Epps admitted to trespassing, directing protesters to go into the Capitol. ‘I wish I could take that back,’ he told agents.

When James Ray Epps Sr. first called the FBI regarding his January 2021 activities in Washington D.C., he didn’t mention how he implored protesters in several locations to go inside the Capitol, but he later told an agent that he expected a bomb would detonate on a side street near the Capitol.

Those are just two of the revelations in a collection of Epps-related material obtained by The Epoch Times, including FBI interview summaries, FBI audio recordings, transcripts, videos, and photographs.

In two interviews with the FBI in 2021, Epps explained his actions on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6. He admitted he was guilty of trespassing on restricted Capitol grounds and confessed to urging protesters to go to—and into—the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Despite the admissions, the FBI never arrested Epps and he was not charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with any Jan. 6 crimes. The non-action has fueled a crop of theories that he might have been working for the FBI or another agency.

Epps, 61, has repeatedly denied those suggestions through his attorney.

Epps recently sold his house and land in Queen Creek, Arizona, because of threats and harassment and moved to Colorado, he told the New York Times in July. According to online records, the Arizona property sold for $2.2 million on April 28, 2022.

Epps at one time was No. 16 on the FBI’s Jan. 6 most-wanted page. His entry was later scrubbed from the list without explanation. He is among a handful of persons of interest to have their photos deleted from the FBI site.

‘Like a Terrorist Act’

In an interview with FBI agents on March 3, 2021, Epps said he brought a first-aid kit in his backpack to Washington because he expected a terror attack.

“Yeah, I thought there might be a problem. That’s why I was there,” Epps told an FBI agent and an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer in a meeting at the Phoenix office of Epps’s attorney, John Blischak.

Blischak told The Epoch Times he would comment after reviewing the FBI interview summary, but had not done so by press time.

“I was afraid they were going to set off an explosion on one of the side streets,” Epps said, according to a recording of the interview obtained by The Epoch Times. “So we tried to stay in the middle, tried to get there early, tried to stay away from the sides. And if something like that happened, I had a first-aid kit. I could help out.”

Epps told the agents the possibility of violence weighed heavily on his mind and he originally did not plan to travel to Washington. It was only when learning that his son, James Epps Jr., was going to the Trump rally that the senior Epps decided to go and keep an eye on his son, he said.

“As time went on, I started getting a bad feeling like something’s gonna happen,” said Epps, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Oath Keepers leader in Arizona. “There’s a lot of wackies out there. I thought something would happen in D.C. I thought there might be, what do they call them, EOD, something like that?”

Epps might have been referring to an improvised explosive device (IED), which is a homemade bomb that was a favorite weapon of insurgents in Afghanistan during the United States’ long war there. In military parlance, an EOD refers to an explosive ordnance disposal specialist—someone who defuses and destroys explosives.

An agent asked for clarification: “Oh, you mean like a terrorist act?”

“Right, like a terrorist act,” Epps said.

The agents did not press Epps on what led him to believe there would be an explosion, nor did they ask about the two alleged pipe bombs found outside the Republican and Democrat party headquarters, each just blocks from the Capitol. The RNC pipe bomb was placed near the corner of the Capitol Hill Club facing a side street, similar to the description Epps offered.

The devices did not detonate and the FBI has not arrested anyone in those cases.

Epps told the FBI he regretted the things he said in downtown Washington the night of Jan. 5, 2021. He spoke to internet personality Baked Alaska and video podcaster Villain Report, both of whom recorded their exchanges.

“In fact tomorrow, I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. …I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol,” Epps told Baked Alaska, whose legal name is Anthime Gionet.

Epps shouted a similar theme to the crowd at large: “Tomorrow, we need to go into the Capitol. Into the Capitol. Peacefully,” he said. The crowd then started chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed! Fed!”

The FBI agents told Epps that his statements on Jan. 5 were problematic. They said they found him often on video and in photographs from Jan. 5 and 6.

Epps replied: “I’m the tallest guy in the crowd, and I stick out, man. They followed me.” Then he joked, “I could never be a bank robber.”

“We said that the same way,” one of the agents said. “We said, ‘It’s a big guy and every photo we find, he’s in it.’ The night before, that video didn’t help.

“…And the video the night before, what you said basically predicted what happened,” the agent said.

“I wish I could take that back,” Epps replied. He called the statements “really stupid.”

On Jan. 6, Epps was filmed near the Washington Monument imploring the crowd, “We are going to the Capitol, where our problems are. It’s that direction. Please spread the word.”

When speaking to a young man in a red and black mackinaw jacket, Epps said, “When we go in, leave this here [pointing to something]. You don’t need to get shot,” according to a video of the exchange.

First Call to FBI on Jan. 8

Epps first called the FBI on Jan. 8, 2021, after his brother-in-law notified Epps’s wife that a photograph of Epps was on the FBI website. That call to the National Threat Operations Center (NTOC) lasted about 27 minutes, according to an audio file of the call obtained by The Epoch Times.

In describing his activities, Epps never mentioned that he urged the crowds on Jan. 5 to go into the Capitol the next day. He said he went down to Black Lives Matter plaza to try to calm things down after people he suspected were Antifa activists were harassing police.

“I tried to calm them down,” Epps told the FBI operator. “I tried to let them know that, you know, that this is not what we’re here for. We’re here because of the Constitution, not the police. Police are on our side.”

Nor did Epps mention getting on a bullhorn on Jan. 6 and encouraging people to go to the Capitol as soon as President Donald Trump was finished speaking. He would comment on those topics nearly two months later when interviewed by FBI agents.

On the January call, Epps insisted his presence on Capitol grounds was to de-escalate when things got violent.

“I am guilty of being there and probably trespassing,” he said. “But I had a reason. I was trying to calm ’em down. I wanted to be there, but I’m trying to calm ’em down. Anything I can do to help. There’s no call for that kind of behavior. I will be your witness.”

Epps told the agents he came to Washington to express his concerns about the 2020 presidential election. He said he received five ballots at his Queen Creek address: one each for him and his wife, and three with names he did not recognize.

“We’ve owned the property for 11 years now. I’ve never heard of those three people that came there. I didn’t recognize the names,” he said. “And then when the election went the way it did, I was a little concerned. I mean, how many apartments are there in Arizona, 3 million? And if they’re sending all these ballots to these different apartments. I mean, you know, that’s a concern.”

Epps said he also went to support Trump, although he did not stay at the Ellipse for all of  Trump’s speech. He said he followed crowds that left the speech early and walked toward the Capitol.

“People started leaving early after President Trump started speaking. So they were running and it was the same people that was, ‘F Antifa,’ and this and that and the other,” Epps said.

“I believe, just my belief, they were Antifa, the ones that were saying that stuff,” he said. “And they were like running that way and I’m like, ‘Maybe I can calm this down.’ So I went with them.”

Epps said it was his original intention to stay for all of the speeches at the Ellipse.

“I planned on being and word was being passed around that right after he gets done speaking, we’re gonna go to the Capitol. And it was a given,” Epps said. “So spread the word spread the word. So I started spreading the word and I said that to a lot of people there: ‘We’re going to the Capitol right after the president speaks.’”

Perhaps the scene that drew the most attention and speculation about Epps on January 6 was when he appeared at the first breach point of police lines. Some 20 minutes before Trump finished speaking at the Ellipse, an aggressive crowd gathered at a lightly defended barrier on a sidewalk not far from the Peace Monument.

As rioters began yanking at the bicycle-rack barriers, Epps pulled Ryan Samsel back from the front line and spoke in his ear. Seconds after that exchange, Samsel and others knocked down the barrier, causing one officer to fall back and hit her head on the concrete.

“I walked up to him, and I put my arm on him and said, ‘Hey, that’s not why we’re here. Don’t be doing that,’ you know.

“I don’t know who he was. No clue,” Epps said. “I just tried to talk him out of doing what he was doing. And then all of a sudden, it blew up.”

When interviewed by an FBI special agent and a detective on Jan. 30, 2021, Samsel corroborated Epps’s description of their brief verbal exchange, according to a transcript of the session obtained by The Epoch Times. Samsel faces nearly a dozen January 6-related charges in U.S. District Court in Washington.

“Now that guy I talked to,” Samsel said, pointing to a photograph of Epps. “He came up to me and he says, ‘Dude,’ his exact words were, ‘Relax,’ he says, ‘The cops are doing their job.’ That’s exactly what he says to me right there in that picture.”

Inconsistencies in Interviews

Epps’s two interviews with the FBI included some inconsistencies and changed details, according to the recordings and FBI summary documents.

Epps told the FBI on Jan. 8 that his brother-in-law called him to notify him his picture was on the FBI’s January 6 website. During his March 3 interview with FBI agents, Epps said, “Someone contacted me and said, ‘Hey, your picture’s up.’”

When asked about his brother-in-law later in the interview, Epps said, “He didn’t call me, he called my sister.” Then his wife interjected, “That was me. And I can tell you exactly because he sent me a text, actually.”

When asked about who was with him on Jan. 5 and 6, Epps replied, “My son.” A short while later he said, “I think he had a friend there. He did have a friend there. I don’t know his name.”

One of the agents said he recalled that on the Jan. 8 phone call with the FBI, Epps said he went sightseeing on Jan. 7. “No, we did that the day before,” he told the agent. A few minutes later, however, this detail changed. “Oh, you know what? The next day we did, no, we got up that morning and we went to the Vietnam Memorial.”

In both contacts with the FBI, Epps asked if his photo could be removed from the FBI’s Jan. 6 page. In the Jan. 8 call, the FBI operator said she had nothing to do with FBI web content. In the March 3 interview, he was given a more discouraging take.

“That picture is probably still out there, will probably be there forever now,” one of the agents told him.

Epps said the notoriety of being publicly listed as a person of interest had caused problems.

“Well, we’ve felt the repercussions. I mean, we’ve had people come on our business site and try to destroy us,” he said. “I’m an insurrectionist, I’m a traitor. I’ve been called everything in the book, but it’s dying down now—I hope.”

The agents asked Epps if his views had changed since Jan. 6.

“I still have concerns about the election. I do. I mean, I think everybody does,” Epps said. “I think our politicians, some of them need to be in jail. I think you guys need to investigate them. I don’t know. How much of what we get is the truth? I don’t know. Not even worth watching the news anymore. Because they just make it up as they go.”

Epps met twice with the House of Representatives’ Jan. 6 Select Committee, including a transcribed interview in January 2022. Committee members seemed satisfied with what Epps told them. No transcript of the session has been released.

“Mr. Epps informed us that he was not employed by, working with, or acting at the direction of any law enforcement agency on January 5th or 6th or at any other time, and that he has never been an informant for the FBI or any other law enforcement agency,” a spokesman said in January.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) grilled top FBI officials about Epps in a January hearing, but received a repeated refrain: “I can’t answer that.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A California teacher who bragged about using his position to radicalize students into far-left “revolutionaries” has been given three years of pay by his school district to resign, according to a report.

Gabriel Gipe, a teacher of Advanced Placement government at Inderkum High School, agreed in January to leave his post with a $190,000 payout from the Natomas Unified School District, according to The Sacramento Bee, citing district records.

Gipe, whose annual base salary is about $60,000, received a final paycheck of about $100,000 after taxes were withheld, according to the newspaper.

The teacher drew outrage from the school district community last year after he was featured in a video by undercover news organization Project Veritas.

In the video footage, Gipe says he gave students extra credit for them to attend left-wing events, including counter-protests to the “right-wing rallies.” He also allegedly kept track of his students’ political inclinations to make sure they drifted further left as time went on.

“So, they take an ideology quiz and I put [the results] on the [classroom] wall. Every year, they get further and further left,” he tells the undercover journalist, who was posing as a left-wing sympathizer.

“I’m like, ‘These ideologies are considered extreme, right? Extreme times breed extreme ideologies.’ Right? There is a reason why Generation Z, these kids, are becoming further and further left.”

Gipe says he displayed on his classroom wall an Antifa flag, which he claimed was “meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable.” The video footage also shows a poster of Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong on a wall in the teacher’s classroom.

When asked about his views on the Chinese Communist Party, Gipe says in the video footage that Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which took place after a disastrous economic campaign that triggered mass starvation and famine, provides lessons for how socialism can take root inside the United States.

“You need propaganda of the deed—your economics—and cultural propaganda as well. You need to retrain the way people think,” he says. “We have to hit both fronts. We have to convince people that this [socialism] is what we actually need.”

Later, when a Project Veritas reporter confronted Gipe on the street, the teacher was wearing a T-shirt with a hammer and sickle on the front. Gipe didn’t respond to the reporter’s questions regarding his persuading of students to adopt far-left ideologies.

Following parents’ outrage, the school district placed Gipe on unpaid leave pending an investigation, acknowledging that Gipe’s “educational approach” was “disturbing and [undermined] the public’s trust.”

An administrative judge later ordered that Gipe be put on paid leave as the district’s investigation continued.

The report of the investigation revealed more details about Gipe’s problematic conduct, including replacing typical AP government curriculum with lectures about communism and pinning photos of students who expressed conservative ideas on a wall next to a swastika.

“You used your position of authority with a captive audience of impressionable teenagers to promote your own political ideology, including advocating or teaching communism with the intent to indoctrinate or inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism,” the district report reads, according to The Sacramento Bee.

In response to a request for additional information, the Natomas Unified School District officials said in a statement that they have put the matter behind them.

“We have put this behind us and have moved forward,” the statement reads. “What’s most important right now is welcoming our students back to the start of a new school year.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Still looking for hand-outs despite the fact that African people have been immigrating here for over a hundred years. White workers in factories, mines, etc. could be considered slaves as well. Get over yourself and start working on improving yourselves instead of trying to further weaken what is (by far) the most free nation on the planet [US Patriot]

The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the United Nations to demand that Joe Biden “take immediate, tangible measures,” including reparations, to “dismantle structural racism” in the United States.

The groups are recommending that the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which will meet later this month, order the United States to “provide effective remedies, including reparations for racial discrimination, including ongoing structural discrimination that flows from the legacies of slavery.”

The ACLU, which ostensibly advocates for Americans’ civil liberties regardless of politics, has a long history of defending left-wing policies. The group in April said it would use “the full force of the law” to allow children to undergo transgender hormone treatment. The ACLU is also a top advocate for the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Human Rights Watch also routinely criticizes the Jewish state, with Ben and Jerry’s basing its anti-Israel boycott on advice from a high-ranking Human Rights Watch employee. Ben and Jerry’s parent company overruled the anti-Semitic boycott following widespread criticism.

While the groups note that Joe Biden has criticized “systemic racism,” they say the president has not gone far enough.

“The Biden administration has shown it can name the problem, but the time has come to take bolder action to radically transform these abusive systems and fully implement U.S. human rights obligations,” ACLU human rights director Jamil Dakwar said in a statement.

One such “bolder action,” the groups say, is creating “a commission to study the need for reparations and develop specific remedies for the enslavement of people in the United States and its myriad legacies.” The ACLU and Human Rights Watch want the government to work against anything that has “a racist effect or impact,” such as “mass incarceration” and concentration of wealth.

Barrington Martin II, a national director of the patriotic group Our America, called the groups’ actions “preposterous” and “oxymoronic.”

“There is not one law on the books or any institution within the United States that seeks to oppress or subjugate any individual or group on the basis of race,” Martin told the Free Beacon. “People from all across the world have come to the United States for decades because of the freedom and equal opportunity America offers for all.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Gabriel Nadales and Barrington Martin II say young Americans should ‘speak confidently about why they love this country’

After turning away from left-wing politics, a former Antifa activist and Democratic politician are launching a new campaign to challenge what they see as pervasive anti-Americanism among the country’s youth.

Gabriel Nadales, an Antifa protester turned conservative activist, and Barrington Martin II, a former Democratic congressional candidate, launched a half-million-dollar ad buy last week through their new group Our America, aimed at empowering young people across the United States to “celebrate a pride in, connection to, and a responsibility for our community and country.” The organization, whose advisory team includes conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, will also spend $2 million to produce online content that promotes what they say are America’s unifying values: patriotism, freedom of expression, respect, dignity, and equal opportunity.

“Our America is specifically here to give people the full faith and confidence to be able to speak confidently about why they love this country,” Martin, who primaried the late Democratic congressman John Lewis (Ga.) in 2020, told the Washington Free Beacon. “When I say ‘I love this country, it’s one of the greatest gifts in the world,’ you shouldn’t scoff at me when we are all Americans.”

Just 58 percent of Americans ages 18-29 believe the United States is “one of the greatest countries” in the world, according to a Pew Research survey in December, compared with 75 percent of Americans across all age groups. Nadales and Martin aim to bolster patriotic views among young Americans by challenging the narrative, promoted by left-wing media, politicians, and activists, that America is systemically racist and oppressive. Left-wing pundits like MSNBC host Al Sharpton, for example, spent Independence Day criticizing the United States, saying, “We’ve gone from Jim Crow to Jane Crow.” Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes that same month called the founding of the United States “awful.”

Still, almost 90 percent of Americans of all races “love” the United States, Our America polling shared with the Free Beacon shows. Yet the minority of the population who believe America is racist and evil are the loudest voices in the room, Martin said.

Nadales, who came to the United States from Mexico as a child, said his public school education encouraged him to believe that America hates immigrants like himself. Nadales said he was recruited by the left-wing movement Antifa, known for its violent rioting and looting in cities such as Portland during the Trump administration, before he graduated high school.

After he became disillusioned with the group’s political extremism, however, he said he realized the far-left movement is a symptom of the division plaguing America.

“They’re incredibly dangerous, and they represent what is wrong with America today that people are so divided that they’re willing to go fight on the streets and recommend violence against one another,” Nadales said.

Nadales said Our America hopes to provide an uplifting message about the United States, bridging political differences with peaceful civil discourse.

“The American dream is not about having a fancy car,” Nadales said. “It’s the idea that we are not subject to the government. We are free people who are masters of our destinies. We can make our choices and we have the ability to choose to succeed. Your life is up to you and no one can take that away from you.”

Our America, which has 125,000 email subscribers after launching two months ago, will air its ads on TBS, TNT, BET, Univision, and MTV.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

WILL REPUBLICAN LAWMAKERS INSIST DAN PRZYGODA IS ALLOWED NOWHERE NEAR THE CAPITOL, AFTER THESE REVELATIONS?

A producer working for the Congressional January 6th Committee posted violent threats towards President Trump supporters and Republican politicians, The National Pulse can exclusively reveal.

The unearthed posts from Twitter are the latest piece of evidence undercutting the alleged independent, nonpartisan efforts of the committee, as well as the hypocrisy of those now claiming to be working to expose violence towards elected officials or law enforcement. The news comes after the committee’s own chairman, Bennie Thompson, was exposed for his links to violent, secessionist movements in the 1960s and 70s.

But producer Dan Przygoda’s threats aren’t 50 or 60 years old. In fact, they appear to have been posted on the day of President Trump’s inauguration, on January 20th, 2017. On the same day, violent left-wing activists descended on Washington, D.C., burning cars, assaulting people, and smashing windows. On that day, at least 217 people were arrested. It is unclear if any of them were incited by Przygoda’s Twitter feed.

The House Select Committee on January 6th hired Przygoda in June 2022 to assist the staging of a series of hearings televised to the American public, many in prime time. Przygoda previously worked for ABC News, Bloomberg, and Good Morning America.

On the afternoon Trump’s inauguration – as AntiFa activists rampaged through the nation’s capital – Przygoda tweeted that he would be “getting this new attachment for my car when I drive around Trump country…” Included in the tweet was a short, black-and-white animation, or “gif,” of a car punching pedestrians as it passes with an automatic, metal arm.

Similarly, in November of 2016, while appearing to reference a variety of movies including Men in Black, he created a scenario whereby then Vice President-elect Mike Pence gets punched in the head.

””welcome to Miami!” *punches Pence in the head as he climbs out of his spacecraft*,” he wrote to his Twitter followers.

The January 6th committee’s recent production staff hire is also an Emmy-nominated news producer whose résumé includes stints as a producer and editor at outlets including Bloomberg and ABC News.

Akin to Przygoda, Congressional members of the committee have also made controversial remarks in the past, including its Chairman Bennie Thompson, who praised radical secessionist groups attempting to overtake states within the U.S. and organizations with deep ties to the the Nation of Islam.

Left-wing activists have also routinely attacked federal buildings, escaping any punishment or inquiry as rigorous as the ongoing efforts surrounding January 6th.

At Charlestown High School in Boston, certain teachers instructing students learning English who have recently arrived in the United States may be indoctrinating these children to incite violence as a form of resistance to their alleged oppressors, according to experts.

The “classroom files” of three of the school’s teachers in the Sheltered English Immersion Program are currently available for download on the Boston Teachers Union (BTU) website. These teachers teach Humanities to ninth- and 10th-grade students who have recently arrived in the country from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and China, the website states.

One part of the curriculum profiled on the website involves “notes and assignments around oppression, resistance, and narrative structure.”

“It includes detailed note-taking sheets and powerpoints on institutional, interpersonal, and internalized oppression,” the BTU website reads. “Students are invited to critically examine when certain forms of resistance might be appropriate.”

A worksheet dubbed “Forms of Resistance” is included as an example of what’s taught in the course.

The first page of the worksheet identifies three types of oppression as “Instituional [sic],” “Interpresonal [sic],” and “Internalized,” and then lists examples of each. One example of oppression at the institutional level listed is, “Trump builds a wall on the border so it is harder for Latinos to enter the US.” At the interpersonal level, an example given is, “A husband tells his wife she must stay home to cook and clean.” An example of oppression at the internalized level used by the worksheet is, “An Asian girl hates her eyes, she thinks she is ugly so she gets surgery to change them.”

Students were next asked to “list different forms of resistance for each level of oppression.”

The following pages of the worksheet with the heading “Forms of Resistance Notes” contains 11 rows identifying 11 types of resistance that could be employed to end certain forms of oppression. The column on the far left contains pictures identifying each type of resistance and students are made to name the type of resistance in the next column. Next, students are meant to fill in the blanks in the column that provides the “explanation” for each form of resistance. In the last section, students are to choose which of the three levels of oppression—institutional, interpersonal, or internalized—that the type of resistance was “most effective at ending.”

Alongside peaceful protest methods, such as boycotts, sit-ins, and petitions, the worksheet also contains three images that appear to portray violent forms of revolt: riots, shown by masked protestors wearing all black throwing projectiles, including what appears to be a flare; fights, depicted by a cartoon image of two people brawling; and political assassinations, shown by an image of President Richard Nixon as a target of crosshairs.

‘Indoctrination’

Parental rights advocates expressed alarm at what was apparently being taught to English as a Second Language students at the Boston high school.

Rebecca Friedrichs, founder of advocacy group For Kids & Country and author of “Standing up to Goliath: Battling State and National Teachers’ Unions for the Heart and Soul of our Kids and Country,” said that as a teacher for 28 years and a parent of two children, she was “disgusted” by the worksheet that she described as “damaging and dangerous.”

“These English language learners [in these classrooms] are likely new immigrants to the country, coming to this country to experience freedom. [But in Boston], they’ve run smack dab into Marxist indoctrinators posing as educators,” Friedrichs said. “Schools are meant for educating children, not indoctrinating them in radical ideology.”

The worksheet is “full of lies,” she said, noting that teachers are using these lies to indoctrinate children.

Alex Newman, award-winning international journalist and executive director of the advocacy group Public School Exit, agrees.

“The material was clearly designed to indoctrinate children into seeing themselves as victims of oppression,” he said.

Newman was most alarmed by the worksheet’s examples of violent resistance that he said implied a need to “overthrow” anyone who’s allegedly responsible for the oppression.

“They seem to be promoting revolt and resistance to legitimate forms of authority,” he said.

Newman is also a contributor to The Epoch Times.

The goal of such teachings is to prime children to accept illegitimate forms of authority and encourage them to engage in violence to achieve those ends, he said.

“Legitimate authorities must be brought down if they want to impose new authorities,” Newman said.

And this “indoctrination program” is “an extension of that same lawless agenda.”

Justifying Violence

The worksheet’s attempt to justify violence could be seen through the picture of three individuals dressed in black throwing various objects, including a flare. Both experts noted that the image alludes to groups such as Antifa, a far-left anarchist movement that seeks the overthrow of capitalism.

The explanation listed alongside the picture on the worksheet reads, “Protesting or marching with [blank].” Friedrichs took issue with the characterization.

“They’re clearly engaged in violence, throwing bottles and more,” she said.

In a second example, depicting crosshairs on the chest of President Nixon, Friedrichs said this type of image is “extremely dangerous in the mind of a child.”

“When children are being encouraged to view assassination as a legitimate form of resistance, we’ve entered into some very, very dangerous territory,” Newman said. “The blatant encouragement of assassination as a tactic of resistance to oppression is how this image needs to be understood.”

Images such as this are “paving the way to more widespread violence in society,” he said, noting that “there are very, very powerful forces that want to see America break out into some very significant violence.”

“In America, there’s a centuries-old tradition of tolerance for peaceful protest, for peaceful assembly, [and] for peaceful seeking of redress of grievances that’s being lost,” Newman said. “A lot of these children are being indoctrinated to believe that the alleged oppression they are facing is so severe that violent rebellion is not only justified, but necessary.”

Teachers Taught to Radicalize

Both Friedrichs and Newman said there have been great efforts to radicalize children against lawful and legitimate authority for quite a long time.

“Part of the problem is that [U.S. education] has gone through a multi-generational process of indoctrination that has resulted in a situation where each generation is more indoctrinated,” Newman said. “As these teachers continue to accept even more extreme and more destructive ideas than the previous generation, they’re not realizing that they’re actually being subjected to the indoctrination programs.”

After a K–12 education, Newman said that “they are further radicalized, [as] the indoctrination is often turbocharged at a four-year college, where they are brainwashed even more to believe that not only are these ideas legitimate, but that they are the correct pedagogy, and this is the way children should be educated.”

“They are made to believe that their education is for justice, education is for social justice, [and] their education makes the world a better place,” he said. “Many of these teachers are so brainwashed that they have a feeling of self-righteousness about this—and it’s very sad to see.”

Friedrichs also noted that “a small amount of activist union teachers have been planted in our schools who quietly push this type of nasty agenda.”

“Teachers unions have made gains in the political arena, and they’ve gotten people into key places of power, which often allows them to get away with this nightmare,” she said.

Friedrichs also pointed out the “glaring” misspellings on the worksheet. On the first page, it reads “INSTITUIONAL” and “INTERPRESONAL.” With three people using the document, she considers this “a dead giveaway that these are not truly professional teachers, but union activists masquerading as teachers.”

She said the misspellings are “a huge embarrassment to professional teachers.”

“People are masquerading as teachers and unions all across the country so they can push a very radical agenda,” Friedrichs said.

Potentially Criminal

The advocates called for those responsible for the worksheet to be investigated.

“Those involved in putting together this worksheet need to be removed immediately and disciplined over this,” Friedrichs said.

Had she presented a worksheet like this to her students in the past, she said she would have been fired.

“It was out of the realm of possibility that anyone would have ever done this until recently, when the teachers unions opened the floodgates of their evil agenda,” she said.

Newman said, “Somebody who thinks this is appropriate to teach to children has absolutely no business teaching children; that much is clear; they should not be in a classroom.”

Both Friedrichs and Newman believe that the document warrants a criminal investigation.

“There’s a fine line between free speech and advocacy for violence, and this document appears to cross over that line,” Newman said.

The responsible person or party for this document needs to be questioned, he said.

“If it is determined that this was actually intended to encourage children to use violence as a political tool, I think serious measures and accountability are going to be justified.”

At the very least, Newman is calling for “a full investigation that results in a strong measure of discipline from education authorities.”

Free Speech Exception

Attorney Daniel Schmid, senior litigation counsel for Liberty Counsel, agrees with Friedrichs and Newman. He told The Epoch Times that while the First Amendment allows for free speech, “there are certain well-delineated exceptions—one of which is incitement to violence.”

In Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court established in 1969 that the First Amendment doesn’t protect speech that incites people to violence or to imminent lawless action.

“Encouraging people to commit an act of violence against political leaders, that’s not protected speech,” Schmid said regarding the worksheet. “It probably falls under fighting words [according to the court case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire] or incitement to violence.

“Assassinating a political leader and committing acts of violence is not to be celebrated and encouraged. It’s a crime, and it ought to be punished as so.”

While he said there’s always a question of intent, U.S. law, 18 U.S.C. Section 373, makes it a crime to solicit people to commit an act of violence. According to the law, “it’s a felony to encourage people to commit an act of violence.”

These teachers should be held accountable, Schmid said.

The Epoch Times contacted the Boston Teachers Union to determine if some of the “classroom files” were meant to incite violence. Neither BTU President Jessica Tang nor Professional Learning Director Paul Tritter have returned a comment. Representatives for Charlestown High School also didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

A picture’s worth a thousand…[US Patriot]

Starbucks announced Monday it is closing 16 stores across the country, citing crime and safety concerns at the locations, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The company is shuttering locations in Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Ore., Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.  Each city is governed by Democratic mayors and is undergoing a spike in crime. In a message to employees, Starbucks executives said the company has been getting “a lot” of incident reports of criminal activity, including drug use in stores. “We cannot serve as partners if we don’t first feel safe at work,” they said.

Starbucks, which has lost roughly a third of its value over the past year, also announced it will give managers more leeway with store policy to deter criminals. Managers will be able to close bathrooms to deter drug use and limit customer seating. Starbucks said it will also offer baristas additional training in deescalating conflicts.  

Starbucks’s move comes two years after the company downplayed violence amid rioting following the murder of George Floyd. In May 2020, Starbucks released a public statement praising racial justice activists and quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s remark that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Kevin Johnson, the company’s CEO, stressed the importance of the “courageous conversations” going on at the time.

Starbucks has worked to quash unionization efforts across the country, and two of the Seattle locations the company is closing are unionized. A Starbucks union leader when interviewed by the Journal said the company should have involved employees in the decision to close the stores.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Oath Keepers founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes III is challenging the House Jan. 6 Select Committee to let him testify on a live broadcast so he can pit the truth as he sees it against the committee’s “pack of lies.”

“Public televised testimony, that’s the only condition,” Rhodes said.

“If I were given a chance to give an opening statement, I’m writing up what I would give them,” Rhodes told The Epoch Times on July 10. “If they decline to accept my offer, I’m going to go ahead and publish my opening statement.”

Rhodes said he does not expect the committee to accept his offer because his appearance would be a free-wheeling discussion, not a scripted presentation.

“They should jump at the opportunity, but they won’t because they don’t want that,” he said. “What they want is what you’ve seen, which is just a scripted, controlled, pre-screened show trial. They’re only going to put people in front of the public that they know are going to say what they want them to say.”

“I want to push back,” Rhodes said. “I want to cut back against this false narrative. They don’t want the truth. That’s why they won’t let me just get up there, unscreened, uncoached, and just answer[ing] questions because they don’t want the truth out.

“If they were concerned with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, they would welcome the opportunity to talk to me because I pled the Fifth on everything from election time on back in February. I answered no questions about anything after election night.”

‘Waive My Fifth Amendment Rights’

The Select Committee next meets on July 12 in Washington D.C.

The panel might hold a prime-time hearing on July 14. It plans to cover the issue of domestic extremism and the roles allegedly played by the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys on Jan. 6, 2021.

Unlike his previous appearance before the committee, Rhodes said he would drop his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and answer questions, but only if the hearing is on a live broadcast.

“So I’m going to do it now and waive my Fifth Amendment rights and do that in front of the public,” Rhodes said in a call from the Alexandria City Detention Center in Virginia, where he is being held pending trial. He is charged with seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, among other counts.

Rhodes was first charged in a superseding indictment on Jan. 12, more than a year after the unrest at the Capitol. He, six other Oath Keepers, and one associate were charged in a new superseding indictment (pdf) on June 22.

Prosecutors say the Oath Keepers conspired to “oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force” by “breaching and attempting to take control of the Capitol grounds and building” to prevent, hinder or delay certification of Electoral College votes by a joint session of Congress.

Oath Keepers and their attorneys say the seditious conspiracy charge was concocted out of whole cloth by misreading and twisting messenger chats, phone calls, and online meetings. They say the Oath Keepers were in Washington D.C. that day to provide security for conservative VIPs speakers at events supporting President Donald Trump.

Their transportation of weapons to nearby Virginia was part of the group’s preparations for what they believed could be the situation where the president invoked the Insurrection Act due to an Antifa attack on the White House, Rhodes said.

Incomplete Narratives

Rhodes said the committee has already shown deception when discussing the Oath Keepers. He pointed to a hearing when a still image of him was shown in a Washington, D.C., parking garage with former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio on Jan. 5, 2021. Had the committee shown the full video of the event, it would have been clear that the so-called meeting between the men was a mere handshake with no discussion, Rhodes said.

“They showed a still photo of me talking to Enrique Tarrio instead of the video, which has me walking up and saying hello and walking away because it wasn’t my meeting; it was somebody else’s meeting,” Rhodes said.

The video shows that the contact between Tarrio and Rhodes lasted less than 30 seconds, although it has been described in prosecution documents as a 30-minute meeting.

Rhodes said Tarrio was in the garage to speak with Bianca Gracia of Latinos for Trump and attorney Kellye SoRelle. They wanted to ensure he had legal representation after his arrest for setting fire to a Black Lives Matter banner in Washington D.C. in December 2020.

Rhodes said he was part of SoRelle’s three-man security detail. SoRelle, who also serves as general counsel for the Oath Keepers and Latinos for Trump, had received death threats, Rhodes said.

“It was their conversation, so I stepped down,” Rhodes said. “I was there for security only for Kellye SoRelle.”

Rhodes said part of his motivation to speak out publicly was the recent indictment of Michael Greene, a friend who ran security operations for the Oath Keepers in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6. Greene, 39, of Indianapolis, was charged with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and three other counts.

According to FBI summaries of those meetings, Greene’s interviews with FBI agents in May 2021 contradict many of the accusations against the Oath Keepers.

“He is a totally innocent man who was operations lead that day; a friend of mine, straight up, excellent, awesome Army veteran and ex-cop,” Rhodes said. “A totally innocent man. They’re just persecuting him.”

Greene had every right to be at the Capitol on Jan. 6 because the Oath Keepers were providing security for a “Stop the Steal” rally in Area 8 on the Capitol lawn and for a Latinos for Trump event two blocks away. Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander had a permit for the Capitol rally and for the erection of a stage.

“He (Greene) was supposed to be on Capitol grounds. He’s supposed to be right there in Area 8, which is on Capitol grounds,” Rhodes said. “That’s where he was supposed to be, to go and protect the venue that Ali Alexander had reserved there. So he was supposed to be on Capitol grounds. And now they’re indicting him for trespass. It’s just ridiculous.”

Event Security, Not Conspiracy

Rhodes said the Oath Keepers presence in Washington D.C. that day was no different than for what they had done for pro-Trump rallies in November and December 2020.

“Our guys dressed the same and did the same thing,” he said. “The difference is that two of our team leaders decided to take their people inside the Capitol of their own volition. That’s the only difference. Their behavior and ambition was the same, to protect people at events in Washington D.C., which they did.”

Oath Keepers provided security in the VIP area at the Ellipse where Trump spoke on Jan. 6. They were then tasked with escorting Alexander and speakers, including Roger Stone, from the Ellipse to the Capitol for an event that was on the calendar well before the president’s speech was booked, Rhodes said.

Two groups of Oath Keepers did enter the Capitol.

Prosecutors claim they were searching for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rhodes said there was no plan for anyone to go into the Capitol. One of the groups intervened between an armed U.S. Capitol Police officer and an angry crowd, de-escalating the situation, he said.

Rhodes ridiculed the charge by prosecutors that the Oath Keepers used a military “stack formation” to ascend the east steps of the Capitol. Oath Keepers have been shown on video walking with hands on each other’s shoulders in a line.

“That formation going up the steps is not a military formation. I was an infantry man, airborne infantry,” Rhodes said. “That’s not a military formation. That’s a PSD (personal security detail) technique to get through a crowd.”

The Oath Keepers have used the technique at other crowded venues to move their protectees through masses of people, he said, including an event in Atlanta in 2020.

“They use the loaded term of ‘military stack.’ No, it’s a PSD detail. You don’t go through a crowd like that if you’re in the military.”

Preparations Were for Antifa, Not to ‘Attack the Capitol’

The Oath Keepers did have weapons and ammunition stockpiled in Virginia and had “Quick Reaction Forces” (QRF) on standby. Prosecutors claim the QRFs were to attack the Capitol. Rhodes said the Oath Keepers in the QRFs were available to extract other Oath Keepers or protectees from Washington if there was a large attack by Antifa.

The weapons were there only if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act and called up militias to defend the White House, Rhodes said. Antifa had made threats to assault the White House and eject Trump by force, he said.

“We’re gonna have well-trained Oath Keeper combat vets with their weapons outside D.C. but ready in case the President invokes the Insurrection Act and calls us up as the militia, which completely lawful,” Rhodes said.

Plea Deals and Coercion

The three Oath Keepers who took plea deals and are cooperating with prosecutors were coerced with threats of long prison sentences, he said.

A letter sent to defendants and their attorneys in May by prosecutors Kathryn Rakoczy and Justin Sher said that if Oath Keepers defendants are convicted at trial, they could face life in prison under sentencing guidelines related to terrorism. A copy of the letter was obtained by The Epoch Times. The letter also set the deadline for accepting plea-agreement offers.

Noted defense attorney and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said the attempt to link seditious conspiracy to sentencing guidelines for treason “is absurd.”

Rhodes said in at least one of the three plea deals, the defendant had told family members he was terrified of the prospect of life in prison. The seditious conspiracy charge includes a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

“They scared the [expletive] out of these guys and coerced them into pleading for something they didn’t do,” Rhodes said. “There’s no [expletive] conspiracy. Did he go into the Capitol? Yes, like a dumb ass, he went into the Capitol. But there was no conspiracy.”

Rhodes said the Select Committee is making it nearly impossible for any of the Oath Keepers to get a fair trial. Recently U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rejected a motion by Oath Keepers defendants to move their trials from D.C. to Virginia.

“The only way we can get any possibility of a fair trial in this country is if we are out of D.C.,” Rhodes said. “I think it’s a foregone conclusion.

“A D.C. jury is going to vote along political lines,” he said. “We walk in there, we’ve got horns, demon tails, already, the ‘evil Oath Keepers.’ They’ve been conditioned over 13 years in the leftist media to hate us. And these are all inside-the-beltway Democrats.”

Overtly Anti-Racist

Rhodes said he would like to address what he called the defamatory smear of the Oath Keepers by Select Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who called the group “white supremacists.” Rhodes said that the Oath Keepers’ rules ban any racial discrimination and that he does not tolerate such attitudes in the group.

On Jan. 6, 2021, the Oath Keepers vice president was a black police officer, he said. Greene, the former police officer who ran Oath Keepers security in D.C. on Jan. 6, is also black.

“We’re overtly anti-racist, and they have to know that. They’ve defamed us on purpose,” Rhodes said. “So since that moment on, there has just been a relentless campaign of defamation, mischaracterization of Oath Keepers—even demonization.”

Rhodes said that he believes the Select Committee’s true goal is to see former President Trump indicted for Jan. 6. The committee and the Department of Justice will work on that goal together, he said.

“They work hand in glove like two different fingers on the same iron fist,” he said.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Law enforcement aware large crowds would be travelling to Capitol from the Ellipse, documents show

The man whose posting on social media warned authorities that agent provocateurs from Antifa and Black Lives Matter would be at the U.S. Capitol dressed as Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, is a self-described government informant tied to former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein.

Rosenstein warned about a “soft coup” against then-President Donald Trump in fall 2020.

On Jan. 4, 2021, an account under the name @JohnHereToHelp posted on Twitter that Antifa and BLM agitators were being bussed from Baltimore to Washington to cause trouble at the Capitol on the day of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse.

“Pantifa/BLM, Balt./DC branches, are already bussing people in to disturb Jan. 6,” the post read. “Orders [were] given to dress like ‘MAGA,’ blend in [and] cause trouble, especially around cameras. At night, arson has been ordered. All to be blamed on Trump supporters attending. Please be careful.”

The post caught the attention of an assistant commander in the Intelligence and Counterterrorism Branch of the United States Park Police, who forwarded it to officials at the U.S. Capitol Police, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and other agencies.

The now-suspended Twitter account belonged to Ryan Dark White, also known as Jon McGreevey.

McGreevey has described himself in court papers and interviews as a former Department of Justice informant who supplied information on corruption in the federal government, law enforcement, and the Trump administration.

He once used the name Ryan White as a cover but now identifies as McGreevey. He is running for federal office in Maryland.

JohnHereToHelp’s original post was shared more than 6,000 times before it hit the radar of the Park Police.

At the time, McGreevey had more than 120,000 followers on Twitter, according to an archived version of his page stored at the Wayback Machine.

Twitter later suspended his account.

“There are multiple replies to this comment that says BLM/Antifa will wear MAGA hats backwards, wear camo, and attempt to blend in with MAGA crowd,” the Park Police official wrote to his colleagues on January 5, 2021.

The Wayback Machine archive of White’s post shows nearly 600 replies, but the replies are not visible from links on the website.

Infiltrator Warning

The emails, part of a trove of documents obtained in 2021 through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch, show that federal law enforcement knew that infiltrators could be among the crowds at the Capitol.

They also back up anecdotal reports of BLM and Antifa activists from Oregon, Maryland, and other states causing disruption and committing vandalism on Jan. 6.

Trump supporters tangled with alleged Antifa provocateurs in several spots on Jan. 6, including the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol.

Victoria White of Rochester, Minnesota, scuffled with a man attempting to break an arched window adjacent to the Capitol’s tunnel entrance.

As the tightly-packed crowd chanted “[expletive] Antifa,” White wrestled for control of the red wooden club wielded by the man, who wore a green helmet with Trump stickers.

“I’m like, ‘We don’t do that. We don’t do that. Trump supporters, we don’t do that,’” White told The Epoch Times in an interview for an upcoming documentary, “The Real Story of January 6,” on Epoch TV.

“And then there’s other people [who said] ‘No, we’re all on the same team.’ I’m like, ‘No. No, we’re not.’

“Who brings something like that to a Trump rally, let alone to break out the Capitol windows?” White said. “That’s not us. That’s not what patriot Americans do. We don’t do that stuff.”

After another man got control of the club and began smashing the window, White helped pull him down before she was pulled away by other bystanders.

Members of the crowd vented anger at the vandals. “We are not Antifa!” one protester shouted. A man with a green stocking cap pulled over his MAGA hat pulled what appeared to be a stereo speaker from a backpack, spurring more howls of protest from the crowd.

At the same window, the crowd shouted at a man dressed all in black. “No, no, Antifa!” a woman yelled from the crowd. “Antifa’s breaking the windows! Antifa’s breaking the windows!”

While conducting a live stream on January 6, independent journalist Tayler Hansen recognized a protester in a gas mask from her appearance at riots in Portland, Oregon.

“I recognize you from Portland,” Hansen told the woman as she quickly turned away from the camera.

“So you’ve got Antifa here, too. You have Antifa and Trump supporters within the same vicinity here for the same thing. This is absolutely [expletive] crazy.”

The documents obtained by Judicial Watch include other disclosures that run counter to the prevailing Jan. 6 narrative that a mob incited by Trump rampaged to the Capitol to storm the building and upend the counting of Electoral College votes.

A “Daily Operational Snapshot” circulated by U.S. Park Police on Jan. 5 noted multiple events planned for the area around the Capitol.

“Large crowds expected to gather at and travel between the Ellipse and the U.S. Capitol,” the document said.

Other scheduled events included a Freedom Rally, Jericho March, the March for Trump, and the “Wild Protest.”

A MAGA Rally Map Guide said of the Wild Protest: “We the people must take to the U.S. Capitol lawn and steps and tell Congress #DoNot Certify on #Jan6!” U.S. Park Police circulated a copy of the map to other agencies.

The WildProtest.com website said, “The Congress cannot certify this fraudulent Electoral College. Our presence in Washington D.C. will let Members of Congress know that we stand with Rep. Mo Brooks and his colleagues in the House of Representatives who will bravely object to the certification of the Electoral College.”

The activist group ShutDownDC circulated a statement asking people to call hotels and demand they cancel reservations of “people coming to town to undermine democracy on Jan. 6.”

Whistleblower Role?

McGreevey posted on social media and his own website that he was a longtime informant for the Department of Justice.

He said he worked under Rosenstein, who became a central figure in the Trump Russiagate scandal.

According to McGreevey, Rosenstein ran what was nicknamed the “Dirty Tricks Squad” out of the Baltimore office of the U.S. Attorney.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington did not respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment on McGreevey’s warning about Antifa or his allegations about Rosenstein and the Department of Justice.

McGreevey accused the federal government of conducting illegal surveillance on journalists, federal judges, political rivals, and other Americans, planting evidence in criminal cases, and other criminal acts.

In August 2020, he warned of a “covert coup” to be carried out by Democrats via the forthcoming presidential election.

McGreevey also made other explosive allegations in 2021 court papers, accusing Vice President Mike Pence, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, and others of sexual impropriety.

McGreevey said the DOJ had scrubbed online and offline records of his academic achievements and military service.

He is one of 10 Republicans on the ballot in the primary for the U.S. Senate in Maryland. The primary will be July 19.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An armed would-be assassin’s alleged attempt on the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week is part of a wave of violence, arson, vandalism, and intimidation targeting pro-life groups and government officials since the leak last month of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

There have been more than three dozen such incidents directed at crisis pregnancy centers and churches in at least 20 states and Washington, D.C., according to a tally maintained by LifeNews.com, an anti-abortion site.

These include:

• The firebombing of a pro-life pregnancy center in suburban Buffalo on June 7
• An arson attack including Molotov cocktails against the headquarters of the pro-life Wisconsin Family Action center in Madison on May 8
• Graffiti with the threat, “If abortion isn’t safe then you aren’t either,” spray-painted on the walls of centers in Washington state.
• Extensive graffiti spray-painted on small rural evangelical churches in the Deep South, where some of the deacons protested their congregations were apolitical

A loosely organized group known as Jane’s Revenge claimed responsibility for several of the attacks, including the apparent arson in Wisconsin and Buffalo. The group, which sometimes attaches the Antifa “A” symbol to its pronouncements, has called for a “night of rage” over the pending Supreme Court decision, on a website called The Anarchist Library.

Another group, Ruth Sent Us–its name evoking the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg–has published the home addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices on Twitter. While not claiming responsibility for the disturbed gunman arrested near Kavanaugh’s house, it informed followers where his children and the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett attend school.

Federal law expressly prohibits “pickets or parades … in or near a building or residence occupied or used by” any judge, and the House passed a bill this week to expand Supreme Court Police protection to justices’ families.

The rash of incidents and intimidating behavior is domestic terrorism, said Jim Harden, executive director of CompassCare, a nonprofit that operates the Buffalo pregnancy clinic and two others in upstate New York. Harden and his family relocated Sunday after social media accounts began seeking his home address.

“This is new,” he said. “It was the leak that really sparked this kind of activity.”

CompassCare also described the campaign against it as “abortion terrorism”–expressing heightened fears in a place where a white supremacist terrorist had murdered 10 people just weeks before. FBI agents visited the Buffalo clinic in response to the firebombing, but the organization has heard nothing since from federal authorities. Harden expressed skepticism that they–in contrast with local police–have taken the incident seriously.

“It’s been eerily silent,” Harden said.

In response to the May 2 leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe, which in 1973 legalized abortion nationally, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul earmarked $35 million in protection funds–but it was to safeguard abortion clinics, which have not been targets of attacks lately.

The Justice Department did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations about whether it has classified the multiple incidents as domestic terrorism or assigned a team to an investigation. Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for the arson and vandalism attack on the Madison office of the Wisconsin Family Action center. Madison police also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

There have been no arrests made in connection with any of the incidents, which began after Politico published the leaked draft opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito declaring that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”

Harden compared the law enforcement response to the CompassCare attacks to the silence surrounding the person who may have leaked the draft opinion.

“There doesn’t appear to be anything going on in either case,” Harden said.

Chief Justice John Roberts said he had ordered an internal investigation that might identify the leaker, who presumably comes from a very small circle of people who would have had access to draft opinions.

Agreeing with Harden was Rebecca Anderson of 40 Days for Life, an anti-abortion group headquartered in Texas that has worked with an organization also targeted by Jane’s Revenge vandals: a Lynnwood, Washington, crisis pregnancy center called NextStep.

“I don’t think these acts of violence are being taken seriously as elected officials aren’t publicly condemning them,” she said. “The lack of response from the Justice Department leads one to believe that they pick and choose what qualifies as domestic terrorism based on politics. Our concern is that this will embolden abortion supporters to commit more violence against those who support life.”

In contrast, several anti-abortion figures told RealClearInvestigations, local police have been exemplary in their response and attitude.

“The police came immediately, and the DC Metro Police have been outstanding,” said Janet Durig, executive director of the Capital Pregnancy Center, which saw its front door splashed with red paint and the threatening graffiti tag left by Jane’s Revenge vandals, “If abortion isn’t safe then you aren’t either.”

“The local authorities are taking this very seriously and are investigating,” Harden said. “We had cameras trained at all the points of entry so there is videotape evidence.” Still, there has been no indication that local authorities have made any progress in their investigations.

The available evidence may be thin. Cameras did capture the vandals at NextStep in Lynnwood, Washington, but the assailant was bundled up like an Antifa extremist and nearly impossible to identify, according to NextStep Executive Director Heather Vasquez. “You could tell it was a woman,” she said.

The attacks on pro-life centers don’t square with an emphasis in major news outlets on the potential for attacks on abortion providers, which do not appear to have proliferated in the past several weeks.

“Abortion clinics are secured like fortresses,” a USA Today headline blared a week after the Politico story. “Advocates fear Roe ruling could spur new attacks.”

Reports about the spate of incidents involving anti-abortion centers by both CNN and the Washington Post have stressed that violence occurs on “both sides” of the abortion debate.

Planned Parenthood said late Tuesday that “we condemn violence and hatred in all forms” in a statement to RCI that emphasized “acts of violence, vandalism, and intimidation from anti-abortion activists and politicians” aimed at the organization’s “health center staff and patients.”

The pro-choice National Abortion Federation claimed in a 2020 report that abortion providers receive hundreds of death threats and thousands of “hate emails” and harassing phone calls each year. There has been one deadly incident at an abortion clinic since 2010–the 2015 attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs that left three dead.

The anti-abortion movement does not have an equivalent database regarding threats received by pregnancy centers and religious organizations. In 2012, a left-wing activist entered the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and shot and wounded a security guard.

While violence and intimidation have long characterized the abortion debate, Jane’s Revenge has promised to escalate the conflict. In its self-titled “First Communique” published after the Wisconsin attack, it declared:

“We have run thin on patience and mercy for those who seek to strip us of what little autonomy we have left. As you continue to bomb clinics and assassinate doctors with impunity, so too shall we adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies. We are forced to adopt the minimum military requirement for a political struggle. Again, this was only a warning. Next time the infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive. Medical imperialism will not face a passive enemy. Wisconsin is the first flashpoint, but we are all over the US, and we will issue no further warnings.”

This article was written by  James Varney for RealClearInvestigations.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/beyond-the-kavanaugh-scare-dozens-of-incidents-targeting-pro-lifers-nationwide_4542422.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_campaign=mb-2022-06-19&utm_medium=email&est=k%2Ba0jxuTYeeDfS9qRpoUDTlvXeIcMlGaBqGOtaosNg9Q5Y0Xfl3khupqquh2FwOqSw%3D%3D

Real America’s Voice correspondent Drew Hernandez corroborated Kyle Rittenhouse’s testimony that he acted in self-defense when he shot and killed Joseph Rosenbaum last summer.

The 18-year-old has been charged in the shooting deaths of Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a police shooting.

“The first time I saw Kyle, he actually de-escalated the situation,” Hernandez, who was at the scene to record the violent demonstration, testified Thursday during Rittenhouse’s murder trial in Kenosha.

The reporter recounted that on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, “Antifa and the rioters were going head-to-head with the police in front of the courthouse, and as they were doing so, the police then responded. I think they, I believe they called it an unlawful assembly of some sort.”

Hernandez said the rioters were throwing rocks at police officers and launching fireworks and other explosive devices.

Rittenhouse Judge Blasts Prosecution, Says They Made ‘Grave Constitutional Violation’

“As they were being pushed down the street [by the police], they passed Car Source 2. And the rioters identified individuals with longarm rifles on top of the building, and they immediately attempted to agitate them, to try to start some conflict with them saying, ‘You ain’t the police. You ain’t the police,’” he said.

“At that point Kyle Rittenhouse came out of Car Source 2 and he attempted to de-escalate the situation.”

Witness says Kyle Rittenhouse tried to deescalate the situation. Meanwhile, rioters picked fights with people protecting a business: pic.twitter.com/1YIArIh41p

— Kyle Hooten (@KyleHooten2) November 11, 2021

Hernandez then recreated how Rittenhouse was motioning with his hands trying to get people to settle down.

Do you think Rittenhouse should be found not guilty?

“He clearly attempts to de-escalate the situation. And he actually is successful because then the rioters then disperse,” the reporter said.

Hernandez went on to describe the fatal shooting of Rosenbaum, who he felt had become “triggered and aggravated” in the moments leading up to it. He testified that Rosenbaum had “led the charge into the gas station” and “was getting physically aggressive.”

“Rosenbaum was charging Kyle Rittenhouse from behind,” Hernandez said.

“Kyle is right at the corner … and turns around and Rosenbaum is lunging towards him very clearly, and Kyle fires,” he said, pointing to a video display in court.

Tulsi Gabbard Blasts Politicians Labeling Rittenhouse a ‘White Supremacist Terrorist,’ Says He Wanted to ‘Protect People’

The defense attorney then asked whether Hernandez had seen Rittenhouse acting in an aggressive manner earlier that evening.

“In no way shape or form,” he answered, saying he had not seen the defendant point his firearm or threaten anyone.

Rittenhouse stood by his actions when he took the witness stand Wednesday.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I defended myself,” he said.

Rittenhouse: “People were saying, ‘Cranium him, kill him’ … and I was just trying to get to the police.”

“Why were you trying to get to the police?”

Rittenhouse: “Because I didn’t do anything wrong, I defended myself.” pic.twitter.com/6U3iHxNqSp

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) November 10, 2021

The 18-year-old testified that people around him were saying, “Cranium him, kill him,” and he was “just trying to get to the police” where he felt he would be safe.

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger asked Rittenhouse during cross-examination, “What was the risk to you of death or great bodily harm at the moment you killed Joseph Rosenbaum?”

Prosecutor: “What was the risk to you of death or great bodily harm at the moment you killed Joseph Rosenbaum?”

Rittenhouse: “If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would’ve used it and killed me with it and probably killed more people.” pic.twitter.com/HfAswVqUED

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) November 10, 2021

He responded, “If I would have let Mr. Rosenbaum take my firearm from me, he would’ve used it and killed me with it and probably killed more people.”

CBS on Thursday deleted a social media post that alleged Kyle Rittenhouse “murdered two men” in Kenosha, Wisconsin last year.

Rittenhouse, 18, is on trial for fatally shooting two men and wounding another.

One of the men had his hand over Rittenhouse’s rifle barrel, according to a pathologist’s testimony. Another smacked Rittenhouse with a skateboard and was reaching for his gun, according to video footage and testimony during the trial. The third was pointing his gun at Rittenhouse when he was shot.

“Kyle Rittenhouse testified in his murder trial yesterday, breaking down in tears as he told the jury he murdered two men at a Black Lives Matter protest last year in self-defense,” a post on Twitter from CBS Mornings stated.

The post drew quick backlash, with some lawyers asserting it could be grounds for a libel case.

“Hard to believe that’s a real tweet. Straight up libel from CBS. I look forward to Rittenhouse’s numerous lawsuits, some of which will be successful,” lawyer Mike Cernovich wrote on the social media website.

“Oh, well, then. No need for trials, CBS News has delivered its verdict!” added Dan McLaughlin, a writer at National Review.

A CBS spokesperson, asked for comment, told The Epoch Times in an email that “the tweet was revised.”

The spokesperson declined to answer who cleared the post and why it was deleted.

The original post was taken down and a new one was put up that used the same language, except it replaced “murdered” with “killed.”

The situation unfolded after David Hancock, a spokesman for Rittenhouse, appeared on Fox News and called the media coverage of the shootings “absolutely irresponsible and purely abhorrent.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/cbs-deletes-post-saying-kyle-rittenhouse-murdered-two-men_4099871.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

A New York City Black Lives Matter group threatened NYC Mayor-elect Eric Adams with “riots” and “bloodshed” if Adams restores the New York City Police Department’s anti-crime units.

The police anti-crime units were disbanded last year in reaction to Black Lives Matter protests and riots and calls to “defund” police departments. Adams, a Democrat, won election after campaigning on a tough-on-crime agenda and pledging to restore the NYPD’s anti-crime units.

Adams met with leaders of New York City’s Black Lives Matter movement at Brooklyn Borough Hall. After the meeting, Hawk Newsome, co-founder of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York, and his sister Chivona Newsome, also a co-founder of the group, threatened civil unrest and violence if Adams kept to his campaign pledge.

“If he thinks that they’re going to go back to the old ways of policing, then we are going to take to the streets again. There will be riots, there will be fire and there will be bloodshed because we believe in defending our people,” Newsome told the New York Daily News after the meeting.

“So there is no way that he is going to let some Gestapo come in here and harm our people,” he continued. “We pray for peace but … prepare for the worst.”

His sister added: “We will shut the city down. We will shut down City Hall, and we will give him hell and make it a nightmare.”

During the meeting, Adams “erupted” at Newsome after the BLM leader swore to hold Adams responsible for any future misconduct by the NYPD, according to the Daily News.

“You’re on the ground: Stop the violence in my community. I’m holding you accountable,” Adams said.

“Don’t hold me accountable,” he continued. “Being the mayor, being the borough president, being the state senator — I put my body on the line for my community, so I’m not here for folks to come and say, ‘Eric, we’re gonna hold you accountable.’”

“No, it’s us. We need to do this together,” Adams said.

Last year, Newsome suggested that his group would use violence and chaos to push its policy goals while claiming “self-defense.”

“If this country doesn’t give us what we want then we will burn down the system and replace it,” he said in a June 2020 interview with Fox News. “All right. And I could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally. It’s a matter of interpretation. Like let’s be very real and observe the history of the 1960s. When black people were rioting we have their highest growth and wealth and property ownership.”

The NYPD eliminated its anti-crime unit earlier that same month, reassigning roughly 600 officers from the units into other posts at the NYPD. At the time, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea defended the decision as a chance to “move forward and change how we police in this city.”

“This is 21st-century policing: intelligence, data, ShotSpotter, video, DNA, and building prosecutable cases,” Shea said. “It continues to be building these cases—cases on a small number of people that unfortunately still terrorize a part of this city. I would consider this in the realm of closing on one of the last chapters on stop, question and frisk.”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/nyc-blm-leader-threatens-riots-bloodshed-if-mayor-elect-follows-through-on-promise-to-police?itm_source=parsely-api&utm_source=cnemail&utm_medium=email

Fake news isn’t just a meme; it could be the undoing of our legal system.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider the warning of Kenosha County, Wisconsin, Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse.

The 18-year-old is charged with homicide and reckless endangerment for shooting three men, two of them fatally, during the Kenosha riots in August 2020. Rittenhouse says he fired in self-defense as the men attacked him.

Schroeder has been under fire from the establishment media simply for doing what he can to provide the fair trial Rittenhouse is entitled to under the U.S. Constitution, though the media have twisted proceedings into what the judge called “the most divisive trial in the country.”

The judge began by barring the prosecution from using the term “victim” to describe the men Rittenhouse shot and allowing the defense to correctly identify them as “rioters” and “looters” so as not to prejudice the jury.Trending:NJ Senate Pres Won’t Concede to Conservative Truck Driver Who Beat Him: ‘12,000 Ballots Recently Found’

That decision, coupled with a recent ruling to allow video evidence of the men’s involvement in those illegal activities prior to being shot by Rittenhouse, led to an uproar in the courtroom Wednesday — and Schroeder halted proceedings to respond with a sober warning.

“Anything that undermines public confidence in what happens here is very important,” he said to the defense and prosecution but away from the jury, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“It’s important for this town. It’s important for this country to have people have confidence in the result of this trial,” the judge added.

“Whatever it is — and I don’t care what it is — but people have to be confident,” Schroeder said.Do you think Kyle Rittenhouse is getting a fair trial?Yes No
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The judge then shifted into criticism of the establishment media for its role in continually undermining the justice system in the eyes of the public.

“There are people in the media, on reputable sites, that are saying things that are totally bizarre,” Schroeder said.

Shilling for the radical left, CNN had mischaracterized the judge’s first decision as “incomprehensible” despite its sound legal reasoning for not painting the men shot — who may have been the aggressors — as victims.

The network’s disgraced legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin also referred to that ruling as a “really unnecessary and unfortunate beginning to this really important case.”

But even before the opening gavel fell on his trial, the die was cast for Rittenhouse in the newsrooms of the leftist outlets.Related:Never-Before-Seen Kyle Rittenhouse Video Shows the Moment the Mob Almost Got Him, Then He Shoots

The media had immediately painted him as a bloodthirsty white supremacist in a sea of peaceful protestors — even though the men he shot were all white and participated in the rioting that night.

As with many of these high-profile cases where the media are heavily invested in a guilty verdict, the facts on the ground or even in the courtroom seemed to be irrelevant to the liberal outlets.

Rather than present events from a position of disinterested neutrality, they pick the winners and losers in these cases before the bodies are even cold.

They disseminate their version of the facts as the indisputable truth and then record the public’s outrage when the justice system rules as it should rather than kowtowing to public opinion — and maybe that’s the whole point.

“The case against Rittenhouse is so incredibly weak, his innocence so glaringly obvious, that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they did all of this in order to intentionally provoke more riots once he’s inevitably exonerated,” conservative commentator Matt Walsh pointed out Thursday.

The case against Rittenhouse is so incredibly weak, his innocence so glaringly obvious, that it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that they did all of this in order to intentionally provoke more riots once he’s inevitably exonerated

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) November 4, 2021

Justice doesn’t seem to be the order of the day based on how the media have treated Rittenhouse and then Schroeder, so the explanation has to be something more.

Riots are good for ratings, and the constant divisiveness they usher in presents an us-against-them mentality that keeps people tuned into the outlets they believe are on their side.

Whether it’s ratings or simple bias that creates this environment, it has the same damaging effect — the public won’t trust the justice system if it’s repeatedly set up to be on the wrong side of a verdict.

A key prosecution witness in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse on Thursday indicated that a man Rittenhouse shot was aggressive and reaching for the then-17-year-old when the shooting took place.

Testimony from a prosecution witness that painted Rittenhouse as responding to aggressions rather than being the aggressor was characterized by the website Legal Insurrection as an “absolute train wreck” for the prosecution’s case against Rittenhouse. “This is NOT how it’s supposed to be done,” author Andrew Branca noted.

Richard McGinniss — who was recording video on a cell phone for The Daily Caller on the night of the shootings with which Rittenhouse is charged — indicated Joseph Rosenbaum, the first man Rittenhouse shot, tried to grab the rifle the teen was holding.

Rittenhouse had gone to Kenosha in response to rioting that took place in the Wisconsin community.

“So your interpretation of what [Rosenbaum] was trying to do … is complete guesswork,”  prosecutor Thomas Binger said at one point when questioning McGinniss, according to a video posted on Twitter.

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“Well, he said ‘f*** you’ and then he reached for the weapon,” McGinniss testified.

In a video posted on Legal Insurrection, McGinnis says that as the confrontation began, Rittenhouse was holding the gun at a 45-degree angle with the barrel pointed toward the ground.

McGinnis said that when Rosenbaum “lunged” for the gun, Rittenhouse “dodged around,” adding “that’s when it was leveled at Mr. Rosenbaum and fired.”

McGinnis continued to use the word lunge to characterize Rosenbaum’s effort to grab the gun.

WATCH: Eyewitness Richie McGinniss of @DailyCaller testifies that Rosenbaum chased Kyle Rittenhouse and lunged for the rifle pic.twitter.com/AMtMPB572H

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 4, 2021

Binger and McGinniss sparred over words, with the prosecutor wanting the witness to characterize Rosenbaum as falling when he was shot.

“He was lunging, falling. I would use those as synonymous terms in this situation because basically, you know, he threw his momentum towards the weapon,” McGinniss said.

Rittenhouse, now 18, is charged with reckless and intentional homicides in the deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and with attempted homicide for wounding Gaige Grosskreutz.

McGinniss said during his testimony that Rosenbaum was “grabbing for the front portion of it,” referring to the rifle Rittenhouse held.

Man Allegedly Commits Double Murder Less Than a Week After Being Freed Without Bail

Binger asked if Rosenbaum’s momentum after he missed and his grab at the gun meant he was no longer a threat.

McGinnis said the two men were “extremely close” and he was uncertain “what would have happened if those shots hadn’t been fired,” according to Reuters.

“I think it was very clear to me that he was reaching specifically for the weapon,” McGinniss added, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Do you support Kyle Rittenhouse?

Ryan Balch, a veteran who was patrolling the streets of Kenosha that night, said Rosenbaum was “hyperaggressive and acting out in a violent manner,” including throwing rocks and trying to start fires.

Balch said that earlier on the night of the shootings, Rosenbaum had been involved in an altercation and said, “If I catch any of you guys alone tonight I’m going to f***ing kill you!”

The major takeaway from the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two rioters during an altercation in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year, has been that regardless of what one might think about a minor showing up at a riot to help guard private property with his AR-15, the teen appears to have been well within his rights to fire the weapon when he did.

Attorneys began their arguments in the high-profile case this week, which had already begun favorably for Rittenhouse when Judge Bruce Schroeder determined that the men Rittenhouse shot could not be referred to as “victims,” but rather “looters,” “rioters” and “arsonists.”

Now, the prosecution appears to have told a flat-out lie about Rittenhouse’s actions on the evening that only seem to further underscore how far-flung the charges he’s facing really are.

Eighteen-year-old Rittenhouse, who was 17 when he shot Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz on the night of Aug. 25, 2020, is facing charges of reckless homicide and attempted reckless homicide, recklessly endangering safety, as well as the lesser crimes of possessing a weapon as a minor and failure to comply with curfew.

He has pled not guilty on all charges according to NPR, and his defense is arguing that the shooting was in self-defense.

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Rosenbaum and Huber were killed and Grosskreutz was wounded in a series of events that was well-documented by photo and video evidence widely shared on social media amid the fiery-but-mostly-peaceful riots which followed the police shooting of Kenosha resident Jacob Blake.

Rittenhouse supporters have long maintained that he was being attacked by rioters when the shooting transpired.

The three men who were shot seem to have been engaged in mostly peaceful arson and looting of that fateful evening; Rittenhouse, for his part, had driven from his home in Illinois to help protect a local car dealership from the kind of senseless violence that can only be defended with the full girth of the ideological mainstream media characterizing it as necessary for social justice to back you up.

Meanwhile, although newly released footage of the events that transpired seems to completely settle the case that Rittenhouse was being chased before he ultimately fired on the three men, the state just argued that he was the pursuer and cruelly chased down his non-victims.

Do you believe Rittenhouse is innocent?

NPR reported that on Tuesday, prosecutors tried to frame Rittenhouse as the aggressor as he had “initiated” contact with Rosenbaum.

Fully admitting that Rosenbaum had acted “agitated,” and was “getting in people’s faces,” Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger argued that Rittenhouse had been the first to initiate contact and had “pursued” him.

“Their interaction in the lot was captured only by infrared camera recorded from a law enforcement plane flying overhead, so there is no detailed video or audio evidence of the encounter,” NPR noted.

“But afterward, the infrared footage shows, Rosenbaum begins to run toward Rittenhouse, who then shot him in his lower body, Binger said. Rosenbaum fell, then Rittenhouse shot again, striking him in the back,” the outlet explained.

“The shot that killed Mr. Rosenbaum was a shot to the back. This occurred after the defendant chased down Mr. Rosenbaum and confronted him while wielding that AR-15,” Binger declared.

Never-Before-Seen Kyle Rittenhouse Video Shows the Moment the Mob Almost Got Him, Then He Shoots

This is the opposite of what appears to have been happening when Rittenhouse confronted Rosenbaum, who can be heard shouting profanities just seconds before the shooting and seen rushing at the armed teenager in footage obtained by reporter Jack Posobiec.

WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language and graphic content.

BREAKING: Human Events Daily has obtained never-before-seen FBI footage of the Kyle Rittenhouse Shootinghttps://t.co/QFAfI7mmJp pic.twitter.com/J8vOOoD3rg

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) November 2, 2021

Posobiec claimed that the FBI “refused to allow this video to be broadcast publicly and covered up the testimony of the pilot who flew the plane.”

Whatever the case may be, the prosecution certainly seems to be either totally ignorant of its existence somehow — or perhaps twisting the truth beyond recognition to the jury.

Is their case falling apart?

It’s sure starting to look like that.

Protesters who bring bloody anarchy to cities have become a threat to everyone, according to one top European official.

Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Jansa tweeted his verdict on antifa on Sunday in response to a post concerning antifa-style protests in Nantes, France.

“Antifa is a global terrorist organization. Supported by the capital of financial speculators forging profits at the expense of the chaos caused by the operation,” he posted, according to a Google translate version of his post.

Antifa je globalna teroristična organizacija. Podprta s kapitalom finančnih špekulantov, ki kujejo dobičke na račun kaosa, ki ga povzroča delovanje #Antifa https://t.co/wXp52kWxaD

— Janez Janša (@JJansaSDS) October 31, 2021

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Slovenia has been battling protests for more than a year over a variety of issues. Slovenia, the home country of former first lady Melania Trump, was formerly a part of Yugoslavia. Under its rules that call for a rotating presidency, Jansa – as Slovenia’s leader – is president of the EU Council.

Jansa’s tweet came in response to a post illustrating violence that took place in the French city of Nantes when far-left protesters sought to disrupt an event for French presidential hopeful Eric Zemmour, a conservative writer

The website Breitbart, citing the French-language newspaper Le Figaro, said about 600 far-left protesters fought with police and called for the death of Zemmour.

“We know who Joseph Stalin was, we know the hundreds of thousands of deaths he caused, these people are only his distant descendants,” Zemmour said in response, Breitbart reported.

Should there be a global crackdown on antifa?

Zemmour has been likened by French political observers to a French version of former President Donald Trump, according to France 24.

His campaign for the presidency has focused on the culture wars and immigration.

“I think many French people were waiting for this message, that someone speaks to them about France, about how they feel: that the country is in danger of dying, subverted by an unprecedented wave of migration, that whole areas of the country have become enclaves of foreign Islamists,” he said, according to France 24.

Antifa protests were also held in Italy last month, according to the Daily Mail. The crowd of antifa protesters was estimated to be around 100,000 people.

In January, as his administration was departing the White House, Trump called for antifa to be designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department, but his administration closed without action being taken.

Portland Antifa Attacker Indicted Over 2019 Assault of Andy Ngo

The call was taken up in the current Congress by Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who has sponsored a resolution. calling upon the Biden White House to designate antifa as a terrorist organization.

“Like the toxic cancel culture of the radical left, ANTIFA threatens to silence anyone who opposes them,” Boebert said in a release posted on her website.

“This past summer, ANTIFA laid siege for over 60 days on a U.S. federal courthouse, injuring over 250 federal law enforcement officers. This treasonous insurrection used violence and fear to advance their political agenda—the very definition of terrorism,” she said, referring to violence that took place in the summer of 2020.

“It is time to put the safety of the American people ahead of politics and designate ANTIFA as a terrorist organization and declare that ALL political violence has no place in our great Nation.”

An alleged member of the far-left Antifa network has been charged with robbery in an attack on Andy Ngo, a reporter who regularly covers the extremist movement.

Court documents show that John Colin Hacker was indicted on Oct. 21 by a grand jury on one count of third-degree robbery for an incident that took place on May 7, 2019, in Multnomah County, Oregon.

Video footage recorded by Ngo showed a man who appeared to be Hacker stealing his phone at a 24 Hour Fitness.

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According to the grand jury, Hacker “did unlawfully and knowingly, while in the course of committing and attempting to commit theft, and with the intent of preventing and overcoming resistance to defendant’s taking of property and retention of property immediately after the taking, use and threaten the immediate use of physical force upon Andy Ngo.”

“I hope last week’s indictment of Mr Hacker signals a change in the prosecutor’s office in Portland,” Ngo said in a statement. “For years, too many violent extremists falsely claiming to be fighting for ‘racial justice’ have gotten away with campaigns of terror and violence against journalists and citizens.”

“Two years later, this is finally a step in the right direction for the rule of law in Portland, where Antifa has been operating with impunity,” Harmeet Dhillo, a lawyer representing Ngo who is also CEO of the Center for American Liberty.

“There is still a long road ahead for the justice that Andy Ngo deserves. Andy has endured years of harassment, serious threats on his life, and the inability to live in his hometown at the hands of these domestic terrorists. This is a good start, but we’re hoping to see more of these actions,” she said.

Hacker did not have a lawyer listed on the court docket. According to Ngo’s law firm, an active arrest warrant was issued for Hacker’s arrest and he has not turned himself in.

Antifa is a far-left, anarcho-communist network whose members have repeatedly committed violent acts in recent years across the United States. They are most active in the Pacific Northwest.

The video from the gym appeared to show a man assaulting Ngo, who said the male also dumped liquid on him.

Ngo, currently with The Post Millennial, is a journalist known for infiltrating Antifa in disguises and being attacked by members on multiple occasions. He recently penned a book about the group.

“The entire agenda and project of the Antifa ideology, that is, anarchists and communists, is to destroy the United States and to destroy its system. So when they say burn it down, burn the system down, they really do mean that. That system is the rule of law, its systems of governance, elected representatives—all of that. They want to get of rid of all that,” Ngo told The Epoch Times earlier this year.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/alleged-antifa-member-charged-with-robbery-in-attack-on-reporter-andy-ngo_4077336.html

A group of antifa agitators convened on a pro-life candlelight prayer vigil in Texas this week to drown out the conservative activists with whistles, megaphones and profane and blasphemous shouting.

These are the people who firmly believe they’re on the right side of history, by the way.

Conservative students held a candlelight prayer vigil at the University of North Texas (UNT) on Monday night and were blindsided by the sudden appearance of dozens of antifa protesters, who came armed with noisemakers and plenty of vitriol.

Kelly Neidert, the founder of the UNT chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) which organized the vigil, told Fox News that, while they expected a handful of protesters, they were caught off guard by the sheer volume of activists who showed up to shout down their prayers.

Just like the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy.

“They harassed us, they were throwing things at us,” she said. “They were chanting things. They brought all sorts of instruments that they were playing to drown out whatever we were saying. They brought their megaphones, they brought whistles.”

Earlier in the day, a notice began circulating on social media which alerted local activists that “fascists are organizing in your area.”

🚨 Alerta 🚨 UNT: fascists are organizing in your area. Tonight the young conservatives have invited groyper influencers & white nationalists such as Lance Johnston to a pro life “vigil” in supporting christo-fascist abortion legislation. pic.twitter.com/S9ULlDzKPo

— Elm Fork John Brown Club (@EFJBGC) October 18, 2021

“Alerta UNT,” the tweet began (it is unclear if this was a typo or if the inclusive poster was sadly in possession of only very limited Spanish language skills), “fascists are organizing in your area. Tonight the young conservatives have invited groyper influencers & white nationalists such as Lance Johnston to a pro life ‘vigil’ in supporting christo-fascist abortion legislation.”

The “cristo-fascist abortion legislation” in question is the so-called Texas “Heartbeat Act,” which restricts the vast majority of abortions in the state. It was signed into law by the duly elected governor after passing the legislative bodies of elected representatives tasked with speaking for the good people of the Lone Star state.

Because that’s precisely how things work in a constitutional republic, after all.

Ironically, the activists who heeded this “alerta” and showed up to protest behaved substantially more like fascists than those who carried out the peaceful legislative process that largely banned the destruction of innocent, unborn Texan lives.

Niedert told Fox that the agitators tried to pick fights with pro-life students, urged them to kill themselves and even harassed them on their way to their cars.

In one video, the pro-life activists could be heard chanting “Christ is King!” while the antifa agitators shouted “F*** your God!”

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In another, a woman screamed into a megaphone that she “loves sacrificing children.”

In a statement to Fox News, UNT spokeswoman Leigh Anne Gullett said that “A few hundred students with opposing views gathered on campus Monday evening to exercise their free speech rights. The gathering ended without incident.”

I wouldn’t say that trying to shut down someone else’s free-speech rights is a free-speech exercise. Would you?

How can anyone claim to oppose fascism when they participate in a coordinated, exerted effort to shout down peaceful attendants to a prayer vigil, of all things?

Yes, it is certainly true that vehemently pro-abortion antifa activists have every legal right to voice their loud, murderous opposition to prayers for the souls of unborn babies, as atrocious as it may be.

But logically, you cannot claim to inhabit a single inch of moral high ground while harassing and attempting to intimidate those who hold differing viewpoints.

That is fascism.

What’s more, one cannot claim moral high ground if they’ve entirely forsaken the philosophical foundations of their own First Amendment rights in the first place.

This is the end result of decades of hyper-secularization in our culture — a radical social transformation that followed the false belief that our country could still function without a common reverence for our theistic origins.

It couldn’t, in fact, and clearly cannot much longer, at this rate.

Does our culture need to return to its Judeo-Christian roots?

In 1798, John Adams wrote that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Our nation was founded as a unique experiment in self-governance, but it was predicated on the assumption that its people would largely share the same ideas of right and wrong.

If we can no longer agree on the most basic fundamental right — the right to life, or “do not murder,” as the objective Word of God admonishes mankind — then we no longer have unifying values.

For roughly 200 years, the Judeo-Christian worldview was the glue that held our common culture together, supported in large part by an active and vocal body of churches that wasn’t afraid to cite their faith in all matters, public and private.

Today, simply vocalizing agreement with what the Bible says about life, sexuality and gender is enough to face alienation and isolation in your community.

Scripture tells us we will be hated for standing firm to this truth when the world is demanding we abandon or compromise it.

So is it any wonder that college students daring to simply hold candles and pray for unborn life, without bothering anyone, would be shouted down and harassed by people who accuse them of being virulent racists and fascists?

Departing from the fundamental truth of Scripture and expelling its wisdom from the public forum has had disastrous results. The answer for Bible-believing Christians is to defend this truth more firmly than ever.

We do not stand on the authority of man, and we simply cannot let the culture shout us down from declaring what we know to be right.

The American experiment can continue to work if believers of the Gospel stand firm to Christ’s teachings and the authority of the Scripture with unwavering boldness.

This kind of lunacy is exactly what we’re up against, but it comes from a world that simply doesn’t know the Lord anymore.

Let’s shine God’s truth into the darkness that has brought about the lies of antifa, the acceptance of abortion and the fallacious reasoning behind secularism.

It’s the only way forward into the light.

“Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil.” (Ephesians 6:11)

A restaurant owner in Portland, Oregon, wrote a letter to city leaders saying she loves her city but it is no longer safe for business as liberal policies continue to allow crime to surge.

“Over the last year and a half, the occurrence of close contact psychotic outbursts from houseless people, aggressive behavior, abuse and damage to our property is a daily norm,” Kristen Murray, owner of the Maurice cafe in downtown Portland, wrote in her letter, according to Fox News.

“It threatens myself, my staff, my customers, my business, your citizens and the mass of unwell people need so much support as well. Our lives are all valuable,” she added.

Murray talked about the situation Thursday morning on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.”

When asked why she wrote the letter, she expressed her love for her city.

Report: Judge Judy Ditches Longtime Bailiff Because of Cost Concerns – But She Makes $47 Million Per Year

“I love Portland, and I believe in Portland being able to come out of this. It’s just gotten so wildly unbalanced right now and it’s not safe, unfortunately,” Murray said.

Her letter has led to an upcoming meeting with city officials and other business leaders to address Portland’s crime problem.

“The city is at a breaking point and it has been, but things have really exploded over the last couple of months, weeks, and I really don’t want to close up shop,” she added.

“The city has to make some dramatic changes,” Murray said.

Some have blamed the city’s rising crime on its attitude toward policing. In June, the city went after a police officer for his actions during one of the many leftist riots in Portland in 2020, leading the city’s team of anti-riot cops to resign and disband.

Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that Portland Police Bureau Officer Corey Budworth was indicted on a charge of fourth-degree assault relating to an Aug. 18, 2020, incident in which he struck a rioter with a baton.

Leftist Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt charged Budworth.

Today, Multnomah County @DAMikeSchmidt announced that a grand jury indicted Portland Police Officer Corey Budworth with one count of Assault in the Fourth Degree for alleged criminal conduct that occurred during a protest in August of 2020. https://t.co/iUoe4uqUzf pic.twitter.com/owYOdkAYZq

— Multnomah County DA’s Office (@MultCoDA) June 15, 2021

Lt. Col. Scheller Pleads Guilty to All Charges of Contempt and Disrespect of Superior Officers, Failure to Obey Orders

“In this case, we allege that no legal justification existed for Officer Budworth’s deployment of force, and that the deployment of force was legally excessive under the circumstances,” Schmidt said in a statement.

“My office will continue to do everything we can to ensure justice is done without error or delay and that we make sure our work and practices are rooted in fairness and equity,” he said.

Schmidt pursued Budworth, who was working as a member of the police bureau’s all-volunteer Rapid Response Team during last summer’s incident.

Oregon Public Broadcasting reported the officer with the baton in the following Twitter video is Budworth:

WARNING: The following video contains vulgar language that some viewers may find offensive.

Cop 37 shoves woman hitting her from behind in the head with baton, then hits her again in the face with baton while she is sitting on the ground pic.twitter.com/t4phwbWpsK

— John #FreePalestine (@Johnnthelefty) August 19, 2020

Budworth was found to have done nothing wrong by his superiors, given the circumstances. But he was hit with a criminal charge, to which he pleaded not guilty on July 12.

REVIEW: ‘No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives’

When I was 10, my mother, a fifth grade teacher, taught a girl close to my age who would arrive at school an hour early every day with matted hair and unbrushed teeth. Her caretakers, elderly grandparents, neglected the girl’s hygiene. My mother did not. She kept a hairbrush, hair ties, a toothbrush, and toothpaste in a desk drawer, just for her.

I’m not privy to every instance when my mother contacted child-protective services for her students. But there were many, and most times, the authorities did nothing. Meanwhile, abused children who continued to come to school sat at their desks with unkempt hair at best, or a rainbow of purple, blue, and green bruises, red scrapes, and pink scars at worst.

Her story reflects the failures of a child-welfare system designed to put the needs of adults over children, as Naomi Schaefer Riley claims in her book, No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives. The stories Riley, a children’s issues expert at the American Enterprise Institute, recounts in the book are not unlike those my mother has shared over the years at our dining room table.

More than 600,000 kids were victims of abuse or neglect in 2019. Roughly 2,000 kids die each year from abuse-related fatalities. And while the official number of children classified as victims has dropped in recent years, Riley provides evidence that the result is more likely a story of shifting semantics and reclassifications rather than a decline in abuse.

Throughout the book, Riley mentions common threads in abuse cases, such as drugs and alcohol or the presence of an unrelated adult such as a mother’s boyfriend. She also dispels the common notion that while abused children often come from impoverished homes, poverty is not necessarily a cause or prerequisite for abuse and neglect cases.

Egregious cases of maltreatment that hit the mainstream media continually remind the public of the need to reform the child-welfare system, Riley says. Take the case of eight-year-old Gabriel Fernandez, who was tortured and killed by his mother and her boyfriend. Prior to the boy’s death, concerned bystanders reported the case to social workers several times.

It would seem obvious that children’s needs should be the first and foremost concern of the child-welfare system, which includes child protective services, foster care and adoption law, and family courts. This is rarely the case, Riley argues. Rather, the child-welfare system often caters to drug-addicted or deadbeat adults and prioritizes racial and social justice objectives over the best interests of millions of victimized children.

Left-wing activists have successfully made race one of the top factors in determining whether a child should stay or be removed from a home.

Advocates for racial equity are quick to admonish the foster care system with charges of injustice and systemic racism. This notion is based on statistics that show black and Native American children make up a disproportionate percentage of those in foster care. Black activists—like the popular “antiracism” advocate Ibram X. Kendi—have decried transracial adoption (white parents of black youths), likening it to neo-colonialism or neo-slavery. Further, Riley says, the perpetrators of abuse in minority families are themselves viewed as victims of lingering oppression and racism in society.

In addition, social workers and judges, fearful of being viewed as biased, are disincentivized from separating minority families. As a result, minority kids are left in vulnerable positions.

“Children who have substantiated reports of child abuse and neglect are left in dangerous environments because the system is reluctant to be seen as breaking up black (or Hispanic or Native American) families,” Riley writes.

Instead of working to fix the system or decrease threats to children across all communities, Riley says, racial justice activists ignore varying rates of abuse and seek only to equate outcomes between various demographic groups.

Judges also use kids as prizes for inept adults. Threatening to take custody of a child could be the incentive a mother or father needs to get clean—indeed, Riley provides one positive example in the book. The author notes, however, that this treatment of children is remarkably “utilitarian.”

“Just as parents see the removal of children as the stick, now they want to see reunification as the carrot,” Riley writes. “The children in this scenario merely serve as tools to get parents to clean up their acts.”

Reunification of the family is the preferred solution in the child-welfare system for cases of childhood abuse and neglect. This is based in part, Riley says, on unsubstantiated claims that removing a child from their home inflicts some of the greatest amounts of trauma a child could ever experience. Many believe that, with proper resources and training, adults can learn to parent properly. Hence the haste to allow for parental visitation and the opposition and lack of enforcement on termination of parental rights.

Studies show, however, that a significant number of children who are returned to abusive parents will again face maltreatment or return to foster care. Studies from several states that Riley cites found the majority of children who died at the hands of their abusive parents were already known to the foster care system—sacrificed to the idea of family reunification.

“[B]ut more disturbing is that children who have been removed from their parents’ homes because of abuse or neglect are then brought back to visit or stay with those parents,” Riley says. “And they are subject to physical or sexual abuse all over again.”

Riley’s book might have benefited from a brief discussion of the collapse of institutions—namely marriage. While mentioned numerous times in the book, mainly in the form of stories about mothers and their revolving doors of abusive boyfriends, such as in the Fernandez case, Riley does not speculate on or articulate the role that the collapse of marriage might factor into the equation.

The author notes, however, that such forays into broad societal issues mean nothing to children once they are killed, tortured, abused, and neglected. Rightly, the book’s main priority is: What can the child-welfare system do now to protect children from becoming the next victim?

She offers some solutions. Group homes, where children are sent to live with trained caretakers and other foster care kids, place less pressure on children than shuffling from one unsuccessful foster arrangement to another. Bolstering the ability of middle-class Americans to take on foster care would create more opportunities for children to find loving homes as would supporting, rather than demonizing, religious foster care organizations.

Child protective services investigators need assistance as well. Often, these officials are called into dangerous situations and lack the necessary training to address a plethora of issues they could confront each day. Left-wing racial justice activists call to defund the police in order to shift funding to social services. These services, however, could benefit from police-like training and, more broadly, taking a “first-responder approach” rather than that of a social worker, Riley says.

To that point, why aren’t child-protective services deployed like police officers to homes when teachers or other mandatory reporters make allegations of abuse on behalf of a child? Lack of resources plays a role. But why don’t they then involve the police? Where are the arrests? Contacting child-protective services to address abuse cases should not result in violent and drug-addicted parents being able to evade the law. This point merits further discussion.

Introducing data analytics to the child-welfare system may also provide a way for social workers to make more clear decisions about best courses of action for children. Collecting data points and plugging them into algorithms, instead of relying on social workers’ subjective evaluations of each case, could help reduce the number of false flags and help focus resources on children who need the most help. Similarly, sharing data across law enforcement, medical services, and the child-welfare system could help adults with past records of abuse from slipping through the system.

In short, the child-welfare system must be reoriented, as Riley rightly states, to put the needs of children first. Until then, the mistreatment will continue. And teachers like my mother can only pick up so much of the slack.

No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts, and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives
by Naomi Schaefer Riley
Bombardier Books, 304 pp., $28

https://freebeacon.com/policy/how-to-break-the-cycle-of-abuse/

Kelley Paul, the wife of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said she’s “exhausted and angry” that mobs harassing the couple last year were not charged, but parents at school board meetings are being targeted as domestic terrorists.

“A mob held us hostage for ten minutes, spitting on and threatening to kill us. No charges! Fake anthrax and death threats sent to our home. No charges! Now just learned the person who called Rand’s Senate office threatening to shoot us will not be charged,” Kelley Paul wrote on Twitter Tuesday. “I’m exhausted and angry.”

Last August, after attending a White House event when former President Donald Trump officially accepted the Republican presidential nomination, the couple and other attendees were accosted by a group of people, some of them were holding Black Lives Matter signs. Video shows that protesters shouted toward the couple, and one protester abruptly pushed a police officer and his bike backward, sending the officer into Paul’s shoulder.

Kelley Paul also noted that in May, a woman called Paul’s office threatening to “shoot you all” and she wasn’t charged either.

“Yet if you dare express indignation at a school board meeting about CRT [critical race theory] or forced masks, the Biden DOJ and FBI say you’re a criminal,” Kelley Paul added.

On Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that he directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys to target any threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment made by parents toward school board members, teachers, and others.

Garland’s move drew instant backlash from parent groups and Republicans. His announcement was criticized as a double standard targeting conservative parents, who have ramped up pressure on school boards over the teaching of critical race theory and the imposition of mask or vaccine mandates.

“When Kelley learned today that a person who threatened to shoot us would not be prosecuted, she felt that it was another example of how violence is excused for the left and a mom who raises her voice at a school board meeting is to be treated as a domestic terrorist by the Biden administration,” Paul said in a statement to Fox News.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for District of Columbia didn’t immediately respond to a request from The Epoch Times for comment.

A record from the prosecutor’s office shows a Florida man, Brennen Sermon, was charged for punching a police officer last year when the officer was protecting the Pauls and others walking from the Whiter House to a hotel. But he was released on his personal recognizance, the record shows.

“The punk who assaulted the policeman defending my wife and I in DC went free but the Biden Admin. labels concerned parents as ‘domestic terrorists?’” Paul wrote on Twitter Wednesday.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco defended the new directive during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.

“I want to be very clear in the memorandum that’s publicly available, the Attorney General issued, talks about the importance of bringing federal, state, local law enforcement together to make sure that there is awareness of how to report threats that may occur, and to ensure that there’s an open line of communication to address threats, to address violence, and to address law enforcement issues in that context, which is the job of the Justice Department, nothing more,” Monaco said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/kelley-paul-mob-holding-us-hostage-not-charged-parents-at-school-board-meetings-criminal_4034877.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

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.

All video in thread shot by me for @N2Sreports and available to license. pic.twitter.com/pJLkMEuURf

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) August 23, 2021

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.

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.

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

— Nancy Rommelmann (@NancyRomm) August 25, 2021

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.”

This article was written by Mark Hemingway for RealClearInvestigations.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/little-outcry-over-antifas-equal-opportunity-beatdowns-of-journalists-left-and-right_4025075.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

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 1/10^th 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.”

This article was written by John Hirschauer for RealClearInvestigations.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/second-thoughts-about-that-fbi-report-of-a-40-spike-in-anti-black-hate-crime_4025223.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

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.

Video of ‘Furious’-Looking Pelosi at Congressional Baseball Game Blows Up Online

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. #HateHoax https://t.co/eCpOLefnoJ

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) October 1, 2021

“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.

More Protection Demanded for Fauci, Others; Critics of Scientists Could Face Hate Crime Charges Under One Idea

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.

SHREVEPORT, La.—A Louisiana coroner’s office has released the name of a baby found dead in a lake after his mother allegedly threw him and his older brother into the water.

The child was identified as 10-month-old Joshua Black, the Caddo Parish Coroner’s Office said in a news release Wednesday night. Police had previously given his age as 8 months old.

An official cause of death was pending based on autopsy results, coroner’s office spokesman John Andrew Prime said in an email.

The baby’s mother, Ureka Black, is accused of throwing Joshua and his 5-year-old brother into Cross Lake in Shreveport last Friday.

Her sisters, Felicia and Pycolyia Black, told KSLA-TV that they’ve long been concerned about Black’s mental health, but she rejected any suggestion of treatment.

“Every time we tried to get her help, she refused,” Felicia Black said. “She just felt like nothing was wrong with her.”

Ureka Black was arrested on charges of second-degree murder, which has a mandatory life sentence, and attempted second-degree murder, which carries at least 10 and up to 50 years.

She is represented by the Caddo Parish Public Defenders Office. Her attorney was in court when The Associated Press called for comment Thursday.

A yard crew working near a bridge alerted authorities to the baby’s body, and the Cross Lake Marine Patrol found the older child floating on his back, KTBS-TV reported. Rescuers thought at first that he was dead, but tapped him and he opened his eyes, the station reported.

Black’s sisters told KSLA that the family had tried weeks earlier to get custody of Black’s children.

“We just knew something wasn’t all the way right with her, but I didn’t want to hurt her in that way of taking her kids. We feeling guilty that we should’ve,” Felicia Black said.

Calls to Child Protective Services were fruitless because Ureka Black acted normal, they said. The sisters said they hadn’t known that she had a baby.

“For my mom, the first time she will ever see that grandchild is in a casket,” Felicia Black said.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/louisiana-coroner-releases-name-of-baby-found-dead-after-mother-allegedly-threw-him-into-lake_4025628.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

September 29, 2021

Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin should rally Virginia parents over Terry McAuliffe’s statement that teachers’ unions – not parents — have the final say on children’s education. 

I think Terry McAuliffe made a huge error in last night’s debate when he asserted that parents really should have no influence on what is taught to their children. This race can break wide open if Glenn Youngkin can focus, in a disciplined way, on rallying every parent and grandparent in the state who believes that parents should  have a role in their children’s education. Employing this tactic will drive home the point that the teachers’ unions own McAuliffe. For the Democrats, it is about control and power, not freedom and personal choice. 

I will reflect more on this and welcome your thoughts in our Inner Circle town hall event on Thursday, Sept. 30. If you haven’t already joined, please consider a subscription to my Inner Circle members program today. 

-Newt

Disgraced R&B artist faces life in prison for federal sex crimes

Rep. Danny Davis (D., Ill.) said on Tuesday that disgraced R&B artist R. Kelly, who faces 10 years to life in prison for federal sex crimes, deserves a “second chance” after serving his prison sentence.

“I think he’ll be welcomed back into Chicago as a person who can be redeemed,” Davis told TMZ. “I’m a big believer in what is called second chances.” Kelly was convicted on nine counts of federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges for recruiting women and underage girls for sex.

A Democratic primary challenger to Davis, Kina Collins, accused Davis of “undermining the broader fight for justice” by advocating for Kelly. She called the Illinois Democrat’s words “thoughtless, distasteful, and incredibly disappointing for a man charged with representing thousands of black women and girls in our district.”

Davis later clarified his comments to the Hill and said “Kelly has been accused of criminal acts, gone through a court of law, been convicted, and must serve whatever time the court decides.”

Davis has faced criticism for praising controversial figures before. In 2018, a pro-Israel group reconsidered its endorsement of Davis after the congressman said anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was an “outstanding human being.”

The congressman also urged Kelly to “find peace with his Maker and peace with himself” in prison and to “reconcile with the universe for the acts that he may have committed.”

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/illinois-dem-r-kelly-deserves-a-second-chance-after-prison/

Prince William County limits public comment amid debate over COVID, woke curricula

Parents are criticizing Virginia’s Prince William County School Board over a rule limiting public comment, a move community members say is an attempt to stifle debate around hot-button issues.

The school board approved changes to its “Citizen Participation” rule during a tumultuous Sept. 15 meeting. The updated rule limits time for public comment to one hour and prohibits attendees from bringing posters or signs into meetings without prior approval from the board.

The rule comes as Prince William County parents and teachers debate COVID-19 policies and “woke” curricula. The changes demonstrate the board’s apathy toward concerned parents and taxpayers, several attendees and concerned community members told the Washington Free Beacon.

“They don’t want to hear from the citizens. They don’t care what we have to say,” Carol Fox, a former Prince William County Public Schools teacher who attended the Sept. 15 meeting, said. “They’re going to run the school how they want to run it, and they don’t care.”

Prince William County is one of several Virginia counties where school board meetings grew contentious throughout the pandemic. Parents in some districts have organized to oust school board members who promote critical race theory or refuse to reopen schools. Fairfax County Public Schools officials cut off one mother from speaking after she began reading graphic material from a novel offered to high school students.

The Prince William County School Board was set to vote on a swath of measures during the Sept. 15 meeting, including changes to guidelines for public comment. While the board was in private session, parents on either side of the critical race theory debate began loudly taunting each other, one attendee told the Free Beacon. Security ended the meeting after local Democratic leader Tonya James began shouting “fuck you” at attendees.

William Deutsch, a former school board member who attended the meeting, said a select few attendees were allowed back into the meeting space for the board to vote on its agenda.

The newly passed rule only allows for one hour of public comment at school board meetings. Half of that time is dedicated to agenda items, leaving only 30 minutes for parents to discuss other issues. During that 30-minute period, only 10 attendees are permitted to speak for three minutes each.

The school board implemented the rule “in order to conduct its business in a timely and orderly fashion,” the final draft of the updated measure states. Those who are not able to speak at meetings due to the time limitation are encouraged to submit their concerns via video message or email.

Deutsch told the Free Beacon he thinks the rule change could give board members the opportunity to tee up a slate of friendly speakers and exclude dissenting voices.

Several attendees at the Sept. 15 meeting said they had gone to debate the district’s coronavirus mitigation strategies and its embrace of critical race theory. Though the school board denies using critical race theory in its curriculum, the district has adopted the Virginia Department of Education’s equity plan. The state’s “Road Map to Equity” cites controversial “antiracist” scholar Ibram X. Kendi and the educational arm of the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center.

Prince William County Public Schools’ equity statement commits district employees to “examine and interrupt beliefs, implicit and explicit biases, policies and/or practices that perpetuate systemic racism and discrimination.”

According to Deutsch, now is not the time for the school board to stifle public comment.

“We’re at a time when there is increasing polarization and division within our school system and it’s up to our leaders to lead by example and listen to the public,” Deutsch told the Free Beacon. “Sadly, the school board has made it clear that they are not willing to listen to the public and shut down viewpoints they disagree with.”

https://freebeacon.com/campus/virginia-parents-say-school-board-gag-rule-stifles-criticism/

NBA players reject COVID-19 vaccine mandate

Woke millionaire Kyrie Irving and other NBA players are stupid conspiracy theorists who literally want all of your family members to die. Rolling Stone reports there is significant opposition among NBA players to the league’s proposal to mandate the COVID-19 vaccine, considered by many to be a “non-starter.”

Irving, whose Instagram feed is filled with homages to Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, has urged Americans to “do your own research”—not as it relates to the COVID-19 vaccine, but rather as to whether the Earth is round or flat. His views on the vaccine, however, can be extrapolated with a high degree of confidence.

For example, Irving has started liking Instagram posts from conspiracy theorists claiming that “secret societies” are using the vaccines to fulfill “a plan of Satan” by implanting black people with microchips connected to a master computer. Similar conspiracies have reportedly spread throughout the NBA.

Irving is a vice president on the executive committee of the NBA players’ union, which held its annual meeting last month to discuss vaccine mandates and other issues ahead of the upcoming season. According to the NBA’s most recent health and safety guidelines, the anti-vaccine players were successful in forcing the league to accept nearly all of their demands.

The league and the players’ union are still negotiating a number of contentious issues, such as “prohibitions on accessing indoor bars, clubs, and lounges.” NBA superstar LeBron James, who has repeatedly refused to discuss his vaccination status, violated the league’s health and safety protocols (but was not punished) earlier this year by attending an indoor tequila party with Drake and other celebs.

Weeks prior to the party, James’s former teammate Dennis Schröder told a German media outlet that “LeBron and I” were the only players for the Los Angeles Lakers yet to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. James has insisted that believing in science (or not) is “a private thing,” despite vowing to use his platform to speak out on “everything that’s going on around this country and around the world,” except for China.

Irving has also refused to comment on his vaccination status, but all evidence suggests he is not. His aunt, Tyki Irving, told Rolling Stone: “There are so many other players outside of him who are opting out, I would like to think they would make a way.”

The NBA may have caved to its anti-vaxx players, but some state and local governments have sought to impose their own vaccine requirements. New York City, where Irving plays for the Brooklyn Nets, will require athletes to show proof of at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose in order to play indoors.

On Monday, the Nets hosted a media day at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Irving, who would have had to present proof of vaccination to attend, wasn’t there. In a virtual interview, he once again refused to discuss his vaccination status. “I like to keep that stuff private,” Irving said. “I’m not able to present there today, but that doesn’t mean that I’m putting any limits on the future of me being able to join the team.”

It remains unknown why Irving, who took a two-week leave of absence to protest the riot at the U.S. Capitol, wants his fellow Americans to die as a result of his reckless behavior. For whatever reason, sanctimonious white liberals were significantly less vocal, if not completely silent, in response to the Rolling Stone report.

Shut Up and Get Vaxxed: These Woke Millionaires Are Literally Killing People (freebeacon.com)

Controversial left-wing activist the Rev. Al Sharpton has joined a chorus of people from across the political spectrum who are decrying President Joe Biden over broken campaign promises and chaotic policy.

Facing multiple crises both foreign and domestic, Biden is entrenched against conservative and independent Americans who perhaps hoped his calls for unity following the 2020 election would bring the country together.

Instead of pursuing unity, Biden has catered to the far left of his party as the country has faced destabilization at home and abroad. Aside from the border crisis, the country left Afghanistan last month with the stinging feeling of defeat.

In addition to those crises, prices for basic commodities are up for Americans of all stripes.

Biden is also facing hurdles with Democrats in Congress over the price of a $3.5 trillion spending proposal and he spent part of Friday threatening his country’s own border patrol agents:

“Those people will pay… there will be consequences” said President Joe Biden on Friday of mounted Border Patrol agents photographed confronting Haitian migrants. pic.twitter.com/cLMliFfJi9

— Newsmax (@newsmax) September 24, 2021

If Biden was under the impression he still had the blind support of every loyal Democratic black voter, Sharpton on Thursday let it be known publicly that they, too, intend to hold the president to account.

Sharpton actually accused Biden of double-crossing minority voters who supported him last November in large numbers.

“[Biden] said on election night: Black America, you had my back, I’ll have yours,” Sharpton told The Washington Post on Thursday . “Well, we’re being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing — from Haiti to Harlem.”

“He said on election night: Black America, you had my back, I’ll have yours,” Al Sharpton said in a Thursday phone interview. “Well, we’re being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing — from Haiti to Harlem.”https://t.co/7e26CJ1JRY @washingtonpost

— Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) September 24, 2021

Sharpton, who visited the epicenter of a humanitarian crisis in Del Rio, Texas, on Thursday to call for an end to deportations of Haitian migrants, told the Post Biden could rectify his betrayal of black America by offering those Haitians residency.

The Post reported Sharpton said Biden faces a “defining moment,” and still has the opportunity to “rise to the occasion.”

Trump Team Says AZ Audit Report Shows Over 50K Votes ‘Illegally’ Cast

That, Sharpton said, or the president could turn the knife and let down “those that helped you get there.”

Sharpton actually took to social media Thursday to unleash on the Biden administration to his 666,000 Twitter followers in a message directed at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The treatment of Haitians in Texas is unacceptable and a moral outrage,” Sharpton wrote. “DHS must meet immediately. This must be stopped!!!”

The treatment of Haitians in Texas is unacceptable and a moral outrage. DHS must meet immediately. This must be stopped!!!

— Reverend Al Sharpton (@TheRevAl) September 21, 2021

The controversial political figure spoke briefly in Del Rio on Thursday, but his remarks — at least at one point — were drowned out by hecklers.

Sharpton and those hecklers do share some overlapping anger.

Biden, during the 2020 campaign, was accused of taking black votes for granted, and at times appeared as though he thought he was entitled to them.

Sharpton appears to have something in common with a majority of the country right now, according to polling: He has a bone to pick with the White House.

Al Sharpton: Black America Is ‘Being Stabbed in the Back’ by Joe Biden (westernjournal.com)

The United States has been subverted by people who believe in the failed ideologies of communism, socialism, and Marxism. America’s experiment in self-governance—with State power constrained by well-crafted limits of our constitution—is under direct threat from people who want to “deconstruct” our nation and replace it with a collectivist system of governance.

Many of the 1960s-era adherents to collectivist ideas have infiltrated our government, churches, and a multitude of other institutions, meaning these destructive philosophies have penetrated deep within our country and will be difficult to root out. Many of these radicals are also embedded within the education system, indoctrinating American children.

These people are America’s enemies. But, trying to counter subversive efforts without a full understanding of your enemy is a fool’s errand. I recently interviewed The Epoch Times’ Joshua Philipp, award-winning investigative journalist and an expert on communism, socialism, and Marxism, to determine how America might reorient itself toward mounting an effective defense against the proliferation of these destructive ideas.

One of the least effective ways to discuss communism, socialism, and Marxism is arguing against the economic outcomes and human suffering that inevitably follows adoption of these systems.

“Your average socialist doesn’t care that it doesn’t work economically. Your average socialist doesn’t care that it’s going to uproot the family system and destroy family order,” Philipp said. “They believe that their end goals are so righteous, that killing a few people along the way is worth it for the sake of accomplishing what they hope to create.”

Frequently cited in arguments against collectivist systems are the hundreds of millions of people killed by leaders such as Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Vladimir Lenin, Kim Il Sung, and Mao Zedong. But, “real socialists and communists don’t even bat an eye to it,” Philipp said.

While he believes the numbers of people murdered by communists should be part of this conversation, he also thinks that in order to persuade people against these philosophies, opponents of collectivism must address the roots of these ideas.

Religion and Natural Order

Karl Marx stood in strong opposition to religion. Though he had been a Christian in his youth, the timeless question that turned him away (and that he used to recruit people into a socialist mindset and the communal communist order) was essentially: If God is righteous, and if everything is created by God, then why does evil exist?

“If God created all things, and evil exists, then he must have created evil. That was the theory,” Philipp said. “And then they believe, well, if he created evil, then he must not be totally good. And therefore, he must not be the true, perfect image.”

For millennia, this has been a part of theological and philosophical debates, with religious scholars arguing that evil is not God’s creation, but the absence of God. Evil exists because man has free will, so people can choose to do good or evil. But, according to Philipp, what communists and utopians have sought to do is essentially try to eliminate evil from the world, as they see it.

Certain questions naturally follow: How do you prevent people from doing bad things? How do you prevent greed? How do you prevent people from doing things you don’t want them to do?

“You have to destroy the natural order. And, so they looked to create systems that could dictate to a very specific degree all elements of free will, that was one side of it,” he said. “That was always the downfall of utopians.”

Communists believe in the destruction of all previous institutions, including religious institutions. They believe in rebelling against God, whom they see as imperfect. Therefore, communism cannot coexist with the church. Communist ideology suggests that in order to perfect society, “you need to remove God from human morality, you need to remove God from human art, you need to remove God from architecture, and from our family structures, and from the way we shape our lives,” Philipp mentioned.

Dialectical Materialism

One of the pre-existing ideas that was brought into Marxism was that of the “negation of the negation,” which basically means that through the destruction of an existing institution, a more highly evolved system will emerge. For example, the chicken is born through the negation of the egg, the plant is born through the negation of the seed, a higher institution can be born through the negation of an existing institution. This would mean that by destroying institutions, a higher state of human evolution can be induced.

So, they must challenge the church, challenge tradition, challenge belief, create antithesis—the opposite of what is. “Marxism did the same thing under what they call ‘dialectical materialism,’” Philipp said, which is where you intentionally create inversion. You identify important cultural systems of that society and create the antithesis of that.

“So, you promote divorce, you promote feminism, you need to find ways to break up the family,” he said. “You need to look at the ways of doing it, and then develop social movements to argue against whatever the existing institution is.”

“If you want to destroy religion, you need to promote atheism,” he said. “Want to destroy the family, you need to promote feminism, promote divorce, promote the taking away of children by the government.”

The Way Forward

We don’t need to look too closely to see the ways in which communists, socialists, and Marxists have infiltrated the United States and other countries. Communists infiltrated American churches in the early 20th century. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has penetrated American schools. They have seized influence in U.S. companies and within our government.

Notably, their presence is visible in the authoritarian policies born from the pandemic response: the capricious, autocratic mandates; the brutal repression of people marching in the streets demanding the government’s boot off of their necks and a return to normalcy; actions by members of groups such as the United Nations and World Economic Forum who decry a return to normalcy, while pushing a global centralization of power.

For freedom-loving individuals, once you understand the goals of communists, socialists, and Marxists, you cannot cede any ground to them. There’s absolutely no capitulating, no negotiating, no meeting halfway.

“Every time they make a moral argument, and you say, ‘Okay, I want to be reasonable here, I’ll concede half the ground to you,’ society loses half its morals, society loses half its beliefs,” Philipp said. “Every time they do this, and they continue doing it, they force people to acknowledge it. And every time they do this, every time people give ground, they give up half their values.”

All supporters of individual liberty, freedom, and human rights must unite to confront the destructive forces attempting to take over. Americans must use all non-violent means available to deliver an immense repudiation of authoritarian systems of governance.

The battle isn’t unwinnable. There are only a few thousand politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate executives. There are more than 333 million American citizens. Who really holds the power in this country?

If government schools enforce Draconian mandates or teach lessons that indoctrinate your kids with communism, socialism, or Marxism, send your kids to private school or homeschool. If businesses enforce unconstitutional mandates, you stop spending your money there—put them out of business. If airlines enforce authoritarian policies or mandates, then stop flying with them. If your place of employment is caving to authoritarianism, you team up with like-minded employees and say no.

“You do not give an inch, you don’t sacrifice even a single morsel of your system of values, you don’t give in even a drop, you don’t play their games, you don’t talk within the boundaries of their arguments,” Philipp said. “You don’t even engage with them, in terms of giving any ground on anything. If they want to call you names for it, so be it. If they want to attack you, so be it. You do not sacrifice an inch.”

Uprooting Communism, Socialism, and Marxism in America (theepochtimes.com)

You have probably heard about Critical Race Theory. It’s not just Political Correctness on steroids. It is the hateful, elitist scam that fuels the woke Left’s anti-American cancel culture. You’ve seen the stories:

❌ CRT says white children start becoming racists at three months old!

❌ Coca-Cola employees were forced to take a class telling them to “try to be less white”!

❌ At one federal agency, all white, male employees were forced to write letters apologizing to women and people of color.

❌ In San Diego, the school board declared that it was racist to expect minority students to hand in homework on time. When these stories pop up, the first thought is, “That’s insane.” But Critical Race Theory is not crazy – it’s just racism.
 
It’s bigotry. Prejudice. Hate. And it’s on the march.

CRT racism has taken over American college campuses, elite corporations, and the mainstream media. But it won’t stop there. It’s coming for our local schools, our small businesses, our rights, our jobs, and our speech.

The good news is, deep down, Critical Race Theorists, like all bullies, are cowards. If Americans stand up to CRT racism, the New Racists will back down.
 
But we know Establishment Republicans won’t take up this fight. They are too afraid of the media and too beholden to corporate donors.
    
That’s why Senate Conservatives Fund only supports principled conservatives who fight. 

Just talking about Critical Race Theory was not enough for Donald Trump – who banned CRT from federal training programs and launched the 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education in American schools. And talk is not good enough for us.
 
As you know, SCF is the only organization in American politics exclusively committed to recruiting, vetting, and electing principled, conservative fighters to the U.S. Senate. We don’t care about a candidate’s Party – we care about their guts.
 
Today I want to tell you about three conservative Senate candidates we have endorsed to replace finger-to-the-wind RINOs.

✅ In Alabama, Congressman Mo Brooks has our support and the support of conservatives around the country – from grassroots activists all the way to Donald Trump. Brooks is leading the fight against the New Racism in the House Representatives, with legislation to bar CRT from federally funded programs and schools.

✅ In North Carolina, we have endorsed Congressman Ted Budd, a member of the House Freedom Caucus committed to the color-blind, equal opportunity America we all know and love. Budd has not only been working in the House to strip CRT from the federal budget. He’s been helping North Carolina legislators to do the same in his home state.

✅ In Ohio, former Secretary of State and combat veteran Josh Mandel is the strongest, toughest conservative in a crowded Republican primary to replace moderate Republican Senator Rob Portman. Mandel is a rock-solid social, economic, MAGA conservative who has made Critical Race Theory – which he calls “a cancer” – a centerpiece of his campaign. He’s not backing down from the outrage mobs or the Big Tech censorship machine.

By contributing today, you will push these three candidates one step closer to winning those races and winning back our country from the woke mob.

Brooks, Budd, and Mandel are exactly the kind of leaders we need to stand up to the racist bullies of CRT. They won’t shy from the truth, or the bigoted beltway insiders who try to hide it.

SCF supports them because they, like us and like you, stand against the racism, hatred, and lies of the Woke Left. We have their back because they have ours.

Now we need your help. I’m asking you to contribute $25 or more today. Will you please help us fight against the New Racists?

The Left is all in, and the established elites won’t give up their power willingly. To win in 2022, conservative Senate candidates have to fight both of them – but with SCF and your help, they will succeed.

Thank you for being part of our team and for doing so much to help fight for America’s future.

Sincerely,

Mary Vought

Executive Director

In American higher education today, the equivalent of the holy trinity consists of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The impact of this pseudo-religion is difficult to overstate. For example, new faculty are often required to sign a loyalty oath pledging their fealty to “diversity,” while administrative positions with “equity” and “diversity” in their titles proliferate. In practice, this results in an unnatural obsession with race and gender, which affects admissions decisions and, to some measure, every degree program. As with any religion, indoctrination is a crucial part of the process. So-called general education requirements are one vehicle for such indoctrination. This issue of indoctrination is particularly perverse, as indoctrination is, in some sense, the polar opposite of education.

Can anything be done to rectify the situation? Being a natural-born optimist, I believe there are a couple of relatively simple, common-sense changes that would have a profoundly positive impact on American higher education. Quoting Hoyt Axton, “If I were the king of the world, tell you what I’d do.”

First, I would require that universities be held financially responsible when their former students default on education-related debt. I believe that such a requirement would, overnight, transform higher education in multiple positive ways. For example, grievance-studies majors would likely vanish from the curriculum, and easy majors in the soft and pseudo sciences would be disfavored. The humanities would not disappear, but they would serve even more of a supporting role than at present. Universities would have a vested interest in promoting fields that are in demand, which include most of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects. Of course, a student could still major in any subject, but if their preferred major is unlikely to provide a positive return on investment, loans would be hard to come by, and as a result, the student would have to foot a significantly higher percentage of the cost.

I believe that this change would benefit students who today are too often lured into easy, worthless majors. And, does anyone doubt that society as a whole would benefit from a renewed and sustained emphasis on STEM subjects?

As a second step towards saving academia from itself, I would require that universities set clear, objective, education-based admission requirements. For example, a highly selective university might empirically determine that an applicant who is in, say, the top five percent of his or her graduating class, or has a composite SAT at the 95th percentile (or higher) almost certainly has the necessary academic foundation to succeed. On the other hand, a less selective university might have analogous, but lower, thresholds. Regardless of how such objective criteria are set, there are sure to be far more applicants who meet any rational baseline requirements than spaces available. I would allow universities to admit any students under full scholarships based on any criteria. But for everyone else, a lottery system would be used to randomly select students from the pool of well-qualified applicants. This would ensure that all applicants who meet a well-defined academic standard for success would have an equal chance of admission. Issues such as the choice of major could be determined after admission.

Such an approach to admissions would ensure true equity among qualified applicants. It would also serve to provide equal opportunity to the children of the taxpayers who fund higher education, instead of artificially favoring one group over another, as is the case today. And, by putting the focus squarely on academic preparedness, the message to high school students would be unambiguous—if you want to succeed academically, prepare yourself academically. Furthermore, it would be well-nigh impossible for universities to game the system, as they would surely be wont to do.

Under such an admissions scheme, to make changes to the racial or gender makeup of the university, the diversicrats would be forced to focus on the lower rungs of the educational ladder, which is precisely where such efforts properly belong. In the process of doing so, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the gross failings of the U.S. public education system, especially as it pertains to disadvantaged students. Perhaps we would then see diversity advocates begin to advocate for proven reforms, such as charter schools (I warned you, I’m an optimist). Most important of all, this admissions scheme would get universities out of the corrosive business of racial and gender gerrymandering that corrupt the admissions process today.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-to-save-american-higher-education-from-itself_4012261.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Based on the allegation that a “woke mob” within his faculty discriminated against him, a North Carolina State University (NCSU) professor filed a civil suit (pdf) on Sept. 14 in federal court against the college’s board of trustees.

Stephen Porter, the plaintiff, is a professor at NCSU in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he has alleged that the college’s 13-member board of trustees infringed upon Porter’s freedom of expression, violating both his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights by retaliating against his free speech.

Porter was hired as a tenured professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development (ELPHD) in 2011.

The defendants are listed individually in the lawsuit as Dean Mary Ann Danowitz, Chancellor Randolph Woodson, and Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs John K. Lee.

Joy Gaston Gayles, the senior advisor for Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and Penny Pasque, a professor in the Department of Educational Studies, are also named as defendants.

In response to Porter’s questioning of social issues, the lawsuit alleges that the defendants “have intentionally and systematically excluded him from departmental programs and activities that are necessary for him to fulfill his job requirements, effectively hollowing his job out from the inside.”

According to the lawsuit, the defendants deliberately have intended “to set the stage for his eventual termination.”

“While the structures of the plaintiff’s academic department—and thus, the details of the adverse employment actions taken against him—is complex, what is happening is quite simple: Defendants are gradually forcing plaintiff into what is effectively a ‘rubber room’ in retaliation for his criticisms of the so-called ‘social-justice’ ideology that now prevails both in his department and in academia more broadly,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit states that Porter had been outspoken in questioning what he called harmful agendas that Porter said further “a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion.’”

Porter began to be known as a “bully,” according to the lawsuit, in 2017.

An Account of Exclusions

Porter alleged that Danowitz “was instrumental” in removing him from his “departmental program area in retaliation for his protected speech” before assigning him a fifth course to teach as a punishment.

Gayles excluded him from doctoral events and activities “critical to the fulfillment of his job duties” before developing the Higher Education Opportunity, Equity, and Justice program, from which Porter said he was not included, a move that was intended to later edge him out of the ELPHD program altogether.

Lee “systematically excluded” Porter from meetings and activates related to higher education programs and the advising of students, Porter said, which prevented him from getting new advisees.

Pasque removed Porter from his “departmental program area” and assigned the previously mentioned punitive fifth course.

The ‘Woke Joke’ Blog

 Much of the contention between Porter and his co-workers centered around opinions expressed in Porter’s blog, Porter said.

“I’m a political conservative who has no problem taking a stand and expressing my opinion, which is why I have, for years now, been targeted by the woke mob at NC State,” Porter wrote in his blog on why he filed the lawsuit, adding that he will begin blogging about the details leading up to the lawsuit, which go back several years.

The Epoch Times reached out to NC State University for a response to Porter’s lawsuit, but it did not immediately respond.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/north-carolina-state-professor-alleges-woke-mob-at-university-discriminated-against-him-files-lawsuit_4008200.html?utm_medium=epochtimes&utm_source=telegram

Despite the passage of laws in some states banning Critical Race Theory (CRT) from being taught in schools, some educators are teaching other educators how to “back-door it” into the classrooms.

A teacher in Iowa posted a video teaching other educators how to circumvent the ban on teaching Critical Race Theory in her state.

In Florida, a Duval County teacher was removed from her position because she refused to remove a banner in support of Black Lives Matter from outside the door to her classroom.

The Zinn Education Project has collected the names of nearly 7,500 educators who vow to keep pushing CRT into classrooms despite the passage of laws banning CRT in a growing number of states.

While the head of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, denied that critical race theory was even taught in elementary schools or high schools, she vowed to fight back against “culture warriors” who are “bullying teachers.”

Not only did the National Education Association adopt a resolution to prioritize their effort to implement CRT in “K-12 and higher education,” it vowed to use all resources at their disposal—including friendly media—to go after those who are “attacking educators doing anti-racist work.”

In June 2020, the Florida Board of Education unanimously passed a rule banning CRT from being taught in the schools.

But on Sept. 20, Florida Atlantic University sponsored a webinar where Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad—an associate professor of language and literacy at Georgia State University—taught educators in Miami Dade, Broward, Martin, and Palm Beach County how to creatively slip the divisive subject matter through the back door of any classroom, regardless of subject matter.

This was not the first time Muhammad made a conscious effort to promote CRT in the classroom. During a 2020 interview, Muhammad discussed her plans for revising the entire education system in five steps.

First, Muhammad believes educators “need to get a team together to write new learning standards that are embedded in identity, skill development, intellectualism, joy, and criticality.”

Second, Muhammad said they need “new standards for folks who are writing curriculum,” suggesting  they “will no longer write a curriculum that’s absent of identity and cultural-responsiveness.”

Third, “we need to change the way we think about standardized testing,” she added. “Skills-only does not measure success for a child’s life.”

Fourth, Muhammad wants schools to “stop hiring folks who don’t have a justice-centered mindset.”

“If they don’t have this justice-centered mindset, stop hiring them as Secretary of Education, stop hiring them as school board members, as superintendents, as principals, as teachers, as staff. Period,” Muhammad said.

“The fifth part of the plan is teacher education,” Muhammad concluded, suggesting “diversity” cannot be “learned in one class” but rather it needs to be “threaded throughout the entire program.”

“This calls for hiring conscious professors who know how to research and teach within the realms of critical race theory and other theories like it,” she said.

The Epoch Times reached out to Muhammad for comment.

Difficulties in Defining CRT

“This is very similar to what has happened here in Loudoun,” Patti Hidalgo Menders—president of Loudoun County Republican Women’s Club in Virginia—told The Epoch Times. “They’re implementing CRT under the guise of equity and diversity.”

Menders explained how the new principal at Parkview High School—Dr. Jason Jefferson—immediately removed the heads of all departments and “fired the bookkeeper because she wouldn’t take the equity training.”

“Then he gave a speech about how he wanted to ‘dismantle and disrupt the American public education system,’” Menders said. “So they’re making it very clear what their progressive ideas are.”

“Dr. Jefferson asked Park View’s department chairs to re-apply for their positions,” Wayde B. Byard, public information officer for Loudoun County Public Schools told The Epoch Times. “This is a common practice used when administrations change so that the principal can interview the department chairs and get to know them. At Park View, all the department chairs reapplied and all were reappointed.”

Byard also said “there was no bookkeeper at Park View when Dr. Jefferson assumed his position on May 25. Thus, he fired no one.”

“Dr. Jefferson related to me that he did not make the following statement: ‘dismantle and disrupt the American public education system,’” Byard stated further. “I would hope that anyone who would make such an accusation would be willing to stand behind it. Attributing such a quote anonymously would be cowardly.”

Menders also shared how the Loudoun County school board “spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring equity consultants.”

“One group is called The Equity Collaborative,” Menders explained, “and while the superintendent of Loudoun Public Schools claims they are not teaching CRT in schools, it talks about CRT training right on their website.”

“The LCPS Ad Hoc Committee on Equity created an Equity Resolution that was adopted by the Loudoun County School Board on September 24, 2019,” the website explains.

“As a part of the on-going equity work in the school division, on June 8, 2021, the newly appointed superintendent, Dr. Scott Ziegler, recommended that the Equity Resolution be reaffirmed by the current School Board. By consensus, the board recommended that this resolution [pdf] should be publicly available.

“In recent days, media reports and social media posts have sought to distort the equity work by Loudoun County Public Schools,” LCPS Superintendent Dr. Scott Ziegler states on the LCPS website. “Misconceptions and misinformation persist. I want to take a moment to clarify LCPS’ efforts to ensure every student, employee and member of the community is treated in an equitable, respectful manner.”

“In explaining LCPS’ equity priorities, it might be helpful to state what they are not,” Ziegler explains. “They are not an effort to indoctrinate students and staff into a particular philosophy or theory. What they are is an effort to provide a welcoming, inclusive, affirming environment for all students.”

However, the Equity Collaborative website clearly states that their “goal is to help organizations develop their own capacity to create educational equity and social justice by addressing bias and oppression.”

“That means creating an environment that is capable of holding staff members in a place where they are uncomfortable enough to change, but not so uncomfortable as to disengage or revolt,” the Equity Collaborative explains.

The Epoch Times reached out to LCPS for clarification regarding what some, like Menders, see as a contradiction in claims.

“Loudoun County Public Schools has said—repeatedly—and I will repeat now,” Byard told The Epoch Times regarding this separate matter. “Critical Race Theory is not part of our curriculum.”

“They’re very good wordsmiths,” Menders said. “They’re re-branding CRT and calling it ‘equity, diversity, and inclusion.’”

Autry Pruitt, CEO of New Journey PAC, agrees.

CRT By Any Other Name

“All they do is take the various aspects of CRT propaganda and change the language, change the name,” Pruitt told The Epoch Times, explaining how textbooks used to mention “Critical Race Theory, or Race Theory” by name.

“Now when you open those same textbooks, you’ll read things such as ‘diversity and inclusion or equity theory,’ which is the same baseline as CRT,” he explained. “That’s one way they back-door it.”

Asked how people can oppose “critical race theory and other theories like it” being taught in schools, Pruitt said parents can provide the first line of defense themselves.

School Boards

“The best avenue is to take over the school boards to monitor and fire teachers who are determined to push CRT,” he said bluntly. “They also have to be represented in the education department at the state level. It’s not enough to take over the school board and have a blue governor. Even if you have a red governor, like in Florida. You’ll still get resistance in the education department.”

“What needs to happen is almost like the spoil system,” Pruitt went further, “where parents take over school boards and conservative governors are elected, and then the governor basically wipes out the entire state-level education bureaucracy and puts in new people. That’s the only real way to solve it.”

Publishers

While Pruitt anticipates the pushback from parents at school board meetings will continue to increase, as will the number of parents who send their kids to different schools or resort to a home school program, pro-CRT publishers are going to keep “pushing the agenda they want” through the textbooks they provide to their supporters throughout the school system.

“Under a different name with new adjectives and nouns, CRT is concealed, shrouded, veiled, or disguised in the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) ELA curriculum,” Pruitt noted. “With the use of subliminal messages, teachers are guided to teach Social Emotional Learning (SEL), equity, diversity, inclusion, etc. Feelings are more important than facts.”

As The Epoch Times reported on June 8, HMH declared on its own website a “commitment” to Black Lives Matter (BLM) and “social justice.”

“We believe the education system needs to change,” the website states, “and we will continue to use our platform to make that change.”

Members of the Collier County School Board (CCSB) were made aware of this during a June 7 meeting by CCSB Vice-Chair Jen Mitchell, who said she learned of the “commitment” through an email she received from a concerned citizen. Mitchell further revealed that one of BLM’s greatest advocates in the education field—Dr. Tyrone Howard—had been given a platform to promote the principles of CRT and BLM through the HMH blog site.

“It will be a wait-out, like everything else with the left,” Pruitt explained. “In other words, they don’t have to win. The left has a hold of the publishing world, and they are teaching it in higher education. So it doesn’t matter what the textbooks say in K-12.”

Textbooks

Pruitt strongly suggests parents “actually open and read the textbooks and highlight passages and send it out to people to show other parents what their children are being taught.” According to Pruitt, “most parents don’t understand the language of diversity and inclusion.” He posited that, when people were first waking up to CRT, it was because it was easy to find if one only bothered to look. They used words like “white people” and “oppression,” which most people found to be “troublesome and problematic.”

“But when you use language like diversity and inclusion,” Pruitt suggested, “it doesn’t come off as rough.”

“The people haven’t changed. The committees haven’t changed. The publishers haven’t changed,” Pruitt said. “It’s the language they’re changing.”

“By the time these children graduate, they will not be able to read but they will be great activists who hate their families, God, and America,” Pruitt predicted. “What a horrible thing to do to a child.”

Pruitt said “we all breathed a sigh of relief” when the Florida Board of Education banned the teaching of CRT in Florida, “embracing a traditional American education.”

“Wonderful we thought, Florida students will be getting a great education. The entire nation said we must use Florida as an example,” he recalled. “How wrong we were. We must remember that Communists NEVER stop.”

It is the opinion of Pruitt that the curriculum department of the Florida Department of Education is either “incompetent and never reviewed the texts and curricula that they approved” or they’re “undermining Governor DeSantis and Commissioner Corcoran.”

“In either case,” he admonished. “they should be fired.”

Despite Bans on CRT, Educators Are Teaching Other Educators How to ‘Back-Door It’ Into the Classroom (theepochtimes.com)

MSNBC host Joy Reid said Monday that people care about the murder of 22-year-old Gabby Petito because they’re afflicted with so-called “missing white woman syndrome.”

Daily Wire host Candace Owens shot back Tuesday via Twitter, questioning why there’s a media spectacle around the fatal police killings of black males while white people killed by the police get nearly no airtime in the media.

“Yesterday I learned about missing white person syndrome,” Owens tweeted, referring to Reid’s comment. “Can someone let me know what syndrome it is that causes us to ignore every white person that is killed by a police officer, but demands that we burn cities across the world to the ground for thugs like George Floyd?”

Yesterday I learned about missing white person syndrome.
Can someone let me know what syndrome it is that causes us to ignore every white person that is killed by a police officer, but demands that we burn cities across the world to the ground for thugs like George Floyd?

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 22, 2021

Owens was swiftly called a “Race Traitor.”

“When will you learn about the Race Traitor syndrome you suffer from where you go out of your way to get attention by being overly critical about your own race because nobody would care about you otherwise?” posted Andreas Hale.

When will you learn about the Race Traitor syndrome you suffer from where you go out of your way to get attention by being overly critical about your own race because nobody would care about you otherwise? https://t.co/LJlGEIdVw6

— Andreas Hale (@AndreasHale) September 22, 2021

“White people discussing white people who have committed crimes against other white people is ‘missing white person syndrome,’” Owens replied to Hale. “But black people discussing black people who have committed many crimes against other black people (see: George Floyd) are race traitors.”

“So basically, it’s very important that black people shut up and say nothing when crimes are committed against black victims, but also very important that we get angry and ask why white victims get so much attention when crimes are committed against them,” the “Candace” host added.

So basically, it’s very important that black people shut up and say nothing when crimes are committed against black victims, but also very important that we get angry and ask why white victims get so much attention when crimes are committed against them.

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) September 22, 2021

As highlighted by The Daily Wire, Reid made her jarring comments about “missing white woman syndrome” on Monday:

“If you’ve been watching the news for the past few days or on Twitter or Tik Tok, you’re probably familiar with the name Gabby Petito,” she began. “The 22-year-old aspiring social media influencer who was reported missing after her fiancé returned from their van life excursion without her.”

“Now, it goes without saying that no family should ever have to endure that kind of pain, and the Petito family certainly deserve answers and justice. But the way this story has captivated the nation has many wondering, why not the same media attention when people of color go missing?” Reid asked. “Well, the answer actually has a name, ‘missing white woman syndrome,’ the term coined by the late and great Gwen Ifill, to describe the media and public fascination with missing white women like Laci Peterson or Natalee Holloway, while ignoring cases involving missing people of color.”

The FBI Denver, the National Park Service, and law enforcement announced Sunday during a news conference in Grand Teton National Park that remains found in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park were believed to be consistent with Petito, ABC7 reported.

The body was confirmed to be Petito’s on Tuesday, and the cause of death was determined to be homicide, pending final autopsy results.

Joy Reid On Why People Care About Gabby Petito: They’re Suffering From ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’

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Joy Reid Goes Off On ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome.’ Candace Owens Has A Question. | The Daily Wire

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Two Florida sheriff’s deputies were ambushed during a traffic stop after a man armed with an AR-15 style rifle stormed out of a vehicle and opened fire on them, terrifying new dashcam video shows.

Brevard County Sheriff’s Deputies Brian Potters and Tyler Thoman were targeted by gunman Paris Wilder, 38, during the stop in West Melbourne on Aug. 30.

The gunman ended up being shot dead as deputies returned fire, while deputy Potters suffered gunshot wounds to his leg and buttocks.

Footage released by the sheriff’s office on Friday showed the deputies speaking to two men outside the stopped car just moments before the ambush unfolded. It wasn’t immediately clear why deputies stopped the men.

Deputy Potters could be seen joking with Wilder as he sat in the backseat after the deputy spotted a two-year-old child and dog sitting next to him.

Their exchange took a turn after the deputy asked Wilder to step out of the vehicle.

Wilder burst out of the car with the rifle and immediately opened fire on the two deputies, the footage showed.

Deputy Potters was shot as he tried to take cover behind his vehicle.

Wilder then chased the two deputies even as they fired at him. He then repeatedly struck Deputy Potters in the head with his gun.

The sheriff’s office said Deputy Thoman fired the fatal shots at Wilder as the gunman was attacking Deputy Potters.

Wilder was described by the sheriff’s office as a career criminal with 40 prior arrests.

“For those out there who might be foolish enough to ask why we shot him so many times, that answer is simple — because evil can never be dead enough,” Sheriff Wayne Ivey said.

“This individual had absolutely no regard for human life and was focused on only one thing — killing our deputies to avoid arrest as he knew he was facing several minimum mandatory prison sentences in his pending cases.” 

The sheriff said Potters is expected to make a full recovery.

The two other men who were at the traffic stop initially fled when the gunfire erupted but returned to the scene shortly after and are now assisting with the investigation.

Florida deputies ambushed by man with AR-15 style rifle during traffic stop (nypost.com)

https://www.khou.com/embeds/video/285-8ce2656c-cf58-4532-84fe-dcf0e8ced130/iframe

HOUSTON—A Houston police officer was killed and another was wounded Monday morning during a shooting that also killed a 31-year-old man whom the officers were attempting to arrest on drug charges, authorities said.

The veteran officers were each shot multiple times while attempting to serve an arrest warrant at an apartment complex on the city’s northeast side, Mayor Sylvester Turner said during a news conference.

“This has been a tragic day today,” Turner said. “It is another reminder that police work is inherently dangerous.”

Senior Officer William Jeffrey, who joined the Houston Police Department in 1990, was pronounced dead at a hospital following the shooting, authorities said. He was 54. Sgt. Charles Vance, who joined the department in 1998, was in stable condition, according to police Chief Troy Finner. Vance is 49.

The officers arrived at the apartment around 7:30 a.m., knocked on the door and spoke with a woman who answered it, Finner said. He said the man then came out and began shooting at the officers.

“You’ve got a suspect with a female girlfriend with small kids in that apartment complex and he still fired upon our officers,” Finner said. He said police returned fire and that the man died on the scene.

Authorities didn’t identify the man the officers were attempting to arrest. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office is investigating the shooting.

Houston Officer Killed, Another Wounded While Serving Warrant (theepochtimes.com)

Many in the political and media establishment have cast the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol as one of the darkest episodes in American history, comparing an episode in which one person was slain (a protester shot by police) to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Civil War, and the British sacking of the capital city in 1814. Seizing on the gravity of a mob trying to interfere with the process of recording Electoral College votes after a presidential election, Democrats impeached Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 breach and put him on trial in the Senate. Democrats have also spearheaded a congressional investigation—one focused on the former president—that will likely stretch into next election season.

Republicans, Trump supporters, and others see a double standard at play in Democrats’ emphasis on Jan. 6. They note that many Democrats cheered nationwide protests and some even put up bail after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer—prolonged unrest that generated far more death and destruction. They argue that groups associated with the summer’s violence, such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa, themselves aim to subvert democracy, and acted accordingly in targeting cops, public offices, and private businesses.

The electorate itself is divided, but doesn’t necessarily view this issue as an either/or choice. Polling shows that a large majority of Americans support the idea of examining the causes of both the 2020 summer riots in America’s cities and the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

It is clear, then, that many Americans see two sides to this story. In keeping with its mission to fill gaps in press coverage, RealClearInvestigations is launching a running compendium of data, with hyperlinked sourcing, comparing the damage done on Jan. 6, and the subsequent treatment of those accused of perpetrating it, with two other recent events: the summer 2020 riots and—in some ways a closer analogy—the all-but-forgotten riot in Washington on Inauguration Day 2017, as protesters challenged Donald Trump’s election and legitimacy much as Jan. 6 rioters challenged Joe Biden’s.

RealClearInvestigations has found that:

• The summer 2020 riots resulted in some 15 times more injured police officers, 30 times as many arrests, and estimated damages in dollar terms up to 1,300 times more costly than those of the Capitol riot. George Floyd rioters were found to have used more sophisticated and dangerous tactics than did the Capitol rioters, and in some cases weapons of greater lethality.
• Authorities have pursued the largely Trump-supporting Capitol rioters with substantially more vigor than suspected wrongdoers in the earlier two cases. Many accused Capitol rioters, unlike accused participants in the other riots, have been held in pretrial detention for months—with one defendant serving more time than the maximum sentence for the charge to which he pleaded guilty. Some allegedly endured solitary confinement and other mistreatment.
• With authorities applying lenient prosecutorial standards in many major cities torn by the summer riots, the vast majority of charges last year were dismissed, as were charges in the Inauguration 2017 unrest. Charges have to date been dropped in only a single Capitol riot case.

You can access the database here.

This article was written by the editors of RealClearInvestigations. 

Introducing RealClearInvestigations’ Jan. 6-BLM Riots Dataset (theepochtimes.com)

MENOMONIE, Wis.—A suspect in the shooting deaths of four Minnesotans who were found in an abandoned SUV in Wisconsin surrendered to authorities in Arizona on Friday.

Dunn County Sheriff Kevin Bygd said in a statement that Antoine Darnique Suggs, 38, turned himself into police in Gilbert, Arizona, a Phoenix suburb. He said Suggs had been living in the Phoenix area recently before traveling to Minnesota in the last couple of weeks.

Bygd said investigators don’t know how Suggs traveled back to Arizona. He said they have not interviewed Suggs, so they had no new information to release on a potential motive. The sheriff said Suggs will be held in the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix while awaiting extradition to Wisconsin.

Authorities said Thursday that Suggs was spotted meeting with one of the victims at a Minnesota bar the night before their bodies were found.

The other suspect, Darren Lee McWright, 56, from St. Paul, Minnesota, was being held in the Ramsey County Jail in St. Paul.

A complaint filed Thursday against McWright, who’s charged in Dunn County with four counts of hiding a corpse, said witnesses told police they saw Suggs late Saturday evening in the White Squirrel Bar in St. Paul with one of the victims, Nitosha Lee Flug-Presley, 30, of Stillwater, Minnesota.

A farmer discovered the bodies of Flug-Presley and three St. Paul residents with connections to her on Sunday in his Dunn County cornfield, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) to the east. All four had suffered gunshot wounds, authorities said.

McWright is the biological father of Suggs’ brother, according to the complaint.

Suspect in Deaths of 4 Found in SUV Surrenders in Arizona (theepochtimes.com)

Hypocrisy! The radicals in Congress, from Maxine Waters to the Squad, are calling to ‘Defund the Police,’ but they spend large sums of campaign cash on private security and Capitol Hill police protection wherever they go in America.

They rely on all of this security while pushing legislation in Congress that would take cops off the streets in our communities, and they still want to increase their own Capitol Hill police force with YOUR taxpayer dollars.

You may recognize them as “the Squad,” but Law Enforcement Loyalty PAC sees them for what they truly are: two-faced charlatans who publicly attack law enforcement and beg private firms to keep them safe. Many employees at private security firms are former and retired law enforcement and military, so the irony is not lost on us…

Law Enforcement Loyalty PAC is fighting back against the Squad’s hypocrisy and history of hatred for police by supporting principled candidates who will Back the Blue in Congress and oppose drastic measures to strip law enforcement of critical resources.

Roll up your sleeves with us as we prepare to make critical endorsements ahead of the 2022 Midterm Elections. Chip in $25, $50, $100, or more toward our effort to send our team to Congress to combat the Squad.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush have spent more than $100,000 on private security this year alone. They believe they should have police protection while you and your neighbors fend for yourselves.

That’s why they’re ramping up their attacks on law enforcement officers:
Ocasio-Cortez backed a rowdy anti-police protest in New York City, where activists shouted “punch a cop!” as they held signs reading “hit ‘em!” and “don’t let these pigs touch us!”
AOC even endorsed the most radical ‘Defund’ candidate for NYC Mayor.
Ilhan Omar took “Defund the Police” to the extreme, backing a ballot initiative to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department in its entirety and replace it with social workers with clipboards. She called Minneapolis police “incompetent” and “brutal” after months of rioting and protests.
Cori Bush is a professional BLM activist who told America to “suck it up” when she was first criticized over her private security expenses, and
Ayanna Pressley is using a D.C.-based political action committee to endorse anti-police candidates all the way down the ballot in states across the country…

They won’t stop until they’ve unleashed their activist mob on your community and left you defenseless and at their mercy. Defunding the police is only the beginning.

STAND WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT – DONATE TODAY

Americans overwhelmingly oppose the Squad’s radical agenda, and we’re stepping up to support principled candidates before the ‘Defund’ Democrats get their wish!

Law Enforcement Loyalty PAC is comprised of former law enforcement and military servicemen, and we’re uniquely positioned to take on the Squad before they force “Defund the Police” and other radical policies through Congress.

Your support is critical as we call out the Squad’s hypocrisy and fight to put an end to the dangerous “defund” agenda emanating from Washington.

Law enforcement officers have your back every day in our communities – now we’re asking you to have ours. Chip in what you can.

For your safety,

Tony Palmer, SGT (Ret), Virginia Beach Police Dept
Chairman of the Advisory Board
Law Enforcement Loyalty PAC

STAND WITH LAW ENFORCEMENT – DONATE TODAY

The ‘criminal first’ policies of the radical left are getting innocent Americans killed in the streets. For example, a Kamala Harris/BLM-backed slush fund bailed domestic abuser George Howard out of jail in August, and he allegedly shot and killed a man in cold blood on the highway just a few weeks later!

Howard is just one of the thousands of criminals that have been released back onto our streets by progressive politicians and activists who are fighting to defund the police in Washington and across the country.

This is part of the left’s all-out assault on our criminal justice system – from defunding the police in Congress to BLM organizations across the country bailing criminals out of jail to Soros-funded prosecutors refusing the put bad guys behind bars.

I patrolled some of the toughest neighborhoods in Dallas for 22 years as a cop, and I’m ready to fight back against the far-left and their reckless policies in Congress

As a Proud, Black American and Law Enforcement Veteran, I’m taking my pro-American, pro-law enforcement message to Washington to counter the efforts of Kamala Harris and BLM. Please chip in $25, $50, $100, $250, $1,000, or more and help me succeed TODAY!

During last Summer’s riots across America supported by Antifa, BLM, and leftist politicians, Kamala Harris drove thousands of left-wing activists to contribute to the “Minnesota Freedom Fund,” which used more than $35 million raised from BLM and ‘Defund the Police’ activists to pay thousands of dollars to release George Howard from jail last month, and dozens of others just like him.

Their crime-spree slush fund freed registered sex offenders, murderers, and child rapists. And for two months, MFF helped free six men accused of domestic violence. The list goes on and on…

I’m running for Congress to restore law in order in Washington and around the nation. Please join me with your donation of $50, $100, or even $1,000 TODAY before Kamala Harris puts more criminals in your neighborhood.

The “activism” side of BLM and ‘Defund the Police goes hand-in-hand with the disastrous policies that Harris, Joe Biden, BLM, and the Progressive Democrats in Congress are pushing. Squad-member Cori Bush went on a hypocritical tirade on national television calling for defunding the police while funneling thousands of dollars in campaign cash to hire private security. As a veteran law enforcement officer, I’m taking a stand, and I want you by my side!

Will you help me fight, stand by our law enforcement officers and keep our communities safe by stopping the Kamala Harris “criminal first” agenda? Please invest what you can today – be it $1,000, $250, $100, $50, or even $25.

You and I must stop the anti-cop, criminal first agenda and put the safety and security of American taxpayers first. So roll up your sleeves and join me today.

Back the Blue,

Tre Pennie

Cop for Congress

STAND WITH TRE

How to protect yourself and your kids from the harmful effects of technology

Every generation worries about the upcoming youth, but does the age of smartphones and digital addiction pose a more serious threat than ever before? In an episode of NTD’s “The Nation Speaks,” host Cindy Drukier interviews teacher and author Jeremy Adams, as well as psychologist Hilarie Cash, to answer this question.

It has only been 14 years since we’ve had computers in our pockets that are available every moment of our lives. In his book “Hallowed Out: A Warning about America’s Next Generation,” Jeremy Adams, a civics teacher of 24 years, brings awareness to what he is seeing in the classroom and how he believes the younger generation is negatively affected by technology.

Adams says when you work in the classroom, you get to know kids and you notice if there are troubling trends. He believes the most disturbing thing about kids today is the value system they are embracing. The way they look at their country, the way they spend their time, and the values they hold are not helping them live purposeful and meaningful lives. In fact, they are hindering them.

Being a civics teacher, Adams says he worries about the American experiment.

“America is not like other countries. We can’t have a single lost generation that doesn’t understand what it means to be an American and what those values are and how you perpetuate the American experiment,” he says.

He is worried about the values that have emerged in young people over the past 10 years. These include the extent to which young Americans live their lives completely untethered to adult values, influences, or role models.

Adams says that although it doesn’t matter to him whether the youth are religious or not, he is bothered that young people don’t seem to know anything about religion.

Other troubling trends are that the younger generation is extremely unpatriotic, they don’t have the desire for relationships, marriage, or family, and they are radically individualistic.

He says that when you think about the things that make life enchanting and grand, you think of friendships, love, learning, and going out and seeing and doing things. Yet today’s youth are lonely and isolated.

Adams stresses how unhappy this generation is, citing rising suicide rates.

“It is shocking,” he says.

He was worried about these things prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, but now these problems have been amplified and accelerated.

Kids today don’t go out and socialize, they don’t have meals with their parents, and they often spend 9 to 10 hours a day on their phone.

Adams says kids post-COVID-19 are zombies in the classroom and don’t know how to engage in academic and social environments.

Adams believes the reason for much of this falls on the adult generation. He says that we have given young people freedom but haven’t stepped forward and given them the values, knowledge, or insight needed to use that freedom well. If adults give youth the freedom to do whatever they want, we have to also teach them that freedom allows them to commit to what is important and meaningful. When we fail to do that, we are left with a generation that sees freedom as tantamount to indulgence or licentiousness, and doesn’t connect it to important things.

Being a parent, spouse, teacher, or person of faith, is hard. It may be the hardest thing a person does, but it will also likely be the most meaningful. Youth today often aren’t able to make the connection between struggle and purpose.

Acknowledging that high expectations usually come from adults, Adams points out that the parent generation, in our zeal to be compassionate and empathetic, have actually let our youth down. Being kind is a good thing, but it should help students feel secure so they can achieve good things.

Now in schools, teachers are also friends, counselors, and often act as parents to their students.

Teachers today need to understand that compassion and empathy should serve youth in a way that prepares them to show up, study, work hard, and have success. Adams says many teachers think they’re being compassionate by giving students a diploma without making them learn anything.

Any form of success requires diligence, knowledge, and skill. Robbing young people of what they need to stand tall in the world and achieve what they want in their lives is not kind.

Thankfully, Adams does believe there is still time to turn the situation around. He says we all want to do better. Young people know they are addicted to their phones and need to live life more. The adults know better and know they need to do things like insist on family time, church, and community. He says parents and teachers need to start “adulting” again, which means putting ourselves in the physical, intellectual, and moral spaces of young people. Awareness is the key to breaking the phone addiction, because once we are aware, we can intervene.

Teacher Warns of Troubled Next Generation; Tackling Digital Addiction | The Nation Speaks [Full Episode]Play Video

Watch the full episode here.

To learn more about how bad the digital addiction in our youth is and what can be done about it, Drukier interviews psychologist Hilarie Cash, co-founder of reSTART: Internet Addiction Recovery Program.

Cash, who has been seeing addicted patients for over 25 years, says the addiction problem has been growing steadily as technology has entered everyone’s lives. The software is designed to be addictive, and kids are now exposed to technology from early ages, which affects their development.

Cash says there are tell-tale signs if there is an addiction problem. One of the disorders is called “Gaming Disorder,” which often happens to people who become addicted to video games. It can be recognized when gaming begins to take over a person’s life: they no longer have control over how much they use it, they lose interest in other things, and they continue with their behavior despite negative consequences.

Cash says that grades going down, not getting enough sleep or exercise, not having many friends or offline activities, or fighting with family about technology-use rules, are all indicators that there is a problem.

Cash says technology affects brain development in young children. Today, many parents are handing devices to their babies, which has never been the case in past generations. This impacts social development substantially, because a person doesn’t develop good social skills unless they are actually interacting socially with other people.

Cash also explains the attachment issues that result from being exposed to too much technology. A child needs to be attached to their caregivers, but if the caregivers are on their devices too much, or putting the kids on devices to keep them distracted, this affects the attachment a child develops with their caregiver, which in turn affects mental health later on down the road.

She says that from ages 13 to 20, many have intimacy disorders, not having the skills and confidence to initiate, develop, and maintain emotionally intimate relationships.

Sexuality is also impacted because there is a blending of activities online, with many users looking at pornography, gambling, gaming, and social media all at the same time.

On top of this, there are physical problems, such as sleep deprivation, inadequate exercise, and poor diet.

In regards to social development, there is a lack of skill in communication, as well as attention problems.

Technology gives us immediate gratification, which negatively affects academic work by not having the ability to stay focused, persevere to get projects done, and look forward to getting a good grade.

So what can we do? Cash says there are apps that help at least monitor phone use, and these can be helpful if a person is actually motivated to make changes.

She recommends that parents don’t give smartphones to their children before high school. The software parents can put on phones to monitor kids is easy for smart kids to get around. She says to make sure kids don’t have smartphones until they have developed a well-rounded life and can sustain that once they get a smartphone.

Cash also says it is wise to have boundaries around phone and screen time, such as checking your phone at certain times and otherwise leaving it off, and making sure times at home are intentional and not surrounded by screen time and devices. Make sure kids are getting time outdoors, exercising, doing their chores, having down time, and in-person social time.

Cash says the key is to focus on giving your kids the proper rules and guidance so they can live a well-rounded life.

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CHICAGO—A Chicago woman has been charged with obtaining dozens of young homicide victims’ death certificates and using them to defraud the government out of thousands of dollars in tax refunds and coronavirus stimulus payments.

Katrina Pierce faces federal charges of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to a criminal complaint made public Thursday. A judge ordered Pierce, who was sent to prison for a similar scheme nine years ago, to remain locked up pending trial. Her next hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.

According to prosecutors, Pierce obtained the death certificates for dozens of young homicide victims and used them to collect thousands of dollars in payments, the Chicago Tribune reported.

An investigation into Pierce began in late 2019 when a Cook County Vital Records Bureau employee noticed that on the same day, Pierce requested death certificates for four people who had different last names, claiming to be a sister of all of them.

A check of the bureau’s database revealed that she had requested 37 death certificates that year and succeeded in getting 26 of them, prosecutors allege. Among the ones she got was that of 7-year-old Amari Brown, who was fatally shot in 2015. According to the criminal complaint, Pierce was able to collect a $4,400 federal tax refund claiming to be the boy’s aunt.

Prosecutors also allege that Pierce filed a tax return for a St. Louis man declaring an income of $1 despite the fact that the man had been shot to death more than a year earlier. That netted her about $4,400 in coronavirus stimulus payments from the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the complaint, the IRS received a tax return for “Rajona Pierce.” That was an alias that Pierce had used in the criminal case that ended with her convicted of stealing more than $200,000 in federal tax and state child care benefits and being sentenced to 11 years in federal prison in 2012.

According to the complaint, in that return, Rajona Pierce reported $1 in income for a beauty salon that didn’t exist at an address that turned out to be a long-demolished public housing project on the city’s South Side.

Investigators also found that Rajona Pierce received a total of $3,200 in stimulus payments, according to the complaint and they suspect that Pierce “used multiple banks and accounts in an effort to hide or to launder the proceeds of her various schemes”,” according to the complaint.

The complaint does not include an exact amount of money that Pierce allegedly made off with, but it makes clear that the total was in the tens of thousands of dollars. For example, it points out that Pierce deposited nearly $84,000 into a bank account during the last six months of 2020 even though she declared that she earned less than half of that amount on her income tax return for that entire year. This, the complaint contends, “suggests that Pierce may have an illicit source or sources of income that she wishes to conceal.”

Chicago Woman Charged With Fraud in Death Certificate Scheme (theepochtimes.com)

With advisers like Joint Chiefs of Staff head Gen. Mark Milley, former President Donald Trump hardly needed enemies — at least, if Bob Woodward and Robert Costa are to be believed.

Woodward and Costa’s new book “Peril,” about the events surrounding the 2020 election and unprecedented instability encompassing it, isn’t even out yet and the allegations contained therein have led to calls for Milley’s resignation.

In one excerpt from the book, Milley is alleged to have talked to the Chinese twice to assure them the United States wouldn’t launch an attack — and if they did, he would give Beijing a heads-up. Milley also reportedly told senior officers that if there was any move toward a nuclear launch, while a president could give the order, he needed to be consulted.

That whole series of episodes, if true, skirts with treason when you consider he would be warning an enemy of an attack. Perhaps more crucially, it undermined the bedrock principle of civilian leadership of the military, one of the principles that separates us from an authoritarian state.

When it came to domestic threats, however, Woodward and Costa say Milley was considerably less concerned — so much less that he called the George Floyd riots “penny packet protests.”

According to an excerpt from the book obtained by Fox News, Milley pooh-poohed White House fears that the riots were insurrectionary and “burning America down” during the summer months last year.

“Mr. President, they are not burning it down,” Milley reportedly said. “They used spray paint, Mr. President, that’s not an insurrection.”

According to the book, the conversation took place near the end of May. The date isn’t given, but the protests had spread well beyond Minneapolis by May 27, according to a timeline of events from The New York Times. That’s just two days after Floyd’s death.

A May 30 timeline from Fox News mentions protests or riots in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix and St. Louis, among many others.

“More than a dozen cities instituted curfews and thousands were arrested, while thousands of National Guard members were deployed in at least 15 states,” Fox News noted.

“When Milley spoke to Trump, however, he reportedly cited data at that time that said there had only been two cities with major protests, while elsewhere it was 20-300 protesters.”

According to Woodward and Costa, Milley then pointed to a portrait of former President Abraham Lincoln and said the protests and riots couldn’t be compared to the attack on Fort Sumter which started the Civil War in 1861.

“We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley said, adding that it couldn’t be compared to the riots which engulfed the country in 1968, according to the book.

Milley also reportedly blamed systematic racism for the protests and said anger had “pent up in communities that have been experiencing what they perceive to be police brutality.”

Milley was, if nothing else, a bad prognosticator.

The George Floyd riots would go on to cost America up to $2 billion in insurance claims, according to estimates obtained by Axios in September of last year. That would likely make them the most costly riots of all time, surpassing the Los Angeles riot of 1992; that cost $775 million in insurance claims at the time, which would be $1.42 billion in 2020 dollars.

The three most costly riots of 1968, meanwhile, barely topped $300 million in damage when adjusted for 2020 dollars.

More importantly, the George Floyd riots would rend our national fabric more than any domestic event in recent memory. It would enable the worst elements in the Black Lives Matter and antifa movements.

The protests — and the so-called anti-racist movement they supercharged — also became an avenue for expressing explicitly anti-American sentiments. How many times, for example, did we witness scenes like this?

Protesters cheer as they burn American flags at the guillotine outside the police bureau #PortlandProtest #Portland pic.twitter.com/R9I6dobNiv

— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) August 23, 2020

Those weren’t the riots that Milley was worried about, though. According to the book, he was more concerned with the Capitol incursion, which the book alleges he perceived as being “indeed a coup attempt and nothing less than ‘treason.’”

The book goes on to say Milley was afraid Trump wanted a “Reichstag moment” — referring to the Reichstag fire, a relatively minor incident in 1933 which Adolf Hitler used as an excuse to consolidate power in Nazi Germany — and that the attack was “so unimagined and savage, could be a dress rehearsal for something larger” for Trump supporters.

It’s not that Milley was the only man expressing these overheated sentiments about the Capitol incursion — but if these reports are true, at some point during the past year, Milley became one of America’s wokest generals, if not the wokest. There’s a clear throughline from his remarks about the George Floyd riots to his testimony before Congress defending his inclusion of critical race theory in military education, and it’s one that doesn’t bode well for the future.

Everything in the report comes with a huge asterisk, of course, given Bob Woodward’s history of problematic investigative journalism. If true, however, it’s more evidence Milley needs to resign posthaste.

Calling the George Floyd riots nothing more than graffiti artists and “penny packet protests” doesn’t rise to the level of treason, but it’s more evidence that this isn’t the man who should be one of the president’s top military advisers.

What Gen. Milley Secretly Revealed to Trump About George Floyd Riots: Report (westernjournal.com)

San Fransisco Mayor London Breed was seen dancing and singing maskless at a nightclub, apparently violating the city’s public health restrictions.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported the mayor was at the Black Cat jazz club in the Tenderloin, where she enjoyed a late night performance, along with other equally maskless guests.

“The fact that we have not been able to enjoy live music in this way since the beginning of this pandemic made it even that much more special and extraordinary,” she told The Chronicle after the performance.

One of the photos published by The Chronicle shows a smiling Breed celebrating with with Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, who was also not wearing a mask.

According to San Francisco’s public health department, every resident, including people who are fully vaccinated, “must wear a well-fitted mask in indoor public settings at all times,” except when they are actively eating or drinking. It also states that “indoor settings, whether public or private, are higher risk for COVID-19 transmission, especially when you are with people you do not live with.”

In a video published by The Chronicle, Breed can be seen standing and dancing along behind a table full of drinks, but she was not actively drinking or eating, or holding food or a drink.

A statement from the mayor’s office acknowledged that it can be hard to follow public health orders.

“The mayor was excited to be out and had an incredible night at the Black Cat, and wants to support small businesses,” the statement reads. “She was with friends at her table, not wearing a mask while eating and drinking and enjoying herself. She knows health orders are hard and asks everyone to do their best to follow them.”

Breed is not the first California Democrat who has been caught violating COVID-19 restrictions. At the height of the pandemic in November of last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom was broadly criticized for attending a party at the famed French Laundry restaurant in Napa without wearing a mask and with visitors from multiple households, after he discouraged state residents from having holiday gatherings.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faced similar criticism in September 2020 during the height of the pandemic, after a security camera footage was posted online, which showed her visiting a San Francisco hair salon, which at that time was closed under the city’s lockdown order. The congresswoman, who advocated for a nationwide mask mandate, didn’t wear a mask during the salon visit.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed Caught Breaking City’s Indoor Mask Rule (theepochtimes.com)

A government watchdog group is calling on New York’s public pension fund to divest from Unilever, the parent company of Ben & Jerry’s, in response to the ice cream company’s decision to boycott Israel.

The National Legal and Policy Center asked New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in a Thursday letter to “effect the immediate divestiture” of the state pension fund’s $73 million holdings in Unilever, arguing that the company has not taken sufficient steps to oppose anti-Semitism and the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.

The letter comes after Arizona and New Jersey announced they would pull investments from Unilever, and as Florida and Illinois have said they are looking at taking similar action. DiNapoli said in July that Ben & Jerry’s boycott decision would make New York reconsider its investments with Unilever in the future.

“Unilever’s position that it is opposed to anti-Semitism is belied by the actions and associations of Anuradha Mittal, the chair of Ben & Jerry’s Board of Directors,” wrote NLPC chairman Peter Flaherty in the Sept. 16 letter. “Mittal is the architect of the ice cream company’s policy of ending sales in Israeli ‘occupied territories.’ Reportedly, Mittal also proposed a boycott of all of Israel. Her Twitter account has many anti-Israel tweets and contain specific endorsements of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.”

Flaherty also noted that Mittal is a trustee of Ben & Jerry’s nonprofit arm, which issued $170,000 in grants to an unrelated nonprofit that Mittal also controls called the Oakland Institute. The arrangement could violate IRS rules against self-dealing, according to the NLPC, which filed a complaint with the IRS about the financial activities last month.

Mittal’s Oakland Institute has published defenses of Hezbollah and Hamas, the Washington Free Beacon reported in July.

In one article published by the Oakland Institute, former Green Party Senate candidate Todd Chretien argued that progressives should support Hezbollah during the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006.

“You do not have to agree with all of Hezbollah’s ideas to support their resistance to Israel,” Chretien wrote. “Condemning ‘both sides’ in the Middle East is just like condemning ‘both sides’ in the American Civil War. During the Civil War, with all its complications, one side fought for slavery and the other fought for emancipation. Today in the Middle East, one side fights to rob and pillage, the other seeks self-determination and dignity.”

The institute also directed a Ben & Jerry’s foundation grant to an organization called the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, which the European Union barred from receiving public funding last year for refusing to sign an anti-terror clause.

“If Unilever were truly opposed to anti-Semitism, it would have already severed its relationship with Mittal,” wrote Flaherty. “Moreover, Unilever’s anti-Israel bias is underscored by the fact that it has announced no intention to end ice cream sales in China, where it is a leading foreign brand.”

The New York comptroller’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Government Watchdog Calls on New York Pension Fund to Divest From Ben and Jerry’s Parent Company (freebeacon.com)

The Heritage Foundation on Thursday alleged that it has been temporarily blocked from advertising and promoting on Amazon a new book about the Marxist ideological root of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization.

In a news release, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank said it was informed by Amazon that its advertisement for the book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution” failed to comply with the online retailer’s policy because it contained “content that is not allowed.”

“Content that revolves around controversial or highly debated social topics is not permitted,” said Amazon in a message to Heritage. “Please remove this content from your ad.”

Heritage said in an update that it has won the appeal of the decision, and was notified that it was the result of “human error.”

“Whether this was the result of an algorithm or human action, the outcome is censorship,” Heritage concluded.

The book, which tops Amazon’s “Black & African American History” category at the time of this article’s publication, is written by Mike Gonzalez, a veteran journalist and senior fellow at Heritage. Gonzalez condemned Amazon for allegedly trying to limit the reach of the book, but also noted that this very attempt reveals how important his work is.

“I wrote this book because most of the press refused to cover the important questions about the people and organizations behind Black Lives Matter,” Gonzalez said. “The American people deserve answers to those questions, especially after the 630 or more riots that left our cities burning, businesses destroyed and billions in damage, and Americans dead.”

Gonzalez also questioned whether Amazon would treat books written by Nikole Hannah-Jones or Ibram X. Kendi the same way under the same standard about controversial content. Hannah-Jones is the leading author of The New York Times’ highly controversial “1619 Project,” an essay collection that portrays the United States as an inherently racist nation founded to protect slavery. Kendi, a professor at Boston University, advocates for active discrimination against racial groups that are deemed “privileged” as a remedy for historical racism.

“I have to wonder if Nikole Hannah-Jones’s and Ibram X. Kendi’s books face similar constraints,” he said.

BLM’s official website originally described its founder Alicia Garza as a “trained Marxist” and said the organization did advocate for the dissolution of the traditional family structure, as did Karl Marx, notoriously, in the Communist Manifesto. Those messages, however, have since been removed from the site.

“We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable,” it stated.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon Temporarily Blocked Advertisement for Book That Links BLM to Marxism (theepochtimes.com)

TheNebulator, [14.09.21 21:17] on Telegram

Not only is General Mark Milley “woke,” he also apparently (https://on.rt.com/bgoh) conspired with the CIA, NSA, Nancy Pelosi and even China (!) to undermine President Donald Trump. This is according to a new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa – who, it needs to be noted, are sworn members of the anti-Trump #resistance – excerpts of which were leaked to the Media-Democrat Complex today.

Milley denies having done anything improper, mind you. But his actions, as detailed by Woodward and Costa, are pretty damning. While most Republicans are following the white rabbit of Milley calling his counterpart in China to say he’s give them advance warning of any US attack (not that any was in the cards, but consider the implications), far worse to my mind is the whole thing about telling the NSA and CIA to spy on Trump for signs of anything “crazy or illegal” (as defined by Pelosi, apparently). If this isn’t treason, then what is?

Ah, but Orange Man is Bad, which means anything goes. Milley is the Who, Trump is the Whom, and thus the “logic” of moral relativism is satisfied. The aforementioned MDC was marching in lockstep defending his reported actions all day.

Mind you, I think the Woodward/Costa book is spin – they’re reporting what happened, but imputing evil motivations to anything Trump did or may have thought of doing, while ascribing the purest noble motives to anyone working against him. Think of it as a sequel to that Time article about the “fortifiers” of 2020: they want to tell everyone what they did, because in their Narrative, they’re heroes, not villains.

Milley’s actions appear to corroborate my analysis from June 2020, when I found it odd that Biden was so confident the military would be on his side, right after Milley uncharacteristically offered a groveling apology to the woke scolds for doing his job. Today’s revelations also reinforced what I wrote back in January, when I argued that the Resistance and the MDC, in their obsession with ousting Trump, had thoroughly discredited what Darren Beattie would later label the Globalist American Empire (both links are in the piece linked above, don’t want to clutter this post).

You’d think I would be happy about that, but… that might also mean I was right about other things, other patterns I’ve observed and extrapolated from. About things that I think might be coming. Trouble is, they’re not pretty.

TheNebulator, [15.09.21 22:35]
[In reply to TheNebulator]
Update on Milley: it’s worse than I thought. I had somehow missed that he made two phone calls to China, one on January 8 (amid conspiring with Pelosi) but the other four days prior to the election, suggesting even more strongly that he was part of the “fortification” already. Moreover, he apparently “suggested” PACOM cancel some exercises to reassure China, and they did so. This is according to the Washington Post, mind you.

The Pentagon’s response today was to double down and say Milley did nothing wrong, while the White House praised his commitment to Our Democracy. As I said, it doesn’t matter what is done, only Who is doing it to Whom. I actually went on News Views Hughes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoXB_dsN0-w&list=PLagVUKF7CUTTtjJqFw6JvO14pG6Z1RBmv&index=1&t=94s) today to discuss the whole situation. But it’s bad, folks, really bad.

TheNebulator, [15.09.21 22:43]
You get two posts tonight, though, because I simply have to comment on the sheer irony of Onika Tanya Maraj-Petty, far better known as Nicki Minaj, becoming the unlikely hero in the fight for common sense against the Branch Covidian cult (as Eric D. July so memorably calls it).

Everything about that story is just perfect: from the original tall tale of “her cousin’s friend in Trinidad” getting his wedding called off because his testicles swelled up ( the symptom is more commonly associated with some STDs, but that was obvious from the get-go) — to her point that people should make the decision for themselves instead of getting bullied into it, to the shrieking response of everyone from her fandom to pundits to Big Tech and the government of Trinidad…

Is there a better way to expose the sheer absurdity of the System, than a rapper with millions of social media followers not giving a damn? When facts and arguments don’t help, because people offering them get censored or smeared, it’s down to the jesters — and entertainers are the biggest jesters of all, aren’t they?

Years from now, when the Davos set has failed in their attempt at a neo-feudal Great Reset, we’ll look back and try to figure out the exact moment the tide turned. It’s entirely possible this will be it.

TheNebulator, [16.09.21 23:07]
So, special counsel John Durham finally indicts someone in his probe of the Trump-Russia probe… and it’s not a nobody, but a partner in the DNC law firm that was behind the Steele Dossier. Michael Sussmann was indicted for lying to the FBI, by telling them he wasn’t representing anyone — while in fact representing a tech executive coordinating with the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to spread the lie about Alfa Bank being a “secret conduit” for candidate Trump to Russia.

Normally this would be a very big deal, except the DOJ already leaked it to the New York Times earlier today, which pre-shaped the narrative to minimize Sussmann’s culpability… (to be continued)

TheNebulator, [16.09.21 23:26]
(continued) What’s the big deal, you might say. Only in that for five years the weaponized FBI, DOJ and the intelligence community went after Trump for alleged “Russian collusion,” bankrupted his aides and allies with legal fees, jailed some for unrelated charges in hopes they’d agree to implicate him, and deterred decent people from taking jobs in his administration while letting neocons and various double agents infiltrate instead. Yet despite the proven, documented wrongdoing of the highest echelons of the FBI and DOJ, CIA and NSA, only one person involved was ever charged — and given a slap on the wrist.

Kevin Clinesmith, who literally falsified evidence to enable the FBI to spy on Trump via Carter Page (by altering a document that said Page was a CIA source to say he wasn’t) got… 12 months’ probation, some community service, and just got his DC bar license back. The regime protects its own, you see.

Earlier this week, we found out that JCS chairman General Mark Milley was back-channeling with China and conspiring with Democrats , CIA and NSA against Trump. But the entire media-political complex came to his defense, calling him a hero. Meanwhile, retired General Michael Flynn was illegally unmasked, charged with lying to the FBI on absolutely zero basis, and dragged through the courts for something like three years — even had his family threatened — before he was eventually pardoned, because the activist federal judge in DC refused to accept the DOJ dropping the case.

That judge, Emmett Sullivan, just ruled this evening that illegal immigrants can’t be sent back to Mexico under a rule intended to protect public health. Get that? Vaccine and muzzle mandates for you, but not for people just walking across. A Fox News crew in Del Rio, Texas has used a drone to film thousands of people (mainly from Haiti) crossing over from Mexico. The regime’s response? Judge Sullivan’s ruling — and a FAA ban on all drone activity. On grounds of “security,” you see.

Even so, some intelligent but apparently still clueless people are harping on the hypocrisy of the What, not realizing that the republic in which it mattered no longer exists. It has been replaced by Our Democracy, in which the only thing that matters is Who/Whom. Do you understand yet?

TheNebulator – Telegram

What’s Happening:

Joe Biden is barely hanging on by a thread. Most Americans are turning on him after one failure followed by another. With each passing day, he loses ground with his own supporters.

And it’s possible they won’t like him much after this news breaks.

Biden is only surviving because he’s shifted from being a moderate to a “woke” leftist. That is a culture built around “social justice” and punishing people for the sins of the past. To cast everything in terms of race and focusing on our history of slavery.

What will the left say, when they learn Biden’s family owned slaves?

From The Hill:

A genealogist who has conducted a sweeping look into President Biden’s lineage says records show some of the Scranton, Pa., native’s ancestors on his father’s side owned enslaved people…

According to Bannerman, the 1800 census showed that Biden’s great-great-great-grandfather, Jesse Robinett, owned two enslaved people in Allegany County, and another great-great-great-grandfather, Thomas Randle, enslaved a 14-year-old boy in Baltimore County.

Ouch. I wonder how many leftists will turn on Joe Biden, after finding out his family owned people?

We’ve seen celebrities, politicians, and other figures taken down by cancel culture for much less. People’s entire lives have been ruined by a tweet some claimed was racist.

But two men have written an article claiming that Joe Biden’s family was part of the worst element of our nation’s history. Will the cancel culture mobs stay silent over this?

Let’s face the facts. Many Americans owned slaves. It was a part of our history. If you look back on many families, you might find the same. Was it Biden’s fault? Of course, not. He might be old, but he wasn’t alive back then.

Rational, reasonable people won’t blame Joe for something that happened a long time ago. But the left is not made up of reasonable people. They thrive off of destroying lives over political correctness and fear.

Make no mistake, the liberal establishment will either ignore this or try to protect old Joe. But the rabid leftists in the party might not. I can already hear AOC screaming about this on her Twitch feed.

It might get very ugly for Joe Biden.

Key Takeaways:

• Two writers are claiming Joe Biden’s family owned slaves.
• Census data suggests at least two of Biden’s ancestors owned people.

Source: Politico

Biden’s Ancestral Closet Swings Wide Open – Genealogist Claims Joe’s Forefathers Were Slaveholders (thepatriotjournal.com)

LOS ANGELES—With their original recall campaign falling short, organizers of an effort to oust Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón announced on Sept. 16 that they have formed a new political committee and will start again from scratch.

According to a statement from organizers, the original recall effort was hampered by COVID-19 pandemic health mandates, along with a “premature start.” Therefore, the effort will be restarted under a new campaign committee known as “Recall District Attorney George Gascón.”

“The reset will allow Recall District Attorney George Gascón to gather necessary financial resources prior to starting the 160-day period for signature collection, rather than play catch-up,” according to organizers.

“The committee will be filing an updated petition with the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters shortly.”

Despite the failure of the original effort, organizers said they remain committed to recalling Gascón, who has come under fire from critics for a progressive agenda that has included directives against seeking the death penalty and dropping sentence-enhancing allegations in criminal cases.

Gascón has repeatedly defended his policies, saying his stances were well known during his campaign and his election signified public support of his agenda.

In their statement, recall organizers said, “Make no mistake, this is not a white flag—it is a double-down on our efforts.”

A campaign spokesman told the Los Angeles Times that the original recall drive had collected about 200,000 signatures. The group needed about 580,000 signatures by Oct. 26 to force a recall election.

Gascón Recall Effort Being Restarted (theepochtimes.com)

Heritage Foundation scholar is latest conservative censored by Amazon

Amazon blocked an ad for a book critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, the latest example of the retail giant censoring conservative voices.

The online retailer prevented the Heritage Foundation from purchasing ads to promote Mike Gonzalez’s BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution. Amazon told Heritage that the ad “contains book/s or content that is not allowed,” specifically “content that revolves around controversial or highly debated social topics is not permitted.” Amazon later reversed its decision and posted the ad, telling the Washington Free Beacon that its “policies were not enforced correctly in this case” and that the employees responsible would receive “additional training.”

Amazon refused to explain the nature of the error. But in recent months, the company has used its policies to suppress conservative books. A book on the transgender movement was pulled from the platform in February without explanation. After senators pushed Amazon to explain its decision, the retailer announced it was changing its policies to ban any books that treat gender dysphoria as a mental illness. Amazon funded an effort to place hundreds of copies of critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You in Virginia public schools.

BLM criticizes the titular movement for its Marxist roots. One of the three Black Lives Matter founders said in 2015 that she and another cofounder “are trained organizers; we are trained Marxists.” Gonzalez, a former journalist and Heritage senior fellow, said his book addresses important questions “after the 630 or more riots that left our cities burning, businesses destroyed and billions in damage, and Americans dead.”

Gonzalez said Amazon is “trying to limit how many Americans read this book” and asked whether books by left-leaning authors on Black Lives Matter and race faced the same restrictions. Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James released a statement calling examples of “big tech censorship … inescapable and irrefutable.” “Conservative voices are deemed ‘unacceptable’ and are silenced,” she said.

Advertising makes up a substantial portion of Amazon’s revenue. Amazon, Google, and Facebook together took up almost two thirds of the digital advertising market in 2020. A growing contingent of lawmakers worry that advertising consolidation on a few online platforms could harm market competition.

Amazon has faced pressure from liberal politicians to exercise more control over which speech is allowed on the platform. Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) called on Amazon to ban books containing “misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines and treatments.”

Amazon Blocks Ad for Book Critical of Black Lives Matter (freebeacon.com)

A professor at Pennsylvania State University is facing multiple misdemeanor charges after he allegedly attacked a student who protested against the advocacy of COVID-19 vaccination mandates.

The incident occurred on Aug. 27, when faculty, students, and community members rallied at the center of Penn State campus and called on the university administrators to immediately issue a vaccine mandate. Student newspaper Daily Collegian reported that the event attracted counterprotesters who held up signs toward the back of the rally attendees.

A video posted to Twitter by Centre County Report appears to show a male, later identified as 36-year-old Walter Oliver Baker, trying to take a sign by force from one of the counterprotesters before eventually pulling him to the ground.

The counterprotester was later identified as Avi Rachlin, the leader of Penn State Resistance, a student group focusing on opposing mask and vaccine mandates on campus. Rachlin was seen escorted away by campus police with blood on his face, likely as the result of the incident.

The campus police record suggests that Baker was charged with simple assault, a second-degree misdemeanor; disorderly conduct, a third-degree misdemeanor; and harassment, a summary offense under Pennsylvania law. The most serious of those charges is the second-degree misdemeanor, with penalties of up to two years in prison and a $5,000 fine upon conviction.

Penn State lists Baker as an assistant professor of English and African American Studies who “specializes in Critical Race Theory.” According to his faculty biography, Baker’s areas of research include “critical ethnic studies, nineteenth-century American literature and culture, critiques of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and histories of African, Native, Chicanx, and working-class liberation movements.”

A Penn State official confirmed to Daily Collegian that Baker was placed on administrative leave as the investigation proceeds.

Meanwhile, in a previous interview with Daily Collegian, Rachlin said he is not against vaccines as a whole, but rather skeptical about the COVID-19 vaccines, given that they lack long-term data on their safety and efficacy.

“When we take this more locally, the majority of people on this campus are vaccinated,” the junior student told Daily Collegian. “It is a small percentage, but there are thousands of others including myself who have opted not to [get vaccinated] as well.”

Penn State is one of the few remaining Big Ten Conference schools that have yet to put in place any form of COVID-19 vaccine requirement. In an open letter to the campus community, Penn State President Eric Barron made it clear that the public university is not going to jeopardize its funding to issue a vaccine mandate.

“Regulations across the country clearly reflect state-level political realities,” Barron wrote in the Aug. 12 letter. “State funding of our University requires a two-thirds vote of the Pennsylvania legislature, meaning that our funding relies on strong bipartisan support.”

Penn State didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Penn State Assistant Professor Charged With Assaulting Anti-Vaccine Mandate Student (theepochtimes.com)

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed a bill on Friday that would have increased penalties for those who engage in riots that result in damage or injury.

“People who commit crimes during riots and at other times should be prosecuted and our laws provide for that, but this legislation is unnecessary and is intended to intimidate and deter people from exercising their constitutional rights to peacefully protest,” Cooper, a Democrat, said in a press release.

A person would have faced felony charges and jail time if he or she caused damage to property, or assaulted a citizen or emergency personnel, during a protest or state of emergency.

Republican House Speaker Tim Moore, a Republican and one of the bill’s sponsors, called it a “common-sense bill” written to protect “small businesses and individuals in the event that a protest became violent and focused solely on the perpetrators of violence rather than peaceful protesters.”

“Every suggested change to improve the bill from the other side of the aisle was incorporated,” Moore said. “Unfortunately for this governor, pandering to the far left is more important than rule of law.”

In a statement released after the bill passed in the Senate in August, Moore said he had witnessed “the violence and destruction caused by rioters right here in downtown Raleigh” in 2020.

“What this bill does is enforce harsher penalties for the perpetrators of violence and looting, while preserving every North Carolinian’s right to protest peacefully,” Moore said. “Our rights to free speech and assembly are precious and must be preserved, but never at the expense of harm to others. House Bill 805 simply ensures the safety of our citizens while upholding their rights to free speech and assembly.”

Felony charges would have been handed down if damages exceeding $1,500, serious bodily harm, or death, had resulted from the actions of the rioter.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called the bill “harmful,” adding that it “would dissuade many people from engaging in peaceful and constitutionally protected acts of protests.”

The bill was retaliation, the ACLU alleged, against the “uprising for racial justice” that happened in 2020 when an outbreak of violence started in May at the time of the killing of George Floyd, a black man who had been arrested.

The May 25 arrest was filmed, and in the video, Floyd, 46, said he couldn’t breathe as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was witnessed kneeling on Floyd’s neck as he pleaded for air.

Floyd was pronounced dead an hour after the incident.

According to a September 2020 report (pdf) from the Raleigh Police Department, May 30 through June 7 became a week of peaceful protest that devolved into acts of violence and destroyed property.

In July 2020, the Triangle Business Journal reported that statewide insurance claims were over $10 million.

Anti-Riot Bill Vetoed in North Carolina (theepochtimes.com)

The 911 emergency call system in Portland, Oregon, is “broken,” officials say, and callers who need help are often waiting more than two minutes for assistance, even though emergency calls are supposed to be answered in around 15 seconds.

“People calling 911 to report a Sept. 4 shootout at a Pearl District restaurant and other emergencies in the following half-hour waited an average of more than 7.5 minutes before a dispatcher answered,” the Oregonian reported. “The lengthy hold time is far above the national standard of 15 to 20 seconds for 911 calls and the latest example of serious problems plaguing the city’s emergency dispatch system.”

An official with Portland’s Bureau of Emergency Communications called the situation “horrible” and “broken,” and said the agency’s own statistics show “an average hold time of a minute. But it also shows a dramatic increase of 911 calls on hold for two minutes or longer starting in late spring and summer.”

“Another striking jump of calls on hold for more than five minutes occurred in May and July, according to bureau figures released to the newsroom,” the Oregonian reported. “Compared to March, when only eight 911 calls took more than five minutes to answer, that number increased to 221 in May and more than doubled to 574 in July.”

Portland, meanwhile, is struggling with an increase in crime. Homicides are still low compared to most major cities, but they are spiking.

“Homicides in Portland increased from 28 in 2019 to 54 in 2020,” Portland’s KGW report. “Among cities similar in size to Portland, Seattle saw an increase from 34 to 53 homicides, in Minneapolis, a spike from 48 to 82, and Milwaukee saw homicides increase from 97 to 190 from 2019 to 2020.”

As of May, per the Seattle Times, ’37 people had died in Portland homicides this year, a more-than-sevenfold increase compared with the first five months of last year, and a stark contrast to Seattle, a larger city, where 11 homicides had been recorded as of late May. So far this year, the victims have disproportionately been people of color.”

At the same time, Portland is struggling to keep police officers. Just weeks ago, dozens of Portland police officers resigned en masse from the city’s rapid response team, “citing a lack of support from city leaders. The move to disband the unit came one day after Portland Officer Cody Budworth was indicted and accused of striking a protester in the head last summer with a baton. It marked the first time a city police officer faced prosecution over striking or firing at someone during a protest,” per Yahoo News.

The city’s emergency communications department is also struggling to keep staff, with a dozen retirements or resignations over the past several months.

“We’re at a tipping point now. It’s become unmanageable,” one city official said. “The system is broken.”

Portland officials have proposed having 311, the city’s information line, handle calls that do not necessarily require an emergency response, but 311 answers calls only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekdays.

‘Broken’: Portland Residents Facing ‘Dramatic Increase’ In Wait Times For 911 Calls Following Efforts To Defund Police | The Daily Wire

CHICAGO—One person has died and five others including a teenage girl have been injured in a shooting on Chicago’s South Side, police said.

A group of people was walking toward their vehicles in the city’s West Pullman neighborhood around 9:40 p.m. Saturday when someone inside another vehicle “fired multiple rounds, striking the victims,” according to police.

A 42-year-old woman who was shot in the arm and armpit was taken to a hospital where she later died. Authorities have not identified her.

A 32-year-old man who was shot in the face was listed in critical condition. The other victims, ranging in age from 15 to 28, were listed in fair condition at area hospitals.

No one had been arrested in the shooting, police said Sunday as the investigation continued.

No further details were released.

Police: 1 Killed, 5 Others Wounded in Chicago Shooting (theepochtimes.com)

The estate of a man who was shot dead in Portland, Oregon last year is suing the city over its approach to public safety.

Portland Mayor and Police Commissioner Ted Wheeler, Multnomah District Attorney Mike Schmidt, and other city officials “created a vacuum where peacekeeping efforts and criminal accountability should be; in its place, an environment of vigilantism emerged that ultimately led to the death of Aaron Danielson,” states the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Portland, and obtained by The Epoch Times.

Danielson was killed in Portland on Aug. 29, 2020. Michael Reinoehl, a self-described member of the far-left, anarcho-communist Antifa network, later admitted to shooting Danielson, who was wearing a hat with the logo for Patriot Prayer, a right-wing group, and has been described as a Patriot Prayer supporter.

The two groups clashed in Portland before the shooting, with little intervention by police officers.

The Portland Police Bureau, overseen by Wheeler, chose to let rioters attack a federal courthouse in the city during the spring of 2020, triggering a deployment of federal officers to protect the building and leading to nightly clashes that drew nationwide attention.

Rioters, including members of Antifa, later turned their attention on other facilities, such as police precincts and the headquarters of the Portland police union. While some arrests were made, many of those arrested saw their charges dropped or their cases not pursued by prosecutors, under an unusual policy implemented by Schmidt’s office shortly after he became the district attorney.

The new suit says the approach used by police and prosecutors also included delegating the authority to engage in crowd control and crime prevention to individuals who provided security services for Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and right-wing groups like Patriot Prayer.

The defendants knew that a large-scale demonstration was planned the night Danielson was killed and was aware that members of Antifa and others planned to confront demonstrators but chose to deploy a minimal police presence while also ordering officers to “stay out of sight” and allow the demonstrators and protesters to “express their emotions,” the suit also alleges, quoting Wheeler.

Danielson was deprived of his constitutional rights to assemble peacefully and to have equal protection under the law, his estate’s lawyer said.

“This case is about accountability. We are seeking justice for the preventable death of a young man, gunned down in a city with a dangerous and deadly hands-off approach to public safety,” Christopher Cauble, the lawyer, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Time and time again, city leadership and law enforcement has failed to find an effective response to clashing groups of protesters. For well over a year, they have known when and where these rallies would occur and the likelihood of escalating violence. Yet no strategy of protective intervention has been utilized to this day. This reckless dereliction of duty cost Aaron Danielson his life. We seek justice for the Danielson family and for a community that deserves far better safety and responsibility from those sworn to protect and serve,” he added.

The suit is seeking $13 million in damages.

Wheeler’s spokesman and Schmidt’s office did not return requests for comment.

Reinoehl was shot dead by law enforcement officers carrying out a warrant days after the Danielson killing. William Barr, the attorney general at the time, said what unfolded was “a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order to Portland and other cities.”

Another shooting took place in a daylight clash in Portland on Sept. 4 after Chuck Lovell, Portland’s police chief, announced that officers would not intervene in physical clashes.

Wheeler, a Democrat, initially defended the strategy despite the firefight, but on Wednesday, during a City Council hearing, said the tactics needed to be rethought.

“It is clear, based on the public outcry, on the media outcry, on the national front, that that strategy was not the right strategy. I think we can all acknowledge that. I take full responsibility for it,” he said.

“I think we all acknowledge we want to do better. So for me, it’s about proper training, it’s about clear directives, it’s about making sure the community feels safe to express their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and assembly, but also to hold anybody—and I mean anybody, regardless of their politics—hold anybody accountable who thinks violence or criminal destruction is the right answer.”

Estate of Man Killed by Antifa Member in Portland Sues City Over ‘Hands-Off Approach to Public Safety’ (theepochtimes.com)

California once was run by conservatives and mostly centrist Democrats.

True paleo-liberal governors like Pat Brown greatly expanded the welfare state. But they also believed in pushing integration and building freeways, dams, aqueducts, and power plants, while preventing forest fires, directing the mentally ill into state hospitals, and ensuring that the state enhanced the housing, timber, oil and gas, nuclear and agricultural industries.

So, why would anyone deliberately destroy that heritage?

Why allow California to have the highest aggregate basket of income, sales, property, and capital gains taxes in the nation, the highest gas and power prices in the continental United States, and nearly the worst schools and infrastructure? California also has the country’s largest populations of homeless, welfare recipients, and undocumented immigrants.

Remember that the left wing of the Democratic Party became hyper-wealthy through globalization and the tech revolution. Coastal universities such as Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, USC, and UCLA became global nexuses of millions who flocked to California to learn business, engineering, science, math, and the professions.

University endowments were no longer measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars but in the billions.

Hollywood and professional sports now had a lucrative worldwide audience of billions.

The market capitalization of Silicon Valley was to be measured in the trillions of dollars, as the world bought iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks to do Google searches, tweet, and use Facebook. The result was the greatest concentration of wealth in such a small space in the history of civilization.

Within 40 years, California had created a new plutocracy of Eloi, whose wealth exempted them from all worries about the mundane problems of the distant and despised Morlock others.

The wealthier the long thin line from San Diego to Berkeley grew, the more the overseers felt they were nearing Utopia, at least in their own lives.

The new Democratic Party liked to redistribute money for the poor and so obeyed the orders from the rich. But they ignored old-fashioned infrastructure that once had allowed the middle class to drive quickly and safely, ensured them water during droughts, curbed their forest fires, and allowed their children to leave school competitively educated.

Reaction, not prevention, was the new mantra. Govs. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom failed to thin out forests, build water storage, and allow affordable housing.

When those problems exploded, they reacted by citing climate change or some other bogeyman as the culprit rather than government dereliction. They preferred utopian high-speed rail solutions to pragmatic problem solving. And they ensured that none of their crackpot ideas ever affected themselves.

Why worry about affordable housing and electricity for the masses when all the right people had the means to live in the right ZIP codes without much worry about turning on the air conditioning or heat, since there were rarely any scorching days or frigid nights in coastal paradise?

Why worry about immigration when labor became even cheaper?

Why worry that California public schools had sunk near the bottom of state ranks, when there were more prestigious prep schools than ever on the coast?

And why worry about producing lumber for houses, irrigated crops for food, or oil for gasoline, when the right Californians would always have the money to import their hardwood floors, arugula, and fuel from grubby others far away who would make or grow what was needed?

Yet ideas eventually have consequences. Soon, even the left-wing paradise on the coast would be infected by the anarchy the rich had created for less important people elsewhere.

The homeless did not just camp on the streets of Fresno, but in Venice Beach and on Market Street in San Francisco.

Fires began to smoke out not just the brush of the inland foothills, but near-saintly Lake Tahoe, home to the right skiers and the chosen shore owners.

Thieves even smashed the windows of Bay Area BMWs and Volvos.

The current California recall election is a choice between Gavin Newsom, who embodies the woke, old-boy privilege of the Bay Area, and an alternative direction. Newsom is the epitome of the virtue-signaling elite who patronize the poor and drive out the despised middle class.

Gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder did not give us the current California. Indeed, he spent most of his life warning us where Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, and the rarified society of the coastal corridor was taking the state.

A careening California is heading for a colossal train wreck. Voters will have to pick between the incompetent engineer snoring at the wheel or the private passenger who rushes into cab to get the engine back on track.

Recall Election Could Reverse the California Ideology (theepochtimes.com)

Critical race theory (CRT) aims to indoctrinate students and turn them into “Red Guards,” akin to those during the Cultural Revolution in China, warned Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese-American living in northern Virginia’s Loudoun County, at a “Rally to Save Our Schools” event on Sept. 8.

She called CRT “communist race tactics” with the goal of “indoctrinating our kids, dividing Americans, and controlling Americans.”

She added that she would talk to Chinese-language media to tell Chinese-Americans not to stay silent.

“If you still want to enjoy the prosperity and the freedom of this country, now it’s your turn—join the fight,” she said.

She said that upon taking over China in 1949, the first thing the CCP did was to indoctrinate teachers with Marxist ideology so they could teach it to students. Red Guards were the “full display” of what indoctrinated children could do, she said.

The Red Guards were communist youth led by then-CCP leader Mao Zedong to persecute those identified as the CCP’s “class enemies” during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. They beat up their teachers in public and tore down temples and statues.

“They became Mao’s bulldogs,” said Van Fleet, adding that she saw a similar phenomenon in America during the “so-called summer of unrest,” referring to the riots during Black Lives Matter protests.

CRT adherents believe America is systemically racist, that racial oppression exists in every institution, and that an individual is either an oppressor or oppressed based on the color of their skin.

Monica Gill, a Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) teacher who teaches Advanced Placement government, said that the LCPS was indoctrinating teachers with CRT tenets to trickle down the effect onto students. Though LCPS is not explicitly telling teachers to teach CRT to students, it is “imposing this very distorted lens of race on kids,” Gill said.

“Our kids are in this cultural battle with us … And we have been asleep at the wheel, just thinking that everything in public schools is okay with the majority of teachers—they are teaching our kids the right things—and that’s not the case,” Gill added.

LCPS Public Information Officer Wayde Byard stated in an email to The Epoch Times, “As LCPS has stated, repeatedly, Critical Race Theory is not part of its student curriculum.” He didn’t comment on Gill’s assertion of the LCPS indoctrinating teachers and students.

Political Action

Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin also attended the event. He accused his opponent, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, of introducing CRT in Virginia’s schools during his administration in 2015 and that McAuliffe called concerns of CRT a “right-wing conspiracy.” The Epoch Times contacted McAuliffe’s campaign for comments and didn’t receive them by press time.

On June 30, in front of the LCPS school administration building in Ashburn, Virginia, Youngkin promised to ban CRT if elected on day one of his administration. “He will end the use of divisive critical race theory in professional development and as an approach to education,” a Youngkin campaign spokesperson wrote in an email to The Epoch Times on Sept. 9.

“I will preside over the largest education budget in the history of Virginia … to reestablish expectations of excellence in the school systems across Virginia that used to be known nationally for the best place to send your kids,” said Youngkin.

McAuliffe’s campaign announced that Youngkin’s tax cut plan would result in Virginia’s schools losing funds, based on a new study by Virginia Excels, an education advocacy organization.

“Between the available surplus, remaining one-time federal funds, and expected future revenue growth, Glenn’s plan can provide significant tax relief to address the cost of living while making a significant investment in education,” a Youngkin campaign spokesperson told The Epoch Times.

Polls have shown a close race for the next Virginia governor. A new one by WPA Intelligence conducted for the Youngkin campaign shows him leading McAuliffe for the first time at 48 percent versus 46 percent. The poll, released on Sept. 8, surveyed 734 likely Virginia voters between Aug. 30 and Sept. 2. Its margin of error is 3.6 percent.

Early voting in Virginia starts next week.

Critical Race Theory Aims to Turn Students Into ‘Red Guards,’ Chinese American Warns (theepochtimes.com)

A report highlighting Chinese government-backed influence campaigns on social media platforms found that the effort sought to mobilize protests against “racial injustice,” CNN has finally admitted.

The network’s summary of the recently released Mandiant Threat Intelligence and Google report notes how bot accounts linked to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) disinformation network attempted to incite Asian Americans to protest against racism and those claiming COVID-19 originated in China.

“US officials believe the operation is linked to the Chinese government,” the article adds.

As the CNN article admits:

In April for example, experts saw thousands of fake accounts calling on Asian Americans to protest racial injustice in the US and “disinformation about the virus’ origins.” While experts found no evidence these posts were successful in mobilizing protesters, the report says “it does provide early warning that the actors behind the activity may be starting to explore, in however limited a fashion, more direct means of influencing the domestic affairs of the US.”

The report identifies how the bot network attempted to catalyze a protest on April 24th in New York City:

In April 2021, thousands of posts in languages including English, Japanese, and Korean, images, and videos were posted across multiple platforms by accounts we assess to be part of this broader activity set that called on Asian Americans to protest racial injustices in the U.S. The accounts specifically called on Asian Americans to protest on April 24 in New York City and “fight back” against the purported “rumors” caused by Dr. Li-Meng Yan, Guo Wengui, and Steve Bannon, and in some instances provided an address that they claimed Guo lived at.

Posts shared by the fake accounts included messages such as “the racism is the virus.”

MUST READ:

High School Teacher With Antifa Flag in Classroom Praises Chinese Communist Party.

“This direct call for physical mobilization is a significant development compared to prior activity, potentially indicative of an emerging intent to motivate real-world activity outside of China’s territories,” the report says.’

“While experts at Mandiant and Google say they have not seen these specific pro-Chinese accounts wade into election specific content to date, they did warn that the actors responsible could be gearing up for a more expansive disinformation push,” CNN adds. Platforms such as TikTok, however, have been used to sabotage Trump rallies during the 2020 election cycle.

The National Pulse first reported on the existence of a Beijing-backed, online bot army in early 2020, which, at the time, was used to criticize former President Donald Trump and his COVID-19 response.

More recently, over 20 advocacy groups comprising the “Stop AAPI Hate” coalition sent a letter demanding the Biden White House terminate the Department of Justice’s Trump-era “China Initiative” – which identifies and prosecutes Chinese Communist Party espionage operations – and publicly discredit the COVID-19 “lab leak” theory.

No evidence of a quid pro quo over the CCP’s attempts to bolster these campaigns digitally and the campaigns’ attempts to shift U.S. government policy on China has yet emerged.

A Hennepin County judge tossed proposal ballot language asking voters if they want to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a department of public safety.

The current language of the city council’s explanatory note accompanying the ballot proposal “is insufficient to identify the amendment clearly, it does not assist the voter in easily and accurately identifying what is being voted on, and it is vague and ambiguous to the point of misleading voters, all of which make it unjust,” Hennepin County Judge Jamie Anderson wrote.

Bruce Dachis, Sondra Samuels, and former City Council Member Don Samuels sued, alleging the explanatory note didn’t provide voters with enough context to make an informed decision.

The proposal would ask voters if they want to approve a plan to replace the police department with a new public safety department focused on a “comprehensive public safety approach” that would include police officers “if necessary to fulfill the department’s responsibilities.”

Anderson wrote that the parties disagreed on three issues of the current ballot language as to whether: 1. The Minneapolis Police Department will cease to exist as of Dec. 2, 2021; 2. The position of police chief would be eliminated; or 3. A funding mechanism exists for the proposed Department of Public Safety.

“These three issues are additional ambiguities in the Current Ballot Language,” the judge wrote. “All of these ambiguities risk creating a ‘chaotic situation’ in Minneapolis.”

Anderson explained:

“For example, does ‘striking’ the Police Department mean renaming it (as the Petitioners suggest it could be interpreted) or taking it apart, as one would ‘strike a set’ after a play is done? The end of the Current Ballot Language says ‘ … to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety.’ To whose responsibilities does that refer? The Police Department? The new Department of Public Safety?”

Anderson did not set a new deadline for approving ballot language.

Attorneys for Yes 4 Minneapolis, which supports replacing the police department, had argued the language provided enough information.

The City Council called an emergency meeting Tuesday and passed revised language for an explanatory note.

City Attorney Jim Rowader said the ballot language could still be rejected by Hennepin County if it finds the new note is “substantially similar” to the language rejected by Anderson.

Judge Tosses Minneapolis Policing Ballot Language (theepochtimes.com)

CHICAGO—The number of young Chicago patrol officers taking leave of absence to work outside jobs has doubled year over year since 2019, and eight out of ten quit within a year after the leave took effect, according to records obtained by The Epoch Times through a Freedom of Information Act request.

In 2019, 23 Chicago patrol officers took leave of absence for outside employment. In 2020, the number doubled to 49. In the first half of 2021, 47 officers did so, on track to double the number again.

The records obtained by The Epoch Times show data from January 2019 through June 2021.

During this period, 30 percent of patrol officers on leave for outside employment were in their 20s, and 60 percent in their 30s. Eight out of ten quit (or in rare cases, retired) within a year after their leave took effect.

In a previous interview with The Epoch Times, Chicago’s police union president John Catanzaro said more and more young officers were taking a leave of absence to work outside jobs because of the terrible working hours, lack of respect for police, and legislation that punish officers for doing their jobs.

The total numbers of Chicago police officers that quit or retired have been on the rise since 2019, and the Chicago Police Department (CPD) has been struggling to hire enough new officers to keep up with the exodus, according to records obtained by The Epoch Times.

In 2019, 592 Chicago patrol officers either quit or retired, and CPD hired 459 new officers.

In 2020, 646 officers quit or retired, and CPD only hired 157 new officers. CPD halted academy training for a couple of months due to COVID-19 restrictions.

From January 2021 through July 2021, 604 patrol officers have retired, according to Susie Park, the Chicago city budget director, at the Aug. 30 Committee on Budget and Government Operations meeting. Park estimates a total of 725 patrol officers will retire by the end of the year.

CPD has four active training classes and plans to add a new training class every month in October, November, and December 2021, according to Park. Each training class lasts six months, after which the cadets will go on a three-month probation before they become a full-fledged police officer, according to Park.

Chicago patrol officers, numbered around 9,000, are the backbone of the police department. CPD has about 400 patrol officer vacancies, according to Park.

Number of Chicago Police Working Outside Jobs on Leave of Absence Doubled (theepochtimes.com)

Are you a racist?

All white people are, says “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo.

Race explains everything, says bestselling “How to Be an Antiracist” author Ibram X. Kendi. “Every policy is either racist or anti-racist.”

Kendi’s and DiAngelo’s books are now recommended reading at schools, corporations and in the military. Both authors command high speaking fees.

Isn’t that good? It’s important to educate people about racism.

But John McWhorter, author of “Woke Racism,” says, “The way we’re being encouraged to think, hurts Black people.”

In my new video, he gives this example: “There is a disproportionate number of suspensions of Black boys in schools for violence. (Kendi says) that must be racist … a stereotype of Black men as violent. But … the data makes it very clear that Black boys do commit more violent acts in schools. If you don’t suspend those boys, the violence is being perpetrated (mostly) against other Black kids.”

Kendi’s positions “leave Black kids in the lurch,” says McWhorter.

Kendi and DiAngelo call most every disparity between races “systemic racism.”

White people live longer than Black people? Racism.

Income inequality? Racism.

White and Asian students get higher test scores? Systemic racism.

In the past, says McWhorter, civil rights leaders asked, “How can we make it so that Black kids are better at the test?” Now they want to “eliminate the tests” because they “make Black people unhappy.”

This just makes the problem worse, he says, because it encourages people to think of themselves as victims. If you believe you are a helpless victim of racism, why study?

The idea that it is “unreasonable to expect Black kids to use analytical thinking in a rigorous way. … This is a new way of thinking. It’s a religious way of thinking.”

Blaming racism for low test scores ignores “aspects of Black culture that don’t stress getting good at those tests — the way that South Asian immigrant culture clearly does.”

Nigerian and Caribbean culture, too. People from those places are often just as dark or darker than Black Americans. They “come here and deal with the same racism that everybody else does. Yet they make the best of the worst. That means: so could Black Americans.”

The media label Kendi and DiAngelo “leading scholars,” but their arguments are rarely tested in the marketplace of ideas. Both refuse to debate opponents. McWhorter calls their work far from scholarly — “more like a toxic religion, a cult.”

In fact, he adds, “Kendi is dim.”

I argue that, even if Kendi is “dim,” he’s winning hearts and minds. Companies now donate millions to his Center for Antiracist Research. His book sales and success with students show that his arguments convince people.

McWhorter disagrees. “As we come out of the pandemic and we’re less bored, less anxious, I suspect that a lot of the extremes that we saw are going to start retreating because there’s going to be pushback.”

The idea of anti-racism is “charismatic,” he adds. “It makes it seem like you’ve got one answer to a bunch of things that look disparate and difficult. But all disparities between white people and Black people are not due to something unfair that was driven by whites.”

I’m puzzled that DiAngelo’s and Kendi’s message is so popular today, when life for racial minorities seems to be better than ever before. With some exceptions, there’s less racism, more intermarriage, more opportunities for minorities, etc.

“Why now?” I ask.

There’s an advantage to being identified as a victim, says McWhorter. “An emotional balm to be treated as this victimized person. The problem is that it’s anti-Black.”

Anti-white too.

If the “systemic racism” cult wins, says McWhorter, “we all lose.”

Toxic Victimhood :: Right & Free (rightandfree.com)

Two GOP representatives are calling on Congress to pass legislation that would require schools that receive federal funding to make the curriculum they use to teach students available to parents and the public.

Education and Labor Committee Ranking Member Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and Rep. Scott Fitzgerald (R-Wis.) introduced the Curriculum Review of Teachings Transparency Act (pdf). The bill stipulates that federal funding can be denied if K-12 schools do not comply with the rule.

Making the K-12 curriculum openly available to parents is an effort by Foxx and Fitzgerald to counter what they call controversial and factually inaccurate ideas being taught in schools under the name of critical race theory (CRT).

“Decisions about what to teach students in school are being made by bureaucrats and teachers unions, often without the input from parents. As a result, parents across the country are flocking to their local school board to demand transparency and to oppose dangerous ideologies, like critical race theory,” said Fitzgerald said in a press statement.

CRT is rooted in the Marxist theory of class struggle, but with a particular focus on race. Proponents of CRT see racism in every aspect of the American public and private life and seek to dismantle American institutions—such as the Constitution and legal system—which they claim to be inherently and irredeemably racist.

While schools have for years been quietly infusing CRT into their curriculums, it wasn’t until last year, during lockdowns enacted in response to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic, that parents were able to see what their children were being taught. Since then, parents have been increasingly stepping forward to oppose CRT due to its racially divisive and anti-American concepts.

There has been fierce debate over whether CRT or similar initiatives—including The New York Times’ “1619 Project” or diversity, equity, and inclusion training—should be taught to schoolchildren. Parents across the United States have held protests against school boards that have increasingly started to promote CRT or CRT-aligned viewpoints in class.

Meanwhile, some media outlets have claimed that CRT is only taught in higher education settings, such as in colleges and universities, and isn’t being widely adopted by teachers. However, critics of CRT have said there are plenty of examples of young children in school being taught to believe that white people are inherently racist—a key CRT tenet—and that “systemic racism” permeates every U.S. institution.

Foxx wrote in a recent op-ed that education’s goal was originally to produce virtuous citizens who would make the country stronger, adding, “The future of our country depends upon a high-quality education system dedicated to equipping the next generation with the knowledge needed for an active civic life. Critical race theory is incompatible with this mission.”

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.

US Reps. Introduce Bill to Mandate Public Access to Schools’ Curriculum (theepochtimes.com)

New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrest activity has declined since 2019 and it doesn’t appear to be simply the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the majority of serious crime types have increased, according to NYPD data.

NYPD arrests have been steadily dropping since 2014 and, for some time, crime was declining in tandem. The numbers particularly cratered with the onset of the pandemic last year, reaching a low of less than 7,500 in July 2020. Arrests have since rebounded, but not to the prior level. Instead, they seem to keep following the previous downward trend. Less than 75,000 have been arrested in the first half of this year, compared to more than 110,000 in the first half of 2019, the data shows.

Meanwhile, four out of the seven categories of serious crime tracked by the NYPD saw increases compared to 2019. Shootings in particular went through the roof.

In 2020, more than 1,850 were shot, fatally and non-fatally—more than double the year before. So far this year, more than 1,300 have been shot by Sept. 5, a slight increase from 2020.

Murders slightly declined this year versus the last, but are still nearly 40 percent above 2019.

In other serious crime categories, rape is up from 2020, but down from 2019; robbery is slightly down; felony assaults are the highest in 20 years, nearing 15,000 so far this year; burglaries are down from 2020, but up from 2019; grand theft is up from 2020, but down close to 20 percent since 2019; and carjackings are the highest since 2010.

There has been a lively debate on what’s the main factor behind the crime hike. There seems to be a whole host of factors in play.

The shooting wave started in May last year coinciding with protests and rioting in the city after the killing of George Floyd, a black man, during an arrest in Minneapolis.

Some officers previously told The Epoch Times officers may be reluctant to go out of their way to make arrests due to new policies that make arrests riskier and less consequential.

The city implemented new laws that banned judges from requiring cash bail for most nonviolent and some lower-level violent crimes, resulting in more criminals returning to the street after an arrest. Some officers called the policy demoralizing.

Last year, the state outlawed officers from placing a knee on a suspect’s back or chest as a restraint technique during an arrest. Police officers and experts have criticized the law for criminalizing martial arts techniques used to safely subdue resisting subjects.

During the initial pandemic lockdown, courts ground to a halt before resuming operations in remote mode, facing a backlog of cases. All staff and judges only returned to work in person in May. That means criminals out on bail have rarely faced conviction and imprisonment.

In addition, prosecutors have been twice as likely to drop charges against suspects last year than the year before, the New York Post reported.

NYPD Arrests Down From 2019, Majority of Serious Crimes Up (theepochtimes.com)

All “anti-racism” and “social justice” writings and campaigns are predicated on the claim that certain races and sexes are being treated unfairly. The only evidence presented to support this assertion is statistical disparities between different census categories of races and sexes.

But statistical disparities don’t prove unfair treatment; they only prove unequal outcomes. Race advocates and feminists claim that statistical disparities reflect racist and sexist discrimination. This is a factual question, and so we must consider the evidence.

But before we address the relevant evidence, it’s important to note the revolutionary change in raising census race and sex categories to the utmost importance. Western Enlightenment culture, particularly in the English-speaking world, has always placed the individual as of prime importance. In this view, collectivities such as governments, churches, and business are meant to serve individuals and their interests, rather than individuals being measured by their service to collectivities. But at least collectivities do have some existence, while the census categories of race and sex to which we are asked to bow are empty labels. This is why racism and sexism are so obnoxious: they honor labels rather than actual human beings.

Is it Discrimination?

Race and sex activists claim that statistical disparities reflect racist and sexist discrimination. With no further proof of actual discrimination, activists claim that any membership or benefit that doesn’t see 13.4 percent representation of black Americans, 18.5 percent of Hispanics, and 50 percent of female Americans—their percentages of the general population—must have resulted from racial and sexist discrimination. For example, the fact that blacks make up 5 percent and Hispanics make up 5.8 percent of medical doctors means that blacks and Hispanics are statistically underrepresented, and that this result is the consequence of racist discrimination against blacks and Hispanics.

Similarly, females make up 15 percent of the American engineering workforce, and are thus statistically underrepresented. For race and feminist activists, these statistical underrepresentations are in and of themselves proof of discrimination. But do feminists then grant that the demographic dominance of females among students and graduates generally, with females making up close to 60 percent, is proof that the underrepresentation of males is the result of sexist, anti-male discrimination? As most students in the social sciences, humanities, education, and social work are females, apparently they prefer these fields to others, including engineering and some other STEM fields. In the most gender-egalitarian societies, such as Sweden, females make up the lowest percentages of STEM students in the world, presumably because they feel free to follow their preferences. Discrimination doesn’t come into it.

If statistical underrepresentation is the result of discrimination, so too must overrepresentation be a result of discrimination. Let us consider a few cases. National Football League players are 70 percent black (compared to their 13.4 percent of the general population), while 74.2 percent of National Basketball Association players are black, 16.9 white, 2.2 Latino, and 0.4 Asian. Are these statistical levels of participation the result of racial discrimination? Are the NFL and NBA actively discriminating against white, Latino, and Asian players? Rather, it appears that teams are competing for the best players so that they can succeed in their fields of competition. The selection is based on athletic merit, rather than race. No racial discrimination is evident.

Asian Americans, with 5.9 percent of the population, provide 17.1 percent of the medical doctors. This is a major statistical disparity. Does it result from racial discrimination against whites, blacks, and Hispanics? Who exactly is discriminating in favor of Asian Americans, people who themselves have long suffered discrimination? Is there any evidence of discrimination in favor of Asian Americans?

If racial discrimination does not explain the dominance of black athletes in professional sport, or the high level of Asian Americans in the medical field, what does explain these successes? We are warned by Ibram X. Kendi that “racial-group behavior is a figment of the racist’s imagination.” Yet, if we consult evidence rather than racialist ideology, it’s beyond dispute that family structure, community culture, and crime level do differ markedly among members of different racial categories.

What Might Be the Reasons for Different Outcomes?

We know that two-parent families, in comparison with one-parent families, are associated with children’s higher educational achievement and with a lower level of criminal activity and incarceration. Members of different census race categories differ in their family structure: the percentage of single-parent families among African Americans, in 2019, was 64 percent; among American Indians, 52 percent; among Hispanics, 42 percent; among whites, 24 percent; and among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, 15 percent.

Educational achievement correlates with family structure. In all standardized tests, Asian Americans achieve the highest scores, then, well behind, are whites, and well behind are Hispanics, and finally blacks. This reflects not only family structure, but also family and community culture. Asian American families have a high level of discipline and respect for parental authority, and their families and communities are notoriously committed to education.

Crime follows a similar pattern: According to 2019 FBI homicide data, “When the race of the offender was known, 55.9 percent were Black or African American, 41.1 percent were White, and 3.0 percent were of other races.” Among murder victims in 2019 for whom race was known, “54.7 percent were Black or African American, 42.3 percent were White, and 3.1 percent were of other races.”

This means the per-capita offending rate for African-Americans was around six times higher than that of whites. As a result, African Americans are highly overrepresented in prisons by demography, although not overrepresented in terms of criminal activity.

The pattern of economic success, as measured by income, is much the same. Median household income of Asian Americans was, in 2018, $87,243, of whites $67,937, Hispanics, $51,404, and blacks, $41,511. Race, however, does not seem to be a determinant, as Nigerian immigrants to the United States have an average income of $52,000, while 35 percent of Nigerian immigrant households earn $90,000.

All of these statistical disparities that indicate difficulties in the African American community have resulted after 50 years of legalized discrimination on behalf of African Americans. “Affirmative action” has made black Americans a preferred category of applicants, and has granted special conditions and benefits for black Americans. Now “diversity, equity, and inclusion” intensifies pro-black discrimination, and, incidentally, anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination. But the disparities remain, because even 50 years of racial discrimination in favor of black Americans has not addressed the social pathologies of their community.

Now, Ibram X. Kendi has warned us that “One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.” Thus, referring to different characteristics of family structure, community culture, and criminality in different race categories is, according to Kendi, racist. Kendi is advocating for black Americans, and rejects the evidence that blacks bear some responsibility for their levels of achievement and for social pathologies such as crime. The problem, according to Kendi, is “power and policies,” and in taking this stand, he’s robbing black Americans of their agency as human beings, of their capability to achieve and to seek their own ends. This is not “anti-racism,” it’s undermining the constituency Kendi claims to champion by no expectations of performance.

Kendi’s solution to “racism” and alleged discrimination is to increase the preferences and benefits for blacks, in perpetuity: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Kendi aims to disaggregate rewards from performance, so that his favored racial category gets the rewards irrespective of performance. This is not anti-racism; it’s reverse racism, as well as the negation of achievement and merit, and the advancement of mediocrity in all of our fields of knowledge and service.

Portland State University professor Peter Boghossian said he’s resigned from his position in an open letter and accused the college administration of creating an environment that imperils dissent.

“I never once believed—nor do I now—that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion,” Boghossian, a philosophy professor, wrote in the letter. “Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.”

But over time, he argued, Portland State University—a publicly-funded college—made “intellectual exploration impossible” and has transformed itself into a “social justice factory” with a primary focus on race, victimhood, and gender.

“Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues,” said the letter, which was published on Bari Weiss’s Substack page. Weiss herself previously worked for the New York Times until 2020 when she resigned, accusing her Times colleagues of bullying, and argued that the paper capitulated to Twitter-based pressure campaigns.

“Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions,” Boghossian added. “This has created a culture of offense where students are now afraid to speak openly and honestly.”

Portland State University has not immediately responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.

Later in his letter, Boghossian said that over time, he faced retaliation for speaking out against academia’s narratives around race, gender, and social justice.

“For me, the years that followed were marked by continued harassment. I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class. I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes,” he wrote.

The lecturer added: “And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation. I wish I could say that what I am describing hasn’t taken a personal toll. But it has taken exactly the toll it was intended to: an increasingly intolerable working life and without the protection of tenure.”

Years ago, Boghossian drew headlines when he and two other authors submitted bogus race, gender, sexuality, and cultural studies to academic journals to see whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication.

Many of these papers were subsequently published, which Boghossian and the others suggested was due to lackadaisical criteria and institutional rot in several academic fields.

Portland State University Professor Resigns, Says School Is a ‘Social Justice Factory’ (theepochtimes.com)

A large statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, will come down on Wednesday, coming months after Gov. Ralph Northam ordered its removal.

The Civil War statue “will come down this week,” the Democrat governor said in a statement. “This is an important step in showing who we are and what we value as a Commonwealth.”

The statue, which was made in France, weighs more than 10 tons, stands about 21 feet tall, and has been on a 40-foot-tall pedestal for about 130 years.

Over the years, various groups have filed lawsuits with the aim of taking the Lee statue down. A contract signed in 1890 gave the state of Virginia control of the property and effectively prevented it from being removed.

During last year’s riots and protests that were sparked by George Floyd’s death, the monument became the center of protests in the city. Vandals and rioters last year often sprayed graffiti with protest slogans on the statue.

William Gregory, a descendant of the family that donated the Lee statue, has fought its removal, arguing that the original deeds from more than 100 years ago viewed the ground it stood on as “perpetually sacred,” according to reports.

In a GoFundMe statement, Gregory said that his “great-grandparents gave the land where the Monument now sits to the Commonwealth of Virginia, on the condition that the state agree to faithfully guard and affectionately protect the statue perpetually—conditions to which the Commonwealth agreed, and which were expressed clearly in the 1890 deed signed by Virginia’s then-governor.”

Northam, he said, issued the order to remove the Lee statue with no regard to “promises made to my great-grandparents on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” adding that’s why he filed a lawsuit to prevent its removal.

But last month, the state Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there is no evidence that Gregory has any ownership interest in the statue or the land on which it rests. Gregory, the court said, “has no property right related to the Lee monument,” meaning that it can be torn down. The documents that controlled the statue’s location were outdated and unenforceable, the court also ruled.

“The statue was installed in 1890, a generation after the Civil War, during the historical movement that sought to undo the results of the war by other means,” Virginia state officials said in a news release on Monday. Preparations for its removal will start Tuesday before it will be taken down on Wednesday, the officials added.

Other lawsuits seeking to block the removal were filed by nearby residents who said they had a property right to keep the statue in place and it should be left alone.

The Lee statue won’t be destroyed but will be kept in storage until a decision is made about what to do with it.

About 10 days after Floyd’s death and rampant widespread riots and protests, Northam announced plans to remove the monument.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Robert E. Lee Statue in Virginia’s Capital Coming Down Wednesday: Officials (theepochtimes.com)

A man who was charged with attempted murder after allegedly firing shots at Minneapolis officers amid George Floyd protests last year was acquitted of all counts.

Jaleel Stallings, 29, of St. Paul, Minnesota, argued via lawyers that he acted in self-defense and fired three shots after being struck by rubber bullets, believing that he was being attacked by civilians, not police.

Lawyers for the man said Stallings surrendered after realizing he was firing at police. No officers were injured, according to court documents.

Stallings was facing two counts of second-degree attempted murder, assault, and other charges.

Video footage and court documents said that the officers approached Stallings in an unmarked white van, and testimony from one of the officers said they did not identify themselves as police and didn’t warn Stallings if he didn’t comply, according to KARE.

The documents said that Stallings “believed white supremacists (or, perhaps, other non-law enforcement individuals) were firing upon him.”

A news release at the time released by the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office that Stallings “quickly ran away while officers began searching for him” after the incident.

In court, the officers testified that they believed Stallings was a rioter and felt the use of force was necessary because they believed him to be armed.

But a judge found that two officers violated Stallings’ Fourth Amendment rights during the arrest and that their actions were unreasonable.

“Officer Stetson and Sergeant Bittell allowed their anger and/or fear to overtake their faculties and they beat Mr. Stallings for nearly 30 seconds before attempting to place him in handcuffs,“ Judge William Koch wrote. “The video evidence does not support their testimony Mr. Stallings was resisting arrest in any way, instead he surrendered to their authority.”

Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo issued a statement saying there is an active investigation into the matter.

“I’m aware of the recent decision by the honorable Judge Koch who as a part of his decision noted context is important, and that the officers had just been through four days of rioting, looting, arson and the burning of the Third Precinct. Peaceful protest sometimes quickly escalated to violence,” said Arradondo. “We respect the judicial process as well as the internal investigatory process which is currently active. It is for that reason I will not be commenting further at this time.”

During last year’s riots in Minneapolis, tens of millions of dollars in damage was reportedly wrought by rioters, arsons, and looters. More than 1,500 businesses were damaged or destroyed in the riots that were sparked by the death of Floyd.

Man Who Fired Shots at Minneapolis Officers During George Floyd Riots Is Acquitted (theepochtimes.com)

Fifty-eight people have been shot in Chicago so far on Labor Day weekend, including seven children.

Five were killed. Among the victims was a 4-year-old child.

The shooting numbers, from police reports, are from Friday evening to early Monday.

The young boy was struck twice in the head by shots that were fired from outdoors and went through the window of the residence he was in the 6500 block of South Ellis Avenue, according to the Chicago Police Department.

After the shooting, which happened just before 9 p.m., the boy was rushed to the hospital in critical condition.

He was later pronounced dead.

No one was in custody for the murder.

Two people were taken into custody for two other shootings, with a person of interest also apprehended in another.

Chicago officers have a persistent problem capturing people who shoot or kill others, an issue they’ve said stems from community members being unwilling to come forward to provide information about the crimes. Officials say most of the shootings are perpetrated by repeat offenders.

The shootings continued into the early hours of Saturday, including shots coming from an unknown location and striking five people who were part of a large group in the 1400 block of South Tripp Avenue. All five survived and were rushed to area hospitals.

In another shooting, around 9 p.m. on Saturday, a male physically attacked and then opened fire on a bus driver.

The suspect was arrested shortly after the incident occurred. The driver, a man, was transported to Northwestern Hospital in serious condition.

On Sunday, a number of shootings took place, during which two people were hit with bullets at a bus stop in the 3400 block of West Chicago Avenue.

Four shootings were reported through 6:30 a.m. on Labor Day.

Overall, between Friday evening and Monday morning, there were 45 shootings and 58 victims.

58 Shot, Including 7 Children, in Chicago on Labor Day Weekend (theepochtimes.com)

Or what I call, “The True White Supremacists” [US Patriot]

For years now, the left has demonized President Donald Trump as a right-wing authoritarian who’s dragging America down into a dark pit of tyranny and oppression. Democrats and the media continue to push this narrative, even with him out of office. Yet, Trump champions free-market enterprise and individual liberty—in other words, freedom, the opposite of authoritarianism. In reality, the true authoritarian threat to America comes from the left.

The great irony is that so many on the left used their argument that Trump is an authoritarian to justify acting as authoritarians themselves. For starters, look at the mainstream media.

For years, the media was biased, slanting its coverage in favor of Democrats and left-wing positions. But at least journalists were doing their basic jobs of reporting the news. Today, however, they’re openly partisan liberals with press credentials.

The political rise of Trump caused members of the media to see themselves as the guardians of democracy, protecting us all from the predations of Trump the dictator. Because Trump was so terrible and the stakes were so high, journalists believed their job was to advocate a cause, not to report the news.

As a result, the media has published a torrent of misleading if not outright false stories about Republicans and conservatives, deceiving the public in order to paint the right as evil. This is a classic authoritarian tactic: pushing misinformation to undermine and demonize one’s political opponents.

Of course, the media isn’t alone. Corporations are now reflecting the whims of the woke mob, adopting causes such as Black Lives Matter and the left’s push to federalize elections. Corporate executives are imposing a far-left ideology not because they believe in critical race theory or universal mail-in voting, but because they’re cowardly and succumbing to the pressure and bullying from the mob. Here is another example of leftists overtaking a key institution.

This leftist onslaught is compounded by Big Tech, which is clearly waging a war to silence conservatives and snuff out dissent. Indeed, the oligarchs running the likes of Google, Twitter, and Facebook claim they’re merely targeting misinformation, but this has consistently manifested as a political witch hunt against one side. “Misinformation” is a catch-all phrase that allows the titans of tech to censor anything they don’t like in a way that doesn’t look like blatant suppression. Of course, much of this began in 2016 with Donald Trump’s tweeting.

To make matters worse, Democrats are effectively pressuring social media companies to ramp up the censoring of this right-wing material, saying they’ll remove Big Tech’s liability protections if Silicon Valley doesn’t take down “misinformation.” This is authoritarianism in the most classic sense: the government using its power to violate individual rights.

The list of left-wing authoritarianism threatening American freedom is long and unending, from COVID-19 lockdowns run amok to the growing imposition of cradle-to-grave socialist government. I discuss it all with Ben Shapiro on this week’s episode of my podcast, “Newt’s World.” Shapiro, the editor in chief of the Daily Wire and host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” just wrote an important book on this topic titled, “The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.”

As Shapiro explains, the left, led by the woke mob, specializes in bullying to get what it wants. One recent example is Major League Baseball moving its annual All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado because of the former’s voting law, which sparked leftist outrage and calls to boycott the state. Yet, these same leftists have the audacity to cry victim and claim they’re the victims of right-wing bulling.

To the left, everything is both personal and political. There’s no compromise, no middle ground. That’s why Parler gets banned and teachers get fired for opposing critical race theory. Leftists want submission and conformity, not debate. They want diversity of appearance but not diversity of thought. In short, the left seeks raw power to impose a radical, divisive vision on the country.

There are certainly authoritarians on the right, but they live in obscurity, on the fringe, without any institutional control. But the authoritarians on the left control our society’s most powerful institutions—and they’re ascendant in the Democratic Party. They are the authoritarians truly threatening America.

From Gingrich360.com.

The Real Authoritarians Threatening America (theepochtimes.com)

In his eloquent and prophetic January 1989 farewell address to the nation (pdf), President Ronald Reagan gave us a somber warning, saying, “If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in the erosion of the American spirit.”

Thirty-two years later, those words have become sadly true. With the continued erosion of the teaching of history and civics in our nation’s schools and universities, Americans have become increasingly ignorant of our nation’s founding principles. Entire generations now have no understanding of how our government works, what powers it rightly has, or how it can justly use those powers. They are also woefully ignorant of the sacrifices made to preserve our history and freedoms.

And, if history is taught, it is a version that attacks and distorts our American memory, focusing only on America’s failings instead of its triumphs. Our children have been told to mistrust the motives of our nation’s Founding Fathers, seeing them as villains instead of heroes. Instead of gratitude for their courage and sacrifice, they now have disdain for them.

The result is the American crisis in which we presently find ourselves. We are a nation that lacks gratitude, for our history, our culture, and for each other. A huge number of our fellow Americans not only despise the foundational values of our culture, they even despise the idea of extending basic civility toward others, regardless of their views; thus, the poisonous well that is American discourse in 2021.

As Reagan warned us, our nation is in great peril because we have forgotten what we have done, and we have no idea of who we are.

Nevertheless, those who have presented distorted and historically inaccurate depictions of our nation’s history, such as the “1619 Project” and its manifestations, are only escalating their efforts to divide America, rather than unite our nation around shared principles and purpose. Yes, America is not perfect, and we have engaged in some egregious things—particularly the sins of racism and slavery—but we can still recognize our imperfections while celebrating the legacy bequeathed to us by those who founded our nation.

As Benjamin Myers, the former poet laureate of the State of Oklahoma and a professor at Oklahoma Baptist University wrote, “There is a battle in the Western world over the continuation of Western civilization, a battle between those who would remember because they understand that memory sustains civilization and those who would forget for the very same reason. One side offers continuity based on a rich cultural inheritance. The other side offers capitulation into darkness and barbarism.”

But there’s hope that we can still turn away from the dark view of our past that is presently being promoted and taught, and back toward the light that illuminates the entire truth about America—the good and the bad—and does so in a balanced and truthful manner.

The genesis of this new effort started with the release of the “1776 Project” last year by the Trump administration. Now, Hillsdale College, which spearheaded this effort, is releasing the 1776 Curriculum, a package of American history and civics materials for K-12 students.

Katherine O’Toole, Hillsdale’s assistant provost for K-12 education says, “Our curriculum was created by teachers and professors—not activists, not journalists, not bureaucrats. It comes from years of studying America, its history, and its founding principles, not some slap-dash journalistic scheme to achieve a partisan political end through students. It is a truly American education.”

This is what our children should be being taught. This history, if properly taught, will likely result in a country that is grateful for our freedom, for the sacrifices made to preserve that freedom, and for our fellow citizens—treating all with dignity and respect.

Hillsdale President Larry Arnn perhaps put it best when he said last year, “To present the young people with a full and honest account of our nation’s history is to invest them with the spirit of freedom. … Depriving the young of the spirit of freedom will deprive us all of our country. It could deprive us, finally, of our humanity itself. This cannot be allowed to continue. It must be stopped.”

I could not agree more. Let’s restore our appreciation for our freedom, humanity, and our nation by once again teaching future generations the true history of America. The 1776 Curriculum is a critical first step in such a restoration.

Teaching True American History (theepochtimes.com)

A teacher who resigned her position at Rancho San Juan High School in Salinas, California, and moved to Florida this year after she said she was threatened and bullied on social media for opposing critical race theory (CRT) claims the school board has refused to read her public comments at meetings.

Kali Fontanilla told The Epoch Times that the Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD) hasn’t read her letter aloud during public comments since she submitted it to the board on July 13.

The letter, obtained by The Epoch Times, criticizes school board president Phillip Tabera, who attacked opponents of CRT on social media after a raucous June 22 board meeting at which he was called a racist.

“As a reaction to the many parents that spoke up and my own voice as a black teacher in the district, your board President, Phillip Tabera, stated publicly on Facebook the day after the meeting on June 23rd that the ‘anti people of color came out last night,’” Fontanilla wrote.

“I am disgusted and insulted that he would say such derogatory words about those that were brave enough to speak up about this indoctrination happening in the classroom,” she wrote. “Some of those that spoke up were people of color, including myself. To be told that we are ‘anti people of color’ because we are against the district forcing all of our students to receive lessons that are racist and divisive is disgraceful.”

Neither Tabera nor SUHSD Supt. Dan Burns have responded to inquiries about Fontanilla’s letter.

Meanwhile, information obtained through the Public Records Act indicates SUHSD dismissed “the actions and public comments” of parents opposed to CRT and ethnic studies at its June 22 board meeting as “part of a national, coordinated action inspired by right-wing, conservative media and political institutions.” The memo included links to “Politico” and the “Republican Study Committee.”

SUHSD then listed “Our Values,” with links to its resolutions on Black Lives Matter, civic literacy and engagement, DACA legislation, among others.

California lawmakers have proposed Assembly Bill 101 (AB 101) would make the state’s Ethnic Studies Modified Curriculum (ESMC) a graduation requirement for all high schools students. SUHSD already implemented its own ethnic studies program for all ninth-grade students ahead of the proposed state legislation.

Fontanilla said Tabera “should be removed from his position immediately for discrimination and racism.”

She also blasted Burns for denying that the ethnic studies curriculum is based on CRT.

“I’ve also seen the way the district superintendent has denied that critical race theory is being taught in our schools to the press. This is a complete lie! He is not being transparent to the public and the parents who have kids in our schools,” Fontanilla wrote.

“Some of the words and concepts included in lessons taught to students are: critical whiteness studies, hegemony, white privilege, white fragility, white silence, white denial, the 4 I’s of oppression, internalized racism, anti-capitalism, counter-genocide, anti-heterosexism, anti-patriarchy, people of color power, decolonization,” she wrote in the letter.

“To deny that critical race theory is inserted into these lessons is completely dishonest!” she wrote.

Fontanilla said ethnic studies is not a history lesson or study of different cultures, but rather “pure divisive and racist brainwashing.”

“I never taught my students that they were victims or oppressed. I never told my white students that they are privileged and oppressors. I told all my students that they were strong, resilient, intelligent, and can do anything if they put their minds to it, despite their circumstances,” she wrote.

Students are a “captive audience” who should not be forced to study CRT in order to graduate, especially without their parents’ knowledge or consent, she said.

Burns said at the school board’s Aug. 10 meeting that SUHSD would no longer hear public comments about CRT or ethnic studies, after controversy erupted over those two issues at meetings this summer.

He announced that “without desiring to change the current course pathway of ethnic studies as a requirement” the school board “will not take public comments on these two topics in the future until there’s a future debate about this again. We’ve heard concerns from both sides. We appreciate the support of both sides in the debate and in the future, we’ll announce if we’re going to have this conversation further.”

But, at the school board’s Aug. 24 meeting, dozens of students and parents spoke in favor of CRT and ethnic studies after Salinas High School students were accused of posting crude photos of a black baby doll online on an Instagram account.

CRT opponent Kelly Schenkoske told The Epoch Times that looking back on the Aug. 10 meeting, Burns’s statement banning public comments on CRT and ethnic studies seems “incredibly strange” considering times limits were not enforced on those who spoke in favor of CRT and ethnic studies two weeks later.

She suggested SUHSD might be violating the Brown Act, which requires meetings to include a general comment period where the public is allowed to comment on anything of interest that is under the jurisdiction of a local government body.

California School District Blocks Public Comments on CRT at Board Meetings (theepochtimes.com)

A reconfigured global elite are shaping up around a new kind of vision for transforming our world. They’ve called their neo-socialist and multilateral vision the Green New Deal.

Joe Biden’s White House team are core players in this vision, as they seek to reinvent Roosevelt’s original 1930s New Deal into a contemporary twenty-first century Democratic Party platform.

But there are also other important players pushing this neo-socialist dream.

One has been the European Union’s large and well-organised green lobby. Another has been Klaus Schwab (economist and founder of the World Economic Forum), who has used Davos to push his vision of a “Great Reset” of the global economy.

Those getting on board with the Green New Deal are the usual advocates of state interventionism, big government, and multilateral globalism. But surprisingly this new elite is a mix of left-liberals, socialists, Greens, bureaucrats, and university researchers/experts. More surprising is that sections of the business elite are also climbing on board what they believe will be a gravy train.

It appears business is motivated by two factors. First, they are afraid of activist pressure. Second, their marketing departments are telling them there are great public relations kudos to be had in signing up to the now fashionable narratives of saving victims, saving the planet, and distancing themselves from left-leaning stereotypes of greedy uncaring capitalists.

So now we have woke businesses greenwashing their brands plus learning to make profits out of the Green New Deal’s neo-socialist strategy to tear up our old infrastructure and replace them with new ones at great expense to the taxpayer. Who knew socialism could be profitable.

But one of the most fascinating features of this trend is how enthralled legacy media journalists are with the green narratives underpinning this emergent global elite.

Journalists who would normally ask questions about self-interest, crooked narratives, and obvious propaganda now meekly buy into the trendy narratives. Indeed journalists are now being told that applying the journalistic principle of balance is a bad thing when reporting on issues like climate change.

Instead, journalists are being taught that it is fine to advocate for green climate change messages. We even have global media like the BBC instructing their journalists not to be balanced on climate change.

In a climate when green activism is now normalised in media newsrooms, it is hardly surprising that we see journalists treating green experts as media darlings, and as a result, those same green experts are no longer challenged by probing journalistic questions.

Instead, what emerges is a de facto partnership between the media, climate change scientists, and activists wherein journalists start to construct pro-green (propaganda-like) stories.

One way of explaining this partnership is to see it as part of the phenomenon of an emergent global elite for whom left-wing “progressivism” has become a kind of secularised religion, built around saving the many kinds of victims we apparently have today.

These victims can be those conventionally beloved by socialists—the poor. They can also be the new victims beloved by identity politics—LGBTQI, Indigenous or ethnic minorities. Or victims beloved by feminists—women persecuted by the patriarchy. Or the victims can now even be non-human—whales, polar bears, coral reefs, nature, or the planet.

What binds all these victims is that they need to be saved by a self-selecting elite of people who have married elements of the narratives of left-liberalism and neo-Marxism.

This elite first emerged in the United States and then spread to the rest of the western world. And now, like a virus, it is also spreading to places like the European Union (EU).

It is an elite who have proven highly susceptible to catching the green virus. Significantly, enormous progress has been made in capturing western universities, the global media, the education system, and the many bureaucracies across the Anglo world and EU.

The result has been the growth of an alliance between left-liberal, progressive politicians; academics; journalists; and bureaucrats.

Once the universities were captured by this progressive-left, universities were used to teach a new “way of seeing” and a “new way of speaking about” the world.

Thus, universities become the source of what is termed ‘woke’ and green narratives; while the media and internet are used to disseminate their tales. In addition, as universities produced more of these progressive and Green “experts,” journalists rely on them to justify their own work—creating an ongoing cycle.

Importantly, since universities teach journalism, public relations and marketing the communication industries are filled with those taught the woke discourses beloved by the globalised elite.

Not surprisingly, the resultant spread of progressivism within the communications industry means progressives are also becoming well placed—and more skilled—at spreading their own ideologies, while shutting down opposing views.

Indeed the Left are so successful that much of the world in the Biden era is starting to feel a bit like a mixture of the hard authoritarianism of George Orwell’s 1984 and the soft authoritarianism of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

The proliferation of both discourse around the Green New Deal, and the expanding power of a medical autocracy calling the shots over COVID-19, are two indicators of the way the global elite are becoming successful at promoting only their views while undercutting all others.

The universities have also given birth to “experts” who believe that secular science can fix everything thereby removing the need for religion or traditional knowledge.

At a deeper level, German existential philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw this rot beginning when Western thinkers “killed God” in the 19th century, and from that wrong turn has evolved the secularist, social engineers of today.

But at a more institutional level, I think American conservative philosopher Paul Gottfried was correct that the problem lies in today’s overly interventionist governments imposing social therapy measures upon their citizens.

His argument was that this began during the post-second World War era in the United States—specifically with Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University in the 1940s to 1950—and in the growth of the 1960s U.S. government-led social engineering policies (for example, affirmative action new migration laws).

And today, we see the modern manifestation of such a long-running trend in state-run welfare systems, the Green New Deal, and the COVID-19 medical autocracy.

Significantly, Lazarsfeld’s behavioural science was built on the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s idea of an “Authoritarian Personality”—a personality type that is submissive and obedient to authority—as well as the notion that experts should learn to manage and control the population better (using psychology, behavioural sciences, public opinion research, public relations, and spin-doctoring). This, in turn, can help stop the re-emergence of “bad ideas” like nationalism or traditionalism.

Lazarsfeld founded an American tradition of academic thinking about how the media could be used to promote “good” (progressive) ideas and shut down “bad” ideas.

Lazarsfeld’s centre employed many Frankfurt School members and so opened the door to the merging of left-liberal and neo-Marxist ideas, which has further contributed to the growth of the progressive elite.

With Biden in office, this elite now has a great base to work from to disseminate their preferred ideological narratives including the virtues of big government, green activism, and multilateral interventionism to save its so-called “victims.”

And because the 2000 anti-Trump crusade helped cement the alliance between left-leaning politicians, activists, mainstream liberal media journalists, U.S.-owned tech giants; and the university sector, we can now expect to see a period of intensified dissemination of “progressive” narratives plus simultaneous attempts at discourse closure aimed at closing-down and disrupting narratives that the Left loves to hate.

Global Elite Latches Onto Neo-Socialist Vision: The Green New Deal (theepochtimes.com)

A great number of people were shocked by the result of the 2020 presidential election, but Curtis Bowers (former Republican member of the House of Representatives) might not have been. Although he never described himself as a prophet, he indeed foresaw in 2015, or earlier, that 2016 would be the last time in his lifetime to see a conservative president elected. In other words, he worried that the political environment in the United States would continue to deteriorate or radicalize unless a miracle were to happen.

Bowers and his interviewees in the documentary “AGENDA 2: Masters of Deceit“ talked about possible electoral manipulation and fraud, but that was not the main factor that led him to make such a judgment about the future of America’s political arena. The basis for his conclusion was simply demographic trends.

According to Bowers’ study, in 1980, about 40 percent of the U.S. population held conservative political views, 50 percent were undecided, and only 10 percent were liberal. The trend was that both the conservative and undecided populations were shrinking. In 2012, the conservative dropped to 30 percent, while the liberal grew to 30 percent, making the two evenly matched. By 2036, the conservative and undecided are projected to fall further to 10 percent and 20 percent respectively, while the liberal might grow to 70 percent accordingly.

For conservatives, if Bowers’ analysis and predictions are accurate, it will indicate the United States is becoming a socialist or communist country. Could there be anything more frightening than that?

Bowers himself was not willing to accept this too. However, he was aware that American conservatives must force themselves to rationally recognize this dire situation and act vigorously to salvage it, rather than simply pinning their hopes for a turnaround on the next election.

What has caused this trend in the proportion of political leanings? The direct answer from Bowers is the left is capturing 85 percent of young Americans each year. They achieved this not because they had magic powers. Rather, they had a long-standing agenda, a communist agenda, to undermine, infiltrate and control the family, the church, the state, the media, the schools, and many more institutions that influence the worldview of the youth.

In the “Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx called on his followers to destroy all traditional political systems, economic models, religious beliefs, moral values, family structures, and so on. And these did prevail in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, North Korea, and some other countries.

At the end of the Cold War, many Americans once believed they had defeated or even eliminated communism. Bowers was one of them. But the first-hand experience in 1992 changed his view. He attended a communist strategy meeting at the campus of the University of California, Berkley. He was shocked to learn that the communists were still or had always been seriously planning to change America to be more in line with their views. What surprised him more was the rapidity with which the Communists were achieving their goals. This led him to drop his prior work and devote himself to researching and exposing the Communist destruction in the United States.

In his first award-winning documentary “AGENDA: Grinding America Down,” Bowers uses a wealth of facts and data to demonstrate that communism is not dead or gone, but has deliberately, yet unwittingly, orchestrated and driven changes in American values over the past decades.

The most convincing witnesses were the communists themselves. In 1958, W. Cleon Skousen listed 45 goals of the communists to infiltrate and convert the United States, in his book “The Naked Communist.” These 45 goals cover everything from influencing specific policies to corrupting American culture. Examples include capturing one or both of America’s political parties; controlling key positions in radio, TV, and pictures; presenting homosexuality, degeneracy, and promiscuity as normal and healthy; replacing revealed religion with social religion; discrediting the American founding fathers; encouraging easy divorce, and more. Please watch the documentary for details.

The sequel documentary “AGENDA 2: Masters of Deceit” explains the reasons why communism has not died out. In defiance of moral principles, the communists and those who were duped masterfully kept changing their names, coining new terms, and winning the cognitive war repeatedly like a duck to water. For example, in Fabian socialism, a denomination of communism, deception is their motto. Another branch, the Frankfurt School, boasted they could convince students that snow is black through distorted interpretations and truth subjectivism in education.

Bowers notes that no matter how catchy the slogans of the communists and the left are, they aim to establish big government and foster dependence on it. Julia Irish, a family therapist, gave “AGENDA 2: Masters of Deceit” five stars and commented, “Our children are being lost. We are well into creating a third generation of state dependents.” But Julia believes all people want self-esteem, so she doesn’t think young people will spontaneously and willingly rely on and support big government, instead, they have been simply indoctrinated to think that way. “The result is depression, anxiety, drug dependence, domestic abuse and poverty.”

Bowers’ remark that 2016 would be the last time in his life to see a conservative president elected may leave many in despair. It was like a lady in the audience crying sadly after a screening of the documentary “AGENDA.” The reason was that a male audience member affirmed Bowers’ research, declaring, “I am a professor at this college, I am a communist, and we will win because we are taking all of your children.”

Tanya Wright, an author for the Natural Homeschool, has a different feeling. “I don’t think this is a fear-mongering documentary,” Wright writes, “it was a desperate call to arms to those who have ears to hear.” I agree.

If Bowers were that pessimistic, he wouldn’t have his entire family committed to going around and presenting these documentaries. He clarified his genuine thought by quoting Sun Tzu, “If you know yourself, you will have a 50 percent chance to win the battle. If you know your enemy, you will have a 50 percent chance to win. But, if you know yourself AND your enemy, you will have a 100 percent chance to win.” Bowers hopes Americans rediscover their identity and values, understand the dangers they are in and who their enemies are, and then act quickly to defend themselves and finally win.

The change in the demographic ratio of conservatives, undecideds, and liberals in the United States is ongoing. In the documentary “AGENDA 2,” Star Parker suggests, “The only way you are going to reverse the trend is to begin to interject a biblical worldview back into the hearts and minds of our youth.” I agree, while it is easier said than done. People who believe in God must also consider the cunning and temptations of satan to walk their path steadily. In this regard, “The Specter of Communism” series from The Epoch Times illustrate it best. So my suggestion is to watch both Agenda documentaries and “The Specter of Communism” series as a collection.

The Terrifying Prophecy of Bowers and the Only Way to Stop It (theepochtimes.com)

Baitulmaal gives financial support to families of Palestinian terrorists

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) on Wednesday shared a tweet that advertised a fundraiser for an organization with ties to Hamas and the Taliban.

Tlaib, who has a long history of anti-Semitic rhetoric, retweeted a post from critical race theorist Khaled Beydoun that urged donations to Baitulmaal, a Texas-based nonprofit. Experts say Baitulmaal helps fundraise for Hamas and distributes aid to the “families of martyrs of the Palestinian people.” And the group’s leader, Mazen Mokhtar, has been accused of working with the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

The retweet isn’t the first time Tlaib expressed support for terrorists. Days after she became a congresswoman, the controversial Democrat hosted Abbas Hamideh, a pro-Hezbollah activist who has repeatedly compared Israelis to Nazis. She shared a post last year that included an anti-Semitic phrase frequently used by Palestinian terrorist groups that seek to destroy Israel. She subsequently unshared the post.

Baitulmaal works closely with Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip, according to a 2020 analysis by the Middle East Forum. The group, which received $10,000 in emergency coronavirus funding last year, frequently partners with Unlimited Friends Association for Social Development, a Palestinian group that describes itself as a “a social, developmental, educational NGO.”

The Unlimited Friends Association works with Baitulmaal to hand out cash to the families of Palestinian terrorists, according to the Middle East Forum. These donations complement the Palestinian Authority’s formal “Pay to Slay” program, which has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Palestinian terrorists. The Palestinian government this year paid $42,000 to the family of a Palestinian terrorist who stabbed two Israelis to death and wounded two more, including a two-year-old child.

The association, which lists Baitulmaal on its website’s partners and donors page, is openly hostile towards Israel. The group’s Facebook page contains references to “the filth of the most dirty Jews” and “Nazi Zionist jails.” The association also partners with Islamic Relief, a group with which the State Department cut ties this year because of “anti-Semitism exhibited repeatedly” by its leaders.

In 2004, federal agents in Connecticut investigated Mokhtar for running a website that “solicited funds for the Taliban and Chechen mujahideen.” Mokhtar was not convicted. Three years later, he was arrested on a multi-count indictment for filing false tax returns. The lead prosecutor was former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R.).

Baitulmaal also partners with West Bank-based Hamas organizations. The organization hosted a 2008 fundraiser for the Yazour Medical Clinic in Nablus, an offshoot of Hamas. One Palestinian newspaper reports that Baitulmaal and the Hamas offshoot have been working together “for years.”

Anti-Semitic activist Linda Sarsour last year hosted a fundraiser for Baitulmaal that raised tens of thousands of dollars.

Tlaib and Baitulmaal did not respond to requests for comment.

Rashida Tlaib Promoted a Fundraiser for Group Tied to Hamas, Taliban (freebeacon.com)

The radical left is doing everything they can to destroy Black America:

• Scream “Black Lives Matter” while you burn down Black-owned businesses.
• Defund the police and make Black neighborhoods less safe.
• Use Critical Race Theory to convince Black kids that they will never succeed without a government handout.
• Increase the handouts, but nobody asks why?

Liberals want to keep Black America dependent on the government – it is the only way they will keep supporting liberal policies.

Help us fight back and save Black America from another century of lies!

CRT is the lynchpin in their plans to keep Black America down for generations. Their fight for CRT hurts the Black boys, and their push for gender equality hurts Black girls. Our fight against this poisonous doctrine cannot be more critical for the future of Black children in America.

“Woke” liberalism is destroying my community, and I have a plan to turn it around.

You can hear more about it here – when I was on Fox & Friends the other morning.

My name is Marc Little, and I am Executive Director of CURE America Action. I am a pastor, a patriot, an attorney, and a Black man. I am also Executive Director of CURE America Action, and I’m counting on you to help me counter the radical left’s attacks on Black America by making your generous contribution of $25, $50, $100, or even $1,000, right away!

The radical left targets Black people like me who push back on their lies. When proud black conservatives fight back, the radical left tries to put us in our place.

Congressman Byron Donalds, a Black Republican and proud conservative, was blocked from joining the Congressional Black Caucus for his conservative views. Senator Tim Scott was called “Oreo” by a Democrat politician and “Uncle Tim” by legions of liberals on social media just a few weeks ago.

They are terrified that someone might tell Black America that they don’t need anyone’s permission to succeed – they have the same opportunity as anyone else. That the mission statement of CURE America Action, and it is precisely what your donation will be funding. We are the antithesis of critical race theory, and we need your help.

Don’t let the radical left enslave Black Americans on their liberal plantation. Help us take our message of prosperity and opportunity to Americans of every race and creed. Chip in $1,000, $100, $50, or $25 and give us the ammunition to teach America the truth!

Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord.
– Proverbs 12:22

If the left succeeds with their push to teach Critical Race Theory to our children, they will be lost to big government liberalism – liberalism that categorizes people by race – forever. The future of our nation depends on our ability to stop this propaganda from demonizing our children with lies and hate.

You and I must work quickly. Please let me hear from you today.

God Bless America,

Marc Little
Executive Director
CURE America Action

When I was young and inexperienced, with no money and no career, I nonetheless made a firm assumption about people who’d made it, who’d risen to the top of their fields. They were daring individuals, I thought, outspoken and candid, willing to go against the crowd. These were people with a skeptical eye on the conventional wisdom, ever ready to challenge and dispute whenever they sensed a stale assertion of it.

When I worked for Dana Gioia at the National Endowment for the Arts, he told me once that when he was in advertising his team would meet at the end of the year to review themselves, and they spent five times as many minutes discussing what they did wrong as they spent on what they did right. That was the kind of toughness I imagined happened in every elite circle.

Look at the leaders of institutions, today, however, and you witness a pageant of conformity and timidity, guardedness ever present, the most powerful people in politics, education, entertainment, media, and business speaking in well-rehearsed terms, mouthing standard pieties with an air of solemnity that is one millimeter thick. Political correctness has turned them into cliche machines.

Did you notice the apology written recently by Mike Richards, the man who was to replace the late Alex Trebek as host of “Jeopardy!”? Richards is a big deal in the game show world, the executive producer of “Jeopardy!” and of “Wheel of Fortune,” winner of three Emmy Awards, too. But after he was selected as “Jeopardy!”‘s new host, some comments that he’d made on his 2013–14 podcast surfaced and set him up for what is now a familiar ritual: the high-profile cancellation. The ritual meant the loss of his post, and also a confession/contrition/plea on the accused’s part that is painful to read—not because of the sentiments themselves, however, but because of their dispiritingly banal expression.

Richards might have said, “Yeah, I made some dumb remarks just trying to get a laugh—I don’t regard them as cause for termination eight years later, though—let’s ease up, okay.”

No, instead we got the nauseatingly customary script:

“It is humbling to confront a terribly embarrassing moment of misjudgment, thoughtlessness, and insensitivity from nearly a decade ago,” he said.

It sounded like every other public apology we’ve heard in recent years, with studied humility and sober drama of self-confrontation. The words follow with all the formulaic layout of an algebraic equation. We have the expected family invocation as well, and role model talk: “My responsibilities today as a father, husband, and public personality who speaks to many people through my role on television means I have substantial and serious obligations as a role model, and I intend to live up to them.”

I don’t blame Richards for this, though. It’s the environment he’s in, a tiresome and phony place that the rest of America recognizes instantly for its mendacity. These declarations sound so sincere, but we know how calculating they are. To the material loss suffered by the penitent one, we have the pain of self-emasculation added in the most predictable language. Can’t any of these people think for themselves? Richards’ public career is over, at least for the near future and maybe the far. What does he have to lose? Why go official and betray his own heart (which is precisely what a man who adopts the idiom of his executioners is doing), even when you know it won’t save you?

Again, these are not people beaten down by life, their egos crushed by poverty and disappointment.  They have all the trappings of self-determination—money, education, worldliness, competitiveness, achievement—and yet the working-class guy and gal show a heckuva lot more independent spirit than Mr. Success ever does.

I think that this conformist atmosphere among the elite has played a significant role in the rise of populist anger in America. The contempt that the elite feel for the non-elite in our country is on display every day in the opinion pages and the liberal cable news shows. Just the recently, while driving through the South and listening to NPR, I heard the host introduce interviewee Robin D’Angelo with the question, “Why is it so hard for white people to talk about racism?” The willingness to cast an entire racial group as deficient in some way used to be called “stereotyping,” and enlightened folk universally rejected it. Here, however, it was offered as an enlightening observation. The condescension was thick and gleeful. The host wasn’t aware of how smug she sounded, but ordinary Americans have seen and heard such sentiments over and over, and they discern the contempt more acutely than elites realize.

How irritating it is, then, for these judgmental elites to appear so weak and obedient and cookie-cut at times that call for bold presentation. They’re avid about their superiority, but feeble in their individuality. They profess to be the best and the brightest, but they sink into stupid politically correct truisms when the pressure’s on. Liberalism claims to honor the individual voice, the lone dissenter, but never does a prominent 21st-century liberal wish to fall out of step with his fellows. The guns of cancellation are always primed, and he knows it.

A country whose leadership class is fearful and wary is in trouble. Insecurity makes for bad decisions, and for bad symbolism, too. A leader who stands up and apologizes for the “systemic” sins of the institution he leads doesn’t come off as properly sensitive and constructively progressive. He’s just weak. The celebrity who gets down on his knees and apologizes for some “phobic” remark made years earlier on the internet isn’t rightly repentant and newly enlightened. He’s just humiliating himself. Ordinary Americans draw a pat conclusion: These figureheads make a lot of money and they’re awfully full of themselves and down on us, but when you get down to it, they’re not so great, not at all.

This is the end of a great American tradition of rebelliousness. Ben Franklin ran away from Boston and struck out on his own as a mere teenager. Emerson praised self-reliance as the essence of genius. Thoreau headed to the woods because he couldn’t stand the copycat mentality of fellow citizens. Huck at the end aims to light out for the territory, knowing he’ll never fit in with civilized society. Those figures are the opposite of today’s Americans aspiring to the realms of the elite. Ambitious ones sense at an early age that climbing the ladder means fitting in and filtering impulses. The pipeline has sensors attuned to pick up the maverick spirit and mark it as suspect. Our leaders are tame souls whose wills are triggered mainly by the appearance of a rogue in their midst.

Therein lies the aversion to Donald Trump. It wasn’t Trump’s politics or policies that disturbed the elite. It was, instead, his headstrong personality and outspoken words. The content of his thought and speech they might have opposed in the normal political ways, but the character of the man couldn’t be handled that way. His performances could be received by them only as an admonishment. He spoke his mind, they didn’t, and that made them feel bad about themselves—as it should. Let us hope that more untamed figures surface and do the same thing.

Our Tame Leaders (theepochtimes.com)

Children hold up signs during a rally against critical race theory being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Va., on June 12, 2021

Race shaming and allusions to surgical castration in children’s literature—as well as accusations of xenophobia against political figures—are among the themes found in Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson’s “Indoctrination in North Carolina Public Education” report.

Robinson previously told The Epoch Times that he created the Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students task force (F.A.C.T.S.) to gather evidence of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the K-12 North Carolina school system.

CRT is a Marxist philosophy that suggests society is a class struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, labelling white people as the oppressors and all other races as the oppressed.

The task force, according to the report, consists of volunteer education professionals with experience in various roles in education, such as teachers, administrators, university professors, education policy experts, and elected members of the state Senate and House.

Through an online portal, parents, teachers, and students could anonymously submit evidence from curriculums by email.

The report was released on Aug. 24 and was gathered from over 500 submissions.

What has surfaced are themes of CRT, bias, sexualization, and race shaming of children, Robinson said in a press release posted on Facebook (pdf).

In one parent’s submission, a child, in learning the word “xenophobia,” was instructed to use former President Donald Trump as an example.

“The teacher had definitions on one side and sentences on the other and the sentence that described xenophobia was ‘President Trump has xenophobia,’” the parent said. “Another example was a definition of Republican was that Republicans don’t care for people’s issues and Democrats are people who care for people.”

The example provided in the image was a prompt for the student to define “xenophobia.”

The prompt said: “It can be said that Donald Trump has xenophobia, because of his fear of people from other countries than the United States.”

Allusions to Surgical Castration

Another submission involved a book titled “George,” by Alex Gino, which is a children’s novel about a transgendered, fourth-grade girl.

According to the report, the book is used in North Carolina classrooms to illustrate the story of a biological boy in the fourth grade who wants to be a girl.

“The book talks about cutting off male genitalia and hormone therapy,” the report stated. “The submitter who shared this information said the book was included in their child’s elementary school. This book is recommended for third to seventh-grade students.”

An excerpt from the book as follows was provided in the report: “’So, like, do you want to’—he made a gesture with two fingers like a pair of scissors—‘go all the way?’ George squeezed her legs together. ‘Maybe someday,’ she said.’”

Faculty Microaggression

A submission from a teacher alleged “microaggression” training class requirements for faculty and staff.

The teacher, who remained anonymous, said she’s been teaching high school for 14 years.

“Faculty and staff are required to attend professional development related to ‘equity’ and ‘microaggression’ as it relates to race, gender, and other areas,” the teacher said. “They define microaggression as ‘The everyday slights, indignities, put-downs and insults that people of color, women, LGBT populations of those who are marginalized experiences in their day-to-day interactions with people.’”

White staff members are told that they are unaware of their racism, the teacher reported, in these personal development sessions.

“We are given examples of microaggression such as a statement: ‘I believe everyone can succeed in today’s society if they work hard and the most qualified people should get the job,’” the teacher said, adding that this statement, according to the tenet of microaggression, translates as: “White people believe people of color are lazy and don’t work hard.”

‘We Didn’t Hide in the Dark’

 The Senate Education Committee passed House Bill 324 on Tuesday after a heated exchange between state Sen. Jay Chaudhuri and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson regarding the task force’s mission.

According to the bill, its purpose is to ensure “the equality and rights of all persons” by requiring that “students, teachers, administrators, and other school employees recognize the quality and rights” of people by prohibiting the promotion of “certain concepts that are contrary to that intent.”

Chaudhuri, a Democrat, said that, during the first week of school, students should be honored instead of debating what he called a “Fox News-driven issue that’s more about fearmongering that’s turned into a fishing expedition of our public-school teachers.”

The task force, Chaudhuri added, operated without abiding by open-meeting laws.

“We didn’t hide in the dark,” Robinson, a Republican, said.  “We didn’t ask to do it.”

Parents, teachers, and students within the North Carolina school system demanded it, Robinson said.

“And to sit here and call it a ‘Fox News-driven issue’ when I have stood with teachers who have cried because they feel like their jobs, livelihoods, and professions have been threatened, for you to call it that is an insult—an absolute insult,” Robinson said.  “And you know where my office is, and you know that this task force is going on. When did you contact me? Please don’t turn this into some partisan issue.”

North Carolina Task Force Reports Themes of Critical Race Theory in K-12 Schools (theepochtimes.com)

Agents also raided homes of Democratic city council members

FBI agents on Wednesday raided Detroit’s city hall and the homes of city council members Janeé Ayers (D.) and Scott Benson (D.) as part of a corruption investigation.

The FBI agents executed warrants to search the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center, which serves as Detroit’s city hall, and Ayers’s and Benson’s houses. While the investigation’s exact focus has not yet been released to the public, investigators have already brought corruption charges against Councilman André Spivey (D.).

“The citizens of Detroit have a right to a city government that’s free of corruption,” special agent Timothy Waters told reporters on the day of the raids.

Ayers is running for a second term and Benson for a third term in November. Ayers’s name came up in a federal bribery investigation three years ago, though she faced no charges.

While Detroit has a long history of political corruption, the probe is the largest federal investigation into the city’s politicians in eight years, according to the Detroit News. In 2013, then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick (D.) was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison on racketeering charges. His sentence was commuted this year by former president Donald Trump.

FBI Raids Detroit City Hall in Corruption Probe (freebeacon.com)

Business headquarters are leaving the state at an accelerating rate. That’s according to a new report (pdf) for the Hoover Institution by Joseph Vranich and Lee E. Ohanian, “Why Company Headquarters Are Leaving California in Unprecedented Numbers.” Ohanian is a Hoover research fellow and professor of economics at UCLA.

Vranich has been one of my sources for 20 years. His Spectrum Location Solutions used to be in Irvine. Now it’s in McKinney, Tex., near Dallas. Just like so many ex-California firms and people.

The new report’s shocking news: For the first six months of 2021, company headquarters exiting California has doubled from the same period in 2018. And in the first half of this year, 74 headquarters skedaddled, more than all last year.

The reasons: “High tax rates, punitive regulations, high labor costs, high utility and energy costs, and declining quality of life for many Californians which reflects the cost of living and housing affordability.”

However, the authors caution the 2020 numbers were affected by COVID-19, which slowed planning and scouting for new locations.

From 2018 to 2021, here are the main destinations for company HQs:

Texas 114;

Tennessee 25;

Arizona 17;

Nevada 15;

Colorado 14;

Florida 13;

North Carolina 8;

Georgia 5;

Idaho 4;

Kentucky 4;

Virginia 4;

Indiana 4;

Alabama 3;

Missouri 3;

Minnesota 3;

Oregon 3.

The study notes of this and other data: “Additional companies have relocated their headquarters to other states, but the only states listed above are those where such events are public knowledge. The states listed have likely experienced more wins.”

Anecdotal evidence also supports the data. I know many people who have left, mainly for Texas and Tennessee. Almost everybody I know talks about getting out, although it’s still difficult to depart the balmy weather, family, friends, and local connections.

No Awareness

I asked Vranich if there’s any awareness of this exodus among Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state’s other top political leaders. “No,” he replied. He said the state isn’t even thinking about cutting taxes, despite what Newsom claims is a $78 billion budget surplus (but which the Legislative Analyst pegged at a still hefty $38 billion).

And he pointed to this July 2021 statement by Ohio Lt. Gov. John Husted: “Fifteen years ago we began reforming our tax plan—we eliminated the corporate franchise tax … eliminated the death tax—we went from a high-tax state to a lower-tax state. We absolutely do see it as a time to compete. Capital will ultimately go where it can be the most appreciated.”

The Hoover report itself noted: “Ohio is gaining popularity as the place where more companies call home. Five states lowered corporate income tax rates for 2021—Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa and Mississippi.”

And: “Gov. Newsom’s strategy is not to reduce taxes but to increase incentives offered to companies, thus increasing taxpayer burdens…. Since the start of the Newsom Administration in January 2019, GO-Biz awarded 147 businesses a total of $593,844,974 in California Competes Tax Credits.”

I asked Vranich if there were any good signs. He said, “An honest politician would admit that the only bright spots include growing tax revenue from Silicon Valley’s billionaires and also from film-making that is being preserved thanks to the state’s generous economic incentives.”

Dismal Rankings

The study cited Chief Executive magazine’s ranking of state business climates, which pegged California the worst of the 50 states and Texas the best—in each case, for the 17th year in a row.

On the Tax Foundation’s 2021 State Business Tax Climate Index, California did better—49th place, after New Jersey. Their analysis: “California’s poor position is unlikely to improve considering that its businesses routinely face threats of increases in income taxes, property taxes, and sales taxes along with higher county and municipal taxes and fees.”

They key to what’s left of California’s once tolerable tax climate is Proposition 13, the property tax limitation passed by voters in 1978.

Vranich and Ohanian warn: “Pro-tax coalitions launch continual efforts to eliminate or weaken Proposition 13’s protections—coalitions comprised of legislators, deep-pocketed special interests, and interests such as government contractors and state and local government-employee unions. Such entities have spent millions of dollars to overturn Proposition 13. Thus far they have not been successful, but they certainly will try again.”

Losses By County

The largest California counties also suffered the largest losses of business HQs:

Los Angeles 54;

San Francisco 47;

Orange 29;

Santa Clara 28;

Alameda 20;

San Diego 17;

San Mateo 13;

Sacramento 8;

Contra Costa 6;

San Bernardino 6;

Riverside 5.

However, San Francisco’s population is 873,965 (2020 U.S. Census) compared to Los Angeles’s 3.9 million. That’s 4.5 times higher. So the per capita San Francisco HQ loss is about four times that of Los Angeles.

By contrast, Orange County’s population of 3.2 million (2020 U.S. Census) is just behind L.A.’s 3.9 million. But OC suffered only about half L.A.’s headquarters losses.

OC’s business and tax climate is well known as more welcoming than Los Angeles. For example, the City of Los Angeles’ sales tax rate is 9.5 percent. By contrast, most OC cities’ rates are 7.75 percent.

The study especially scorches California’s addiction to litigation. They charge, “Lawmakers in Sacramento continually enact laws designed to expand civil liability on business and property owners … California’s statutes and regulations are so unreasonable that companies have reported in confidence that their legal costs in California are disproportionate to the number of employees they have in the state.”

No wonder the American Tort Reform Foundation brands California a “legal hellhole.”

Workers Compensation Costs

California reformed workers compensation laws in 2003 under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. It worked for a while. But a friend of mine in the industry said since then the reforms have been undercut by laws, court rulings and new legal maneuvers devised by plaintiff attorneys.

The Hoover study listed the average workers compensation costs, per $100 in 2020:

Worst:

New Jersey $2.52;

New York $2.23;

Vermont $2.21;

California $2.16;

Hawaii $2.08.

Best:

North Dakota $0.67;

Arkansas $0.72;

West Virginia $0.79;

Utah $0.85;

Texas $0.98.

Shocking Energy Costs

Business energy costs also are excessive. All that “green energy” doesn’t come cheap. Here are the electricity prices paid in March 2021, cents per kilowatt-hour:

Worst:

Hawaii $30.76;

Alaska $18.89;

California $17.20;

Connecticut $16.98;

Massachusetts $16.81.

Best:

Oklahoma $6.36;

Nevada $7.15;

Idaho $7.76;

Virginia $7.77;

Utah $8.01.

It’s going to get worse for California: “Customers in all parts of California are likely to see energy cost increases by virtually every utility. PG&E Corp. submitted a proposal to regulators for a rate increase totaling $3.6 billion starting in 2023 to help make its system more reliable and safer by sparking fewer fires.

“Southern California Edison in April 2020 increased its rates by approximately 7 percent overall. In 2021, SCE requested an additional residential rate increase of 14 percent, while commercial rates are estimated to rise between 9 and 11 percent.”

Major Firms Leaving

The report identified large and medium firms whose relocation can be found in news accounts. But many small firms just up and leave with no notice.

At the end the report lists all the corporate HQs that have left from January 1, 2018 to June 30, 2021. Some of those include:

Charles Schwab, from San Francisco to Westlake, Tex.;

DailyWire (Ben Shapiro’s website), from Los Angeles to Nashville, Tenn.;

Dole Food Co., from Los Angeles to Charlotte, N.C.;

Hewlett Packard Enterprise, from Santa Clara to Houston, Tex.;

Joe Rogan Experience, from Los Angeles to Austin, Tex.;

Kaiser Aluminum, from Lake Forest to Franklin, Tenn.;

Lockheed Martin FBM, from Sunnyvale to Titusville, Fla.;

Musk Foundation (Elon’s nonprofit), from Menlo Park to Austin, Tex.;

Mitsubishi Motors, from Cypress to Franklin, Tenn.;

National Hot Rod Association, from Glendora to Indianapolis, Ind.;

Nestle USA, from Glendale to Arlington, Va.;

Conclusion

In sum, it’s a dismal report. The state budget currently is buoyed by the bounty from Silicon Valley, whose revenues just keep growing and growing.

But for just about any other firm in California, the times are tough and getting tougher. And when the going gets too tough, even the tough get out.

California Businesses Exiting Faster than Ever (theepochtimes.com)

VA Dem nixes pledge to ‘eliminate racial disparities’ in education as VA parents blast ‘equity initiatives’

Virginia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe quietly removed race-focused language from his campaign website’s education page as voters pushed back on “equity initiatives” in public schools.

McAuliffe has made “equity” a chief theme in his campaign for a second term in the governor’s mansion, tying racism to issues such as education, the economy, and criminal justice. In mid-August, however, McAuliffe removed his pledge to “eliminate racial disparities” from the top of his campaign’s K-12 education page, screenshots reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show. The Democrat also nixed the term “equitable” from the top of four issue pages on his campaign site.

The move came just weeks after a Trafalgar Group poll showed McAuliffe with a narrow lead over Republican Glenn Youngkin. It also came as Democrats in Virginia and across the country expressed concern over “equity initiatives” in public schools. In Loudoun County, for example, parent groups have collected thousands of signatures to recall school board members who have endorsed critical race theory.

The changes to McAuliffe’s campaign site suggest the Democrat is attempting to play both sides of the issue. McAuliffe in June called critical race theory “another right-wing conspiracy” that is “totally made up by Donald Trump and Glenn Youngkin.” At the same time, the Democrat collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from teachers’ unions that have defended teaching critical race theory in public schools.

McAuliffe did not return a request for comment.

The Democrat has not changed his full K-12 education plan, which is aimed at “ensuring that every child has access to an equitable, world-class education.” But removing race-focused language such as “equitable” from prominent positions on his campaign site could reflect an attempt to distance himself from critical race theory while remaining in his union allies’ good graces. 

McAuliffe has received nearly $1 million from the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions. One week before the NEA contributed $400,000 to McAuliffe’s campaign, union president Becky Pringle said her members “are not going to be afraid” to teach critical race theory in schools, because they “know that to not teach it, we are not telling the truth.”

Youngkin, meanwhile, has placed his opposition to critical race theory at the center of his campaign. The Republican in May pledged to “make sure our kids learn real math, not a political ideology.” 

McAuliffe and Youngkin are set to square off in November. McAuliffe leads the Republican by four points, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. President Joe Biden won the state by 10 points in November

As Public Pushback Mounts, McAuliffe Buries ‘Equity’ Agenda (freebeacon.com)

• A supposed DNA match between Rep. Ilhan Omar and her second husband Ahmed Elmi allegedly proves that the two are siblings 
• It has long been rumored that Omar and Elmi are siblings, but because of a lack of paperwork in war-torn Somalia, positive proof has never been uncovered 
• The match says that Omar’s DNA was taken from a cigarette butt, while Elmi’s DNA purportedly came from a drinking straw
• Although Omar is not known to be a smoker, a grainy photo appears to show her smoking outside of her Washington, DC home   
• Republican strategist Anton Lazzaro posted the results hours before he was arrested and charged with trafficking underage girls for sex 
• Omar’s spokesperson is already discrediting the report due to Lazzaro’s involvement 
• A shadowy Republican group is behind the surreptitious sleuthing and claims this finally proves the two are siblings

Persistent claims that leftist congresswoman Ilhan Omar married her own brother to get around US immigration laws may be legitimized by what appears to be a conclusive DNA test.

The results of the test assert that there is a 99.999998% chance that Omar and her second husband Ahmed Elmi are siblings.

The report, drawn up by Endeavor DNA Laboratories does not name either Omar or Elmi, instead referring to them as ‘Sibling 1’ and ‘Sibling 2.’ DailyMail.com understands that Omar is Sibling 1.

It says that Sibling 1’s sample was garnered from a cigarette butt and Sibling 2’s from a drinking straw.

Omar has never before been known publicly to be a smoker, although her third husband Tim Mynett is. However, a grainy picture of her with a cigarette in her mouth, said to have been taken outside her home in Washington, D.C. appears as part of the evidence gathered in an intensive investigation by a shadowy conservative group.

Endeavour Laboratories did not name either Omar or Elmi on the results, identifying them merely as ‘Sibling 1’ and ‘Sibling 2.’ DailyMail.com understands Sibling 1 is Omar

The test was posted online by Anton Lazzaro, a Republican strategist in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Around 12 hours later Lazzaro was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges.

He is now in custody awaiting a hearing on Monday.

Lazarro’s lawyer Zachary Newland could not immediately be reached as he was on a flight. However he confirmed by email that the website was put up by his client.

Omar’s spokesman Jeremy Slevin threw shade on the report. ‘This is a fraudulent website created by a man charged this week with child sex trafficking and lying to federal investigators to cover it up,’ he said in a statement.

The supposed DNA match between the two was posted on Republican strategist Anton Lazzaro’s (pictured) Facebook page and Twitter feed just before he was arrested and charged with trafficking underage girls for sex

Endeavor, which is based in El Paso, Texas did not return a call for comment. The company charges $189 for a siblingship test.  

DailyMail.com understands that a shadowy Republican group was planning to release details of a DNA report in the next day or two. It is not known what relationship Lazarro, 30, has to that group.

Its work could have been undermined by Lazarro as it gives Minnesota congresswoman Omar, 38, an opportunity to try to discredit the information as coming from a tainted source.

Lazzaro’s website says that the group garnered a DNA sample from Elmi’s straw in Leicester, England as part of a two-year investigation. He has recently been living in both Kenya and on the east African island of Zanzibar.

The test result appears to show that some of the DNA matches are exact while others are close. The group behind the surreptitious sleuthing claims this proves the two are siblings.

Claims that Omar and Elmi, 36, are siblings have been rampant for years. The allegation is that they married so Elmi, a British citizen could go to school in the United States. He followed Omar to North Dakota State University.

Lazzaros’ website says: ‘Rep. Omar was a U.S. Citizen for a decade and her brother/ex-husband Mr. Elmi was a UK Citizen.

‘This is purely a crime of convenience, by an individual with extremely poor ethics now representing hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans in Congress. There was absolutely no threat to these individuals causing them to commit multiple felonies while living in the two wealthiest countries in the world seeking reduced tuition at a public University.

Omar, who was first elected to Congress in 2018, has never fully addressed the question of whether she is related to Elmi. While serving in the Minnesota House of Representatives she did issue a press release in which she called the allegations ‘absurd and offensive.’

In her memoir, This Is What America Looks Like, published last year, she claims she hardly knew him when they married, saying: ‘I had a Britney Spears-style meltdown, I not only eloped with a man — whom I spent so little time with that I wouldn’t even make him a footnote in my story if it weren’t for the fact that this event turned into the main headline later on — but I shaved my head.

‘Yes, like the beleaguered pop star, who shaved her head in 2007, I took clippers to my own head. Too many headaches, too little sleep — I had to flee myself, my relationships, my hair.

‘The difference between Britney and me is that I wore a hijab, so nobody knew what I had done — except my children who were very surprised. ”Mommy looks like me,” Adnan (her young son) declared. And he was right, I did look like a little boy.’

She didn’t even name Elmi in her memoirs.

Although Ilhan Omar is not known to be a smoker publicly, Elmi has been seen smoking along with her current husband Tim Mynett.

Omar was married to Ahmed Hirsi — who she later remarried. They have since divorced and in March 2020 she married Mynett, her chief fundraiser

But others have long claimed that she married him so he could go to school in the United States. She had come to America as a refugee fleeing war in her native Somalia, but he had taken up British nationality.

He followed her to North Dakota State University, after their marriage in 2009. A Christian minister performed the ceremony despite the fact that both are Muslim.

Somali blogger Abdihakim Osman Nur told DailyMail.com in February last year that he had known Omar growing up and suddenly her brother arrived in Minneapolis.

At the time Omar was married to Ahmed Hirsi — who she later remarried. They have since divorced and in March 2020 she married Mynett, her chief fundraiser.

‘No one knew there had been a wedding until the media turned up the marriage certificate years later,’ Nur said, about the Elmi-Omar marriage.

‘People began noticing that Ilhan and Southside were often with a very effeminate young guy,’ Osman said, referring to Hirsi by his nickname.

‘He was very feminine in the way he dressed — he would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very, very, short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him, added Nur, who spoke in Somali through an interpreter.

‘Southside and Ilhan both told me it was Ilhan’s brother and he had been living in London but he was mixing with what were seen as bad influences that the family did not like,’ added Nur.

‘So they sent him to Minneapolis as ”rehab”.’

Nur said that Omar kept her marriage to Elmi quiet, with no one from the Somali community invited to the wedding that was held at a county office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

He explained: ‘When Southside and Ilhan got married, a lot of people were invited. It was a big Islamic wedding uniting two large clans in the Minneapolis community.

‘I would say there were 100-150 people there.’

But he said: ‘When she married Elmi, no one even knew about it.’

Nur said he believed Elmi and Omar sought out someone outside the Somali community to conduct the ceremony because an imam would have known they were related and would have refused to marry them.+10

Elmi and Omar married on February 12, 2009 at a Hennepin County office in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, southwest of Minneapolis, their license shows. The marriage was conducted by a Christian minister+10

In the late 2000s Elmi (pictured) appeared in Minneapolis, said Somali blogger Abdihakim Osman. ‘People began noticing that Ilhan and [Hirsi] were often with a very effeminate young guy. He was very feminine in the way he dressed — he would wear light lipstick and pink clothes and very short shorts in the summer. People started whispering about him. [Hirsi] and Ilhan told me it was Ilhan’s brother’

The marriage was conducted by Christian minister Wilecia Harris. When DailyMail.com approached her in 2019 she would not discuss the ceremony or why a Muslim couple would have asked her to marry them.

In a Facebook message, Harris’s husband Marcus told DailyMail.com: ‘My wife doesn’t want to be involved or interviewed about Congresswoman Omar.’

‘It’s not going to happen, not now and not never.’

Lazzaro’s arrest could complicate the latest attempts to prove the congresswoman may have broken federal immigration laws.

According to a press release from the Department of Justice in Minnesota, Lazzaro ‘conspired with others to recruit and solicit six minor victims to engage in commercial sex acts.’

‘The indictment charges Lazzaro with one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, five counts of sex trafficking of minors, one count of attempted sex trafficking of a minor, and three counts of obstruction.’

He is being held in federal custody until a hearing on Monday.

Lazzaro, who has appeared on Fox News and other conservative media outlets has posted pictures of himself posing with former president Donald Trump, former vice-president Mike Pence and other leading Republicans.

According to the Daily Beast, which broke the story of his arrest, the FBI had raided Lazzaro’s luxury apartment in the Hotel Ivy Residences in downtown Minneapolis in December last year.

‘The indictment accuses Lazzaro of having ‘recruited’ at least five underage victims for paid sex between May and December last year, and trying to entice a sixth. It also says he ‘knowingly and intentionally interfered’ with the investigation as it closed in on him,’ the Daily Beast reported.

The outlet said law enforcement served the condo building’s management company with a search warrant seeking Lazzaro’s bank records and video surveillance footage a week before the raid.

At the time, Lazzaro told the Daily Beast: someone had ‘made a false allegation against me,’ and he said the matter was ‘almost resolved.’

Claims DNA match proves Ilhan Omar married her brother | Daily Mail Online

On Saturday 18 RINOs joined Democrats to pass the Democrat Party’s infrastructure bill. Democrats never allowed a similar bill to reach President Trump’s desk last year.

The RINOs gave Joe Biden a rare win at a time when the illegitimate president is sinking in the polls and continues to struggle with his diminishing faculties.

Mitch McConnell led the charge of the RINOs.
Here are the 18 GOP members who voted for this monstrosity on Saturday:

** Mitch McConnell
** Roy Blunt of Missouri,
**Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia,
**Bill Cassidy of Louisiana,
**Susan Collins of Maine,
**John Cornyn of Texas,
**Kevin Cramer of North Dakota,
**Mike Crapo of Idaho,
**Chuck Grassley of Iowa,
**John Hoeven of North Dakota,
**Deb Fischer of Nebraska,
**Lisa Murkowski of Alaska,
**Rob Portman of Ohio,
**Jim Risch of Idaho,
**Mitt Romney of Utah,
**Thom Tillis of North Carolina,
**Todd Young of Indiana
**Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

On Sunday morning Senator Kevin Cramer joined Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures to discuss his vote for the Socialist infrastructure plan. Big mistake. Maria Bartiromo chewed him up and spit him out — as he deserved.

TRENDING: MUST SEE: Mike Lindell on War Room Lays Out Day-by-Day Schedule on What to Expect at Much Anticipated Cyber Symposium This Week (VIDEO)

Bartiromo pointed out in the $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” monstrosity there is not a single dime for a border wall during the worst border crisis in US history. Cramer had no response. Instead he started spouting off about the globalists at the Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable who support the Uniparty spending plan.

Cramer was outmatched and looked ridiculous.
Maria destroyed him.

On Monday the War Room panel pointed out that there is not a dime in the trillion dollar plan supported by RINOs for border security.
And yet 18 Republicans voted for it.
It is clear these dirty RINOs DO NOT support their constituents.

Below are the 17 REPUBLICAN Senators and links to EMAIL THEM, keep your messages short, but let’s flood their email boxes with messages like “VOTE NO on Trillion Dollar Infrastructure bill”, “NO to Socialism”, “NO to GREEN NEW DEAL”.

Via Midnight Rider:

Contact Sen Blunt
https://www.blunt.senate.gov/contact/contact-roy
Senator Burr
https://www.burr.senate.gov/contact/email
Senator Cassidy
https://www.cassidy.senate.gov/contact
Sen Capito
https://www.capito.senate.gov/contact/share-your-opinion
Senator Collins
https://www.collins.senate.gov/CONTACT
Senator Cramer
https://www.cramer.senate.gov/contact/contact-kevin
Senator Crapo
https://www.crapo.senate.gov/contact/email-me
Senator Graham
https://www.lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/e-mail-senator-graham
Senator Grassley
https://www.grassley.senate.gov/contact
Senator Hoeven
https://www.hoeven.senate.gov/contact/email-the-senator
Senator McConnell
https://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=contact
Senator Murkowski
https://www.murkowski.senate.gov/contact/email
Senator Portman
https://www.portman.senate.gov/meet/contact
Senator Risch
https://www.risch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/email
Senator Romney
https://www.romney.senate.gov/contact
Senator Tillis
https://www.tillis.senate.gov/email-me
Senator Young
https://www.young.senate.gov/contact

Read More

THEY HATE YOU: Mitch McConnell and 17 RINO Senators Vote for Infrastructure Bill that Included ZERO DOLLARS for Border Security During Greatest Border Crisis in History – Orwellian Post

The city’s enforcement against shoplifters has dwindled, and these are the results.

San Francisco ranks as the fifth-worst city in the US when it comes to retail theft. Now, the problem is getting so bad that businesses like Target and Walgreens are being forced to make drastic changes in response.

“For more than a month, we’ve been experiencing a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents at our San Francisco stores,” a Target spokesperson said. “With the safety of our guests, team members and communities as our top priority, we’ve temporarily reduced our operating hours in six San Francisco stores.” 

Target stores normally stay open to 10:00 pm, but many in the San Francisco area will now close their doors at 5:00 pm or 6:00 pm. Meanwhile, Walgreens stores are faring even worse, with some shutting their doors altogether.  

“Representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable,” the New York Times reported. 

This isn’t just a problem at big-box retailers, either. The California Retailers Association has decried the rampant theft, which is hurting Golden State businesses small and large. Theft has gotten so bad in some parts of San Francisco that it is beyond belief. 

“I’m new to San Francisco,” Times journalist Thomas Fuller told a grocery store clerk shortly after moving to the city. “Is it optional to pay for things here?” It sounds like an absurd thing to ask, but Fuller explains that he was genuinely forced to wonder what was going on after he witnessed people walk into Walgreens and Safeway, grab stuff, and walk out.

The dysfunction-driven closures and scale-backs at major retailers will hurt everyday Californians. From the workers whose hours are cut to the customers who can’t get the products they need, this undermining of the market will have many victims beyond just those who are directly robbed. 

The sad affair is another reminder of the timeless truth described by economist Thomas Sowell, who said that property rights “belong legally to individuals, but their real function is social, to benefit vast numbers of people who do not themselves exercise these rights.”

Protecting property rights is a necessary precursor for basic economic activity to function. As I previously explained on FEE.org:

“When property rights are insecure or routinely violated—widespread looting and arson are prime examples—the very foundation of a community’s economy is undermined. Investors understandably balk at the uncertainty and forgo investing there, while entrepreneurs cannot launch new enterprises or even continue current ones without the knowledge that they will be secure in their property. As a result, job opportunities and income streams dry up.” 

This is why millions of our taxpayer dollars are given to police departments and other government agencies tasked with enforcing property and protecting our rights. But in San Francisco, they’ve woefully failed this most basic responsibility. 

A 2014 ballot referendum downgraded theft of goods less than $950 in value to just a misdemeanor, a slap on the wrist, and the city’s enforcement against shoplifters has dwindled in the years since.

That’s why Target and Walgreens are being forced to take drastic actions to protect their stores. But if widespread violation of property rights continues unpunished, they won’t be the last businesses in San Francisco to close their doors in response.

Target and Walgreens Are Making Drastic Changes Amid Skyrocketing Shoplifting in San Francisco – Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)

• The number of homicides in six major cities across the country has increased compared to last year, disproportionately affecting black people, according to crime data.
• “We are seeing an uptick in violent crime across the country, specifically gun violence,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told The New York Times.
• In Chicago, black people have been the victims of roughly 81 percent of the 317 murders in the first six months of 2021, data shows. They were the victims of about 70 percent of the 295 murders committed in the first six months of 2020.
• “I am proud to lead a City Council that took the first step to responsibly reduce Baltimore’s budget dependence on policing,” former Baltimore City Council President Brandon Scott, who is now the city’s mayor, said after the council voted to strip funding from the city’s police last year, the Baltimore Sun reported.

The number of homicides in six major cities across the country has increased compared to last year, disproportionately affecting black people, according to crime data.

Black people have represented a massive share of murder victims in six major cities through the first six months of 2021 compared to last year, which itself saw a large crime surge, according to data analyzed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The DCNF analyzed both police department data and homicide reports compiled by local news outlets to determine how black people have been victimized in the wake of the 2020 crime spike.

“We are seeing an uptick in violent crime across the country, specifically gun violence,” Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told The New York Times earlier this month.

The DCNF collected homicide data from Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis, some of the only cities in which such data is readily available. Most major cities have limited statistics tracking 2021 murders and homicide victims.

The percentage of murder victims in Chicago that were black increased from 70 percent in 2020 to 81 percent in 2021 while that figure increased from 60 percent to 90 percent year-over-year in Milwaukee, the data showed. In one of the cities analyzed, the percentage of black victims decreased, but the raw number of black victims still increased.

Democratic leaders of most of the cities examined voted to greatly reduce police funding amid widespread Black Lives Matter protests last year. In the wake of the death of George Floyd, who died after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck in May 2020, thousands of protests and riots took place across the country.

University of Missouri criminologist Richard Rosenfeld blamed the uptick in violence seen nationwide on the lack of trust between police and citizens, according to the NYT.

“When police legitimacy is greatly reduced, you get more crime because people are no longer relying on the criminal justice system for assistance,” Rosenfeld told the NYT. “People are less willing to cooperate with police in investigations, less willing to report crimes or other problems to the police, and more willing to take matters into their own hands.”

While murder statistics in just six cities were analyzed, the number of homicides has spiked roughly 18 percent across the country compared to 2020, according to a random sample of 37 cities, the NYT reported. In 2020, the number of murders increased by 36.7 percent compared to 2019, according to data analytics reporter Jeff Asher.

As Violent Crime SURGES across America, some politicians and some in the media are gaslighting the public into thinking the Police are the Problem…

Homicides:
Atlanta ⬆️ 58%
Portland ⬆️ 533%
Philadelphia ⬆️ 37%

Shootings:
New York City ⬆️ 64%
Los Angeles ⬆️ 51%
Chicago ⬆️ 18% pic.twitter.com/5RbhbKY312

— National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) (@GLFOP) June 22, 2021

Chicago, Illinois

At least 317 total homicides were committed in Chicago between Jan. 1, 2021 and June 22, 2021, according to a Chicago Sun-Times database. In that same period last year, 295 murders were committed.

While black people represented 207 of the murder victims in Chicago through the period last year ending on June 22, 2020, they represented a whopping 257 of the victims this year, according to the Sun-Times database. That means black people have been the victims of roughly 81 percent of murders this year while they were the victims in about 70 percent of 2020 murders.

Meanwhile, Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot proposed an $80 million cut to Chicago Police Department funding in October, according to Injustice Watch.

“While we will slow the rate of growth, with a resulting $80 million in corporate fund savings, on my watch we will never make cuts or policy changes that inhibit the core mission of the police department, which is to serve and protect,” Lightfoot said, according to the Sun-Times.

Illinois became the first state to completely abolish its cash bail system earlier this year, NBC News reported. The legislation laid out a new, stricter decision-making process for judges to determine if a person charged with a crime presents a threat.

“This legislation marks a substantial step toward dismantling the systemic racism that plagues our communities, our state, and our nation and brings us closer to true safety, true fairness, and true justice,” Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker said after signing the bill in February, according to NBC News.

Baltimore, Maryland

In Baltimore, black people represented 69 of the 152, or 45 percent, of total murder victims between Jan. 1, 2021, and June 17, 2021, according to a Baltimore Sun database.

While murder statistics between that same period in 2020 were unavailable, black people were the victims of 130, or 39 percent, of the 335 total homicides committed in Baltimore for all of last year, the database showed.

The majority of murder victims in 2020 and 2021 were listed without racial information in the Baltimore Sun database. Black people represented the vast majority of victims with their race listed.

But the Baltimore City Council agreed to cut $22 million from the city’s police budget in June 2020, according to the Baltimore Sun.

“I am proud to lead a City Council that took the first step to responsibly reduce Baltimore’s budget dependence on policing,” former City Council President Brandon Scott, who is now the city’s mayor, said after the vote, the Baltimore Sun reported. “This is just the beginning, and I intend to continue leading this process to redirect our public dollars and reimagine public safety in Baltimore.”

In March, Baltimore City State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, the city’s top prosecutor, announced she would no longer prosecute prostitution, drug possession, or other minor offenses, NBC affiliate WBAL-TV reported.

After multiple shootings in a popular area of Baltimore earlier this month, 37 businesses threatened to stop paying taxes unless Scott addressed surging crime, according to Fox affiliate WBFF-TV. The business owners argued that allowing minor crime to continue leads to major violent crimes.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The number of total murders increased in Milwaukee from 75 in the period between Jan. 1, 2020, and June 17, 2020, to 87 committed over that same period this year, according to murder reports compiled by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Black people were the victims of 79, or 90 percent, of the total murders this year, the database showed. While isolated victim data wasn’t available for the first six months of 2020, black people represented 74 percent of all murder victims in Milwaukee last year.

The Milwaukee Common Council approved a police budget cut in November that reduced the department by 120 officers, the Journal Sentinel reported.

“Although the proposed budget cut would undoubtedly impact the operations of the Milwaukee Police Department, we remain committed to working and engaging with our community, elected officials, and public safety partners to ensure that all of our neighborhoods are safe, vibrant and livable,” the department said in a statement after Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett proposed the budget, according to the Journal Sentinel.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

In Pittsburgh, black people made up 90 percent of murder victims between January and April, according to county data. In comparison, 60 percent of murder victims during the same time period last year were black.

There were 20 murders between January and April this year and 10 in that same period in 2020, according to Allegheny County. Data beyond April 31, 2021, hasn’t been made available.

The Pittsburgh City Council approved a police department hiring freeze in July 2020, according to WPXI-TV. The council also ordered the department to redirect 10 percent of the budget to social service programs every year.

The Pittsburgh Bureau of Police said the actions would “greatly impact” its ability to increase diversity within its ranks, WPXI reported.

Los Angeles, California

Between Jan. 1, 2020 and June 21, 2020, black people were the victims of 92 of the 272 homicides committed in Los Angeles County, which includes the city and surrounding communities, according to a Los Angeles Times database. In the same period this year, they represented 103 of the 315 total homicides.

The data showed that the share of black murder victims in the county has stayed level at around 33 percent year-over-year. However, the uptick in violence this year has caused at least 11 additional deaths in Los Angeles County’s black community compared to last year.

Hispanic people, who are the largest demographic group in the county, accounted for the majority of murder victims in Los Angeles County in both 2020 and 2021 while black people accounted for the second-highest number of murder victims, according to the database. Hispanic people were the victims of 50 percent of the murder victims between Jan. 1, 2020 and June 21, 2020 and 57 percent of the victims in that same period this year.

The Los Angeles City Council approved a $150 million cut to the city’s police department in July 2020, ABC affiliate KABC-TV reported. Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti supported the massive budget cuts.

“It will take years to recover from that,” Los Angeles Police union spokesman Dustin DeRollo told the DCNF last summer. “And it will result immediately with less officers patrolling the streets.”

“What that means simply is longer response times to emergency calls,” he continued. “It means less time to do community-based policing like building relationships in neighborhoods. And it also will mean less ability to implement the training that everybody wants our officers to have.”

But, amid the increased violent crime, the Los Angeles County Metro unanimously approved a $36 million budget boost for transit police in March. Garcetti, who serves on the Metro’s board, voted in favor of the budget increase.

Indianapolis, Indiana

Black people represented 58 of the 98 murder victims in Indianapolis between Jan. 1, 2021 and June 1, 2021, according to a homicide database created by the Indianapolis Star. Last year, black people were the victims in 53 of the city’s 70 total murders.

While the percentage of homicide victims who were black decreased from 75 percent to 59 percent in that period, the number of total black homicide victims still increased, the data showed.

Democratic Mayor Joe Hogsett resisted calls for defunding the city’s police department budget last year, the Indianapolis Recorder reported. Instead, he proposed a $7 million police budget increase.

Homicides Have Skyrocketed in These Six Democratic Cities; Black People Are Disproportionately the Victims, Data Shows (theepochtimes.com)

‘Crime Is Skyrocketing In Many Big Cities,’ But Some Jurisdictions Have Cut Police Budgets In Response To ‘Defund The Police’ Demands And Many Others Are Rapidly Losing Police Officers

SENATE REPUBLICAN LEADER MITCH McCONNELL (R-KY): “From coast to coast, American families are facing an explosion of violent crime on their streets and in their neighborhoods. 2020 saw homicides skyrocket nationwide. The sharpest one-year increase in decades. And 2021 is already shaping up to be even worse…. Crime and delinquency have many causes. In some ways, the pandemic likely contributed. But it is impossible to ignore that these terrible trends are coming precisely as so-called ‘progressives’ have decided it’s time to denounce and defund local law enforcement. Seattle cut police funding by 20%. Minneapolis defunded cops by millions of dollars. The District of Columbia’s city council approved $15 million in cuts. These bone-headed decisions are the direct result of an anti-law-enforcement fad that has swept through the political left like a wildfire…. So, look, I’m not sure exactly how the rantings of far-left Twitter about crime and policing became official Democratic Party dogma in so many places across America. What I do know is that ordinary Americans cannot bear much more of this. And that goes double for the most vulnerable neighborhoods.” (Sen. McConnell, Remarks, 5/27/2021)

FLASHBACK: Far-Left Democrats: ‘No More Policing,’ ‘We Need To Disinvest From Police,’ ‘Defunding Police Means Defunding Police’

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): “Defunding police means defunding police.” (“Ocasio-Cortez Dismisses Proposed $1B Cut: ‘Defunding Police Means Defunding Police’,” The Hill, 6/30/2020)

REP. ILHAN OMAR (D-MN): “I will never stop saying, ‘Not only do we need to disinvest from police but we need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.’” (“‘Defund The Police’ Movement Hits Semantics Roadblock,” The Hill, 6/14/2020)

REP. CORI BUSH (D-MO): “Defunding the police isn’t radical, it’s real.” (Rep. Bush, @CoriBush, Twitter, 1/27/2021)

REP. RASHIDA TLAIB (D-MI): “… Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist. … I am done with those who condone government funded murder. No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed.” (Rep. Tlaib, @RashidaTlaib, Twitter, 4/12/2021)

REP. AYANNA PRESSLEY (D-MA): “From slave patrols to traffic stops. We can’t reform this.” (Rep. Pressley, @AyannaPressley, Twitter, 4/12/2021)

And Sure Enough, Left-Wing Activists ‘Successfully Pushed For $840 Million In Police Spending Cuts Across The U.S.’

“According to Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative at the Barnard Center for Research on Women that supports defunding the police, organizers successfully pushed for $840 million in police spending cuts across the U.S., and $160 million in shifts to other social programs. Cities cut another $35 million by canceling contracts with police departments to patrol schools, the center said.” (“Cities Reverse Defunding the Police Amid Rising Crime,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/26/2021)

• “Last summer, nearly half of 258 police agencies surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said their budgets had been cut or were likely to be cut. The cuts hit purchases of new police equipment hardest, followed by training, hiring new officers and overtime spending, the survey found.” (“Cities Reverse Defunding the Police Amid Rising Crime,” The Wall Street Journal, 5/26/2021)

In 2020, The United States Had ‘The Largest Single One-Year Increase In Homicides Since The Country Started Keeping Such Records’

“2020 has been a killer year in every way, including murder. The United States has experienced the largest single one-year increase in homicides since the country started keeping such records in the 20th century, according to crime data and criminologists.” (“2020 Saw An Unprecedented Spike In Homicides From Big Cities To Small Towns,” The Washington Post, 12/30/2020)

• “It is a trend mirrored across the country, where crime is skyrocketing in many big cities, putting liberal leaders under pressure to balance the demands of activists against the concerns of some residents about rising violence. In New York, where homicides grew by nearly 45 percent last year, crime is dominating the discussion in the race for mayor…. Even smaller cities haven’t been spared the rise in violence: Louisville last year set a record for homicides, with 173, and this year is on pace to surpass that.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

“A group of 34 of America’s biggest cities suffered a 30 percent total increase in homicides in 2020, according to a new survey published Monday, with police in four Midwestern cities reporting increases of more than 60 percent over 2019. In Milwaukee, homicides rose from 97 to 189, a 95 percent increase. In Louisville, homicides increased from 90 to 173, a 92 percent increase. Of the 34 cities surveyed by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice, a project of the D.C.-based Council on Criminal Justice, only four — Raleigh, N.C.; Baltimore; St. Petersburg, Fla.; and Virginia Beach — saw declines in 2020.” (“Homicides Rose 30 Percent In 2020, Survey Of 34 U.S. Cities Finds,” The Washington Post, 2/03/2021)

“[In March], the F.B.I. released preliminary statistics showing a major increase in murder last year, with a 25 percent rise in agencies that reported quarterly data. The F.B.I. did not receive data from several cities with known big increases in murder like New York, Chicago and New Orleans, but cities of all sizes reported increases of greater than 20 percent. A 25 percent increase in murder in 2020 would mean the United States surpassed 20,000 murders in a year for the first time since 1995. (The final official numbers for 2020 will not be released until late September.)” (“Murder Rate Remains Elevated as New Crime Reporting System Begins,” The New York Times, 3/16/2021)

Over The First Three Months Of 2021, The Murder Rate In 37 Cities Is Up 18 Percent Compared To The Same Period In 2020

“The big increase in the murder rate in the United States in 2020 has carried over to 2021. A sample of 37 cities with data available for the first three months of this year shows murder up 18 percent relative to the same period last year.” (“Murder Rate Remains Elevated as New Crime Reporting System Begins,” The New York Times, 3/16/2021)

As Murders Surged In 2020, Seattle Cut Its Police Department’s Budget ‘By Nearly 20%’

“Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan signed off on the 2021 budget, after months of debate and public outcry.  It includes a significant cut to the Seattle Police Department (SPD), and puts new money in new hands. … The 2021 budget sliced SPD’s budget by nearly 20% …” (“Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan Signs City’s 2021 Budget With 20% Cut To Police,” King5, 12/01/2020)

“Calling 2020 a year like no other, interim Seattle police Chief Adrian Diaz said Monday his department’s homicide detectives investigated 50 homicides last year, representing a 61% increase over the 31 people killed as a result of homicidal violence in the city in 2019. Citing data that shows homicides across the country were up 36% in 2020 compared to the previous year, Diaz said Seattle’s 50 homicides were the most investigated in the city in 26 years.” (“50 People Died From Homicidal Violence In Seattle In 2020, The Largest Number In A Quarter Century, Police Chief Says,” The Seattle Times, 1/11/2021)

The LAPD Had Its Budget Slashed By $150 Million In 2020 As Murders In Los Angeles Reached The Highest Number ‘In More Than A Decade’

“Now, a year after Mr. Floyd’s death, Los Angeles and other American cities face a surge in violent crime amid pandemic despair and a flood of new guns onto the streets. The surge is prompting cities whose leaders embraced the values of the movement last year to reassess how far they are willing to go to reimagine public safety and divert money away from the police and toward social services…. A year after streets echoed with calls to ‘defund’ law enforcement and city leaders embraced the message by agreeing to take $150 million away from the Los Angeles Police Department, or about 8 percent of the department’s budget, the city last week agreed to increase the police budget to allow the department to hire about 250 officers. The increase essentially restores the cuts that followed the protests. On the streets of South Los Angeles, where residents have historically suffered the most from aggressive policing and gang violence and where much of the current surge in shootings is happening, officers are ramping up patrols and stopping more cars to look for guns. ‘We’ve lost more than a decade of progress,’ Chief Michel Moore of the Los Angeles Police Department said in an interview, referring to the significant drops in crime in the years before the pandemic…. [T]he number of murders in Los Angeles last year — 350 — was the highest in more than a decade …” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

• “If the old crop of activists sought changes by partnering with the police, the defining view of the new movement is a focus on money, and trying to pull as many dollars as possible away from police budgets and toward other programs that address systemic racism.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

Following A $15 Million Cut To Washington, D.C.’s Police Department Budget, 2020 Ended With The District’s Highest Number Of Homicides In 16 Years

“Homicides in the District rose for the third consecutive year in 2020, reaching nearly 200 for the first time since the previous decade and further stressing a city rattled by the pandemic and social and political unrest. The number of killings stood at 198 Thursday evening, making the past year the deadliest in the city since 2004. More than 920 people were shot in D.C. in 2020, a 64 percent increase from three years ago.” (“Homicides In D.C. Hit 16-Year High; Shootings Also Have Spiked,” The Washington Post, 12/31/2020)

• “In 2020, homicides in D.C. hit a 16-year high. If current trends continue, 2021 could be even deadlier. D.C. Police data reports a 43% increase in homicides from the same time last year, with 2021 totaling 63 as of April 28, compared to 44 on this date in 2020.” (“DC’s Homicide Rate Already Is Outpacing 2020, Which Saw A 16-Year-High,” WUSA, 4/28/2021)

“D.C. lawmakers [in June] advanced measures to cut $15 million from the police department budget, a change that defund-the-police activists dismissed as insufficient and the police chief warned could result in the loss of hundreds of officers. The D.C. Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety unanimously approved a plan to reduce the $533 million police budget proposed by Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) by cutting vacant positions and rejecting an expansion of the police cadet program. The committee also voted to cut the department’s capital budget and reallocate funds to alternative violence-reduction programs.” (“D.C. Activists And Lawmakers Confront Challenges Of ‘Defund Police’ Movement,” The Washington Post, 6/25/2020)

‘Last Year, The Homicide Rate In Minneapolis Hit Highs Not Seen Since The Mid-1990s’ And Still The City Council Voted To Cut $8 Million From The City’s Police Department

“Last year, the homicide rate in Minneapolis hit highs not seen since the mid-1990s, when killings led the city to be derisively called ‘Murderapolis.’ The bleak trend has continued into this year. According to police data, nearly 200 people have been shot this year — more than double the number in the same period last year and the most recorded in more than a decade. There have been 31 homicides, compared with 15 at this point in 2020.” (“A Year After George Floyd’s Death, Minneapolis Remains Scarred, Divided,” The Washington Post, 5/23/2021)

“Months after their pledge to dismantle the Police Department fell apart, members of the Minneapolis City Council voted [December 10^th] to divert nearly $8 million from the proposed policing budget to other city services … Trimming of those items raised alarm bells among the police chief and some lawmakers, as the department has lost 166 officers this year — some permanently, others because they are on disability, and still others saying they have post-traumatic stress from the massive protests that swept the city over the summer.” (“Minneapolis City Council Votes to Remove $8 Million From Police Budget,” The New York Times, 12/10/2020)

• “Steven Belton, the president of the Twin Cities chapter of the Urban League, called the cuts to the police budget misguided and misinformed. He said council members made it an either-or proposition between funding the police and other services when he believed everything was needed…. [In 2020], the city has logged 5,164 violent crimes, up 25.7 percent from last year, according to data from the Minneapolis Police Department. The cuts to the police budget could embolden criminals to think that policing was going away, Mr. Belton said. ‘It’s the wrong optics to the communities that are most impacted detrimentally by violence and the absence of policing and poor policing,’ he said.” (“Minneapolis City Council Votes to Remove $8 Million From Police Budget,” The New York Times, 12/10/2020)

‘The Number Of Slayings In 2020 Dwarfs Anything Louisville Has Seen’

“In 2020, 173 people in Louisville were victims of criminal homicides, according to metro police — shot, bludgeoned, strangled or stabbed to death. Another 20 people were slain in homicides investigated by other Jefferson County police agencies or in cases that didn’t result in criminal charges. The number of slayings in 2020 dwarfs anything Louisville has seen — obliterating the previous record of 117 criminal homicides in 2016…. Of last year’s homicides, 160 were shootings. Another 585 people were shot and survived — another grim milestone.” (“170-Plus Killings And Few Answers: Louisville Besieged By Record Homicides And Gun Violence,” Louisville Courier Journal, 1/01/2021)

• “Louisville is on pace to have another record year for homicides in the city [in 2021]. Community activist Christopher 2X said — as of the end of April — Louisville has now seen the deadliest four-month stretch of gun violence in the city’s history. ‘In four months and three days, we’re at 59 fatals, 218 nonfatals, and we’ve never been in this space before,’ 2X told WDRB News on Monday. ‘We’ve never reached almost 60 homicides this fast.’ 2X said April was the 15th consecutive month with double-digit homicides…. In the first weekend in May, LMPD responded to at least six separate shootings, two of them ending with fatalities.” (“Several Weekend Shootings Put Louisville On Pace For Another Record Year For Homicides,” WDRB, 5/03/2021)
• “As of [April 25], there had been 84% more non-fatal shootings so far this year, with 201, compared to the 109 instances reported during the same time in 2020, LMPD statistics show. There were 56 murders reported as of Sunday — a 75% increase from the 32 reported by April 25, 2020.” (“Louisville Police Department Staffing ‘In Dire Straits’ Amid High Crime Rates, Recruitment Woes: Union,” Fox News, 4/27/2021)

“In November, Louisville social justice organizer Travis Nagdy met with another local leader, Kenneth Forbes, to discuss turning attention to the city’s seemingly intractable violence. ‘The people dying look just like you,’ Forbes, founder of the group Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters United, told the 21-year-old Nagdy. ‘We are just asking for help, for compassion, for people to open up their ears and listen. For people to talk about it.’ Days after their meeting, Nagdy was dead, fatally shot in an apparent carjacking.” (“170-Plus Killings And Few Answers: Louisville Besieged By Record Homicides And Gun Violence,” Louisville Courier Journal, 1/01/2021)

“It’s a complicated problem, said Christopher 2X, founder of the Louisville nonprofit Game Changers, which tracks gun violence and supports victims…. 2X noted, Black men haven’t been the only victims. The majority of homicides each year, he said, take place in areas covered by LMPD’s First, Second and Fourth divisions, downtown and in Louisville’s West End. In 2020, though, 51 homicides were reported in areas patrolled by LMPD’s Third, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth divisions — on the outskirts of the city and in some of Louisville’s more upscale neighborhoods. In 2019, just 22 homicides were reported in areas covered by those five divisions. Just as striking, 2X said, is 34 female homicide victims in 2020, a higher number than in previous years. ‘That’s a number that we’ve got to be concerned about,’ he said.” (“170-Plus Killings And Few Answers: Louisville Besieged By Record Homicides And Gun Violence,” Louisville Courier Journal, 1/01/2021)

In New York City, Shootings Nearly Doubled In 2020 While Murders Rose Around 45%

“Homicides and shootings in New York City rose sharply in 2020, New York Police Department officials said Thursday, as police resources were stretched thin by the Covid-19 pandemic and responses to large-scale protests over the killing of George Floyd. The number of murders in the city rose to 462 last year, up nearly 45% from 319 in 2019, according to the NYPD. The increase accompanied a steep rise in gun violence more intense than any seen in the previous 20 years, according to police statistics. The city recorded 1,531 shootings in 2020, 97% more than the 777 in 2019. Data showed the number of shooting victims in the city more than doubled to 1,868 in 2020 from 923 in 2019. The number of shooting victims exceeds the number of shootings because multiple people may be shot in a single incident.” (“New York City Homicides And Shootings Rose Dramatically In 2020,” The Wall Street Journal, 1/07/2021)

• “The major rise in gun violence in the city began in 2020, after a period in which violent crime dropped to its lowest levels in more than six decades. Now, even as New York City emerges from the pandemic, the spike that began as the virus spread last spring has shown no sign of receding: As of the second weekend in May, the city had recorded 505 shooting victims, the most through that point of any year in the last decade. … Murders in New York are at 146 this year, up from 104 over the same period in 2019 and 115 in 2020. … This year, about 96 percent of shooting victims have been Black or Latino, police data shows, similar to previous years. One percent, or seven victims, have been white.” (“The Spike in Shootings During the Pandemic May Outlast the Virus,” The New York Times, 5/14/2021)

“A shooting in Times Square, a spike in gun violence and a spate of high-profile attacks on subway riders have pushed concerns over crime and public safety to the forefront of the New York City mayor’s race, altering the trajectory of the contest as the June 22 primary approaches. A year after the rise of the ‘defund the police’ movement amid an outcry over racial injustice, the primary will offer one of the first tests of where Democratic voters stand as the country emerges from the pandemic but confronts a rise in gun violence in major cities like New York…. As of May 2, 132 people have been killed compared with 113 this same time last year, a 17 percent increase, according to Police Department statistics. There have been 416 shooting incidents compared with 227 this time last year, an 83 percent increase…. Even before the Times Square shooting, there were mounting signs that public safety was intensifying as a concern in New York: a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll released late last month found that ‘crime or violence’ was a major concern for New York Democrats, second only to the coronavirus.” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

New Yorkers: ‘Are We Back In The ‘70s And ‘80s?,’ ‘I Want Someone [For Mayor] Who Can Make Us Feel Safer’

“Jade Lundy, a child-care worker who lives in the Bronx, said she has begun taking more precautions because there seems to be an uptick in crime, which she blamed on economic hardship caused by the pandemic. ‘I don’t take out my phone anymore,’ she said Monday afternoon as she headed for the subway to the Bronx, from Times Square. Ms. Lundy, who recently turned 18, said she plans to vote in the mayoral election and has just begun learning about the candidates. ‘I want someone who can make us feel safer,’ Ms. Lundy said. ‘Especially for the women. We have it harder out here.’” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

“A spate of crimes targeting Asian-Americans have also alarmed New Yorkers across the city, some candidates say. ‘That makes them very worried about the city, and particularly for people who have lived here a long time,’ said [Kathryn] Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner. For those New Yorkers, she said, some wonder, ‘Are we back in the ‘70s and ‘80s?’” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

“‘Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, people that lived here, including myself, you know, we witnessed some pretty nasty stuff,’ said Representative Adriano Espaillat, a New York Democrat. ‘We don’t want to slip back to that. So I think that that’s going to be a major issue with this year’s mayoral race.’ … Diana Ayala, a councilwoman representing East Harlem and the Bronx … said the response from the mayoral candidates to addressing crime will determine if she endorses anyone else for mayor. ‘Citywide, people are alarmed at the numbers of shootings but quite frankly, those numbers have been pretty consistent in my district for the last three and a half years,’ Ms. Ayala said. ‘Every summer, even as we speak, we are planning for what’s to come.’” (“Shootings and Subway Attacks Put Crime at Center of N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race,” The New York Times, 5/11/2021)

San Francisco Is Suffering From A ‘Shoplifting Epidemic’ That Has Forced Stores To Shutter And Even City Officials Now Admit Is ‘Out Of Control’

“[T]he shoplifting epidemic in San Francisco has only worsened. At a board of supervisors hearing [in early May], representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable. Brendan Dugan, the director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, called San Francisco ‘one of the epicenters of organized retail crime’ and said employees were instructed not to pursue suspected thieves because encounters had become too dangerous. ‘We’ve had incidents where our security officers are assaulted on a pretty regular basis in San Francisco,’ Dugan said. The retail executives and police officers emphasized the role of organized crime in the thefts. And they told the supervisors that Proposition 47, the 2014 ballot measure that reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950, had emboldened thieves. ‘The one trend we are seeing is more violence and escalating — and much more bold,’ said Commander Raj Vaswani, the head of the investigations bureau at the San Francisco Police Department. ‘We see a lot of repeat offenders.’” (“San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge,” The New York Times, 5/21/2021)

• “The cost of business and shoplifting led Walgreens to shut 17 locations in San Francisco in the past five years — an ‘unpopular and difficult decision,’ Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii, said at the hearing…. Theft in Walgreens’ San Francisco stores is four times the average for stores elsewhere in the country, and the chain spends 35 times more on security guards in the city than elsewhere, Cunningham said. At CVS, 42% of losses in the Bay Area came from 12 stores in San Francisco, which are only 8% of the market share, Brendan Dugan, director of organized retail crime and corporate investigations, said at the hearing…. CVS security guards in San Francisco have been assaulted, especially at the now-closed Seventh and Market streets location, Dugan said. Some businesses instead hire costly off-duty police officers.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)
• “A statement from Safeway read at Thursday’s hearing blamed Proposition 47, which lowered penalties for thefts under $950, for ‘dramatic increases’ in shoplifting losses…. Professional shoplifters can work the system by stealing items under the threshold from one store and hitting several retailers in the same day.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

“Retailers attributed a majority of losses to professional thieves instead of opportunistic shoplifters who may be driven by poverty, with one CVS leader calling San Francisco a hub of organized retail crime. Losses have shuttered drugstores providing vital services, even more critical during the pandemic as some stores give out vaccines.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

• “For years, John Susoeff walked from his home two blocks to the Walgreens at Bush and Larkin streets — to pick up prescriptions for himself and for less mobile neighbors, to get a new phone card, and to snag senior discounts the first Tuesday of the month. That changed in March when the Walgreens, ravaged by shoplifting, closed. Susoeff, 77, who sometimes uses a cane, now goes six blocks for medication and other necessities. ‘It’s terrible,’ he said. On his last visit before the store closed, even beef jerky was behind lock and key. A CVS nearby shuttered in 2019, with similar reports of rampant shoplifting. ‘I don’t blame them for closing,’ Susoeff said.” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

“‘This has been out of control,’ said Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who held a hearing [May 13^th] with retailers, police, the district attorney and probation departments. ‘People are scared to go into these stores — seniors, people with disabilities, children. It’s just happening brazenly. We can’t just as a city throw up our hands and say this is OK. We have to come up with solutions.’” (“‘Out Of Control’: Organized Crime Drives S.F. Shoplifting, Closing 17 Walgreens In Five Years,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/2021)

• “On Thursday I called Ahsha Safaí, the member of the board of supervisors who organized the hearing. We talked about the thefts we had witnessed in the city and the sidewalk thieves’ markets where steaks, bicycles and other stolen goods are fenced. Safaí said he had recently stopped to inspect one of these markets at 24th and Mission. ‘Half of Walgreens was on the sidewalk. I’m not kidding,’ Safaí said. ‘I was blown away. I’ve never seen anything like it in this city.’ He talked about what he called a laissez-faire attitude in San Francisco. ‘It has become part of the landscape,’ he said of thefts. ‘People say, “Oh, well, that just happens.”‘ Thieves ‘are obviously choosing locales based on what the consequences are,’ Safaí said. ‘If there are no consequences for their actions, then you invite the behavior. Over and over.’” (“San Francisco’s Shoplifting Surge,” The New York Times, 5/21/2021)

As Violent Crime Surges In Cities, Metro Police Departments Are Hemorrhaging Officers While The Remaining Cops ‘Are Demoralized And Pulling Back On Patrolling High-Crime Areas’

“In some liberal cities like Minneapolis, where gun violence is surging and where the Police Department is depleted after so many officers quit or retired, some elected leaders and older clergy members and civil rights leaders are echoing the sentiments of conservative commentators who claim a link between the violence and the movement to defund police departments, saying officers are demoralized and pulling back on patrolling high-crime areas.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

• “From the crucible of 1992, former gang members in South Los Angeles worked to make peace, often working alongside a new force of police officers dedicated to ‘community policing,’ in which officers worked in specific neighborhoods to establish close relationships with residents. Leon Gullette, who was drawn to activism after 1992, now works for Community Build, which was co-founded by Maxine Waters, a local congresswoman. Mr. Gullette’s specialty is working to achieve truces between rival gangs. Unlike the younger activists with Black Lives Matter, he says working with the police is essential. ‘We can’t operate without the police, so I wouldn’t say defund the police,’ Mr. Gullette said.” (“A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime,” The New York Times, 5/23/2021)

SEATTLE: “Seattle Police Department (SPD) officers are leaving the job at a ‘record pace’ — with at least 249 people leaving over the past year alone — as statistics show manpower has been declining in recent years, according to union and city officials. SPD boasted a police force of 1,276 uniformed members at the end of February 2020, but staffing levels dropped by 249 people to 1,027 by the end of February 2021, according to the most recent department statistics available to Fox News. … As of last week, 66 officers had left SPD so far this year, Solan said, confirming previous reports from local news. ” (“Seattle Police Department Losing Officers At ‘Record Pace’ Amid Budget Uncertainty, Lack Of Support: Officials,” Fox News, 5/01/2021)

• “Last June, three months into the pandemic and as the protests exploded in Seattle and around the country, officer-initiated calls plunged to a 10-year low. Mostly for that reason, the department’s overall call load dropped by almost half, to about 16,000, by June, according to a Seattle Times analysis. At the same time, the department’s monthly average response time for all remaining calls more than doubled, climbing from about 20 minutes in May to 41 minutes in June. Response times for the most serious 911 calls — known as Priority 1 and Priority 2 calls — increased 48% and 84% respectively, even though commanders repeatedly ordered the department to operate on ‘priority call status.’ That means dispatchers send officers only to Priority 1 and Priority 2 calls such as homicides, robberies and assaults, skipping other calls, such as break-ins.” (“Seattle 911 Response Times Climbed In Summer 2020. Now, Police And Activists Debate What Comes Next,” The Seattle Times, 5/11/2021)

LOS ANGELES: “Like in many major cities, homicides and other forms of violent crime in Los Angeles have risen sharply in the past year, and the LAPD is facing an unexpected staffing shortage. The LAPD was expected to have roughly 9,750 officers at the end of June 2021 — but an increase in retirements and resignations have left the department with about 9,450 officers, which [Mayor Eric] Garcetti is hoping to expand with this year’s budget.” (“Defund The Police Encounters Resistance As Violent Crime Spikes,” CNN, 5/25/2021)

WASHINGTON, D.C.: “The D.C. police force has already grown smaller, from about 3,850 officers in 2019 to around 3,650 today, because of budget cuts lawmakers imposed last year and an increasing number of resignations and retirements. About 90 percent of the department’s budget is spent on personnel.” (“Commission To Reimagine Police In District Grapples With Effort To Defund,” The Washington Post, 3/21/2021)

MINNEAPOLIS: “Nearly 200 Minneapolis police officers have left the department since Floyd’s death, including dozens who filed PTSD claims after the unrest.” (“Minneapolis To Bring In Outside Help To Deal With Surge In Violence,” Star Tribune, 5/24/2021)

• “Minneapolis police are bringing in outside help as they try to temper violence that killed four people this weekend alone, including a college senior who was out celebrating graduation. Mayor Jacob Frey said the city has asked state and federal agencies for assistance, citing the city’s shortage of officers. ‘Safety in our city has to be a priority,’ Frey said at a news conference Sunday, calling the reinforcements ‘really, really critical.’” (“Minneapolis To Bring In Outside Help To Deal With Surge In Violence,” Star Tribune, 5/24/2021)

LOUISVILLE: “Nearly 190 cops left the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) in 2020 and 43 have stepped away from the Kentucky city’s agency so far in 2021, either choosing to retire or resign altogether, as law enforcement officials struggle to recruit new members to make up for a deficit in manpower, authorities and a union spokesperson told Fox News on Tuesday.” (“Louisville Police Department Staffing ‘In Dire Straits’ Amid High Crime Rates, Recruitment Woes: Union,” Fox News, 4/27/2021)

• “Statistics provided by LMPD on Tuesday show the department has hired 26 new members so far this year, while 43 have left. The 1,069-person department falls 255 people short of its ‘authorized strength’ of 1,324 — the number of personnel it is authorized to employ, statistics show.” (“Louisville Police Department Staffing ‘In Dire Straits’ Amid High Crime Rates, Recruitment Woes: Union,” Fox News, 4/27/2021)

NEW YORK: “More than 5,300 NYPD uniformed officers retired or put in their papers to leave in 2020 — a 75 percent spike from the year before, department data show. The exodus — amid the pandemic, anti-cop hostility, riots and a skyrocketing number of NYC shootings — saw 2,600 officers say goodbye to the job and another 2,746 file for retirement, a combined 5,346. … Through April 21 of this year, 831 cops have retired or filed to leave…” (“Are NYPD Officers Rushing To Retire Amid City’s Anti-Cop Climate?,” New York Post, 4/24/2021)

Research | The Leader Board | THE NEWSROOM | Republican Leader (senate.gov)

The National Police Association lobbying group has said that the House hearing into the Jan. 6 Capitol incident is politically motivated, urging Congress to instead investigate left-wing riots that left numerous officers injured last year.

Association spokeswoman Betsy Brantner Smith said in an interview that Congress should hear testimonials from thousands of officers who were injured during demonstrations, riots, arson, and other violence last year following the death of George Floyd.

During the first hearing for the House select committee on the Jan. 6 breach, four police officers offered testimony saying that individuals who entered the Capitol made specific threats against them.

“People need to see that police officers go through horrible things, and Jan. 6 was a horrible thing for some of those officers,” Smith told Fox News. “But, quite frankly, I find this whole Jan. 6 Commission, frankly, a dog and pony show. It doesn’t tell the whole story.”

Later, Smith questioned why the federal government hasn’t provided more information about the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt, one of several Trump supporters who died during the incident, or raised questions about video footage of Capitol Police officers’ interactions with demonstrators on Jan. 6.

“Myself, like millions of Americans, sat there watching the testimony thinking, ‘Wait, where are the police officers who appeared—appeared—to let some of the protesters in?” she asked. “Where is the police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt? In fact, why aren’t we talking about Ashli Babbitt? I mean there’s so much more here.”

On July 27, one of the testifying officers, Daniel Hodges, who works for the Metropolitan Police Department, recounted being allegedly told, “You will die on your knees.”

Hodges said he was kicked in the chest and struck with something heavy in the head as other officers and he clashed with a crowd near the Capitol.

But Smith suggested that the injuries those officers suffered likely paled in comparison to the numerous officers who were injured during riots last year.

“We have a Las Vegas police officer who is still paralyzed from the Black Lives Matter riots,” she told Fox. “We have thousands of police officers around the country who are retiring because of post-traumatic stress because of the riots.

“The 2020 riots, we can’t just say the whole George Floyd thing was bad and that’s what cops have to deal with, and then watch these four weeping men talk about their experiences, ignoring thousands and thousands of police officers, ignoring their feelings and their experiences and their injuries.”

A recent analysis from The Epoch Times in late June showed that major metropolitan police departments are struggling with hiring new recruits and dealing with an increase in retirements or officers quitting amid anti-police rhetoric and activism. Violent crime such as murders, rapes, and robberies has also spiked in most major cities.

Last month, the Portland Police Bureau’s riot squad quit en masse after one of its officers was indicted on an assault charge. The arrest stemmed from violent demonstrations that roiled the Oregon city last year.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Smith said. “I have some cops who would rather go back to Iraq than continue to work on the street, just because of the massive amounts of blood and bodies and everything they deal with that people don’t see.”

The office of Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), head of the select committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.

National Police Association: Congress Should Investigate 2020 Riots, Not Jan. 6 Capitol Breach (theepochtimes.com)

A Sartell-St. Stephen School District student is speaking out after the school required grade-school children to take an equity survey.

Some students didn’t understand some of the surveys questions, but were told by a teacher they couldn’t repeat the survey questions to their parents, according to a video uploaded by Alphanews.

The survey asked questions that some students didn’t understand. Even after hearing an explanation from their teacher, some still couldn’t comprehend the survey questions.

But a teacher told the students they couldn’t ask their parents for help, according to student Haylee Yasgar.

“My teacher said that I could not skip any questions even when I didn’t understand them. One question asked us what gender we identify with. I was very confused along with a lot of other classmates,” Yasgar said during Monday night’s meeting.

She said students were told they could not “repeat any of the questions to our parents.”

The school district hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment. It’s unclear what value a survey holds if respondents don’t understand the questions.

“Being asked to hide this from my mom made me very uncomfortable, like I was doing something wrong,” she told the school board.

The equity survey is part of a reckoning of how school systems nationwide should teach issues related not only to sexuality but as well as race in a state where George Floyd died in police custody last year.

Now that the city settled a lawsuit for $27 million and former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been sentenced to 22.5 years in prison for third-degree murder and manslaughter, the question now remains how school systems should explain similar events to children.

Some parents call the curriculum divisive while supporters say it’s teaching history and showing how racist attitudes and activities such as redlining are embedded into daily life.

Despite being more than 40 years old, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has evolved to a flashpoint between political parties over the past year.

CRT holds that “the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans,” according to Britannica.

CRT scholars allege many societal problems are rooted in the country’s white majority using laws and other power to suppress the non-white population, whether consciously or subconsciously.

CRT opponents claim its conclusions rely on anecdotes and storytelling, rather than a comprehensive examination of evidence. They say its supporters focus on disproportionate outcomes from those individual stories, incorrectly drawing conclusions about institutional racism and white privilege and failing to take into account strides that the nation has made toward racial equality.

Critics say CRT employs heavy use of the Marxist “struggle” ideology and tactic that advocates for the destruction of history, traditions, and culture of a society.

Around the United States, there has been a growing movement of parents who have become increasingly dissatisfied with the CRT-derived curriculum being taught in their children’s classrooms.

Minnesota Student Says Teacher Told Her to Hide ‘Equity Survey’ Questions From Parents (theepochtimes.com)

She unveiled the black ops military force on the Capitol steps today as she gave an impassioned speech about defunding the police.

“If you don’t want to defund the police, my private army has been ordered to take care of you,” she said, standing in front of dozens of hardened, trained private special forces. “Butch, Spike, Zero, Aces, Skull—go get ’em!” 

The private military she’d hired with her healthy congressional salary then went out to find anyone who didn’t like Bush’s idea of defunding the police to apprehend them. Many tried to call the police to protect themselves, but their cities had already defunded the police, and nobody responded, or else a social worker showed up to ask about their feelings.

Bush has arrested thousands of Americans so far. Prisons are filling up quickly, but no worries: Bush says she is holding a protest to make sure violent criminals are released as soon as possible to make room for pro-police Americans.

Cori Bush Hires Mercenary Army To Arrest Anyone Who Doesn’t Want To Defund The Police | The Babylon Bee

Rudy Giuliani was still the mayor the last time New York City saw so many people shot. By mid-August, 1,163 were shot in the Big Apple. That’s the most recorded by this time of the year since 2000, according to NYPD data.

The wave of violence started in May last year coinciding with the mass protests and rioting initiated after the killing of George Floyd, a black man, during an arrest in Minneapolis. High incidence of shootings has been plaguing the city ever since.

Last weekend alone, 35 people were shot, all non-fatally, The New York Post reported.

While the total number of more serious crimes has slightly declined compared to last year, shooting incidents are up nearly 11 percent. The data indicates more people are surviving the shootings as murder is up only 0.7 percent.

In 2020, more than 1,850 were shot, fatally and non-fatally. That’s more than double the year before.

Meanwhile, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) is down about 1,500 officers since 2019 due to a wave of retirements and resignations. Some officers and experts previously told The Epoch Times that people are leaving the department because of anti-police sentiments in the city as well as obstacles to the profession created by the city and state governments.

Last year, the state outlawed officers from using a knee on a suspect’s back or chest as a restraint technique during an arrest. Police officers and experts have criticized the law for criminalizing martial arts techniques used by police to safely subdue resisting subjects.

The city implemented new laws regarding bail that banned judges from requiring cash bail for most nonviolent and some lower-level violent crimes, resulting in criminals returning to the street after an arrest. Some officers called the policy demoralizing.

Less than two weeks ago, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared “a disaster emergency on gun violence,” calling for the targeting of crime hotspots, curbing the sale of illegal firearms, rebuilding trust between communities and local law enforcement, and other initiatives. Cuomo has since resigned.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the frontrunner in the November mayoral election, is a former NYPD officer running partly on public safety platform.

New York City used to be notorious for high levels of violence and street crime, particularly during the crack epidemic in the 1980s. Shooting numbers dropped precipitously during the 1990s and continued a gradual decline, reaching historic lows of less than 1,000 people shot a year in 2017-2019.

NYC: 1,163 Shot so Far This Year, Two-Decade Record (theepochtimes.com)