports can be filed by anyone and are unverified by the CDC. Thus, as the agency notes, “Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” The decision of whether to receive a COVID vaccine is a personal one, but it is important to consider context when making that decision. — Ed. note
In a shift from years of rhetorical posturing, liberal journalists and other Democrats endorsed the harassment of LGBTQ women after Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.), who is proudly bisexual, was followed into a bathroom in Phoenix and accosted by radical activists who violated state law by recording the encounter on video.
“I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody,” President Joe Biden said Monday. “It’s part of the process.” Several hours after Biden’s remarks, White House press secretary Jen Psaki refused to comment on whether the administration condemned the taped harassment of a U.S. senator.
The president wasn’t the only lib who defended Sinema’s harassers, who belong to an activist organization bankrolled by left-wing billionaire George Soros. “Sinema’s constituents feel this is the only way to reach her,” wrote Democratic strategist Max Burns. “Don’t run for office if you’re just going to hide.”
Kyle Kulinski, cofounder of Justice Democrats, agreed. “If you don’t wanna get followed in the bathroom maybe support the bill,” he said in reference to the controversial $3.5 trillion spending bill crafted by radical House Democrats.
“Which is worse: your grandparents being deported or being followed into a bathroom (bc you refused to stop and listen) by ppl desperate for your help? This is not a trick question,” wrote Kirsten Powers, a senior political analyst for CNN.
A number of Sinema’s colleagues—Sens. Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.), Catherine Cortez Masto (D., Nev.), Alex Padilla (D., Calif.), and Robert Menendez (D., N.J.)—belong to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which has donated money to Living United for Change in Arizona, the activist group whose members harassed the bisexual woman in the bathroom. None of them returned the Washington Free Beacon‘s requests for comment on the group’s questionable tactics.
Sources: Former Obama administration communications guru Bill Burton and his company Bryson Gillette are working the high-profile campaign
The Facebook whistleblower who revealed herself in a 60 Minutesinterview is getting strategic communications guidance from a top Democratic operative, according to a source with direct knowledge of the relationship, which was confirmed by another half-dozen sources with indirect knowledge of the partnership.
Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette. It is unclear when Haugen’s relationship with Burton and Bryson Gillette began, how big her communications team is, and whether it includes other political operatives.
But Burton is now deeply integrated with an emerging infrastructure on the left comprised of individuals and organizations, including the nonprofit Center for Humane Technology, seeking to press Facebook to more aggressively police political content.
In Haugen’s public testimony, industry and political insiders see a sophisticated communications campaign intended to put Facebook on defense, from a steady trickle of leaked internal documents that fueled a Wall Street Journal investigative series dubbed “The Facebook Files” to the blockbuster 60 Minutes interview to congressional testimony scheduled to begin Tuesday. Haugen on Sunday also debuted a slick personal website in part to field media requests.
“It does have the appearance of being an incredibly well-orchestrated communications campaign,” said the GOP operative Kevin McLaughlin, the former director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Neither Burton nor Haugen responded to a request for comment, though sources say reporters and Burton himself have been open about the relationship.
Haugen’s 60 Minutes interview kicked off a media feeding frenzy, with the story mentioned at least 200 times on cable news since the segment aired, according to a review conducted by the Washington Free Beacon.
Since 2016, both political parties have gone after Big Tech companies like Facebook, with the left charging that the company’s failure to adequately police “disinformation,” helped tip the election to Donald Trump and the right charging that it arbitrarily silences conservative voices.
Burton’s involvement helping to manage Haugen’s public debut suggests that her argument is part of a broader Democratic initiative. A Facebook employee in the company’s now-defunct “civic integrity” division until May, Haugen is calling for the federal government to intervene against the company. Though she did not specify in the Sunday interview what sorts of regulations she might support, she is likely to be pressed on that when she appears on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.
Burton himself has also been an outspoken Facebook critic, likening them to tobacco companies that knowingly poisoned people and concealed the health risks of using their products — an analogy Haugen is expected to use in her congressional testimony.
“The thing that the social media companies are doing, it’s sort of like the tobacco companies, like when people first started making and selling cigarettes, people didn’t know about cancer,” he said. “But then they did, and the tobacco companies would sort of tinker with the nicotine to maximize the addiction.”
Haugen is expected to make the same point in her opening testimony tomorrow, according to a copy of that testimony obtained by Reuters. “When we realized tobacco companies were hiding the harms it caused, the government took action,” her testimony reads. “When we figured out cars were safer with seat belts, the government took action. I implore you to do the same here.”
Facebook pushed back on the report, telling 60 Minutes that the company works diligently to “balance protecting the right of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place.”
Now a public affairs consultant, Burton, the founder of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action, also serves on the board of the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit organization founded in 2018 that has pit itself against technology companies like Facebook, arguing that they are incentivized to stoke outrage and polarization at the cost of human well-being. The organization produced the 2020 Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma,” which explores the deleterious influence of social media on its users. Bryson Gillette has done communications work for the Center for Human Technology, according to an event agenda posted online by PR News in which Burton is expected to discuss his work to create a “cultural awakening around the impacts of social media on democracy and our daily lives.”
Haugen echoed that message on 60 Minutes, telling CBS’s Scott Pelley that because Facebook “can be hacked with anger, it’s easier to provoke people into anger.” She continued, “And publishers are saying, ‘Oh, if I do more angry, polarizing, divisive content, I get more money.’ Facebook has set up a system of incentives that is pulling people apart.”
The Center for Humane Technology’s “key advisers” also include Facebook cofounder and former New Republic owner Chris Hughes and is funded by left-wing charitable organizations including George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson foundation.
The Center for Humane Technology did not respond to a request for comment.
David Brock uses liberal media outlet to target voters, skirting campaign finance law
Democratic dark money kingpin David Brock is using his “pseudo-news outlet” to send Virginia voters unsolicited mailers that falsely attack Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin.
Brock in September bombarded voters in the state’s northern suburbs with an unsolicited “Virginia edition” of his liberal media outlet, The American Independent, photos obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show. The 11-page mailer—which is designed to look like a local newspaper—includes misleading content that echoes Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe’s campaign messaging.
One page, for example, falsely says Youngkin’s plan to “eliminate the state’s income tax” would cut funding for public schools. Just days before Brock sent the mailer, McAuliffe made the same false claim during a debate against the Republican nominee. McAuliffe’s campaign followed up with a press release, which said Youngkin’s “plan to eliminate the state income tax would usher in massive cuts to funding for Virginia’s schools.” Brock Called “misinformation” an “existential threat to democracy” in a 2016 interview with former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, whose career ended after he used fake documents to claim then-candidate George W. Bush went AWOL while serving in the Texas National Guard.
The mailers mark the latest attempt by a well-funded liberal group to influence elections with fake news. Liberal activist Tara McGowan launched Courier Newsroom in 2019 through her dark money group, ACRONYM. The media company aims to “build nimble communications infrastructure for Dems in critical states,” an internal memo obtained by Vice states. The Center for Responsive Politics admonished both Courier and The American Independent in a 2020 article, which referred to the sites as “pseudo-news outlets” that are “pouring millions of ‘dark money’ dollars into ads and digital content masquerading as news to influence” elections.
Brock’s mailers sparked concern among ethics experts. Traditional political groups are required to “disclose who they are and where their funding comes from” when they spend “more than $1,000 to influence an election,” Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust executive director Kendra Arnold told the Free Beacon. But that law does not apply to a “progressive news” outlet such as The American Independent, which has received millions of dollars from dark money sources.
“This is a new legal issue, and there is some gray area on what precisely constitutes a legitimate media outlet in the context of political spending, but in this particular case it does appear to be pushing the limits,” Arnold said.
Brock founded The American Independent—which did not return a request for comment—as the Blue Nation Review in 2014. Brock started the outlet to help elect failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, he told the New York Times in 2016. According to its website, The American Independent receives charitable donations from groups in Brock’s vast political network, including the American Bridge 21st Century Foundation and The American Independent Foundation, two tax-exempt nonprofits that do not disclose their donors. American Bridge, which Brock launched in 2010, funneled nearly $2.7 million to The American Independent‘s parent company from 2017 to 2018, tax filings show.
Those transactions prompted an ethics complaint, with Patriots Foundation cofounder Craig Robinson alleging Brock “circumvented rules and exploited the tax-exempt status of the organizations for personal benefit and partisan political purposes.”
One Virginia voter who got The American Independent‘s “Virginia edition” told the Free Beacon she “never signed up to receive these mailers.”
“At first glance, it looked like a normal neighborhood newsletter, but once you start reading it the bias was very clear,” the voter said. “It’s pretty sad McAuliffe’s allies are resorting to literal fake news to try and con voters.”
Brock’s mailers came as McAuliffe struggled to maintain a strong lead against Youngkin in a state President Joe Biden won by double digits. A September Fox News poll showed McAuliffe leading Youngkin by just 4 points. Voters have until Oct. 12 to register to vote in the election, which will take place on Nov. 2.
When false philosophies have been cultivated and have attained a wide sphere of dominion in the world of the intellect they are no longer questioned. False superstructures are raised on false foundations, and in the end systems barren of merit parade their grandeur on the stage of the world. — Francis Bacon
There have been two threats to human health in the past 18 months: the immediate biological threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the political decision to wage asymmetric warfare on it through social restrictions that destroy jobs, contravene human rights, and trash medical ethics.
The political decision to contravene standing law was taken, like every globalist advance, under the auspices of an emergency. Since in war the first casualty is truth, the malign asymmetric effects of these political decisions on public health are getting less publicity than the virus. Yet they are worse, and increasingly so as the war progresses.
Some of the traumas of these political decisions have to be acknowledged. The bitter pill came first. Rather than adopt the sensible, focused protection of the vulnerable elderly proposed by the Great Barrington Declaration, the authorities implemented mass lockdowns and painful restrictions, intensifying the demand for vaccines. The financial consequences of that decision will affect public health for decades.
The decision was sold to the public without debate as a tough but necessary phase that the vaccines would end. There was no indication that the arrival of vaccines would require further “stages,” or an infinite regress of booster shots, or an advancing police state. No one mentioned it would require us to lose individual identity by being indefinitely masked in public or in school, or receive a QR number to identify us—as in prison.
Once the vaccines came, we were assured, things would return to normal.
But it appears the vaccines cannot deliver such a result. Since COVID is a mucosal respiratory virus, and the vaccines are intramuscular vaccines, the virus replicates in the respiratory tract long before any humoral immune response provided by the vaccines can even begin. That means that vaccinated people have viral loads and replication numbers just as high as unvaccinated people.
Neither the threat of the virus nor the threat of the government’s draconian measures has ended, or will end.
You might say that vaccine passports offer hopeful signs. I disagree. Vaccine passports, an odious term that normalizes restrictions, are political theatre that suggests that freedom is a gift granted by a benevolent government. Vaxxports are simply a carrot to reward the masses and to give them a scapegoat (the unvaccinated) for the evident failures of vaccines, while distracting them from the fact that the stick of the ongoing political warfare against everyone continues apace.
The vaccines do not stop further waves, and never will. SARS-CoV-2 is endemic.
So apparently is the political war.
As we can already see, public health dictates that everyone must continue to wear masks and practice social distancing and follow mandatory contact tracing protocols. And worse still, rather than admit the failure of the vaccines, because of the sunk costs of both the politicians and the credulous public, people are more willing to do what would have been unconscionable a year ago: dividing their own society, firing employees without cause, and even extending the vaccine mandate to 5-11 year olds who are at no risk, as announced recently by the City of Toronto.
So what is behind the politicians’ continuation of the manifest failures in the fight against COVID?
It is not ignorance. Destroying economic independence, restricting access to medical care, and restricting civil liberties are well known social determinants of poorer health. It is part of the human rights case against dictatorships.
The terrible biological threat posed by COVID may be the excuse, but it lacks any substance. In Canada, life expectancy rose in 2020 and has continued to climb in 2021, and the statistical average age of death from COVID in Canada reflects that it remains a threat to the elderly.
Furthermore, if vaccines spell an intensification of government restrictions, in the form of so-called “vaccine passports” and government-mandated job losses for the non-compliant, mirrored in the corporatist world, then once again, we don’t just face a failure of public health but an atrocity against it. Firing thousands of health-care workers in systems that were said at the outset of the war to be at capacity makes the individual health assaults into a mismanaged social health disaster.
If firing front-line health-care professionals is what it looks like when the government is protecting public health, what does it look like when it is assaulting it?
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has caved to the demands of progressive activists to cancel a guest lecture because of the speaker’s opinions on diversity hiring.
Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago (UC), had been invited by MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences to give its prestigious Carlson Lecture on Oct. 21. He was to talk about the climate on exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars other than the sun of our solar system.
On Oct. 2, however, Abbot wrote on Twitter that MIT has cancelled his lecture, a move he described as a “bad decision under pressure.”
Abbot became the target of the progressives last year after he expressed doubts about certain aspects of the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)” policies at the UC. In August, the UC campus left renewed its effort to “cancel” Abbot, after he co-authored an opinion piece in Newsweek discussing the flaws of race-centric DEI hiring.
“American universities are diverse not because of DEI, but because they have been extremely competitive at attracting talent from all over the world,” he says in the article, noting that German universities never fully recovered from the Nazi years, during which their employment policies focused on race instead of merit. “We should view this as a warning of the consequences of viewing group membership as more important than merit, and correct our course before it is too late.”
In a petition sent to the UC Department of the Geophysical Sciences, activists declared that Abbot’s opinions “threaten the safety and belonging of all underrepresented groups” and were “an aggressive act,” and demanded, among other things, his immediate removal from his teaching position. In response, UC administrators made it clear that they won’t punish a faculty member for simply expressing his views on the university’s policies.
“Faculty are free to agree or disagree with any policy or approach of the University, its departments, schools or divisions without being subject to discipline, reprimand or other form of punishment,” UC President Robert Zimmer said in a letter to campus community.
Several academics have voice their support for Abbot, including Robert George, a Princeton University professor and vocal opponent of cancel culture. In a Twitter thread documenting the incident, George urged academia to condemn the “politicization of science.”
“It’s not just the scientists who need to speak up against this outrage against academic freedom and integrity,” he wrote. “It is all of us in academia–scholars in every field, and scholars from across the ideological spectrum. Please, don’t be silent.”
George was joined by Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. Filer argued that MIT should reinstate Abbot as the Carlson lecturer and apologize for their treatment of him.
“By capitulating to a mindless Twitter mob as it did in this sad case, MIT has severely diminished its institutional reputation. Reversal of the absurd award cancelation and high level and sincere apologies are required,” he wrote on Twitter.
MIT didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling prohibiting the federal government from diverting funds from the military to construct the U.S.–Mexico border wall, sending the case back to the lower court for review.
During his administration, then-President Donald Trump had sought to transfer money from the Department of Defense toward the construction of a U.S.–Mexico border wall after Congress rejected his request for more funding. But President Joe Biden canceled the Trump-era emergency declaration when he took office and returned the unspent funds to the Pentagon.
The Supreme Court’s Oct. 4 decision means that the justices agreed to take the appeal and vacated a previous federal district judge’s ruling.
“The District Court should consider what further proceedings are necessary and appropriate in light of the changed circumstances in this case,” the justices said in a brief order. Biden had signed an executive order on Jan. 20 prohibiting border wall construction.
The Sierra Club, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and others had previously challenged the Trump-era wall order, challenging Trump’s emergency declaration to divert the funds. A district court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals have both ruled that Trump acted improperly.
“Today’s order comes after the government conceded that the Trump wall was wasteful and destructive, and returns the case to the district court so that Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition can seek relief for the damage the wall has already inflicted,” Dror Ladin, an attorney at the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Hill. The groups also want the administration to remove the wall, saying that the structure disrupts wildlife and damages protected plants.
In the case, at issue was about $3.6 billion in funding that the Biden administration has since diverted to about 60 military construction projects.
In February, the Supreme Court also agreed to a Biden administration request to cancel arguments on a separate case that challenged the diversion of about $2.5 billion in military funds that were used for the wall construction.
“The President has directed the Executive Branch to undertake an assessment of ‘the legality of the funding and contracting methods used to construct the wall,’” the administration wrote to the court.
In recent weeks, the Biden administration has come under increasing criticism for its handling of border security and a surge in illegal immigration along the U.S.–Mexico border.
Thousands of illegal aliens of Haitian origin created a makeshift encampment underneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, in late September. Later, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that about 12,000 of the Haitians were released into the interior United States with pending court dates.
The crisis triggered calls from Republicans and even some Democrats to restart the construction of the border wall, which was a major campaign promise of Trump’s during his 2016 presidential campaign.
When I walked out of Planned Parenthood after working there for eight years and climbing the ladder within the organization, so many people on the pro-life side had endless questions for me, not just about the internal working of Planned Parenthood but how I could do the things I did, persuading women that abortion was their only option, putting together the body parts of aborted babies and then somehow sleeping at night.
Valid questions. It’s important to understand how the other side thinks, how they justify those choices and how to approach them with love and truth.
Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, a board-certified OB-GYN and abortion doctor, told the House Oversight Committee, in a hearing on the Texas abortion law last week, that “abortion saves lives. For the thousands of people I’ve cared for, abortion is a blessing.”
There is no possible scenario where abortion saves a life or is a blessing or an act of love. Zero.
Yet this is how the abortion industry justifies the killing of innocent life and even the harming of women during an abortion.
Through my ministry, And Then There Were None, almost 600 abortion workers have left the industry, and nearly every one of them went into those clinics with the intent of wanting to help women, a noble goal.
We were taught that abortion is indeed a blessing to a woman in crisis, dealing with abuse or in college. We told a woman that she needed to have an abortion so she could take care of her other kids, so she could continue working to provide for her family, so she could get her education and find her dream job. Kids would get in the way of her dreams and abortion would give her freedom.
All lies. This was the exact opposite of empowerment.
Several of our former abortion workers decided to quit their jobs after spending a lot of their time in the recovery room where women were placed after their abortions.
They all had similar stories: Women were always crying, bleeding, had blank stares, some immediately voicing their regret. They looked like completely different women than the ones who had walked into the clinic.
When you see firsthand the devastation of abortion and allow even a tiny smidgen of truth to seep into your heart, those first cracks in the lies you’ve been told start to form.
When you’re told lies everywhere you look — your job, the media, celebrities, friends, family, supervisors — it can be difficult to see the truth. And especially for people working in abortion clinics, it can seem like they have no options to get out for family, financial or other reasons.
But for those who do leave, the freedom they experience is worth it.
As much as we on the pro-life side want to snap back at people who scream at us on the sidewalk or yell in our faces at marches, we need to approach them with both love and the truth.
I didn’t leave Planned Parenthood because of the people who showed up on the sidewalk dressed like the Grim Reaper (true story). I left because God was softening my heart and because the sidewalk advocates I talked to were kind and loving. One of them even works for my ministry now.
This also means we must be bold in speaking the truth, which we have on our side, and pray for the conversion of those inside abortion clinics. Where sin abounds, God’s mercy abounds even greater.
Abortion is never acceptable. It is never health care. Killing an innocent human being is never a blessing. The death and dismemberment of an unborn human being is never an act of love.
One would think Steve Schmidt, co-founder of the anti-Trump political action committee the Lincoln Project, would be keeping a low profile these days.
The former Republican strategist-turned-professional NeverTrumper got what he wanted; Donald Trump is no longer president.
While the impact the Lincoln Project’s multitude of viral advertisements smearing Trump had on the election can be debated — one study found they were hilariously ineffective at doing anything but making a handful of squishy former GOP power brokers momentarily beloved on the left — the spots will remain a bit of overheated ephemera emblematic of the 2020 campaign.
The post-election period was never going to be kind to the Lincoln Project, given that it had no overarching principles other than returning the ossified country-club establishment to pre-eminence in the Republican Party.
It’s been more unkind than one might have originally thought, given the majority of headlines the group has generated since last November have come from co-founder John Weaver, who was alleged to have sexually harassed scores of young men and behaved like a predator, sending his targets provocative text messages and enticing them with promises of employment.
What’s worse, reports alleged that the Lincoln Project was informed of accusations against Weaver as early as June 2020, despite a statement from the group saying it was “shocked” by the revelations.
As for the veracity behind the accusations, Weaver pulled a Kevin Spacey and said in a statement that he had “tried to live a life that wasn’t completely true” and that “[t]he truth is that I’m gay.”
Of course, no one was accusing him of homosexuality; they were accusing him of sexual harassment and using his power to procure assignations with much younger men. Given the situation, one might have thought a rebrand into the “Epstein Project” might have been in order.
Add into that another report from female-centric publication The 19th that chronicled a culture at the Lincoln Project “where women in key positions were sidelined and where sexist and homophobic language was used by those in leadership posts,” and you would have thought every one of the group’s principals would have consciously withdrawn from the spotlight.
Schmidt, in fact, resigned from the Lincoln Project board of directors in February, saying he was “incandescently angry” about the allegations.
But having been “incandescently angry” about his own group’s failures apparently hasn’t instilled a whit of humility when it comes to lecturing others.
Schmidt has persisted — telling MSNBC that right-wing anger “is very quickly metastasizing into violent extremism.”
He made the claim during an appearance Thursday on “Deadline,” telling host Nicolle Wallace that a suspect who is alleged to have thrown a Molotov cocktail into the Travis County Democratic Party headquarters in Texas on Wednesday at 2 a.m. was “radicalized like a young man drawn to the lies of ISIS.”
“We have an autocratic movement teeming with violence and the intimations of violence in this country. And it’s a threat to democracy,” Schmidt said.
“So let’s look at that domestic terrorist, that criminal who desecrated the American flag by wrapping it around his head, who committed violence in the name of right-wing extremism. What is it that he has heard?” he continued. “He has heard that he lives in an occupied country with an illegitimate president who lost the election, who was put into power by millions of fraudulent votes, mostly black and brown votes out of the inner cities.
“He turns on [Fox News host] Tucker Carlson, and he hears that he’s going to be replaced in a great plot where the Democratic Party is importing people from the third world to strip him of his franchise, of his rights. He has been stoked. He has been instigated. He has been radicalized like a young man drawn to the lies of ISIS in a different part of the world, and we will have more of it.
“Since the beginning of time, all right-wing political movements try to create chaos, including violence. And out of that chaos and out of that violence that they have caused, they then claim that they can bring order, that only they can bring order, and it is with that order that we will lose our democracy.”
For whatever reason, I don’t remember Schmidt going on MSNBC and sounding the alarm about liberals being “radicalized like a young man drawn to the lies of ISIS” when the Orange County Republican Party headquarters in North Carolina was attacked with a Molotov cocktail during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, along with spray-painted graffiti that said “Nazi Republicans” on the side of the building. I’m sure I just missed it.
Or apparently Schmidt just missed the entirety of the 2016 election, since he went on to say that “there is a fundamental difference between these political parties in two big ways. And those two big differences exceed every other difference. One party will abide by election results. They’re called the Democratic Party. The other political party no longer will.”
“Since the beginning of time, all right wing political movements tried to create chaos… out of that chaos… that they have caused, they then claim that they can bring order… and it is with that order that we will lose our democracy” – @SteveSchmidtSES w/ @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/CwKO9fjSLn
The Democratic Party, you might remember, spent four years prattling on about how the 2016 election was suspect, with some openly saying it was stolen. Then, with whiplash speed, anyone who didn’t just accept but enthusiastically embrace the results of the 2020 race was party to the “big lie.”
And now, according to Schmidt, Republicans and conservatives are essentially on par with bloodthirsty terrorists — and they’re responsible for what happened at the Travis County Democratic Party headquarters.
“Historically, we know, when you put all of that fuel on the ground, and you start throwing sparks at it, that you can ignite a conflagration, and when you dehumanize people the way that this man and this movement has, in the end, it kills people,” Schmidt said.
“And historically, this type of politics has wound up, in its worst excesses, killing tens of millions of people,” he said. “That’s why it’s such a frightening moment, and that’s why it’s time to wake up and understand that we don’t have a shortage-of-panic-buttons problem. We have a political extremism problem that is very quickly metastasizing into a violent extremism that we’ll be dealing with for a generation because of what happened over the last five years.”
Oh please.
We may have a political extremism problem, but the agents of it won’t be found where Schmidt thinks they will be. Instead, you’d be better off looking at the Lincoln Project, a group that injected content-free vitriol into the 2020 electoral race and, in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s inauguration, promised to build “a database of Trump officials & staff that will detail their roles in the Trump administration & track where they are now. No personal info, only professional. But they will be held accountable & not allowed to pretend they were not involved.”
If that sounds a lot like a witch hunt, that’s because it is.
The Lincoln Project also targets other Republicans it finds distastefully close to Trump, such as Trump-endorsed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. As Fox News reported last week, the group issued a public warning to Youngkin that it was “coming for him” in his attempt to defeat Democrat Terry McAuliffe, the former Virginia governor and Clinton family ally.
And yet, the Lincoln Project, with or without Schmidt on board, is arguably the least effective vehicle for fist-shaking moral indignation that there is. Weaver remains the most prominent example of the group’s hypocrisy, but it was always little more than an outrage machine designed to stoke fear for the benefit of its principals.
Amazingly, long after that should have become apparent to everyone, the group is still stoking baseless anxiety.
Now, Steve Schmidt is putting forth the ludicrous notion that a random guy who threw a Molotov cocktail into a local Democratic Party headquarters represents a vanguard of men indoctrinated like Islamic State group terrorists — but instead of being radicalized by a video of an infidel being beheaded in the name of Allah, they’re being radicalized by “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
If this fatuous notion won’t convince MSNBC that Schmidt and his Lincoln Project cohort are fundamentally unserious grifters who are noxious to democracy, nothing will.
Looks like this ‘whistleblower’ is doing less whistling and more blowing.
acebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen is a longtime Democrat donor, supporting campaigns for far-left extremists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She has also donated money to activist groups actively attempting to derail the U.S. primary process that allows ordinary members of the public to beat out establishment, career politicians, The National Pulse can reveal.
Blowing the Establishment.
Haugen’s “whistleblowing” has been lauded by the corporate media: a sure sign that rather than being a sole actor attempting to call out corporate abuse, she is likely backed by some hefty interests. Haugen first anonymously leaked internal documents before revealing her identity and calling for mass censorship on the Facebook, but only of political ideas she opposes.
The National Pulse has thus far identified 36 donations from Haugen during her time as an employee of Facebook, Pinterest, and Gigster. All of the donations, which total nearly $2,000 since December 2016, have gone to Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On January 13th, 2020, Haugen sent money to Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign and a further contribution to her “Courage to Change” Political Action Committee (PAC).
“All endorsees will embody the ideals of racial, social, economic, and environmental justice,” promises the PAC.
Haugen’s most recent donation was August 4th, sending $100 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC).
Anti-Democracy Campaigners.
In-keeping with her wishes to purge political views other than hers from social media, Haugen has also donated to a left-wing “resistance” group which lists as one of its top priorities the dismantling of the U.S. primary process for elections.
America is somewhat unique on the world stage in its commitment to a decentralized process whereby ordinary citizens can become political party candidates. It is perhaps the most democratic part of U.S. elections.
But, in the words of the Haugen-backed “It Starts Today” campaign, “the modern partisan primary—particularly within the GOP—has turned out to have an unintended consequence: extremism in our elected officials and dysfunction in our legislatures.”
There is, of course, far more extremism on the political left in the U.S. Congress than on the political right. But as of June 2021, the group founded by ActBlue’s Jonathan Zucker decided that the way to beat Republicans was not to win the battle of ideas, but rather to stop real conservatives winning primaries.
Haugen donated twice to “It Starts Today,” and curiously claims that it “holds donations” for Democratic primary nominees until the end of the selection process.
Haugen’s loathing of free speech tracks with her disdain for the democratic process. Her previous roles include working at Google, which paid for her degree from the Harvard Business School.
I told everyone I wouldn’t be holding back this year . . . and my newest ad is just the start.
My Do-Nothing opponent, Daniel Webster, WOULD NEVER air an ad like this, or even speak out about the threat Radical Islam poses to our Constitutional values and our education system.
As a matter of fact, on the 20th anniversary of 911, Webster blamed the Taliban for attacking us that day . . . which is just mind-boggling dumb.
It’s dumb, because as a sitting member of Congress with voting power, Webster should know al-Qaeda, NOT the Taliban, killed 2,981 people on September 11th.
And twenty years later, as part of the Democrats’ growing Critical Race Theory agenda, Joe Biden wants to teach our school children about the “Islamic faith” while ignoring the ongoing war that Jihadis have been waging against the West for decades!
And sadly, Democrats and Do-Nothing Republicans go right along with the Biden Regime’s agenda to normalize Sharia Law and Islamic “traditions” that include religious bigotry, violence, spousal abuse, sexism, racism and homophobia.
Do you want a member of Congress who speaks the truth about Islam or hides their head in the sand?
Paid for by Laura Loomer for Congress Inc Contributions to Laura Loomer for Congress Inc are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes. Contributions from corporations, labor unions, federal contractors, and foreign nationals are prohibited.
In Woody Allen’s classic film “Annie Hall,” we encounter the paranoia of the lead character Alvy Singer, who spots anti-Semitism even where there is no anti-Semitism to be found. At one point he tells his friend Rob that an NBC executive kept asking him, “Jew eat?” Of course, the man was asking Alvy, “Did you eat?” But Alvy only heard, “Jew eat?” The anti-Semitism that Alvy could not find in society, he generated in his own mind.
I keep recalling this incident every time I read or hear on TV, which is a lot, how parental resistance to critical race theory (CRT) in schools is a form of “whitelash.” The accusation is launched against parents in more than 200 school districts who are organizing and protesting against racial indoctrination in their children’s schools. Whitelash is one of those neologisms that basically means “backlash,” except since it is evidently coming from whites, it has been renamed whitelash.
Recently, the online magazine Slate alleged that the parents who fight against CRT are mostly bigots and white supremacists who fear “white replacement” in their communities and are motivated by a desire to “protect whiteness.” Pundits on TV routinely attribute the mobilization against CRT to “white resentment,” “white fragility,” and “white rage.”
Attempting to give these charges an empirical foundation, NBC News journalists Tyler Kingkade and Nigel Chiwaya offered a stash of data to prove that parents nationwide are reacting against “rapid demographic change” and “the exposure of white students to students of color.” NBC showed that in 22 of 33 school districts under review, parental activism could be explained by “backlash over equity initiatives” in districts that are “diversifying faster than the national average.”
NBC embedded its data in a larger narrative that seems glibly lifted from the civil rights era of the 1960s, in which all resistance to change is automatically attributed to people who seek to revive Jim Crow, racial segregation, and the night-riding of the Ku Klux Klan. In a familiar but by now tedious mode, NBC invokes the dark days of the past in which some of these very same school districts actively segregated their school districts to exclude blacks.
But when researcher Christopher Rufo—a leading critic of CRT—reviewed the NBC data, he noted that one third of the districts in the study had diversified slower, instead of faster, than the national average. Moreover, NBC itself noted that parental protest against CRT had been counted in more than 220 school districts, implying that NBC cherry-picked its data from 15 percent of the sample size, ignoring a whopping 85 percent of the evidence.
Let’s zoom in to two counties of Virginia, Fairfax County and Loudoun County, where parental opposition to racial indoctrination has been particularly severe. One might expect, taking NBC’s word, that the leadership of the opposition would be some old-school white male, perhaps someone with direct ancestral ties to the Confederacy. In Fairfax, however, Rufo notes, the parental opposition is led by an Indian American woman, Asra Nomani, who reviles CRT for debasing academic standards and for legitimizing systematic discrimination against high-scoring Asian American students.
In Fairfax and Loudoun counties, the parents who are up in arms are not stereotypical rednecks but rather educated, affluent, and racially diverse, Rufo observes. While both counties have rapidly diversified over the past 20 years, Loudoun County has the same proportion of blacks as it did in 2000. The highest rate of population expansion has been among Latinos and Asians, and it turns out that they oppose CRT by the same two to one margin as whites.
As Rufo demonstrates, data consistently show that the more parents learn about CRT, the more likely they are to oppose it. This is why the first move of CRT defenders was to deny that it was even being taught in schools. Pundit Joy Reid and many others insisted CRT was a highly abstruse legal theory that was merely the subject of specialized academic debate in law schools. The message here was clear: No need for parents to worry; this is not something that’s actually going on.
But parents knew this was a lie. One of the silver linings of COVID-19 is that with students at home, and classes being conducted online, parents are in a much better position to see firsthand what their children are being taught. Moreover, why would teachers unions and the U.S. Conference of Mayors endorse CRT in public education if there was no effort under way to teach it?
Once the first line of defense—“we aren’t doing it”—collapsed, advocates of CRT were forced to switch to “here’s why we’re doing it.” And the best they could come up with is the claim that they are merely teaching established historical facts and that critics were motivated by nothing more than bigotry or “whitelash.” The absurdity of this is clear from the simple fact that survey data show that CRT is opposed by huge margins not only by white parents but also by Latino parents, Asian American parents, and yes, black parents.
Rufo points out that opposition to CRT isn’t even partisan. Both Loudoun and Fairfax counties went heavily for Biden in 2020, one by a 25-point margin, the other by a 39-point margin. Even so, parents oppose CRT in those liberal bastions by an eight-point margin, and 59 percent of public school parents express concern that their children are subject to racial indoctrination.
The problem with CRT is that it’s a poisonous brew of half-truths and lies. The bad news is that this indoctrination seems to have infected, if not taken over, American public education. The good news is that more and more parents, Democratic and Republican, white, black, Hispanic, and Asian, are waking up to the lie and they’re exposing it, resisting it, and warning of a very painful political price if this newest form of child abuse continues in the public school classroom.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s claim that it’s “just too soon to tell” if families can hold Christmas gatherings has come under scrutiny by a Johns Hopkins professor who accused him of failing to communicate that the COVID-19 risk is “not equally distributed.”
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, made the claim Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
However, Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins professor and public health researcher, disputed that assessment during an interview Monday on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”
“We’re going to be in a much better place in a couple of weeks or maybe by November at the latest,” Makary said.
“Cases are down 35 percent, and we’ve always known this delta virus is so contagious. It’s burning through that last segment of the population with no natural or vaccinated immunity,” he said. “By December, almost every adult will have had COVID or vaccination.”
Makary also noted Fauci failed to disclose the shift from the coronavirus pandemic to an endemic.
“In the language that he’s using there’s an implicit denial that we’re moving from an epidemic to an endemic phase, that is, we’ve got to learn to live with it,” he said.
The medical researcher also noted the problem with not explaining the unequal distribution of risk across America.
“We’ve got over 90 percent of seniors vaccinated. The risk is not equally distributed in the population, and that’s what they fail to communicate,” Makary said.
Dr. Fauci claims it’s too soon to tell if families can hold Christmas gatherings. Dr. @MartyMakary sounds off: “The risk is not equally distributed in the population and that’s what they fail to communicate.” pic.twitter.com/K5Er8vTRdA
This is not the first time Makary has provided a medical perspective that contrasted with the views of Fauci.
Last month, Fox News published an opinion piece in which he shared his concerns regarding President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates.
Speaking about studies on natural immunity, Makary wrote, “If you recovered from a COVID infection, you have natural immunity which is 27-times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic COVID, according to a large Israeli study.”
Another concern he shared was that mandates are not flexible with children.
“The current adult dose and short interval between doses may be too high for children,” Makary said.
“It’s always concerned me that we give are giving the same vaccine dose and short interval between doses to a thin 12-year old girl that we give to an overweight 50-year old man,” he said.
Makary concluded that the Biden phrase “pandemic of the unvaccinated” is not completely accurate.
“President Biden has rallied around the term ‘a pandemic of the unvaccinated’ but the more precise term is ‘a pandemic of the non-immune,’” he said.
A successful golf career can actually pay the bills; track and field? [US Patriot]
A Michigan college is having its knuckles rapped by the American Civil Liberties Union because the sport that replaced track in its roster of men’s varsity programs is “among the whitest of sports.”
Central Michigan University eliminated its men’s track program in May 2020, according to Central Michigan Life, the college’s student-run newspaper. Cost issues related to the impact of COVID-19 were cited as a reason to drop the program.
In August, the college announced that its varsity golf program, which had been part of the college from 1936 to 1985, would be revived. Adding a program was necessary to meet the number of men’s varsity teams required to keep the college’s NCAA Division One status.
But that did not set well with the ACLU, which delivered its demand that the track program be reinstated in a Sept. 16 letter.
“The ACLU of Michigan shares the concerns of the many people who believe the program’s elimination has harmful racial implications, and to ameliorate the harm, the university should restore track and field as an opportunity for all students, and particularly students of color,” the letter began.
The ACLU said it was disappointed that a missive containing “historical and social factors” about having a men’s track program brought not a word of reply from the college and said the decision “speaks volumes” about the college’s attitude on race.
The letter then viewed the school’s actions through the lens of race.
“The decision to eliminate track and field, a sport heavily populated by African American athletes, was itself sufficient to raise concerns and questions about the university’s commitment to diversity and inclusion,” the letter said.
“But then, after eliminating track and field, the university decided to replace it with a golf program, a sport that is among the whitest of sports. How white is it? It is so white that only three percent of NCAA golfers are African American. How white is it? It is so white, that even at historically Black universities, golf programs faced with a paucity of Black golfers must sometimes make specific efforts to place white golfers on their teams,” the letter continued.
The ACLU was roundly mocked on Twitter.
ACLU wants college athletes to run track, not play golf, calling it ‘among the whitest of sports’https://t.co/yzcjGnzunE
ACLU wants college athletes to run track, not play golf, calling it ‘among the whitest of sports’ I did not know TIGER WOODS was white. DAMN the most popular golfer in history and they feed you this BS. https://t.co/4wTeSa96E0
When the program was announced, athletic director Amy Folan said it was a way to stay within budgetary realities, according to MLive.
“We have been working diligently toward this goal since I joined CMU 10 months ago. The financial challenges that forced changes in the sports we sponsor remain,” Folan said. “Our top priority is to offer programs that provide an exceptional experience for our student-athletes.”
“I feel strongly we will be able to do this with our men’s golf program based on the financial parameters necessary for a successful program. We are fortunate to have so many fantastic golf courses locally and statewide, which will make this an attractive program for prospective student-athletes,” she said.
However, in attacking what it called “the decision to replace track with a white sport,” the ACLU letter said that the college was dismissing anyone and everyone supporting racial justice.
The decision, so the ACLU wrote, “might be viewed as the university’s way of saying: ‘We hear the concerns about race, but those who are concerned don’t matter. Not only do we not care about these people, but we want to show them that people of color are not wanted at CMU by making the problem worse and rubbing their faces in it.’”
The ACLU said the decision could be seen to be discrimination at work.
“Because African American male athletes participate in track more than any of the other minor sports, replacing CMU’s track program with golf, a minor sports program that is demonstrably ‘white’ speaks volumes about the university’s racial insensitivity if not its discriminatory intent,” the letter said.
The ACLU then told the college to do as it was told or “this issue will otherwise continue to haunt the university well into the future, all the while exacerbating racial tension and promoting the idea that CMU is an institution that is at least indifferent (if not hostile) to the concerns and interests of communities of color.”
Jessica Berg Wilson’s obituary described the Seattle woman as “an exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions” who “died unexpectedly on Sep. 7 from COVID-19 Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia (VITT).”
The obituary on Legacy.com continued: “Jessica fully embraced motherhood, sharing her passion for life with her daughters. Jessica’s motherly commitment was intense, with unwavering determination to nurture her children to be confident, humble, responsible, and to have concern and compassion for others with high morals built on Faith.”
“Jessica’s greatest passion was to be the best mother possible for Bridget and Clara. Nothing would stand in her way to be present in their lives,” it said. “During the last weeks of her life, however, the world turned dark with heavy-handed vaccine mandates. Local and state governments were determined to strip away her right to consult her wisdom and enjoy her freedom.
“She had been vehemently opposed to taking the vaccine, knowing she was in good health and of a young age and thus not at risk for serious illness. In her mind, the known and unknown risks of the unproven vaccine were more of a threat.
“But, slowly, day by day, her freedom to choose was stripped away. Her passion to be actively involved in her children’s education—which included being a Room Mom—was, once again, blocked by government mandate. Ultimately, those who closed doors and separated mothers from their children prevailed.
“It cost Jessica her life. It cost her children the loving embrace of their caring mother. And it cost her husband the sacred love of his devoted wife. It cost God’s Kingdom on earth a very special soul who was just making her love felt in the hearts of so many.”
This very sad story was made even worse by the Twitter Police.
When a Twitter user shared Wilson’s obituary on Friday, adding in the caption that she had not wanted to get vaccinated, the post was slapped with a warning label.
“This Tweet is misleading,” it said. “Find out why health officials consider COVID-19 vaccines safe for most people.”
It provided a link so users could “find out more,” adding, “This Tweet can’t be replied to, shared or liked.”
Seattle, WA — Jessica Berg Wilson, an “exceptionally healthy and vibrant 37-year-old young mother with no underlying health conditions,” passed away from COVID Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia. She did not want to get vaccinated. 😥
Misleading? On the contrary, it’s very clear. A healthy young woman, who believed that the vaccine posed a greater risk to her health than contracting the virus itself, was forced to comply with the school’s vaccine requirement for visitors if she wanted to be involved in her children’s classrooms.
She took the vaccine and then died of a vaccine-induced blood clot. She was one of the unlucky ones.
The author of the tweet was not misleading readers, either. She was simply mourning the loss of a young mother who would not have gotten the vaccine (and therefore likely would not have died) had she not been forced to.
Nobody was trying to convince others not to take the vaccine or claiming that it will cause mass deaths.
I am not anti-vax. Vaccines are a potent tool in the fight against COVID. That said, these vaccines do pose a risk to some individuals. Some might have medical reasons for rejecting the vaccine, and others are highly skeptical about taking a vaccine that was developed so quickly. Not everyone needs to be vaccinated.
This is tyranny, and it’s hard to believe this is happening in America.
A Facebookwhistleblower, who is due to testify before Congress on Tuesday, has accused the Big Tech company of repeatedly putting profit before doing “what was good for the public,” including clamping down on hate speech.
Frances Haugen, who told CBS’s “60 Minutes” program that she was recruited by Facebook as a product manager on the civic misinformation team in 2019, said she and her attorneys have filed at least eight complaints with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
During her appearance on the television program on Sunday, Haugen revealed that she was the whistleblower who provided the internal documents for a Sept. 14 exposé by The Wall Street Journal that claims Instagram has a “toxic” impact on the self-esteem of young girls.
That investigation claimed that the social media giant knows about the issue but “made minimal efforts to address these issues and plays them down in public.”
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” said Haugen.
She explained that Facebook did so by “picking out” content that “gets engagement or reaction,” even it that content is hateful, divisive, or polarizing, because “it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.”
“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” she claimed.
Haugen is expected to to testify at a Senate hearing on Oct. 5 titled “Protecting Kids Online,” about Facebook’s knowledge regarding the photo sharing app’s allegedly harmful effects on children.
During her appearance on the television program, Haugen also accused Facebook of lying to the public about the progress it made to rein in hate speech on the social media platform. She further accused the company of fueling division and violence in the United States and worldwide.
“When we live in an information environment that is full of angry, hateful, polarizing content it erodes our civic trust, it erodes our faith in each other, it erodes our ability to want to care for each other. The version of Facebook that exists today is tearing our societies apart and causing ethnic violence around the world,” she said.
She added that Facebook was used to help organize the breach of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, after the company switched off its safety systems following the U.S. presidential elections.
While she believed no one at Facebook was “malevolent,” she said the company had misaligned incentives.
“Facebook makes more money when you consume more content,” she said. “People enjoy engaging with things that elicit an emotional reaction. And the more anger that they get exposed to, the more they interact and the more they consume.”
Shortly after the televised interview, Facebook spokesperson Lena Pietsch released a statement pushing back against Haugen’s claims.
“We continue to make significant improvements to tackle the spread of misinformation and harmful content,” said Pietsch. “To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true.”
Separately, Facebook Vice President of global affairs Nick Clegg told CNN before the interview aired that it was “ludicrous” to assert social media was to blame for the the events that unfolded on Jan. 6.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Facebook for additional comment.
The battle over President Joe Biden’s sweeping clean energy plan isn’t over, but there already appears to be a winner–natural gas.
The fossil fuel will likely remain a mainstay of America’s electrical grid for some time, according to energy experts and lawmakers. That’s a big disappointment to liberal Democrats and environmentalists. In protests in cities and campuses nationwide, one of them fronted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, they made natural gas the new climate villain, replacing coal, the dirtier fossil fuel that’s fading in the states.
Climate activists had pinned their hopes on the administration’s proposal to remake the energy industry at breakneck speed. It gives financial incentives to utilities to ramp up the deployment of clean energy sources such as wind and solar and would slow if not stop the expansion of gas-fired power plants.
But Sen. Joe Manchin, who controls climate policy as chair of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in early September that he would block Biden’s ambitious plan and seek a middle ground. The West Virginian’s insistence that any climate policy must leave plenty of room for natural gas was criticized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among other progressives, as a favor to the fossil fuel industry, which has a large footprint in his home state.
As Manchin tells it, hitting the brakes on natural gas is a risk he’s not willing to take. Although such a move would reduce carbon emissions – a goal the senator shares – it makes the nation’s aging and feeble grid more vulnerable to dangerous blackouts as wind and solar energy play a larger role. They don’t supply power when the wind stops blowing and the sun is down. So natural gas plants, which have contributed to the closing of hundreds of coal burners, need to anchor the grid until viable clean substitutes come of age.
“The United States leads the world in emissions reductions and that’s largely because of the increased utilization of natural gas,” says Anne Bradbury, CEO of the gas and oil trade group American Exploration & Production Council. “It seems extremely shortsighted to be demonizing the use of natural gas.”
The prospect that the fossil fuel will have more staying power than opponents had hoped is an early signpost of America’s energy future as Democrats aim to transform it – and much else in society – in its roughly $4 trillion spending snarl. Here are others.
A Setback for Carbon Capture
Environmental groups are getting in the way of the rollout of a technology that could eventually clean up gas plants, according to carbon capture advocates, which emit about half the emissions of coal.
The Carbon Capture Coalition, a group of energy and advocacy groups, has been lobbying for an increase in the federal tax credit for a technology that can remove more than 90 percent of carbon emissions from gas plants. The bigger subsidy is needed to kick-start the commercial rollout of large carbon-capture installations, much like the tax credits that spurred the expansion of wind and solar power.
But groups like Greenpeace and the National Resources Defense Council are campaigning against federal support for the technology, arguing that it would needlessly extend the life of fossil fuels and delay the deployment of renewables. They have the upper hand. The House Ways & Means Committee failed to boost the tax credit as part of the big reconciliation bill it released earlier this month that carries the administration’s climate package.
That may change if the bill reaches the Senate. Manchin is a big supporter of carbon capture.
A Lack of Transparency
Americans have had only a limited view of the consequential battle over Biden’s clean energy plan in Congress–which affects almost everyone who depends on electricity, and their pocketbooks. So far consumers have paid an average of 2.6 percent more for green power.
Democrats are pushing their climate plan through the budget reconciliation process because it requires only 50 votes for passage in a divided Senate and avoids a Republican filibuster. It’s also an expediated process that limits debate on the floor of Congress and public transparency. Without congressional hearings, consumers haven’t had the benefit of testimony from experts who can point out the merits and flaws of Biden’s plan.
That’s a big departure from the sunshine that typically illuminates such big proposals. The last time Congress considered a major climate measure, the Waxman-Markey bill, experts testified in high-profile public hearings in the House that were covered by the national media. The Affordable Care Act featured hundreds of hours of public hearings.
“With something as important as energy policy that could have a big impact on the national economy, it should be fully debatable and fully amendable,” says Bill Hoagland, a former staff director of the Senate Budget Committee who worked on 17 of 21 previous reconciliation laws. “It’s not something that should be done in a partisan manner through reconciliation.”
Hoagland says both parties have “abused” that procedure to create new laws after it was set up in the 1970s to bring fiscal accountability to existing laws. Biden’s climate plan marks the first attempt to transform a major industry through reconciliation. Hoagland, now a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, says Senate staffers and advocates called him to get his advice.
“I told them not to use the reconciliation process for energy policy,” he says. “They said, ‘Thank you very much. But this is the only tool we have to allow us to get it through and we are not going to waste any more time.’”
The Truthiness of Computer Models
Computer models–a bête noire of climate skeptics–live on in the debate over the clean energy transformation, providing ammunition for each side.
The dispute boils down to the reliability of the electrical grid. If intermittent wind and solar power quickly dethrone natural gas as the dominant source of energy, as the Biden administration envisions, will the grid become even more prone to blackouts?
No one really knows for sure. Enter computer models.
University of California-Berkeley experts earlier this year asked their model the big question: Will the grid be reliable if 80 percent of its power comes from clean sources such as wind and solar farms and nuclear plants by 2030? The model, which analyzed seven years of weather and energy use data, answered with a resounding yes. In fact, gas use could be cut in half, supplying the remaining 20 percent, without a glitch.
“The expansion of natural gas should come to a halt if the Biden policy is passed,” says Mike O’Boyle, who collaborated on the study as director of electricity policy at Energy Innovation. “I’m sure some utilities will make the case that they need it for reliability. So it will be up to the regulators to hold their feet to the fire and make sure that the gas plant is the most economic option.”
But models by Energy and Environmental Economics, a consulting group, draw the opposite conclusion. A 2020 study, which covered 40 years of weather data, looked at ways to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 in New England. It found that natural gas capacity would need to grow by about one-third from today’s level.
Even a large deployment of wind and solar farms won’t be able to meet peak demand – which is expected to grow in coming decades – when the wind and sun are down, says Arne Olson, a senior partner at the consulting firm and co-author of the study. That means additional gas power needs to be available, particularly in regions where coal plants are closing, until the day arrives that cleaner fuels like hydrogen can carry the load, he says.
With the best computer models providing conflicting answers, Olson says having plenty of natural gas on hand to shore up the grid makes sense: “Once we get closer to the other side of the energy transition, we will learn how the systems are going to perform and we can shut down some gas plants if we don’t need them anymore. But in the meantime, people want to make sure that they have reliable power.”
Tina Smith Takes the Stage
If the administration and Manchin come together on a clean energy plan, Tina Smith will be a big reason why.
Tina Smith, a self-described Democratic pragmatist from Minnesota. (Glen Stubbe/AP Photo/The Star Tribune)
Since 2019, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, a self-described pragmatist, has focused on crafting a practical policy that utilities could support. Biden’s team took some ideas from Smith’s playbook but set far more ambitious goals: 80 percent carbon-free electricity by 2030.
Even supporters consider the Biden plan “aspirational.” It’s meant to line up with the greenhouse gas reduction targets of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which recently concluded that the warming of the planet has already caused “irreversible” effects such as rising sea levels.
Some Republicans and moderate Democrats are backing a much slower transition by 2050 that wouldn’t push gas power aside. The influential utility trade group Edison Electric Institute and labor unions, including the United Mine Workers – a backer of Manchin – have rallied behind the bipartisan bill.
Smith, who was first elected in 2018, now finds herself at center stage in negotiations with Manchin. They are trying to find a middle ground, which may be somewhere between 2030 and 2050.
There are more knobs to turn in the negotiations. The administration wants to compel utilities to adopt any form of clean power by giving them a federal grant if they hit an annual growth target of about 3 percent to 4 percent. They will also pay penalties for missing it. (The spending and revenue scheme was also devised to try to make the energy plan eligible for the budget reconciliation process.)
But gas power isn’t included in the proposal, putting it at an economic disadvantage compared to renewables. Industry and utility groups object and are lobbying for gas to receive a partial grant since it’s cleaner than coal.
Adding to the uncertainty over a climate policy in Congress, Democratic leaders in the Senate recently put a politically controversial carbon tax back on the table. They see it as a way to reduce emissions and raise revenue to help pay for the social spending package.
“I’m always interested in figuring out how we can make adjustments to solve problems that people see, and frankly, sometimes that makes a bill better,” Smith told RealClearInvestigations. “There are a lot of issues in this. But I think we are going to get there.”
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Education Secretary Miguel Cardona was reprimanded on Twitter for not following the science when he tried to push the Biden administration’s policy of forcing students to wear masks in school.
Cardona seized upon a study published on the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website as evidence that wearing masks in school reduced transmission of the coronavirus.
“A Wisconsin study found that schools that required masking had a 37% lower incidence of COVID-19 than the surrounding community,” he wrote in a Twitter post last week.
A Wisconsin study found that schools that required masking had a 37% lower incidence of COVID-19 than the surrounding community. https://t.co/hGN5eX3Bau
The 2020 study, which examined 17 Wisconsin schools over three months last fall, found that in those schools in which masking, social distancing and other steps were taken to minimize the spread of the virus, the percentage of positive coronavirus cases was in fact lower than the community at large.
But Tracy Heeg, an author of the study, objected to it being misrepresented for political purposes.
Although the study showed there was apparently high mask-wearing and low incidence of virus transmission, there was nothing to show one caused the other.
Further, Heeg noted, one of the basics of the scientific method was lacking.
Secretary Cardona, I was the senior author of this study. Our study is not able to give any information about the role masks played in the observed low in-school transmission rates. We had no control group so don’t know if the rate would have been different without masks.
“Secretary Cardona, I was the senior author of this study. Our study is not able to give any information about the role masks played in the observed low in-school transmission rates. We had no control group so don’t know if the rate would have been different without masks,” she tweeted.
That led some to note that the administration that promised to follow the science might have wandered afield.
Secretary Cardona, I was the senior author of this study. Our study is not able to give any information about the role masks played in the observed low in-school transmission rates. We had no control group so don’t know if the rate would have been different without masks.
In fact, the published study said there were seven limitations on its result, which relied on surveys for its data.
For instance, the study noted that the level at which students actually wore masks might not have been all it was cracked up to be.
“First, mask use was assessed using a survey that was not validated, dependent on voluntary teacher response and subject to recall and social desirability biases,” the study reported.
“The actual mask-wearing rate might have been different because only approximately one half of teachers participated in the study. Teachers with lower masking compliance in their cohort might have been less likely to complete the survey, which limits the reliability of this measure,” the student said.
The study also noted that there was no independent verification of whether teachers and other staff actually wore masks as much as they said they did.
“Third, it was not possible to determine the specific roles that mask-wearing and other disease mitigation strategies played in the low rate of disease spread, and information on school ventilation systems was not obtained,” the study said.
@SecCardona claims WI study proves masks in schools work. Physician author of study says study proves no such thing.
Education Secretary Touts Mask Study—Gets Rebuked by Senior Author of the Study – Foundation for Economic Education https://t.co/RWBQ1Cn383
The study’s purpose, as explained on the CDC site, was to determine – at a time when many schools were closed – whether schools could reopen without spreading the virus, and not whether masks were essential.
In a city aflame with crime, firefighters will get new protection against being singed with the violence Democrats have been unable to control.
Firefighters in Portland, Oregon, will soon have the option of wearing bulletproof vests when responding to calls, according to Oregon Live.
The decision reflects a “changing landscape” in which firefighters often brave a gauntlet of hostility when they respond to a call, Portland Fire & Rescue spokesman Terry Foster said.
“First responders, as they go in, we can become targets,” said Alan Ferschweiler, president of the Portland Firefighters Association, according to KGW-TV.
The city will order 200 vests and is working out the rules governing when they are to be worn in addition to the heavy load of gear firefighters already wear, which includes their turnout gear, boots, a helmet, an air tank and other items.
Isaac McLennan, vice president of the Portland Fire Fighters’ Association, noted a 2018 case in which a man shot at first responders after allegedly setting a building on fire as a way to ambush them.
Portland has suffered more than 870 shootings to date with 283 people injured and 46 others killed, Democrat Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler said Sept. 15, according to KGW-TV.
Through all of 2020, there were 891 shootings with 57 homicides, which was the highest number of killings since 1994. Portland has had 62 homicides so far in 2021.
Wheeler said he is trying to get a handle on the violence, but he could not say when that might happen.
“The hard part is actually deploying the strategies and the resources to make it happen and that’s where I’m focusing my attention and my energy,” he said.
The bottom line for first responders is that the risks have risen.
“Even if you look at the totality of the city, it’s definitely become a less safe place to work for their firefighters,” Ferschweiler told KGW-TV.
After he allegedly refused to give black students special treatment at the request of a “non-black” student amid protests over the George Floyd death last year, University of California-Los Angeles professor Gordon Klein was essentially shuffled off to the back room by his school.
He was suspended and the university tried to terminate him, the accounting and finance professor said. That didn’t work, but by the time the ordeal was over, he’d lost most of his income, which came from his consultancy. UCLA had all but called him a racist in public statements.
Now, Klein, who started teaching at UCLA in 1981, according to a school biography, is suing the University of California system.
In a piece written for former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss’ Substack newsletter and published Friday, Klein said he had been singled out because “I refused to discriminate against my students.”
The dust-up began after a June 2, 2020, email from a student who said black students should be graded with more “leniency” due to the trauma caused by the death of Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. Klein did not identify the race of the student, but described him as “non-black.”
“The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community,” the student reportedly wrote. “As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.”
The student then suggested that the final be counted as a “no-harm” test for black students, meaning it only counted if it helped their grades.
Klein said the email “struck me as deeply patronizing and offensive to the same black students [the writer] claimed to care so much about.”
“Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black half-Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half?” he wrote back.
“Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they are probably especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might possibly be even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not.”
Once this email was publicized, a petition for Klein to be fired garnered almost 20,000 signatures in a period of days. The school suspended him just three days after the email, with the dean of his school saying that it was “deeply disturbing to learn of this email, which we are investigating. We apologize to the students who received it and to all those who have been as upset and offended by it as we are ourselves.”
“This implied I didn’t believe in equality for all — when that was exactly what I believed and continue to believe,” Klein wrote.
The professor also received death threats, he said, such as one he said came June 11, 2020 that read:
“You are a typical bigoted, prejudiced and racist dirty, filthy, crooked, arrogant Jew k**e mother f***er! Too bad Hitler and the Nazis are not around to give you a much needed Zyklon B shower.”
And yet, Klein wrote that UCLA’s threat manager didn’t reach out to him until 10 days after this incident.
Within three weeks, after an attempt to fire Klein failed, he was reinstated, Klein wrote. However, the money from his consultancy dried up after he was pilloried in public, costing him “the lion’s share of my annual income,” he said. That’s part of the reason why he’s filing suit.
“No employee should ever cower in fear of his employer’s power to silence legitimate points of view, and no society should tolerate government-sponsored autocrats violating constitutional mandates,” he wrote.
“As the Supreme Court ruled in a 1967 case in which a university professor refused to sign an oath stating he was not a communist, professors should never be coerced into an unthinking timidity. ‘Academic freedom,’ Justice William Brennan wrote, ‘is of transcendent value to all of us.’”
In an interview with the Daily Caller, also published Friday, Klein said that at UCLA, “[professors] are becoming more like robots … They avoid anything that may be controversial or colorful or humorous … Anyone who goes anywhere near a controversial topic runs the risk of being cancelled, being fired, being suspended.”
He also said the dean of students for UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, Antonio Bernardo, set the tone for the school with staff emails and public memos on racial issues that name-checked, among others, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors on the issue of defunding the police and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“The dean seems to believe he is a racial justice crusader as opposed to someone in charge of giving people an objective and elite education,” he added. “The purpose first and foremost of a dean is to run a fine educational institution and maintain its elite status. In that regard, by any subjective or objective measure, he has horrifically failed.”
As has the University of California system. Klein’s case is emblematic of how far academia has degenerated, where “academic freedom” only means the freedom to repeat certain leftist outlooks.
If you find yourself outside of that, you’ll end up reaping a whirlwind of hate the way Gordon Klein did — and that’s not even taking into account the career consequences. Given the enormity of the failure, one hopes injunctive relief is in the cards.
One of the underpinnings of America’s justice system is being threatened by uneven tactics used by the Justice Department, according to a federal judge.
U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, said Friday that a double standard is being applied to those who are facing rioting charges in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion.
He said authorities were far more lenient in charging those connected with riots that took place after the death of George Floyd, according to CNN.
“The U.S. Attorney’s Office would have more credibility if it was even-handed in its concern about riots and mobs in the city,” McFadden said at a sentencing hearing for one of the Jan. 6 rioters, the network reported.
McFadden noted that Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser issued a scathing letter last summer to federal officials over their refusal to prosecute cases from the riots.
“[S]ince May 30, the Metropolitan Police Department has submitted 63 affidavits in support of arrest and search warrants directly related to criminal activities conducted under the guise of First Amendment assemblies,” Bowser wrote in the August letter, according to WUSA-TV.
“Twenty-eight of these warrants have been declined, while another 24 are will [sic] pending review by your office. This mirrors a disturbing pattern we have also identified in homicide cases, where our records reveal 18 warrants that are currently pending with your office awaiting action,” she wrote.
During Friday’s sentencing, McFadden scolded defendant Danielle Doyle, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for unlawfully protesting at the Capitol.
“You were acting like those looters and rioters who attacked our city last year,” McFadden said, likening the Capitol incursion to the violent Floyd protests.
“You participated in a shameful event, a national embarrassment that, like last year’s riots, made us feel less safe and less confident that our country could be governed by democratic values and not mob rule,” he said, according to CNN.
Prosecutors wanted Doyle to be sentenced to two months of house arrest. McFadden instead fined her $3,000, with an additional $500 to cover damages to the Capitol.
Doyle entered the Capitol through a broken window and spent 24 minutes inside the building, according to The Associated Press.
She said she never intended to be part of what the protest morphed into.
“I love this country,” she said, according to the AP. “So many people came here to represent things that were important to us but in the blink of an eye, all of those things were overshadowed. For that, I’m sorry, because it overshadowed the things that were good.”
Some have noted that many of those charged for the events of Jan. 6 did not commit serious crimes.
“Many of those charged are people who pushed their way through, were taking selfies and were not causing damage,” sentencing consultant Tess Lopez told The Washington Post in May.
“Defense attorneys are likely to make compelling arguments that a prison sentence isn’t warranted.”
It is curious, and perhaps not coincidental, that the searchers-out and punishers of so-called hate speech have not yet turned their attention to expressions of class hatred.
It is curious because class hatred and its associated policy, economic egalitarianism, were probably responsible for as many deaths in the twentieth century as racism, if not more.
I don’t want to make a precise calculation as to which was worse, class hatred or racism because I recall what Doctor Johnson replied when asked who was the better poet, Derrick or Smart. “Sir,” he said, “there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.”
I do not expect any time soon that the inquisitors of hate speech will call for class warriors to be banned from expressing themselves in the social media or anywhere else. Some hatreds, then, are deemed respectable, even praiseworthy, and expression of them, even to the point of incitement, a manifestation of a good or pure heart.
The deputy leader of Britain’s left-leaning Labour Party, Angela Rayner, recently told a meeting, with regard to the governing Conservative Party, “We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile … banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian … piece of scum,” later adding that she had held herself back a little.
We cannot get worse? I have no great regard for the antics of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who seems to me unprincipled, inconstant, boastful, vainglorious, and incompetent, but to say that we cannot get worse seems to me to demonstrate a pitiful ignorance of history that is rather worrying in someone who might one day hold high office.
Were not Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot (to name only a few) just a little worse than Johnson? Even as an emotive insult, however, Rayner’s words seem to me to indicate not merely a lack of restraint but also a worrying lack of command of the English language: for example, scum does not come in pieces, although it does, almost by definition, rise to the top.
However, literary criticism is not my main concern here.
It is the depth of hatred and resentment expressed in Rayner’s words that worries me, and the evident absence of hesitation in giving vent to them.
Contrary to the hydrostatic view of emotions such as hatred, they tend with venting to increase rather than to decrease. The view that if an emotion is not expressed openly it will do incalculable damage to a person is one of the “gifts” of psychoanalysis to the world.
As a prisoner who had just murdered his girlfriend once put it to me, “I had to kill her, doctor, or I don’t know what I would have done.” Suffered some frustration, perhaps.
Rayner was criticized for what she had said, but she defended herself by claiming that this was her habitual manner of speaking: as if she could not conceive that she might do wrong, as if her only criterion of rightness was what she herself had done.
Although what she said was, in my opinion, horrible, I do not think that she should be punished for having said it or prevented legally from ever saying anything similar again. Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, not gentility or decency or even intelligence.
Her words were imbued with infinitely more hatred than those of, say, someone who merely points out that a transgender woman is not a real woman, for the latter, far from being an expression of hatred, is perfectly compatible with sympathy for such a person.
Indeed, in a sense it is a prerequisite for such sympathy, insofar as it recognises the inevitable psychological discomfort of anyone in such a position.
But it is he or she who draws attention to an evident truth, rather than someone whose words seethe with insult and crude insensate loathing, who is held to be guilty of hate-speech—because hatred in the name of equality is regarded as generous, despite its record of mass murder rivalled only by racism.
Those who hate in the name of equality believe themselves, and are frequently believed to be, virtuous because they supposedly value justice.
But two things need to be pointed out. First, if by equality is meant identity or even similarity of outcome, rather than equality before the law, then there could be no greater injustice than equality, at least if justice is the distribution of reward according to desert.
Naturally, desert is a complex and difficult concept, but real egalitarians wish to eliminate it completely in their desire that all should have prizes, and the same prizes at that. However, if reward is disconnected entirely from desert, much, most or all meaning in life is eviscerated, for the reward will be the same whatever you do. Why, then, even try?
Second, however, is the fact that while justice is desirable, it is not the only thing that is desirable, and sometimes must yield place to considerations such as charity, kindness and humanity.
An utter wastrel may well deserve to starve, considered in the abstract, because of his constant and repeated feckless behaviour, but we should not let him starve because our humanity will not allow it. As Hamlet puts it, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?”
Thus, the fact that inequality is not in itself unjust does not dispose altogether of the question of how equal in outcome a society should be, even leaving aside the question of the loading of the dice in some people’s favour and against others, and how far the dice may in practice be loaded fairly.
A society is certainly conceivable in which only a tiny proportion of the population deserved by their efforts to enjoy the better things in life, but we should not care to live in such a society, however just it was. But the problem with modern redistributionism is that it is founded much more upon hatred of the rich or fortunate than it is upon love of the poor or unfortunate.
Hatred is an incomparably stronger political emotion than love. In the worldview of redistributionists such as Angela Rayner, it is more blessed to take than to give, which is why taxation is for them an end in itself, irrespective of its effect upon the economy and society as a whole.
It also has the great advantage, from their point of view, of conferring great power on those who levy it, namely themselves. All power corrupts, but the desire for power corrupts even before it is ever achieved.
From covering displaced refugees around the globe to the obstacles faced by protesters seeking change in America, freelance photojournalist Maranie Staab believes her camera can be a force for truth and social justice. The work of a “conflict photographer” often requires physical courage in places she has reported from, such as Africa and the Middle East. It certainly did so on Aug. 22, while Staab was covering demonstrations in Portland, Ore.
Members of the left-wing group antifa called her a “slut” and then demanded that journalists assembled to cover the protests “get the f— out.” Staab, a 2020 reporting fellow for the liberal Pulitzer Center, tried to calm the situation. She was assaulted. She told the Willamette Week that they grabbed her phone and smashed it. Then they threw her to the pavement and sprayed her with mace. The ugly assault on Staab (below) was filmed and distributed quickly online, resulting in widespread condemnation. “If we’re on a public street and a newsworthy event is occurring, you’re not going to tell me what I can and cannot film,” Staab told the weekly newspaper.
VIDEO THREAD (content warning – violence) Today Proud Boys and other right-wing groups fought black-bloc-clad counter-protesters Sunday afternoon outside their “Summer of Love” rally in Portland, Oregon.
For the small band of reporters willing cover the violent left-wing radicals in antifa, such attacks are distressingly common. Protest mayhem has been in the news since the murder of George Floyd last summer brought many Black Lives Matter and antifa activists out on the streets. But the anti-media animus of antifa—which, unlike BLM, focuses on deliberately attacking reporters—has been an issue for years.
“We are deeply concerned by the increase in attacks on journalists working in the United States,” the Committee to Protect Journalists tells RealClearInvestigations. “Since 2017, the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker has documented 517 journalists attacked during protests, 400 of those in 2020 alone. Attacking reporters who are covering matters of public interest is never okay.”
Despite the alarming increase in such attacks, reporters who cover antifa express frustration that the condemnation of the attack on Staab was an aberration. More often than not, antifa’s attacks on the press have gone ignored, with the police typically standing back in the current climate of hostility toward law enforcement.
The journalists who have done significant reporting on the loose-knit group are of divergent backgrounds and motivations, but tend to have one thing in common—they represent a new breed of journalist without the backing of traditional corporate media outlets. Instead, they rely on social media to break news. Some of their work has been criticized by other journalists who claim they blur the line between professional reporting and activism.
Independent journalist Andy Ngo during an interview with The Epoch Times in February 2021. (The Epoch Times)
No reporter is better known for covering antifa than Andy Ngo, author of the best-selling book “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.” Ngo, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, first started reporting on protest violence for the Portland State Vanguard, Portland State University’s student newspaper, in 2016. He was fired from his job at the paper the next year after he was accused of sensationalizing a clip of a Muslim student at a university event saying that “being an infidel is not allowed” in Muslim countries. This ended Ngo’s traditional journalism career, but the story blew up online and was picked up by conservative media nationally.
With left-wing violence largely ignored by legacy news organizations, Ngo quickly found there was a market for coverage of Portland’s growing problem with street violence—notably by antifa, a largely decentralized, avowedly anti-fascist and anti-racist political movement without an identifiable leader or spokesperson that is concentrated in the Pacific Northwest.
Soon Ngo was in the streets working as a freelance reporter while his Twitter feed became a nationally known clearinghouse for information related to antifa—everything from videos of violence and vandalism to the ensuing mugshots and charging documents. Ngo currently works as editor-at-large for a right-leaning web outlet, The Post Millennial. However, his journalism is still largely defined by his outsized social media presence, to say nothing of his reputation for angering antifa.
In June of 2019, Ngo was jumped by a crowd of antifa protesters while reporting on a demonstration in the city. They kicked him in the groin, repeatedly punched him in the head while wearing tactical gloves with fiberglass-reinforced knuckles, and then pelted him with hard objects. Ngo ended up in the hospital with a brain hemorrhage.
Unidentified Rose City Antifa members beat up Andy Ngo, a Portland-based journalist, in Portland, Oregon on June 29, 2019. (Moriah Ratner/Getty Images)Andy Ngo, a Portland-based journalist, is seen covered in unknown substance after unidentified Rose City Antifa members attacked him in Portland, Ore., on June 29, 2019. (Moriah Ratner/Getty Images)
Ngo says he has been attacked four times and no longer lives in Portland out of concern for his safety, but antifa regularly show up and make menacing appearances at his aging mother’s house in the city. Graffiti has appeared in Portland saying, “Kill Andy Ngo” and “Andy Ngo 187”—187 being a police code to denote a murder. “It’s just been this constant incitement to kill me,” he says. “That’s why I left at the end of last year,” Ngo said. When he returned to Portland this past May, he said, he was chased down a street and beaten and bloodied. He narrowly escaped when he took refuge in a hotel, with the antifa mob surrounding the lobby doors and demanding that he come outside.
Although the attacks have generated sporadic news coverage, Ngo and other journalists complain that media organizations have not done enough to defend them. Following the attack on Maranie Staab, the Oregon chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists issued a statement noting that “assaulting journalists runs counter to the ideals of our democracy” before adding, “This isn’t the first time SPJ Oregon has had to issue a statement like this.” Ngo counters that the organization hasn’t once spoken out about the attacks on him—even though those brutal attacks have garnered national media attention from conservative outlets.
RCI could find only one other statement from the society’s Oregon’s chapter condemning an attack by left-wing protesters, one earlier this year involving Justin Yau, a journalist working for Willamette Week. The organization did not respond to RCI’s request for other examples of its condemnation of attacks on other reporters or for comment on this article. SPJ’s national president, Rebecca Aguilar, said in an email Wednesday that she would need more time to issue a “proper response,” acknowledging “a very dangerous situation for journalists seeking the truth.” (Reporters Without Borders, the international organization, also did not respond to a request for comment on antifa attacks on reporters.)
Ngo isn’t alone in thinking that these attacks on the press are being downplayed. So does Nancy Rommelmann, who as a journalist has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and has been an author for decades. Her well-received 2018 book, “To the Bridge: A True Story of Motherhood and Murder,” detailed an infamous case of infanticide in Portland. As a longtime area resident who watched her husband’s small business suffer from antifa’s violence, she felt compelled to get to the bottom of what was happening. Working as a freelancer, she filed several reports on antifa and street violence in Portland for the libertarian magazine Reason.
She was attacked in the streets, she says, and threatened online, with her photo publicly posted. Rommelmann believes the traditional media are ignoring the street violence for political reasons—they don’t want antifa’s extremism to be seen as discrediting to liberal causes. “I can tell you that 100% of the people that have attacked and continue to attack me, they’re all on the left—all of them. And I consider myself a liberal,” Rommelmann said.
To the extent that traditional news media are forced to cover antifa, Rommelmann says, they do so only when its adherents clash with right-wing protesters, and draw equivalencies with right-wing violence regardless of whether comparisons are warranted. After the assault on Staab last month, Rommelmann began venting on Twitter about why the media refused to acknowledge that “black bloc protesters [those wearing black ski masks and other garments to obscure their identities] in Portland are the MAIN source of violence. Proud Boys and right-wing groups rolled through [just] four times in 2020. Then who tf was committing the violence every night?” She then linked to video footage she took of a man in downtown Portland trying to smash a window with a fire extinguisher. “I was reminded, again, of a Portland editor telling someone my reporting ‘infers without actual evidence,’” she tweeted. “Like, what, my eyeballs were rolled in flour? I didn’t have my phone stolen? We are supposed to believe the guy who says I staged this video in a studio?”
Last night I was reminded, again, of a Portland editor telling someone my reporting “infers without actual evidence.” Like, what, my eyeballs were rolled in flour? I didn’t have my phone stolen? We are supposed to believe the guy who says I staged this video in a studio? Wtff? pic.twitter.com/CvQV4elreD
There’s no question that attacks on journalists are common from angry Americans on the right. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker notes a number of recent violent episodes at school board meetings and anti-COVID restriction protests. But a number of the right-wing groups that clash with antifa don’t necessarily have hostile relationships with the media. Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer, a right-wing group active in Portland known for clashing with antifa, has shown a willingness to be profiled and talk to reporters. The difference with antifa is that it espouses an explicit ideology that compels its adherents to attack the press.
In “The Antifa Handbook,” radical Rutgers University lecturer Mark Bray observes that First Amendment beliefs are held only by “a minority of today’s anti-fascists in the United States.” Bray writes that they distrust the press because, “instead of privileging allegedly ‘neutral’ universal rights, anti-fascists prioritize the political project of destroying fascism and protecting the vulnerable regardless of whether their actions are considered violations of the free speech of fascists or not.”
Rommelmann reports that “‘YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM’ and its occasional variation, ‘PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!’” are rallying cries at protests where antifa is present. And at the same time some antifa protesters assault independent journalists and smash their cameras, she says, radical activists run around protests with PRESS emblazoned on their clothing as a putative “Independent Press Corps” in league with antifa. The goal is to shut down impartial reporters covering events so that the only photos and video footage released on social media are hand-selected by antifa to make police look bad and for other propaganda purposes. “It’s a revolution via the cellphone video they allow you to see,” Rommelmann said.
Rommelmann says this strategy of limiting what people see appeared to work when antifa and allied leftist groups laid siege to the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in downtown Portland for a month last summer.
“They would then disseminate [their own recordings] to news organizations around the country and around the world and on their own Instagrams. And they would form a narrative and the narrative was, all from the Antifa black bloc saying, the protesters are beleaguered. Were the feds inside shooting things out at the protesters? Hell, yeah. Mostly hours after the protesters had been shooting stuff at them, but that was not the story that was getting disseminated,” Rommelmann says. “The story that was getting disseminated was, ‘People on the right bad, people on the left good.’ Well, when I would try to bring some balance to this, I had my phone stolen. I was called a fascist and that continues to this day, because of the narrative that’s seeped out in the mainstream media.”
Making matters worse, the media readily adopted the simplistic and inaccurate framing of protest violence because it fed into national political narratives. “There seemed to be this sense, amid the massive pro-Trump/anti-Trump environment of last year’s protests, that if you said one eenie-weenie bad thing about the violence, it meant you were, at best, anti-protest movement, and at worst a racist,” Rommelmann says. “This caused the cognitive dissonance we saw on both ‘sides’: Fox News shouting, ‘SAVAGES COMING TO YOUR TOWN!!!’ and the CNN anchor in Kenosha standing in front of an absolute conflagration and saying, ‘It’s really mostly peaceful.’”
More broadly, many news outlets downplayed the left-wing violence associated with the broader protest movement that swept the country in the wake of the murder of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer. According to data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project—an independent organization that receives funding from the State Department, German Foreign Office, and University of Texas—during the peak months of the protests last summer, there were 11,541 “civil-society incidents.” Of those events, 1,101 devolved into some form of violence or rioting, and 933 of the violent incidents directly involved events affiliated with Black Lives Matter.
The organization’s data is pulled from media reports, so this figure is likely understating the problem. Nevertheless, many news outlets reported on the findings as if they absolved BLM and the left of violence. “About 93% of racial justice protests in the U.S. since the death of George Floyd have been peaceful and nondestructive, according to a new report,” reported CNN. “The findings, released Thursday, contradict assumptions and claims by some that protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement are spawning violence and destruction of property.”
Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, a senior adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and one of the architects of the “surge” in Iraq, said those stats were more in line with the levels of violence seen in war zones, writing that:
[T]he argument that the protests have been ‘largely peaceful’ may be true, but it is also irrelevant. Only a tiny minority – 2 to 5 percent – of individuals in insurgencies, civil wars, or criminal gangs actually commit violence. In Iraq during the ‘Surge,’ my team started from the assumption that 20 percent of insurgents would prove so irreconcilably violent that they would never negotiate and must therefore be killed or captured. We were off by an order of magnitude – the true number was not 20, but 2 percent.
Even as outlets including the Guardian and the Washington Post published articles dismissing left-wing violence — including a Post fact-check piece last summer declaring, “Who caused the violence at protests? It wasn’t antifa”—others attacked the journalists trying to cover the protests.
In May, the left-wing publication The Intercept published a lengthy feature headlined “Meet the Riot Squad: Right-Wing Reporters Whose Viral Videos Are Used to Smear BLM,” which identified a “tight-knit group of eight young journalists” who travel around the country and report on street violence. The article highlighted instances where reporters critical of left-wing protesters shared video of street violence that appeared to be either selectively edited or missing important context. This is bad journalism for sure, but it’s also a problem endemic to social media. All journalists covering breaking news—not just those dedicated to covering antifa—have been incentivized to rush to get viral clips online or share clips they’ve been given without knowing the context, and examples of it are widespread.
The article was quickly denounced by a founder of The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, who resigned from the website during the 2020 presidential campaign citing censorship of his work and “ideological homogeneity.” “This is what so much ‘journalism’ is now,” Greenwald tweeted. “They believe that the real menaces are individuals who have politics or ideology different than their liberal orthodoxies. So these reporters are now like criminals to them because they report for right-wing sites, thus this targeting.”
Robert Mackey, one of the Intercept article’s co-authors, tweeted in response: “These journalists are public figures, already familiar faces on the most-watched prime time shows on the most-watched television news network in America; what is overlooked is how their reporting and video is used by Fox to distort the real scope of violence at BLM protests. … There have been assaults on some conservative video journalists by left-wing protesters who view them as propagandists, attacks I reported and showed in the video and denounced forcefully in my article. The claim that I intended to promote more attacks is false and repulsive.”
Facing similar criticism from the left, Andy Ngo has been dogged by accusations that he should not be treated as a legitimate journalist because critics accuse him of having reported misleading information and not reporting on antifa objectively. An article in the Columbia Journalism Review referred to him as a “discredited provocateur.” Ngo does much of his reporting on Twitter and social media, in part due to a lack of interest in antifa from the broader media. Leftists on Twitter complained that the social media platform labeled him a journalist on the site’s curated newsfeed, so in response Twitter relabeled him an “author.”
Twitter’s move prompted an editorial in the New York Post defending Ngo’s reporting. “How is he not a journalist? Indeed, that he’s doing the work that establishment outlets skip out on makes him more of a journo than the members of the press who turn a blind eye to Antifa’s violence,” the paper wrote.
Ngo’s reporting has always made it clear that he’s critical of antifa. Moreover, if making the occasional error or having a point of view is disqualifying for a journalist, the New York Times and Washington Post — and the vast majority of reporters and editors in the country — would have their press credentials revoked. The criticism of Ngo is particularly galling when one considers that his main point of view is that “political violence is wrong.” And while Ngo’s nontraditional, social-media-heavy approach to reporting might be disdained by traditional media outlets, he has distinguished himself by authoring a best-selling book on antifa and having a track record of breaking several major stories.
Ngo, however, remains undeterred. In June, when a reporter from the left-leaning sports site Deadspin was among those demanding Twitter stop calling Ngo a journalist, he responded. “My detractors do this because they want to take away the one thing that all decent people agree on: press freedom is sacred,” Ngo wrote. “Who the far-left defines as ‘press’ are those who write what they approve of. Anyone else is a ‘provocateur’ deserving of intimidation and violence.”
The FBI’s latest annual report on hate crimes seemed to deliver more grim news about race relations in America, announcing a nearly 40% rise in anti-black hate crimes in 2020. Major news outlets trumpeted the headline-grabbing statistic, noting that it coincided with a rise in “white nationalism” and came amid a surge in anti-black “hostility” caused by summer 2020 protests. Attorney General Merrick Garland quickly promised “a comprehensive response” by the Department of Justice.
But a closer look at the data reveals a more complicated picture. Some of the biggest increases in anti-black hate crimes occurred in Democratic Party strongholds yet, perhaps surprisingly, almost no increases were reported in major cities riven by the racially tinged protests and riots after George Floyd’s murder. It’s no surprise, then, that experts caution against using these numbers to claim an epidemic of anti-black crime–both because of the FBI data’s limitations, as well as the small absolute and relative size of the reported increase.
The recent FBI dataset tallies reported hate crimes, not the number proven in court. It’s unknown whether the “true” number of hate crimes committed in 2020 is higher or lower than the FBI’s reported total. On one hand, not all crimes are reported to police, which could lead to undercounting. On the other, it’s likely that some portion of reported hate crimes would not withstand legal scrutiny, meaning the FBI’s figures might be inflated. The high evidentiary threshold required to prove a hate crime in court is illustrated by the fact that Derek Chauvin–the white cop cast as a racist convicted of murdering George Floyd last year–was not charged with a hate crime.
Whether the FBI’s data over or understates the true number of hate crimes, the total number of reported anti-black hate crimes is relatively small. In 2020, the FBI recorded a total of 7,759 hate incidents—which the FBI defines as “one or more offenses committed by the same offender, or group of offenders acting in concert, at the same time and place”—in a country of 330 million people. Assailants with anti-black biases allegedly initiated 2,755 such incidents, targeting some 3,769 victims. This was the highest number of anti-black incidents recorded by the FBI since 2008, but at that time there were 13,690 law enforcement agencies submitting hate crime data, versus the 15,136 agencies reporting such data last year, reflecting the imprecise nature of hate crime statistics.
What was the nature of these reported crimes? Most of the anti-black offenses recorded by the FBI in 2020 were acts of intimidation and vandalism; roughly 1,200 (approximately 30%) involved violence. One bias-motivated crime is too many, of course, but the number of reported black hate-crime victims pales in comparison to the reported black victims of other crimes.
For example, there were over 189,000 reported black victims of aggravated assault in 2020—more than 50 times the number of victims in all anti-black incidents combined. Black homicide victims dwarfed the total number of victims of all anti-black incidents in 2020. According to the FBI’s Expanded Homicide Data, there were more than 9,900 black homicide victims recorded by the FBI in 2020. Of the more than 3,700 black victims in single offender/single victim homicide cases, over 85 percent of the offenders were black. Among all anti-black offenses reported nationally in 2020, the FBI recorded a total of five murders and nonnegligent manslaughters—less than 1/10th of 1% of the total homicides committed against African Americans.
While the absolute increase is relatively small, there’s no doubt that reported anti-black hate incidents rose significantly in 2020. A majority of states (37) reported year-over-year increases to the FBI. However, only 14 of these states—including Ohio, which submitted its figures after the FBI released its report—saw increases of more than 20 cases.
Further, state data available on the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer site reveals that just six states—California, Ohio, Texas, Oregon, Indiana, and Colorado—were responsible for more than half of the national increase between 2019 and 2020.
Charles Lehman, a fellow at Manhattan Institute and an expert on policing and public safety, told RealClearInvestigations that one reason the number of reported anti-black hate crimes varies significantly across states is that state and local police departments differ in how they classify criminal incidents. In other words, some states are more willing than others to label certain criminal incidents as hate crimes. State laws, too, vary with respect to hate crimes, which can affect the types of incidents that are ultimately reported as such. Lehman pointed to the disparity between Alabama and Arizona as an illustrative example, noting that Alabama has more than twice as many black residents as Arizona but recorded only seven anti-black hate incidents in 2020 compared with Arizona’s 124.
City-level data complicates the story further. Several solidly blue cities that figured prominently in the summer’s protests—Minneapolis, Portland, New York, Kenosha, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Chicago—did not record meaningful increases in anti-black hate crimes between 2019 and 2020. Minneapolis recorded nine anti-black hate incidents in 2020 after failing to report in 2019. Portland and New York City each had two additional reported anti-black hate incidents between 2019 and 2020; Seattle’s total fell from 84 in 2019 to 52 in 2020. Chicago had five total reported incidents in 2020, down from seven in 2019. Kenosha and Atlanta recorded zero incidents in both 2019 and 2020.
Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, cautioned that municipal hate crime data can be imperfect.
“The problem is, when you get to a place like Kenosha, or some other places, they have no levels of reporting. During these kinds of protests, when 911 systems are overwhelmed, you may not get all those [hate crime] reports in. In addition, there are issues with regard to trust [with] those police departments,” Levin told RealClearInvestigations.
Sample size is also a significant issue with hate crime data. The relatively small number of anti-black hate crimes reported annually makes it difficult to distinguish genuine trends in the data from random noise.
The issue is underscored by the FBI’s findings regarding hate crimes perpetrated against other groups. Asian Americans, for example, suffered a 70% increase in reported hate crimes during 2020 – to a total of 274. This was trumpeted as a “surge” in anti-Asian hate incidents, but the absolute numbers are so small relative to the population that it’s unclear whether the increase is due to a bona fide spike in “hate” against Asian Americans or randomness.
Some researchers argue that traditional hate crime statistics are unreliable more generally. Jacob Kaplan, the chief data scientist in research on policing reform and accountability at Princeton University, explained in his book on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting initiative (UCR) that hate crimes are the most difficult category of crime to track at the national level because of reporting irregularities and the relative infrequency of hate crimes.
“[The hate crimes dataset] is also the most under-reported UCR dataset with most agencies not reporting any hate crimes to the FBI. This leads to huge gaps in the data with some states having zero agencies report crime, agencies reporting some bias motivations but not others, [and] agencies reporting some years but not others,” he said. “While these problems exist for all of the UCR datasets, it is most severe in this data. This problem is exacerbated by hate crimes being rare even in agencies that report them—with such rare events, even minor changes in which agencies report or which types of offenses they include can have large effects.”
Lehman echoed Kaplan’s concerns about underreporting, noting that the “number of jurisdictions that actually report [hate crimes] at all is small and varies wildly, and people’s willingness to report also varies significantly.”
Levin argued that the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey proves that a significant number of hate incidents go unreported each year. He also claimed that southern states such as Mississippi and Alabama have historically underreported the number of hate crimes, which has had the effect of depressing the national numbers.
“We were having more hate crimes in Eugene, Oregon, than in multiple Southern states combined for a while,” he said.
The reporting disparities across states and localities make it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions about reported hate crime data. The nebulous nature of “hate”—most crimes involve some element of malice, after all—adds to the challenge. Despite these limitations, Lehman argued that the reported surge in anti-black hate crimes warrants federal attention.
“I think it warrants serious attention,” he said. “In absolute terms, non-hate crimes are a much bigger deal, and I’d prefer limited resources go there. But we should always take it seriously when there’s a spike in heinous offenses, and I think hate crimes qualify.”
A public defender who was fired for speaking out against critical race theory says what happened was troubling and that she expects to win a legal battle she’s engaged in.
“I wasn’t even talking about my job. I was talking about my kid’s schools and my kid’s education. And so the idea that my employer felt that they had the right to weigh in, and to say that my ideas and my thoughts rendered me unfit to do my job, it’s really troubling,” Maud Maron said on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”
Critical race theory is a movement that focuses on a person’s race being the defining aspect of their identity, as opposed to other aspects of their being such as personality traits or achievements. It assumes that race is socially constructed and racism is systemic. Critics say the movement, which supporters allege is aimed at combating racism, is itself racist.
Maron spoke out about “anti-bias training” she received from the Department of Education as a public school council member. She said she was told to refer to herself as a “white woman” and that attendees learned about the “white-supremacy culture” and other ideas that trace back to “White Fragility,” a book penned by white author Robin DiAngelo that claims people must constantly think about race as they interact with others in their daily life.
Maron’s op-ed, published in the New York Post in July 2020 after the training, also detailed how she was harassed after correctly listing Asians as being part of the group sometimes referred to as “people of color.” Critical race theorists sometimes allege Asians are not people of color because their achievement metrics are often the highest of any racial group.
“We all want a well-integrated, high-quality public-school system. Parents have the right to demand an education that prepares their children to meet or exceed grade-level expectations, which in America often lag other countries,” Maron wrote at the time.
The piece and comments Maron made on social media drew backlash, including from the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, representing black lawyers who work for the Legal Aid Society.
They said Maron’s rhetoric was ostensibly against racism but that she was actually racist, in part because she denounced the so-called “anti-racism” ideas that some put forth.
“That Maud finds this to be ‘chilling’ tells true racial advocates all they need to know: she’s racist, and wants the [New York City] school system—which holds the honors of being the most segregated in America—to remain unequal,” the group wrote in a statement.
That led to the Legal Aid Society and the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, Maron’s employer and union, attacking her. For instance, the society shared the black attorneys’ statement, suggesting an endorsement of the views. The society later denounced Maron for her op-ed in its own statement, claiming she “denies the existence of structural and institutional racism.”
Maron sued the society and the union, charging there was no evidence that, among other allegations, she is racist and emphasizing she believes in structural and institutional racism and opposes it.
“My union and my employer released statements basically saying that I was unfit to do the job because of the opinions that I held,” Maron told The Epoch Times.
Redmond Haskins, a spokesperson for the Legal Aid Society, told The Epoch Times in an email: “We believe this lawsuit is a frivolous and misguided attempt to use litigation to harass a non-profit employer and its employees who have spent their careers advancing social justice causes.”
The case is still in its early stages and has not been ruled on.
Maron, who is running as an independent for a seat on the City Council for New York City, said she received support from a wide range of folks, including people who hold far-left views and people who are “deeply conservative” after her situation was highlighted by former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss.
“They were people whose politics and whose ideas spanned a very wide range but agreed with the idea that you should have any ideas you want and still be able to show up and work and if you’re doing your job well you should be able to keep doing it, even if your employer doesn’t agree with you about some issues, some concern. So there is common ground among Americans, even Americans have different political parties, even people with very divergent views on important issues; there is common ground that if you’re invested in finding it and creating a space for that open discourse, you can find it,” she said.
Maron encouraged people to run for office and go to local meetings, nodding to those who have shown up in large groups in recent months at school board meetings to protest against critical race theory and similar ideologies.
“I’d like to see more people run for office who are not parroting the party line, whether it’s the Democratic Party line or the Republican Party line, but are really speaking directly to the issues that people are talking about,” she said. “School boards are a great place to see sort of grassroots concerns. If you go to your local school board and you see what makes parents get up, stand up, sit on uncomfortable chairs, and wait around forever to speak two minutes into a mic, then you’ll know what people are worried about and concerned about. And we need more politicians who are speaking to that.”
Former President Donald Trump on Friday asked a federal court to reinstate his Twitter account, saying in an injunction request that the social media company was “coerced” by lawmakers into banning him.
“[Twitter] exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate,” the legal filing said in part, according to Reuters.
Trump also pointed out in the filing that leaders of the Taliban are currently allowed on Twitter.
The request was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
In July, Trump sued Twitter, Facebook and Google, accusing the Big Tech giants of unfairly censoring conservatives.
The former president was banned from Twitter on Jan. 8 amid a gauntlet of criticism over the riot at the U.S. Capitol by some of his supporters a few days earlier.
Twitter issued a blog post on the day of the ban describing the then-sitting president as a threat to society.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the company said.
One tweet cited for Trump’s ban read, “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter called that tweet dangerous, claiming it was “highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
In the weeks leading up to the ban, Twitter had turned to censoring and flagging Trump’s tweets regularly.
While Twitter said Trump’s ban was to prevent violence, no one was censored or kicked off the platform for supporting the riots following the death of George Floyd in 2020.
Additionally, prominent establishment media personalities who condoned the violence on Twitter, such as CNN host Don Lemon, were allowed to keep their accounts.
The official “Don Lemon Tonight” account tweeted a clip of Lemon applauding the often violent and destructive riots.
“When we see these riots around this country, I say, like King said, it’s the language, it’s the voice of the unheard.” – CNN political commentator Bakari Sellers on protests over the death of George Floyd https://t.co/efs7RA6KRvpic.twitter.com/NEEabFVTDU
— Don Lemon Tonight (@DonLemonTonight) May 29, 2020
Not only did Twitter allow high-profile Democrats to glorify violence on its platform, but the company seemingly purged thousands of conservative accounts in the days after the Capitol incursion.
A bit more information has emerged from the John Durham investigation into Russiagate (or “Spygate,”as it is known hereabouts).
This is due to what is likely a leak from one or more of the targets to their loyal propagandists at CNN. (In the article, the reporters do their best to downgrade the scandal they fanned for years as no more than a trivial “dirty trick” that all campaigns do. There’s a well-known word for that adapted into the English language.)
The import of these leaks is usually to soften the impact on the target(s), but it also gives us another indication Durham is still active.
In this instance, more subpoenas have been issued, including some to Perkins Coie. That’s the Democratic National Committee’s and Hillary Clinton’s law firm that only a few weeks ago defenestrated—for reasons unspecified, but we can guess— one of Hillary’s principal lawyers, Mark Elias.
The other Clinton campaign lawyer, Michael Sussman, has already been charged with lying to the FBI on the matter of alleged Trump links to the Russian Alpha Bank, ties that turned out to be non-existent.
This time, however, we learned that “Tech Executive-1” in the Sussman indictment is Rodney Joffe, a rather distinguished cybersecurity expert, but not in this case because he was apparently involved with the same attempted deception.
Mr. Joffe was evidently no fan of Donald Trump. How far he took his enmity we shall see as this plays out.
Or we won’t. Therein lies the problem. Many are worried that Durham will only take the investigation so far and then peter out.
A real Russiagate investigation has myriad possible targets with very famous names, some of the most famous, in fact. Yet negativism about the results is everywhere in conservative circles with some justification.
When then AG William Barr gave Durham his brief, he was quoted in The Hill (March 2020) as follows:
“Attorney General William Barr said Monday that he does not expect a criminal investigation of former President Obama or former Vice President Joe Biden to result from the probe undertaken by U.S. Attorney John Durham.
“Based on the information I have today, I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man,” Barr told reporters at the Justice Department. ‘Our concern over potential criminality is focused on others.’”
Sounds pretty weak, doesn’t it, with some people, too big to be investigated, surrounded by a cordon sanitaire.
Yet rumor has it already that Jake Sullivan is under suspicion in the Alpha Bank matter, at the least. That’s remarkably close to Biden as Sullivan is his National Security Advisor, one of the most powerful positions in the country (cf. Henry Kissinger), as we have seen, to our national misfortune, during the Afghanistan debacle.
How justified is that suspicion of Sullivan? Paul Sperry wrote in Real Clear Investigations: “The indictment states that Sussmann, as well as the cyber experts recruited for the operation, ‘coordinated with representatives and agents of the Clinton campaign with regard to the data and written materials that Sussmann gave to the FBI and the media.’ One of those campaign agents was Sullivan, according to emails Durham obtained.”
Biden himself was said to have recommended the ancient and hardly-used Logan Act—how he would even have known about it is worth finding out, but anyway…—in an attempt to punish Gen. Michael Flynn during an oft-discussed, but never fully revealed, Oval Office meeting at the tail end (Jan. 5, 2017) of the Obama administration.
That meeting itself, emailed about by Susan Rice weeks after it took place seemingly to provide Obama presidential deniability, is even more worthy of exploration—or is it off limits as per William Barr? We don’t know.
Yes, there is plenty of reason to be skeptical. The Sullivan matter has barely been discussed in the mainstream media, even though the possible miscreant is the National Security Advisor.
Is everything being sent down the memory hole? Who exactly is to blame in all this? We don’t know that either, though we have guesses about that too.
But it is imperative we must ultimately know. Durham must carry his investigation through to the end, because Russiagate quite clearly marked the beginning of the end of our democratic republic as we knew it.
All the malfeasances that have occurred since from the endless COVID lockdowns to Afghanistan to the open border to the violence in our streets and the relentless propaganda and bizarre arrests surrounding Jan. 6, not to mention the 2020 election itself, point back to it, relate to it, in one way or another.
None of these events would have happened the way they did without it. Some would not have happened at all.
Russiagate was a crime whose extent and import dwarfed Watergate and made that supposed scandal, subject of a Hollywood movie though it is, barely as important, by comparison, as shoplifting at a 7-11.
Yet Nixon and the others paid, badly. Hardly anyone has been punished here so far beyond what has amounted to slaps on the wrists.
So what do we do? Do we sit back passively, maybe adding a few snipes here and there, and let Durham do his job, hoping for the best?
I say no. We all have a role to play. Durham is a man like the rest of us. Consciously or unconsciously, if he knows we’re watching, he’s going to behave in a different manner than if he thinks we’re lulled to sleep.
Be as active as possible in talking and lobbying about this. You don’t have to be a so-called “elite” to do this or be an anchorman on ABC. You just have to be a concerned citizen, an honest man or woman. Keep talking about it to friend and foe. Show up with a sign at an inconvenient (for them) place. Put it on the internet, text to everyone you know or can think of. Discuss it on Signal and Telegraph. Never let Russiagate be forgotten. Put it out there in the zeitgeist and keep it there.
The mainstream/legacy media isn’t going to do it. They will obfuscate as much as possible. We have to do it. It’s up to us. If we don’t, we have no grounds for complaint when it goes down the memory hole—and with it our country.
Two things are of paramount importance to us going forward if we want to save our republic, this full explication of what happened during the Trump-Russia affair, including everyone responsible being properly punished, so we are sure as we can be it will never happen again, and genuine integrity for our broken elections.
Work on that too. Many already are. The two go hand in hand.
I speak from experience when I say the following: China is not a fun place to live. Constantly monitored, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, citizens find themselves victims of a perverse social credit system.
Like something quite literally out of the British TV series “Black Mirror,” innocent people are punished for the most frivolous of reasons. Then, there’s the grueling “996” work culture, which involves working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promised to regulate the country’s excessive work culture, millions of Chinese citizens have already thrown in the towel. Fed up of 72-hour work weeks and poor pay, China’s Gen Zers and millennials have embraced the idea of “lying flat.”
Instead of working, they are opting to “chill.” In other words, they are refusing to work.
Obviously inspired by the rebels in China, an increasing number of young Americans are opting to “lie flat.” This does not bode well for the U.S. economy, according to Alison Schrager, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal. Schrager is, of course, correct. Gen Z and millennials are leaving the workforce in record numbers. Why? Because of “high unemployment benefits and stimulus payments,” the author argued. Furthermore, because the country was basically shut down for 18 months, many now find themselves “flush with savings.” After all, they had nowhere to spend all this free money, wrote Schrager.
Well, that’s not completely true. According to a Yahoo-Harris poll, young investors are all too eager to gamble as 11 percent of Gen Zers have bought cryptocurrencies with their stimulus payments. Meanwhile, 15 percent of millennials, those between the ages of 25 and 40, have invested in crypto. Is this a wise way of using “free” money? I’ll let you decide.
In the United States, those opting to “lie flat” would do well to realize that Americans have “never worked so little,” wrote Schrager, a statement that is backed up by a rather interesting study. Since 2003, American men have gained an average of 28 hours of extra leisure time per month. American women, on the other hand, have gained an average of 24.
Firefighters exit a Starbucks Coffee that was vandalized by rioters during a “Youth Day of Action and Solidarity with Portland” demonstration in Seattle, Wash., on July 25, 2020. (Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images)
With so much extra leisure time, why are America’s Gen Zers and millennials opting to lie flat? Is it because they are lazy, ungrateful souls? No, not necessarily. They are lost, some of them incredibly so.
As someone with a background in psychology, I believe the problem is much more deeply rooted. The “job hopping” and refusal to work paint a worrying picture for the future of the country. There exists a fundamental disconnect that cannot be legislated away.
Entitlement and Self-Absorption
Before continuing, I must state two things. First, although I loathe the term, I am a millennial. Second, the points made going forward are not intended to describe all Gen Zers or all millennials. They are designed to give a broad picture of the troubles facing the country and its citizens. The refusal to work is symptomatic of a deeper malaise.
The decision to “lie flat,” I contend, has more to do with narcissism and entitlement than laziness. We’re told millennials are painfully narcissistic. Gen Zers appear to be even worse. God help those born after 2010, the members of Generation Alpha.
According to psychologist Karyl McBride, entitlement is defined as “the unreasonable expectation that one should receive special treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.” In the world of the narcissist, wrote McBride, he or she must always come first. This is called narcissistic entitlement.
McBride warns that the narcissistically entitled lack the capacity “to feel empathy towards others.” Therefore, they are governed by impulse and craven desires, or as Freud would say, their identity. When a narcissist speaks, others must listen. All must obey. They see themselves as special, even exceptional, and for this reason they must be treated like royalty.
Not surprisingly, because of their tendency to manipulate and deceive, narcissists find it incredibly difficult to build or maintain connections with other people. In this “Age of the Selfie,” where individual needs come first, the community comes a distant second. According to one pertinent study, over the past 30 years, American college students have become 30 percent more narcissistic. Thirty years from now, expect things to be 30 percent worse.
With the atomization of society and less commitment to long-term, monogamous relationships, young Americans are opting to turn inwards. Traditional values, no longer attractive, have been replaced by nihilism. Society is becoming increasingly selfish. In the United States, maintaining a job is, as obvious as it sounds, hard work. According to Gallup, 85 percent of Americans hate their jobs. To be an American is to persevere with Sisyphus-like persistence—or at least that used to be the case. Younger workers appear to be less resilient than previous generations. Resilience, which is intimately linked to wellbeing, involves possessing the ability to not just adapt to new situations, but persevere through the pain. Now, though, among the younger generations, perseverance is in short supply. With less commitment to marriage, less commitment to community, and less commitment to religion, millions of Americans are less committed to the idea of work. This is a deeply worrying trend with no obvious solutions.
A popular social media group for leftists floated the idea of strategically relocating young Democratic voters in a number of traditionally red states this week, with the aim of ensuring a permanent Senate majority for Democrats.
Occupy Democrats, a page for Democratic voters ranging from disaffected supporters of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to blue-haired liberals, on Thursday posted a meme online which asked people who work in remote jobs to relocate to places such as Alaska.
“If just 220,00 work-from-home Democratic voters (less than the population of Williamsburg/Bushwick) moved to: [Alaska, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming] … we could flip eight Senate seats within the next six years,” the meme stated.
A graphic showing a male wearing Chelsea boots, carrying a laptop computer and holding a coffee cup was presented with the meme.
The post noted it was aimed at young tech workers who have the ability to work from anywhere with an internet connection.
“(This has been a friendly PSA to well-paid tech-employed millennials who want to make a difference but remain unstrategically clustered in coffee shops in blue states,” the meme added.
The meme caught fire on Facebook, where it received 25,000 reactions, 5,000 comments and over 8,000 shares.
Some commenters on the post didn’t seem too excited about the idea.
“WTF would we want to surround ourselves with Republicans??All set thank you, I will stay in [Massachusetts],” one user commented.
“The big question is given everything [Trump] and Republicans have done, not to mention all the anti Vax [Trumpers] that have died from covid, how strong can their base really be? It seems that they have lost a lot of voters,” another Facebook user added.
“They might win certain areas but collectively, unless they cheat successfully, they can’t win. They’ve done too much damage to themselves.”
No commenter more adequately summed up the reaction from Democrats on Facebook than the beatnik hippie who wrote, “I love Alaska. But then I remembered that it gets dark at 3:00 in the winter.”
When the meme was shared on Twitter, one user pointed out how easily Democratic donors could flip the states mentioned. All that would be needed is cash.
yea I mean OD sucks real hard, but this is actually a good idea and if billionaires who donate lots of money to Dems actually wanted to make the Senate permanently blue this is a good way to do it. Bloomberg alone could spend $11B on giving $50K to 220K people to do exactly this
did some back-of-the-napkin math and found out it would take about $14B to move 220K people (<3% of LA County) to those 4 states to flip 8 senate seats. Includes $5K apiece for moving and $1K/month in rent assistance for 5 years. Bloomberg, Zuck, Mackenzie Scott, where yall at?
In reality, if only 36,000 more Alaskans had voted for President Joe Biden than former President Donald Trump in 2020, the state would have gone blue. That likely would have meant that the state’s congressional delegation would have flipped as well.
Margins in the other states are similar.
Democrats seem interested in taking these states due to their lower populations and conservative leanings.
Thankfully for conservatives who aren’t ready to surrender the Senate over to Democrats in perpetuity, liberals who follow the Occupy Democrats page don’t seem interested in colonizing cold areas without a nightlife where Starbucks locations are scarce — at least not without someone else’s money.
A new poll has found that a majority of voters who chose former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election are in favor of a national divorce, while roughly four in ten voters for President Joe Biden are in favor of the same idea.
One would of course have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the cultural and political divide in the country. Have you ever seen such partisan division?
Still, when polled about the idea of separating into two distinct countries, a stunning number of Americans are in favor of splitting up, according to a new poll from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
“Significant numbers of both Trump and Biden voters show a willingness to consider violating democratic tendencies and norms if needed to serve their priorities,” the poll noted.
“Roughly 2 in 10 Trump and Biden voters strongly agree it would be better if a ‘President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or courts,’ and roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union,” the poll added.
While the idea of states, both red and blue, seceding from the union is nothing new, UVA’s poll found that support for the idea is popular among both Republicans and Democrats nationwide.
Apparently, Republicans don’t want socialism forced down their throats. Meanwhile, Democrats can’t stand the idea of being able to think and act for themselves. That isn’t the least bit surprising.
The last 18 months or so have definitely exposed the partisan divide in the country. More than half of the people who told UVA they voted for Trump are willing to walk away from the United States and carve their own path.
Despite seeing their party in power in Washington and in control of entertainment, academia and sports, people who chose Biden in the 2020 election would be content with seeing their states seceded. Power is never enough.
UVA Center for Politics director Larry Sabato commented on the release of both the poll and its findings.
“The divide between Trump and Biden voters is deep, wide, and dangerous,” Sabato said. “The scope is unprecedented, and it will not be easily fixed.”
Voters seemed more divided when asked more specific questions, according to the poll. A vast majority of both Trump and Biden voters said they view their political opponents as dangerous.
Asked if they view the elected officials from the opposing party as a “clear and present danger to democracy,” 80 percent of Biden voters either somewhat or strongly agreed. Meanwhile, 84 percent of Trump voters answered the same way.
Asked if their counterparts “no longer believe in the ideas that make America great,” the divide was also apparent. Seventy-two percent of people who said they voted for Biden told the pollster they believe their opponents’ views are counter to what might make the country great.
Eighty-seven percent of Republicans told UVA that Biden voters hold views that can’t make the country prosper.
When paying attention to current events and conversations about politics and policy, it’s impossible to imagine a time when the country was more divided. Still, seeing so many Americans willing to call it quits and go their own way is a tragedy — considering all the country has been through across two-and-a-half centuries.
UVA’s Center for Politics polled 1,001 Trump voters and 1,011 Biden voters from July 22 to Aug. 4 and reported a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percentage points.
In March, WGCL-TV in Atlanta reported on a series of incidents in the suburb of Douglasville in which families were receiving letters from “a local racist who is hoping to spread fear.”
“I received one two days ago, and I was alarmed at what I read,” one father told the station.
“The letter is using the N-word, talking about the KKK, hanging people, killing kids, killing whole families, and setting houses on fire,” he said, adding that he had given the letter to police, who had hoped to find forensic evidence on the note.
Other residents had told the station they’d received similar notes starting in December; on one street alone, at least seven black families reportedly had been targeted.
In arguably the least shocking update this story could have received, police say the incidents are a hoax — that the perpetrator is a 30-year-old black woman named Terresha Lucas who identified as a 6-foot white man with a red beard and as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
WGCL reported Thursday that Lucas, a Douglasville resident, was arrested and charged this week with making terroristic threats to residents on Manning Drive in the Georgia city from Dec. 21, 2020, to Sept. 6 of this year.
Douglasville police said in a Facebook post that they “received the break they needed on Labor Day, Sept. 6, when evidence was found linking the notes to the house of Terresha Lucas. Detectives said they were able to gather enough evidence to obtain a search warrant.”
For 11 months, black families in an Atlanta suburb were terrorized w/letters from someone saying they’re a white KKK member who will burn the houses & kill them. Following an extensive investigation, police charged Terresha Lucas, a black woman. #HateHoaxhttps://t.co/eCpOLefnoJ
“During the search, detectives found other evidence which ties the suspect to the incidents,” the statement continued.
Police said the notes all had similar handwriting, tone and verbiage, leading them to the conclusion they were all written by one person.
The notes said they were from a 6-foot white man with a long, red beard. In initial reportage on the notes, no one seemed particularly concerned about the fact that hate criminals don’t usually identify themselves if they’re leaving anonymous letters in neighbors’ mailboxes.
What would have been surprising in an incident as brazen and blatant as this is if the suspect arrested hadn’t been a minority.
Take a high-profile case of racist graffiti at Emory University in Atlanta. In August, the Emory Autism Center was hit with a burglar who left behind racial slurs and a swastika.
“These acts of racism and antisemitism are painful for all of us at the EAC and in the Emory community. They will not be tolerated and every effort will be made to bring the perpetrators to justice. Our priority remains the wellbeing and safety of our faculty, staff, learners, patients and their families, and upholding our values and Emory’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion,” the university said in a statement.
“As we heal in the days and weeks ahead, it is important that we continue to support and provide strength to one another. Our goal will remain to provide an environment and a learning community focused on each other and maintaining an inclusive society where everyone’s identity is valued and celebrated.”
On Sept. 22, the university announced the arrest of Roy Lee Gordon Jr. on a charge of second-degree burglary. That statement was much drier, save for a pro forma statement about how racism and anti-Semitism remain “painful for the entire Emory community.”
Unmentioned were Gordon’s race or prior employment history. According to WGCL, he’s black and a former part-time employee of the Emory Autism Center.
In the St. Louis metro area, Parkway Central High School in Chesterfield, Missouri, was the site of a student walkout after racist graffiti was discovered in bathrooms last week.
“The walkout at Parkway Central was organized on social media on Wednesday evening, students said, by those fed up with similar incidents. Students stood outside the administrative building on campus on Wednesday, chanting ‘no justice, no peace’ and passing around a megaphone to share their experiences with prejudice at school,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on Sept. 24.
“Students at the rally circled around Principal Tim McCarthy and yelled questions and complaints through a megaphone, some cursing at him, asking how school policies would change to discourage racist behavior.”
The reason for the invective apparently was a supposed pattern of racist incidents at the school: “We just absorb it, most of us,” senior Ronald Griffin told the Post-Dispatch. “There’s a ton of people that act friendly, but then you hear about things people have said … off to the side.”
“It’s messed up, and it’s not funny,” said senior Joe Siervo. “We want to see a change … but this happens every year.”
This past Wednesday, the Post-Dispatch reported a black student had admitted to writing the graffiti. A participant in the walkout called it “embarrassing” but said it didn’t diminish their message.
However, as the newspaper noted, this was the second time in recent years that the school has seen a hate-crime hoax; in 2017, a non-white student eventually admitted to writing “White Lives Matter” in a bathroom.
And these, it’s worth noting, are just the arrests made in September. Given that, the only real shock here would have been if Douglasville, Georgia, police had found a 6-foot-tall Klansman with a red beard.
A former director at Montana State University (MSU) allegedly called a student a “stupid fuck” and several other staffers berated the student for starting an anti-mask campaign on campus, according to emails obtained by the Daily Caller.
MSU student Dylan Dean and Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) created a petition to end the university’s mask mandate on campus, garnering more than 1,100 petition signatures, according to data provided by YAL. The university’s mask mandate orders students, faculty and staff to wear a mask indoors.
The petition alleged the university waited until the last minute to implement the mandate and students did not have the opportunity to “make decisions about their schooling accordingly.”
Face masks [Shutterstock/Beton Studio]Dean allegedly tried to present the petition to MSU President Dr. Waded Cruzado, who allegedly shut him out of the office. Several staffers and even a professor also attacked Dean over the petition, emails show.
Dean had sent an email to several staffers on Sep. 15, noting the petition and asking “if you agree that the mask mandate is unnecessary at this point, please sign the petition.”
Rick Winking, who worked at the school’s Alcohol and Drug Assistance Center, sent a brief email to Dean that read “you stupid fuck.”
Winking also told Dean “there was a time when conservatives were respectable and had intellectual arguments that made sense. Now being conservative seems to mean emotionally stunted whiny little victims.”
In a subsequent email, Winking told Dean he retired on Sept. 1 and had plenty of time to “fuck with dumb shit whiners.”
Professor Seth Pincus sent Dean an email calling him “a selfish idiot who cannot even consider the potential suffering [Dean] can cause others.”
“If you behaved as a citizen concerned about others, loved thy neighbor, and believed in the golden rule, we would not need mandates,” the email continued.
YAL criticized the university for allegedly defrauding students by implementing the mask mandate.
“Students at Montana State University are right to be infuriated. Administrators have cheated them with a bait-and-switch, promising a normal school year, then imposing tyrannical mandates once they arrived on campus and their tuition checks had been cashed. President Cruzado thinks she can dodge accountability by locking doors to public buildings and siccing police on student protesters, but this will not end until she reverses these policies,” YAL senior spokesman Eric Brakey said.
President Trump cared about the voices of America’s youngest voters, while the Biden administration seeks to suppress the voices of young dissenters through unfair disciplinary procedures and restrictions.
Free Speech on college campuses is more important than ever as university students across the country make the long-awaited return to in-person learning this fall. Along with this exciting transition, however, is the anxiety that many students feel in expressing their personal beliefs.
Colleges have long been known to promote liberal ideology to students. Conservative student groups such as the College Republicans, Young Americans for Freedom, and conservative women’s groups, are often extracurricular safe-havens for conservative students. These clubs, however, do not mitigate the threat of retribution from peers, professors, and university administration.
The fear of being “cancelled” has stretched across the country, and is now besetting students on both sides of the aisle. According to Forbes, more than half of college students regularly hold back their political views, for fear of consequences. While many schools proclaim their commitment to intellectual diversity and curiosity, self-censorship and fear prevent the expression of free speech and diverse perspectives. Another report from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, surveyed 37,000 students from 159 colleges. The report found that three-quarters of students who identify as strong Republicans, regularly censor themselves, while less than half of strong Democratic students do so.
Recently, colleges have become increasingly combative against speakers who do not promote the university’s liberal ideology. Campus groups spend months coordinating with speakers and receive funding to host top conservative speakers. Many of these events are ultimately canceled by university administration. Ben Shapiro, one of the most popular speakers among young conservatives, has been barred by several colleges including UC Berkley, Gonzaga University, Grand Canyon University, and others due to his “controversial” opinions. The sited “controversial” opinions all boil down to Shapiro’s unapologetic conservatism which violates liberal groupthink on campuses.
On Sept. 23, Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania cancelled Turning Point USA speaker, Joe Basrawi’s speech on critical race theory due to an alleged “disruption” at the college. College administration met with the Turning Point chapter leader and directed him that the event should be canceled and moved off campus. The school also requested for its name to not be associated with the event. Elizabethtown claimed that Basrawi was not qualified to speak on the topic of critical race theory because he is not a critical race theorist.
University suppression has led to a renewed commitment to free speech by many campus groups. Counter-protests and national representatives from groups such as YAF and Turning Point USA are more vocal against cancel culture on campuses, but the reality is that the left has become so good at suppressing beliefs, many students have been silenced.
As the new administration seeks to undermine our most basic freedoms, we are reminded of the work of President Donald Trump, who defended the rights of America’s youngest voters.
In March 2019, President Trump signed an executive order protecting freedom of speech on college campuses. President Trump signed this executive order with the support of student leaders who faced suppression at their universities. The executive order supported free inquiry and debate and aimed to promote a culture of understanding on campuses. Colleges that benefit from American tax dollars should not actively limit First Amendment rights.
President Trump cared about the voices of America’s youngest voters, and supported a culture of free inquiry and debate. The Biden administration wants to suppress the voices of young dissenters through unfair disciplinary procedures and restriction. When it comes to free speech, Trump was right, and Biden is wrong. Our President must support and defend the voices of young Americans.
Martin Luther King Jr. considered this question in his powerful letter from Birmingham Jail (1963). He was responding to fellow members of the clergy who opposed segregation but rejected civil disobedience, which involved breaking the law. His central point was that laws may be just or unjust. We have a duty to obey just laws and to oppose, even defy, unjust laws. We need to recognize that both kinds exist and learn how to tell the difference.
Referring to the examples of Nazi tyranny under Hitler and the 1956 Hungarian revolution against communist tyranny, King writes,
“We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.”
King gives examples—from the Bible, the martyrdom of early Christians, and the Boston Tea Party—of the refusal to submit to unjust laws.
Like the American Founders and the Declaration of Independence, King does not seek to abolish the rule of law but to appeal to it. King saw, as Thomas Jefferson did, that it was not enough to define law as whatever the sovereign power declared it to be. He saw, as did the Founders, that law so defined provides no constraint on tyrants who want to reduce it to a matter of their own will and power.
So what distinguishes a just law from an unjust one?
In addressing this question, both King and the Declaration draw on a classical tradition that perceives law as rooted in objective reality, in the way things are. It’s a tradition at least as old as Aristotle. King cites St. Augustine as stating the principle that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He cites St. Thomas Aquinas as teaching that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”
In a similar way, the Declaration appeals to “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” It bases itself on truths that it holds to be self-evident and affirms inalienable rights that are endowed by the Creator rather than conferred by the state or sovereign:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
No Truth, No Injustice
For some moderns, such appeals to truth or reality seem intrinsically intolerant, since your truth is different from my truth. We see a radical relativism pervading law, education, and media that turns out to be anything but tolerant. It’s not enough to accept that I have the right to proclaim my belief, however absurd or illogical or contrary to the very nature of the human person or species. It’s not enough that you tolerate it, you must now endorse it with all the visible enthusiasm of a Communist Party Central Committee member applauding the statements of the Dear Leader.
Relativism is the ideology of tyrants. For Stalin and Hitler, history was on their side, victory was inevitable, and anyone who questioned their version of truth was objectively an enemy of the state. “Truth” itself was a matter of the will and power of the ruler. If the outcome of their policies and edicts was not what they promised, it was not because they contradicted reality, the givenness and constraints of life. It was because enemies, within and outside the ruling party, conspired to sabotage the program.
In the United States, we see such an unconstrained vision of reality, not in the full-blooded totalitarianism of a Stalin or Hitler, but in the growing denial of reality itself. It’s a rejection of democratic processes, a refusal of argument or debate, the censoring or suppression of speech, even of plain information, in the media and on campuses. Those who bravely speak up for truth and against injustice are more likely to face hateful mobs on Twitter than Red Guards or Brownshirts in the street.
Retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy often accompanied his most aggressive judicial activism with rhetorical flourishes about the right to make up our own reality. The rhetoric was a sign that Kennedy was going to ignore the Constitution and impose his own views in place of democratic political and legislative processes.
In the Casey abortion decision of 1992, Kennedy famously declared, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center translates: “We justices have the unbounded authority to decide which matters you yahoo citizens should be prohibited from addressing through legislation.” Kennedy’s purple prose signified in practice the inauguration of decades of legalized killing of the vulnerable and innocent on an unprecedented scale, the denial of reality and repudiation of the right to life of a whole class of human beings, the most vulnerable among us.
Transgender identity ideology appears in this light as an extreme case of truth-denying as a requirement for participation in polite society. The absurdity and incoherence of the claims being advanced as scientific by this quasi-religious pseudoscience, along with the catastrophism and zeal of adherents (you must accept my self-diagnosis or you will kill me; saying that is committing genocide) suggests a fringe cult of extremists. The numbers who identify as trans is small, even allowing for the craze among teen girls in the United States and Britain. But the rapid embrace of the ideology in left-liberal parties, professional bodies, media, education, libraries, and the bureaucratic state has been extraordinary, and this despite the irreversible damage done to young people, their bodies, and their family relationships.
Live Not by Lies
Communism and Nazism both accept a relativism that reduces “truth” to a matter of will and power, while seeking to impose their own truth on others. They are obviously tyrannical, if not totalitarian. But we see the same tendencies in ideologies and movements promoted by Western elites that deny objective truth and seek to suppress free speech, open debate, and democratic decision-making.
The tyranny of radical relativism is one of its paradoxes. It denies the very existence of objective reality while insisting on its own truth.
Must we surrender to this bullying out of fear that speaking the truth will elicit enraged Twitter mobs demanding that we be canceled, fired, refused admission to the college or job of our choice, or deplatformed from speaking engagements or denied future employment?
The witness of those who have survived the severest persecution in our times, under Nazis, communists, or Jihadi terrorists of ISIS, offers an answer. Whether the surviving victims were Jews or Christians, victims of slavery or religious persecution, they always insisted on the ultimate importance of telling and hearing the truth about what happened on the ground. The perspectives of concentration camp guards and their victims in the Holocaust were different, as were those of Christians in communist Eastern Europe and the agents of state repression who persecuted them.
To say this is not to assert that there is only one true narrative of an event, or that accusers must always be believed. The ruin of many lives and reputations by a pedophile fantasist, Carl Beech, whose false allegations led British police to conduct a sweeping historical sex abuse investigation (2014–2016), should give us pause before adopting the then fashionable mantra “believe all victims” or junking due process and the assumption of innocence. Years later, in 2019, Beech was convicted on multiple charges of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison. His false allegations against prominent individuals, some no longer living, led to a disastrously flawed investigation and immense damage to those Beech accused and their families, while discouraging true victims of abuse from coming forward.
Truth Matters
Justice can be perverted or denied by false allegations: by the failure to take seriously real victims (as happened notoriously in Rotherham in the UK over several decades where authorities failed to act on reports of actual sex trafficking and organized child sexual abuse); and by victims’ fear of retaliation if they speak the truth—there were an estimated 1,400 victims in Rotherham, many of whom were not believed.
The point is simply that justice depends on recognizing the real, objective nature of truth (beyond what the state or party or leaders says it is at the moment), establishing the truth of the matter, and then telling it (or at least not lying about it) even when the cost of truth-telling is high in terms of job security or, in these days of doxxing, risk to one’s family. It’s the priority of those who have witnessed such horrors as the Russian Gulag or the Nazi concentration camps. It should be ours as well. Without truth there can be no injustice, and hence no justice.
Virginia’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe argued that parents should not tell schools what to teach, during the final debate before the upcoming Nov. 2 election.
The remark by McAuliffe, who served as governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2018, came after Republican candidate Glenn Youngkins said he believes that parents should be given more say in the decisions of local school districts, including what kind of books their children are exposed to at school.
“What we’ve seen over the course of this last 20 months is our school systems refusing to engage with parents,” Youngkin said. “In fact, in Fairfax County this past week, we watched parents so upset because there was such sexually explicit material in the library they had never seen, it was shocking.”
He then pointed out that McAuliffe in 2016 put down what was known as the “Beloved” bill, a measure that would have made Virginia the first state to require schools to warn parents of sexually explicit content in books, and allow parents to block their children from reading those books.
“You vetoed the bill that would have informed parents that they were there,” Youngkins said to the former governor. “You believe school systems should tell children what to do. I believe parents should be in charge of their kids’ education.”
In response, McAuliffe said that parents would have had the power to remove books from library shelves if the 2016 bill passed.
“It was not that the parents had the right to veto books … also take them off the shelves,” he said. “I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.”
“I stopped the bill and I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” McAuliffe added.
The candidates’ comments comes amid ongoing controversies around public education in Virginia, including the incorporation of critical race theory (CRT) in schools, and the Commonwealth’s new model policies encouraging school districts to allow transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity.
McAuliffe during the first gubernatorial debate on Sept. 16 said individual school boards should be making their own decisions on whether to implement the model policies. Youngkin on Tuesday agreed with McAuliffe’s response, but added that parents should be included in the conversation, and that schools must consider “concepts of safety, privacy, and respect” when making decisions.
When it comes to CRT, McAuliffe reportedly dismissed the concerns as a “right-wing conspiracy” that was “totally made up by Donald Trump.” By contrast, Youngkin said the CRT is a real issue.
“Virginia schools are in a state of chaos because of the left-liberal, progressive agenda that is being ramrodded across the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Youngkin told The Epoch Times earlier this summer. “We kept our schools closed so unnecessarily, and damaged kids across Virginia. We have infused a political agenda of critical race theory into the curriculum, and we are seeing parents stand up across Virginia, and acutely in Loudon County.”
So happy someone else sees the Orwell and Animal Farm in The Woke Joke Making Us Broke [US Patriot]
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” — George Orwell, “Animal Farm”
What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama’s 60th birthday bash at his Martha’s Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants?
Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a designer dress to the more than $30,000-a-ticket Met gala? Her entourage needs were certainly well-attended to by masked Morlock servants.
Did the leftist celebrities at the recent Emmy awards gather to discuss opening Malibu beaches to the homeless when the (unmasked) stars virtue-signaled their wokeness?
For answers about these hypocritical wokists, always turn first to George Orwell. In his brief allegorical novella, “Animal Farm,” an array of animal characters—led by the thinking pigs of the farm—staged a revolution, driving out their human overseers.
The anti-human animal comrades started out sounding like zealous Russian Bolsheviks (“four legs good, two legs bad”). But soon they ended up conned by a murderous cult of pigs under a Joseph Stalin-like leader. And so, the revolution became what it once had opposed (“four legs good, two legs better”).
Our own woke, year-zero revolution is now in its second year. Yet last year’s four-legged revolutionaries are already strutting on two legs. They are not just hobnobbing with the “white supremacists” and “capitalists,” but outdoing them in their revolutionary zeal for the rarified privileges of the material good life.
The Marxist co-founder of BLM, Patrisse Cullors, is now on her fourth woke home. She has moved on from the barricades to the security fences of her Topanga Canyon digs in a mostly all-white, all-rich rural paradise—the rewards for revolutionary service.
Professor Ibram X. Kendi has evolved from the edgy revolutionary work of flying all over the country, hawking his Orwellian message of “All racism bad! But some racism good!” Now he has mastered the art of zooming the wannabe woke for his $20,000 an hour avant-garde hectoring.
What of Colin Kaepernick, the mediocre second-string quarterback turned sudden firebrand? He refused to stand for the national anthem and spread his “take a knee” kitsch throughout professional sports.
Kaepernick became a boutique revolutionary multimillionaire. For $12 million a year, he pitches Nike sneakers, often made in Chinese forced-labor camps.
Woke NBA star LeBron James, from his $23 million Brentwood mansion, blasts America for its endless unfairness—in service to his totalitarian Chinese paymasters who will ensure his good life with an eventual lifetime $1 billion payout for hawking their goods.
Our other elite wokists navigating around the revolution are even more cynical. The corporate and Wall Street capitalists feel that a little virtue signaling, showy diversity coordinators, and woke advertising will more or less buy off the latest version of Al-Sharpton-like shake-down artists.
Then there are the trimmers and enablers. These are the wealthy, rich, and the professional classes. They feel—in abstract—absolutely terrible about inequality, but hardly enough in the concrete to mix with the unwashed.
For them, wokism is like party membership in the late ethically bankrupt Soviet Union. It is necessary for peace of mind and good income, but otherwise not an obstacle for the continuance of the privileged, comfortable life.
The more TV news hosts rant about “systemic” this and “supremacy” that, and the more college presidents write stern penance memos to their faculty about “that’s not who we are,” the more they feel not just good about themselves, but relieved of any real obligation to live and socialize with the Other.
As for the self-declared non-white Other, wokism is also a top-down revolution of celebrities, intellectuals, actors, activists, academics, grifters, lawyers, and the upper-middle class and rich. And they are not calling for a Marshall Plan to bring classical education to the inner city. They themselves have little desire to move in or spread their wealth. They rarely mentor others on their shrewd capitalist expertise that made themselves rich.
They are far more cynical than that. The regrettable violence of the street, the 120 days of 2020 looting, death and arson, are the levers of the woke professionals. They fight with the various tribes of the same class and mindset over the slices of the same coveted elite pies. But they bring to the scrap the unspoken cudgel that without greater non-white de facto quotas in comic books, TV commercials, Ivy League faculties and students, symphonies, and sit-coms, then “systemic racism” could once again ignite downtown Portland or Seattle or Baltimore.
Orwell would say of the woke Obamas, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Bernie Sanders, LeBron James, or Ibram Kendi—and their supposedly unwoke, but similarly rich and privileged enemies—“It was impossible to say which was which.”
Having a dissenting view within the prevailing orthodoxies of many universities today can lead to “a death by a thousand cuts,” according to a lawyer who specializes in constitutional law.
Samantha Harris, with Allen Harris Law in Connecticut, represents Stephen Porter, a professor at North Carolina State University (NCSU). Porter filed a lawsuit on Sept. 14, alleging that faculty members in his department were discriminating against him, violating both his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights by retaliating against his free speech.
“In some ways, it’s nothing new,” Harris told The Epoch Times, “but what I’ve observed in recent years is these institutions have gotten smarter in knowing that they can’t just fire someone.”
Over the last 20 years, Harris said she’s seen multiple strategies on how universities censor unpopular speech of faculty and students.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Rather than termination or direct punishment, Harris said the latest is the adoption of an incremental strategy, in which the institution subjects the dissenter to investigations, removal from committees, and accusations of professionalism violations.
This subtle death by a thousand cuts can complicate the livelihood for someone who expresses an unpopular belief, Harris said, and blur the line between First Amendment rights and the institution’s overreach.
“It can make it difficult for people to advance their careers, as well as to get justice for what’s happening to them,” Harris said.
Race-Focused Worldviews
On the predominant social justice ideologies being debated—such as what Porter said he was contesting at NCSU—Harris said she avoids using phrases like Critical Race Theory (CRT), the Marxist philosophy that suggests society is a class struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, labeling white people as the oppressors and all other races as the oppressed.
“That’s become shorthand for what I would call this very race-focused view looking at how we should as a country deal with issues of race and identity,” Harris said. “As a result, people who ascribe to what I would call a more traditional civil rights view of treating people equally and viewing each person as an individual has fallen out of favor on many campuses and is often the accused of being racist itself.”
Color blindness, which used to be the standard for not being racist, is now considered in many circles to be racist, she said.
“Critical Race Theory is a school of thought that evolved out of the universities, and that has informed a lot of thinking, but what I really call it is this very race-focused view of the world, the way humans interact with one another, and the way policies should be made,” Harris said.
Opinions Targeted
Most of her clients are people who have landed on the “wrong side” of these views by expressing opinions not in line with “this very race-focused world view.”
“The same goes for gender identity,” Harris said. “Interestingly, I’ve had clients who are feminist who do not ascribe to the current views on gender identity and have found themselves targeted for that.”
Most frequently, Harris said what she’s observed is the suppression of traditional, conservative views at liberal universities.
Before setting up her own firm, Harris worked for 15 years at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit academic and individual rights advocacy center set up to be a resource for students and faculty members who have had their freedom of speech infringed upon.
“FIRE is a faculty rights organization that does some targeted First Amendment litigation at public universities, but they also advocate on behalf of the students and faculty at private universities who are facing censorship,” Harris said.
On her transition from “big-picture advocacy” at FIRE to “getting into the trenches” to represent individual clients at her law firm, Harris said her focus is primarily on freedom of speech and due process, ensuring those who are accused of misconduct can go through an impartial investigation before facing disciplinary action.
Freedom of Conscience
The firm also defends freedom of conscience, or the freedom to hold one’s own thoughts and beliefs free from governmental interference.
“The seminal freedom of conscience case was when a court held that Jehovah’s Witness students could not be forced to salute the flag in class,” Harris said. “That violated their freedom of conscience, the right to be free from compelled speech and compelled beliefs.”
In the 1943 case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the board adopted a directive requiring all public-school students to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance or be expelled.
A group of Jehovah’s Witness students challenged the directive on the pretense that saluting the flag conflicted with their religious beliefs prohibiting idol worship, therefore violating their freedom of religion and speech, and the Supreme Court concurred.
Similarly, the freedom of conscience comes into play with what Harris said are “intrusive training” methodologies in which world views and theories aren’t shared, but required.
In North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students task force report, teachers and parents anonymously provided testimony and examples of curriculums of what they were seeing in North Carolina classrooms.
One teacher alleged in the report that white staff members were told that they were unaware of their racism and required to attend “professional development” sessions related to “microaggression” and “equity” as it relates to race and gender.
Porter’s Case
What brought Harris’ client, Stephen Porter, to the attention of his faculty members at NCSU was his blog posts challenging the social justice ideologies of his department.
“Faculty at public universities have the right to speak as private citizens on matters of public concern,” Harris said. “When a faculty member or public employee has a private blog in which they express their opinions about important societal issues, they have the right to free speech to do that.”
Porter told The Epoch Times that for three years his own department has been attempting to isolate and drain him of resources in retaliation for opposing “the broader push for social justice ideologies within our college.”
After writing a blog criticizing the Association for the Study of Higher Education research conference, which he said had become a “woke joke,” the president of the conference, during her keynote speech, had a picture of Porter behind her at the conference, where he said, “she spent 10 minutes castigating me and my blog posts, accusing me of white fragility.”
In addition, Porter said the department had engaged in untested research methodologies to inquire about diversity being taught in the classroom.
“My background is in survey methodology, so, not realizing this would start a furor, I began asking simple questions,” Porter said.
In the lawsuit, Porter alleged that he had been “systematically excluded” from meetings and activities related to higher education programs and the advising of students, which Porter said prevented him from getting new advisees.
As Porter experienced his own “death by a thousand cuts,” he said he slipped into depression, concerned that he was going to lose his job and the means to provide for his family.
After meeting with Harris and filing the lawsuit, he said he’s in “a much better place, particularly since we filed.”
“I feel like I’m fighting back for my rights, and quite honestly, I’m doing this to restore my job to what it was a few years ago,” he said.
Another reason he filed the lawsuit was to give others the courage to take a stand.
“This is happening in universities around the country,” Porter said. “People are afraid to speak up, and I’d like to provide an example that says, ‘It’s possible to stand up for yourself and fight for your rights. It’s OK to be a conservative in academia, although my colleagues would obviously disagree.’”
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for NCSU said the university does not comment on pending litigation.
LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va.—Hundreds of protesters rallied in Loudoun County to voice their objection over a recently adopted pro-transgender policy. The event occurred outside the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) administration building on Sept. 28, an hour before the school board meeting.
The policy, also known as policy 8040 (pdf), requires LCPS staff to address students with their preferred pronouns and allows transgender students access to bathrooms and locker rooms according to their self-identified gender. It also requires all LCPS staff to “complete training on topics relating to LGBTQ+ students” and schools to create more single-user restrooms within the next five years. It was adopted on Aug. 11, before the start of the current school year.
For the county parents, the pro-transgender policy was just one out of many issues they had with the Loudoun County School Board (LCSB). “Trust,” or instead, the loss of trust, was often mentioned in rally speeches and during public comment at LCSB meetings since June 22, at which two LCPS residents were arrested after the superintendent Scott Ziegler declared the meeting an “unlawful assembly.”
“I’m even thinking about sending my kids to school with a body cam. When they get into the class, start recording. Because we’re not in the classroom,” said an LCPS parent at the rally. Another LCPS parent said during public comment of the LCSB meeting, “The parents of Loudoun trusted that the members of the board would have our children’s best interests in mind when making decisions; that trust is lost.”
Ian Prior, executive director of Fight for Schools, said that the LCSB needed to act like elected officials and “stop acting like a politburo” that wants to take away parents’ responsibility of raising their children. “If you want to take that responsibility from me, you’re going to have to pry it from my cold, dead hands,” warned Prior. On Aug. 25, Fight for Schools filed a petition in the Loudoun County Circuit Court to recall LCSB member Beth Barts. The next court hearing is scheduled for Oct. 5.
A woman holding a sign at a rally outside the Loudoun County Public Schools administration building in Ashburn, Va., on Sept. 28, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
On Sept. 23, the LCPS changed the rules of public participation at LCSB meetings, again. It asked registered speakers to show proof of residence in the county, following changes that took away public viewing during public comment in August. Public participation didn’t dwindle as a result. Instead, the number of registered in-person speakers at the Sept. 28 meeting was 82, more than the 70 at the previous session on Sept. 14.
Andrea Weiskopf, an LCPS teacher, was the only in-person speaker supporting the LCSB. “Will you fight so that it will be pretty clear that they will benefit, that all children of Loudoun will feel like they belong? Cui bono [for whom it benefits]?” she asked. She wrote in a tweet about her plan to “incorporate critical race theory into my lessons” during the summer. On Aug. 24, Weiskopf posted another tweet asking for lesson plans “designed to indoctrinate students.” The LCPS has repeatedly said that it doesn’t teach critical race theory.
The following is an installment in a weekly series of commentary articles by Cameron Arcand, founder of the conservative commentary website Young Not Stupid and a contributor to The Western Journal.
From the moment I arrived at Arizona State University last month, the faculty stressed the importance of diversity and inclusion in the college community.
In fact, ASU’s charter says the school is “measured not by whom we exclude, but rather by whom we include and how they succeed.”
One of the oft-mentioned tenets of this creed is the need to respect others’ political affiliations, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has given ASU a green light for its First Amendment policies.
But a recent incident shows that although the university promotes ideological diversity on paper, the student body still has work to do when it comes to political tolerance.
A viral video from the “multicultural space” on ASU’s Tempe campus features liberal students arguing with two conservative students.
A woman confronts the conservative men over a laptop sticker that says “Police Lives Matter.”
“What did I do wrong?” the student with the pro-police sticker asks.
“You’re offensive. Police lives matter?” the woman recording the scene says.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
The argument continues, with the woman saying the men are “making the space uncomfortable.”
“But you’re white!” the woman says. “Do you understand what a multicultural space [is]? It means you’re not being centered.”
“White’s not a culture?” says one of the men, who is wearing a “Did Not Vote For Biden” T-shirt.
“No, it’s not a culture. White is not a culture,” the woman says. “This is the violence that ASU does and this is the type of people that they protect. OK? This white man thinks he can take up our space.”
When one of the students says he’s not racist, the woman responds, “You are racist. Your sticker’s racist.” When he apologizes and says he didn’t mean to offend anyone, another woman says, “But this offends us automatically because these people kill people like me and like us, right? So you’re promoting our murderers.”
In the full video, the two men eventually leave as the situation escalates.
ASU’s dean of students released a statement condemning the altercation.Does the left really value ideological diversity?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
“The Dean of Students Office is aware of the incident between a handful of students that was captured in a video circulated on social media. The Dean of Students Office will be discussing it with all involved,” the statement said.
“ASU is a community of more than 100,000 people from all 50 states and more than 150 countries. Differences of opinion are part of the university experience. The university expects respectful dialogue between students in all engagements.”
It’s clear that ASU’s administration is trying to attract and appease left-wing students and faculty, and will likely sweep this incident under the rug.
With that being said, it is undeniable that the university has a significant conservative plurality, making it more reflective of the nature of American politics than many schools.
Let’s be honest: ASU is no University of California, Berkeley, when it comes to leftist hostility.
But this video shows that its political climate leaves a lot to be desired. All students must do a better job respecting the ideological diversity the school claims to value.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki has a habit of responding to difficult questions with sarcasm, condescension or downright snark. Earlier this week, she appeared to get so miffed by a press query that she forgot to mask up.
At the end of her Monday media briefing, Psaki was gathering up her notes to exit the White House briefing room when a reporter — as they are wont to do — shouted a parting question to her about President Joe Biden’s poll numbers.
“The president’s polling continues to collapse–” the reporter began, but Psaki quickly spoke over her.
“I know you like to shout at the end. Next time we’ll do it during the briefing,” she replied in a sarcastic, condescending tone.
Psaki then put on an artificial smile, walked off the stage, and in a voice still dripping with snark, repeated “thanks everyone,” and “thank you so much” before finally leaving the briefing room.
Psaki often appears to work hard to convey the kind of cool and in-control demeanor that made Trump supporters such big fans of White House press secretaries Sarah Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany, who expertly thwarted the attacks of the activist media on a routine basis without batting an eye.
Yet Psaki was clearly bothered by this comment, as she left the stage without obediently remasking as she was finished speaking, as per White House guidelines.
Lately, Psaki has typically paused when she is finished with her briefing to put her mask back on, during which time it is normal for reporters to shout out last-minute questions they’re hoping she’ll answer.Is this another case of Democrats’ double standards?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Reporters, of course, remain masked during the whole of the briefings as the White House requires. The guidelines were reimposed over the summer after a brief pause in the practice before the delta variant prompted a fresh wave of COVID scares.
At the time, as The New York Times reported, Psaki said she was prepared to wear masks again, although she does not appear to be required to do so while giving briefings.
When President Donald Trump was in office, he was roundly criticized both for his treatment of the establishment media and his own failure to wear a mask in public.
The Biden administration, for which Psaki is the chief spokeswoman, promised to be the administration that was going to play by the rules and respect our nation’s free press.
And here Psaki is, throwing shade at reporters and forsaking masks that she herself has insisted are necessary to save lives.
The Democrats seem to genuinely believe that what they expect of everyone else — particularly us plebs in the American public — doesn’t apply to them.
After all, during Monday’s briefing, Psaki had been pressed on a comment that Biden made Friday while meeting with Indian Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which he’d disparaged the American press on a hot mic and suggested the Indian media was “better behaved.”
As the New York Post reported, several reporters had taken their grievances to Psaki immediately after Biden’s Oval Office meeting with Modi, and Psaki was then grilled about the incident on Monday.
Maybe this was why she was feeling so annoyed with the press pool and distracted to the point that she forgot to dutifully swath her face before leaving the podium.
She’d already fielded a question on why Biden would suggest that the American media is worse than the Indian media when the latter nation ranks 142nd in the world for press freedoms, so perhaps a question on the president’s dropping polling numbers was just too much for her to handle.
Yes, it certainly can’t be easy being the press secretary for the disastrous Biden administration and being expected to live up to all those lofty goals it set for itself by slandering and smearing the unwashed, unmasked masses who criticize the media.
Over the weekend, House Democrats reportedly snuck a provision into the controversial $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill that could raise the fines for violating the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate from $14,000 per violation to $70,000 per violation, and “willful” and “repeat” violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations could cost some businesses a shocking $700,000 per incident.
“Buried on page 168 of the House Democrats’ 2,465-page mega bill is a tenfold increase in fines for employers that ‘willfully,’ ‘repeatedly,’ or even seriously violate a section of labor law that deals with hazards, death, or serious physical harm to their employees,” Forbes reported Tuesday.
“The increased fines on employers could run as high as $70,000 for serious infractions, and $700,000 for willful or repeated violations—almost three-quarters of a million dollars for each fine,” the outlet noted, adding that if the provision is “enacted into law, vax enforcement could bankrupt non-compliant companies even more quickly than the $14,000 OSHA fine anticipated under Biden’s announced mandate.”
The Biden administration may have begun laying the groundwork for this change over the summer when OSHA “published an emergency Covid-19 rule in the Federal Register taking jurisdiction over and providing justification for Covid-19 being a workplace hazard for healthcare employment.” That jurisdiction currently covers “encouraging” vaccines.
Early in September, Biden announced his 100-or-more employee Covid-19 vaccine mandate and tasked OSHA with drafting an enforcement rule to exert emergency vaccine compliance authority over companies with 100 or more employees.
The legislative provision that passed the Budget Committee raises the OSHA fines for non-compliance 10 times higher – and up to $700,000 for each “willful” or “repeated” violation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not announced when the House will vote on the reconciliation bill that includes the new OSHA fines.
If the legislation is enacted, OSHA could levy draconian fines to enforce Biden’s vaccine mandate, a move that could rapidly bankrupt non-compliant companies. The Biden mandate affects employers collectively employing an estimated 80 millionworkers.
The new OSHA regulations are expected to build on the existing “general duty” requirements, which currently demand health care workplaces implement an “infection-control plan developed with worker participation” and mandate “the wearing of masks and respirators,” as well as “Covid-19 screenings at entry points. The current regulation “compels paid time off for employees to get vaccinated or recover from a shot’s side effects.”
OSHA has shown a willingness, particularly in the Biden administration to pursue “willful” violations of this clause. According to Bloomberg Law, “President Joe Biden‘s OSHA, which June 10 released an emergency rule limited to health-care employers, has used the general duty clause against several types of workplaces, from a mobile phone repair shop to a medical clinic. It twice has alleged willful violations, which carry a maximum fine of $136,532.”
The prosecutable “illful” violations included a workplace that specifically did not allow employees to wear masks, and one workplace where a health care provider allegedly continued to work after becoming infected with COVID-19, “passing the virus to co-workers.”
Congress has also been tasked with increasing OSHA’s capacity for enforcing its COVID-19 regulations: the administration’s Biden fiscal 2022 budget requests that “OSHA’s enforcement staff…grow to 1,545 positions in 2022, a 15% increase.”
They say when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When it comes to Vice President Kamala Harris, she can count on energetic admirers in the press who take on the task of making lemonade out of her lemons.
Take Washington Post White House reporter Cleve Wootson Jr., who accentuated the positive in a Sunday story headlined “Handed a pile of no-win issues, Harris builds a network: Gains credit with liberals focused on migration, abortion and the vote.”
One would think that being handed “volatile social issues” such as illegal immigration, abortion and voting rights may be very damaging for Harris. But no! Wootson touted that, “behind the scenes, Harris has been quietly seizing the opportunity to build a liberal national network of dedicated activists that is convinced she embraces its causes.”
Wootson found delighted leftists who appreciate the allyship of Harris. “Advocates invited to the White House, or to Harris’s ceremonial office in the adjacent Eisenhower Executive Office Building, often express appreciation that their opinions and standing are being amplified by a political star.”
Is this reporting? Or merely advertising? Cuddly Cleve has a way with sweet talk.
The story began with Harris meeting with abortion advocate Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Women’s Health in Austin, Texas. Miller said she appreciated how Harris would “talk straight to the extreme politicians in this country,” and she meant Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
That’s fascinating. The House of Representatives just passed a bill called the “Women’s Health Protection Act” with 218 of 219 Democrats that is so extreme on untrammeled abortion that it would require states to allow abortions of an unborn baby viable outside the womb if one physician can proclaim that an abortion would protect the woman’s health. An army of Gov. Ralph Northams could make post-birth abortions happen across America.
But sure, tag the anti-abortion Republicans as the “extreme politicians in this country.”
Liberal extremism is no vice in the pursuit of the presidency. Wootson added, “If Harris has a path to the presidency, it is likely to run through an energized liberal base — not, as it did for Biden, through blocs of centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans.”
Political scientist Matthew Wilson argued that Harris doesn’t need to be broadly popular to win the presidency, but can triumph as the “champion of a base cause.”
The Washington Post story noted Harris was “dogged” by Republicans on the issue of “irregular migration.” She was hounded as the “border czar” who wouldn’t go to the border. But when she (sort of) went there in June, to El Paso, it was a triumph with her base.
Fernando Garcia of the left-wing Border Network for Human Rights, a group bearing hashtags such as “#HugsNotWalls,” told Wootson, “I made remarks in regard to not forgetting our history — this border, the U.S.-Mexico border, is the new Ellis Island. And then when she went over and had a press conference at the hangar, she said the same thing.”
Wootson concluded the story by telling readers that an audience with Harris gives activists the proverbial “seat at the table,” and then they will feel they are heard and this will make them more open to “bring about a Harris administration,” whenever Joe Biden isn’t going to be president anymore.
“She’s breaking ground, and Black women will keep fighting and keep supporting her,” said Melanie Campbell of the Black Women’s Roundtable, another leftist collective.
Harris is not exactly holding a pile of press conferences, so almost no one can name her press secretary. But keep an eye out for Wootson. He’s making a good case for himself.
There’s the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs” but the real war our leaders fight with any perspicacity is the “War on Truth,” second only to that even older, perhaps oldest and most crucial of all, wars known colloquially as CYA.
The latter is fought to the bitter end and takes precedence.
We find this on display frequently in Washington, D.C. and Sept 28 was no exception.
During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, both Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley and U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth McKenzie insisted, under oath, they had advised against President Biden’s precipitous and, to be as polite as humanly possible, ill-conceived exit plan from Afghanistan.
Milley said he urged Biden to leave 2,500 troops in place. This would have left enough military to guard Bagram air base and prevent it becoming the staging area for the Chinese air force it likely will become.
They also would have been able to arrange for either the destruction or the recovering of the 80+ billion dollars of U.S. weaponry, much of it high-tech, now in Taliban (and therefore Chinese, Russian and Iranian) hands.
It goes without saying too, most importantly, an operable Bagram could have saved myriad lives, American and Afghan, and would continue to do so.
President Biden denied hearing any of this. Or, more precisely, he didn’t recall hearing this.
The real question is—was he lying? Most likely, yes. From law school onwards he has plagiarized and lied multiple times. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, as they say.
But there are other possibilities.
One is that President Biden’s cognitive issues are so severe that he couldn’t understand or actually allow himself to hear what the generals were advising. He had been so completely locked into an idée fixe of getting out of Afghanistan on whatever schedule he thought politically useful (Sept. 11?) nothing permeated.
A yet more disturbing alternative is that he was counseled against the generals’ view by some of his own advisors. Normally, that would make little sense, considering the disaster that occurred, but many actions of the Biden administration can be read as being against the long-term interests of the United States, actually weakening it deliberately, and in favor of the globalists or the Chinese communists, assuming they are not, in reality, one and the same.
The recent indictments and leaks from the Durham investigation lend credence to this possibility. Many of the officials in the Biden administration, in the State Department and elsewhere, are holdovers from the Obama administration, just in different positions as if reseated in a game of musical chairs.
How many of these people really want a strong U.S. military in a position to be guardians of the free world as it has been for decades? Wouldn’t they prefer it to fall apart? It’s worth thinking about.
But enough “paranoid” speculation. What about the head man in this CYA fiesta, General Milley?
When Sen. Tom Cotton, among others, asked Milley why he didn’t resign after the Afghanistan debacle, he replied as follows:
“Senator, as a senior military officer, resigning is a really serious thing—it’s a political act—if I’m resigning in protest. My job is to provide advice—my statutory responsibility is to provide legal advice or best military advice to the president, and that’s my legal requirement.”
Perhaps the general has short-term memory loss.
No American general in this century has been more overtly “political” than he.
Has he forgotten that for some time he has been referred to as the “woke” general?
Nothing is more political than “woke.” Indeed, that is its intention, to turn everything in our lives into politics—the food we eat, the air we breath, our educational system, our entertainment, our press, who gets a job, who gets promoted, who appears in a commercial, who goes to a restaurant, what we can say on social media, who’s skin color is best, who’s the biggest victim, what sex we declare ourselves to be, our pronouns and on and on.
Not very long ago, General Milley made a speech sympathetic to that flagship of “woke”—critical race theory. That the chairman of the joint chiefs would do that is astonishing and, in a sense, revolutionary.
He has, in effect, politicized the military that is supposed, for very good reason, including winning wars, to be neutral.
Also with good reason, we could dub him General “Woke.”
But now, of all a sudden, in Senate testimony, he self-righteously claims the military should not be politicized. He would never do such a thing.
Actually his vision of politicization is, in itself, completely politicized. He wouldn’t resign from Biden, no matter what the issue, and the current one is unbelievably extreme, but could well have resigned from Trump.
It wasn’t that long ago that he made a public apology for merely accompanying the then president to the torched St. John’s Church:
“I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics. As a commissioned uniformed officer, it was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it.”
Learn what exactly? That the chairman of the joint chiefs is a hypocrite? We certainly learned that.
During his questioning by Sen. Marsha Blackburn we also learned Milley is a kind of creepy gossip who likes to make sure the likes of Bob Woodward know the general’s side of the story for the journalist’s forthcoming—is it fiction or non-fiction— best seller. After all, General “Woke’s” legacy is in play.
I’m not going to go into the telephone calls to the Chinese general, interesting as that may be, because I suspect more facts will be coming out.
What I will say is that, as usual “woke”—or in this case General “Woke”—is the opposite of really woke. What business was it of his to supersede the commander-in-chief and telegraph our intentions to the enemy?
Milley seemed to think that was his job, that he was just being internationally “woke.” Many would disagree.
Yes, CYA trumped the War on Truth, as it almost always does, in Washington Tuesday.
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