GOV/MIL Leftists Call For New "Secret Police" Force To Spy On Trump Supporters (AN ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ THREAD)
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Andy Ngo: 'Cancel culture' doesn't go far enough to describe left's tactics against political opponents
Conservative author Andy Ngo said Thursday that people sabotaging others over political ideology is the “undoing of American civilization” after Mumford & Sons banjoist Winston Marshall announced he would step away from the popular band over backlash he received from complimenting Ngo’s...
www.foxnews.com
Andy Ngo: 'Cancel culture' doesn't go far enough to describe left's tactics against political opponents
Mumford & Sons musician faces backlash for complimenting Ngo's book
By Brian Flood | Fox News
'Cancel culture' doesn't go far enough in describing left-wing tactics: Andy Ngo
Author Andy Ngo addresses the backlash Mumford & Sons musician Winston Marshall is receiving for praising his book on Antifa.
Video on website 3:18 min
Conservative author Andy Ngo said Thursday that people sabotaging others over political ideology is the "undoing of American civilization" after Mumford & Sons banjoist Winston Marshall announced he would step away from the popular band over backlash he received from complimenting Ngo’s anti-Antifa book.
Ngo told "America’s Newsroom" co-host Bill Hemmer that Marshall’s exit from the band is being covered as "the latest example of cancel culture" but he thinks it’s bigger than simply being part of cancel culture.
Conservative author Andy Ngo said Thursday that people sabotaging others over political ideology is the "undoing of American civilization."
"I don’t think that term fully encapsulates what’s going on. We’re dealing with a phenomenon of people who have powerful ties who are working to systematically close minds and to silence voices," said Ngo, author of "Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy."
"They’re doing this entirely without throwing a punch, without any legislative change, that’s what makes it quite shocking… and insidious," Ngo added. "I think all of these campaigns work to undermine American norms and to undermine civil society. This particular musician has been made to suffer pretty severe consequences for a pretty innocuous tweet about enjoying my book."
Marshall announced Wednesday he would step away from the popular band after backlash over simply complimenting Ngo’s book. In a now-deleted tweet that sparked outrage, Marshall congratulated Ngo for writing "Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy."
Marshall, who had less than 8,000 followers as of Wednesday morning, called the book "important" and praised the conservative author.
"Finally had the time to read your important book. You’re a brave man," Marshall wrote in the now-deleted tweet.
Ngo said it’s very clear that anyone who challenges "reigning orthodoxy" will be "made to suffer" the consequences of left-wing tactics.
"Particularly if you are vulnerable profession, such as entertainment or culture, you will stand to lose, potentially, everything," Ngo said.
Marshall issued a lengthy apology for endorsing Ngo’s book. It appears he also deleted all of his previous tweets, as only the apology remains on his timeline.
Video 9:17 min
"Over the past few days, I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed. I have offended not only a lot of people I don’t know but also those closest to me, including my bandmates and for that, I am truly sorry. As a result of my actions I am taking time away from the band to examine my blind spots," Marshall said in a statement.
"For now, please know that I realise [sic] how my endorsements have the potential to be viewed as approvals of hatred, divisive behavior. I apologize, as this was not at all my intention," he added.
Hemmer read Marshall’s statement to Ngo, noting the musician "fell on his sword" and pondered if a comeback was possible.
"I feel a lot of pain for this individual, I mean, it looks like it was written under duress and I’m very disappointed that his bandmates… they’ve been together for I think more than 13 years, instead of standing by their bandmate and longtime friend it seems they threw him under the bus," Ngo said.
"But this is to be expected. This is the cultural revolution that we’re experiencing… I think this is the undoing of American civilization."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
GOING VIRAL: Virginia Teacher Slams Critical Race Theory at Virginia School Board Meeting (VIDEO) | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
One Courageous Teacher Speaks Out.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
GOING VIRAL: Virginia Teacher Slams Critical Race Theory at Virginia School Board Meeting (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft
Published March 11, 2021 at 5:47pm
One Courageous Teacher Speaks Out.
Recently, a brave teacher attended the Loudoun County School Board in Virginia. This school district is rated number four in the state of Virginia and has made national headlines for moving away from Dr. Seuss from associating him with their reading celebration due to the “racial undertones” in several of his books.
This Virginia teacher reached out to The Gateway Pundit following the meeting in Loudoun County. The teacher who runs Patriotic Educators on Instagram told this reporter Loudoun County schools policies and leadership trickle down to the rest of the school districts and pave the way to further indoctrinate the rest of the state.
While only ONE teacher from this district has spoken up, it is rare and extremely dangerous for teachers to speak up due to cancel-culture and horrible backlash.
This teacher went off during the meeting.
Virginia Teacher: “If you keep up this racist insanity you will have successfully stripped us of every ounce of love of teaching you have succeeded in doing that.”
This was a powerful witness by a brave teacher.
Here is the video:
1:04 min Login • Instagram
marsh
On TB every waking moment
[COMMENT: Free speech is the "bride" of freedom of conscience.]
www.thegatewaypundit.com
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer – Is Free Speech Important?
By Joe Hoft
Published March 11, 2021 at 3:05pm
Free speech laws in Western nations have supported Christians in spreading the gospel throughout the world. Free speech is a special gift that is underappreciated by all of us. But historically, for most of 2,000 years, the church has had to survive without freedom of speech.
Opposition to free speech began early in the history of the church. Shortly after the church was birthed, to preach in the name of Jesus was considered forbidden speech; it was hate speech that carried the penalty of imprisonment and sometimes even death.
Take time to reread Acts 4. Peter and John performed a miracle in the name of Jesus. But the authorities were not pleased. For this the two were arrested. When asked to defend themselves, Peter boldly proclaimed that the miracle was performed in the name of “Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified…for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:10, 12).
No political correctness here. “By your agreement, you let Jesus be crucified, and if you don’t believe in Him, you have no salvation!”
When Peter and John were threatened and warned to no longer speak in the name of Jesus, they answered, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (verses 19-20). Take it or leave it—your threats will not keep us from preaching the gospel!
The martyrs before us have shown that it is not necessary to have free speech in order to be faithful. Richard Wurmbrand, in Tortured for Christ, wrote about parents who taught their children the Christian faith. “If it was discovered that they taught their children about Christ, their children were taken away from them for life—with no visitation rights.”
Of course, our speech must be with grace seasoned with salt. Free speech does not mean that we speak judgmentally to our nation as if we are free from our own weaknesses and sins. We give reason for the hope within us with respect, meekness, and fear (see 1 Peter 3:15).
One of my heroes is the sixteenth-century Reformer Hugh Latimer. When asked to preach in front of King Henry VIII, he struggled with exactly what to say. You’ll recall that Henry had the reputation of chopping off the heads of his enemies, including two of his wives.
As it turned out, Latimer boldly declared God’s Word, and although Henry spared his life, Henry’s daughter, Queen Mary (Bloody Mary), had him burned at the stake in Oxford. As he was dying amid the flames, he called out to Bishop Ridley, who was also consigned to the flames with him, and is quoted as saying, “Master Ridley, play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
The secret of boldness? Fear God more than the flames. Fear Him more than your reputation. Let us be done with fainthearted, tepid leadership. Ours is the day to “play the man” with bold, uncompromising truth and love, risking it all for God.
We can expect views that differ from those of the thought police will be boycotted, shamed, and outed. But we will not be silenced. We will endure the shame, the ridicule, and the penalties.
We will be heard, and we pray that the church will speak with one voice.
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer - Is Free Speech Important? | The Gateway Pundit | by Joe Hoft
Free speech laws in Western nations have supported Christians in spreading the gospel throughout the world.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
EXCLUSIVE: Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer – Is Free Speech Important?
By Joe Hoft
Published March 11, 2021 at 3:05pm
Free speech laws in Western nations have supported Christians in spreading the gospel throughout the world. Free speech is a special gift that is underappreciated by all of us. But historically, for most of 2,000 years, the church has had to survive without freedom of speech.
Opposition to free speech began early in the history of the church. Shortly after the church was birthed, to preach in the name of Jesus was considered forbidden speech; it was hate speech that carried the penalty of imprisonment and sometimes even death.
Take time to reread Acts 4. Peter and John performed a miracle in the name of Jesus. But the authorities were not pleased. For this the two were arrested. When asked to defend themselves, Peter boldly proclaimed that the miracle was performed in the name of “Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified…for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:10, 12).
No political correctness here. “By your agreement, you let Jesus be crucified, and if you don’t believe in Him, you have no salvation!”
When Peter and John were threatened and warned to no longer speak in the name of Jesus, they answered, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (verses 19-20). Take it or leave it—your threats will not keep us from preaching the gospel!
The martyrs before us have shown that it is not necessary to have free speech in order to be faithful. Richard Wurmbrand, in Tortured for Christ, wrote about parents who taught their children the Christian faith. “If it was discovered that they taught their children about Christ, their children were taken away from them for life—with no visitation rights.”
Of course, our speech must be with grace seasoned with salt. Free speech does not mean that we speak judgmentally to our nation as if we are free from our own weaknesses and sins. We give reason for the hope within us with respect, meekness, and fear (see 1 Peter 3:15).
One of my heroes is the sixteenth-century Reformer Hugh Latimer. When asked to preach in front of King Henry VIII, he struggled with exactly what to say. You’ll recall that Henry had the reputation of chopping off the heads of his enemies, including two of his wives.
As it turned out, Latimer boldly declared God’s Word, and although Henry spared his life, Henry’s daughter, Queen Mary (Bloody Mary), had him burned at the stake in Oxford. As he was dying amid the flames, he called out to Bishop Ridley, who was also consigned to the flames with him, and is quoted as saying, “Master Ridley, play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”
The secret of boldness? Fear God more than the flames. Fear Him more than your reputation. Let us be done with fainthearted, tepid leadership. Ours is the day to “play the man” with bold, uncompromising truth and love, risking it all for God.
We can expect views that differ from those of the thought police will be boycotted, shamed, and outed. But we will not be silenced. We will endure the shame, the ridicule, and the penalties.
We will be heard, and we pray that the church will speak with one voice.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Democrats Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Naomi Wolf Discuss Today’s Abuse of Power, Standing Up to Tyranny and Preserving Our Constitution (VIDEO)
By Joe Hoft
Published March 11, 2021 at 2:45pm
Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and Naomi Wolf discuss today’s abuse of power and tyranny emanating from the country we all once were enamored with, the United States of America. These Democrats are surprised that more Democrats are not standing up for the ideals that make this country great.
Kenndy says to Wolf that they may be the only two liberals in America who read the great works of the 20th Century and believed what they were reading and now are seeing it all come true. He says:
The video of their discussion is in the link below:
58:33 min video at ‘TRUTH’ With RFK, Jr. and Naomi Wolf: Fighting for Our Constitutional Rights • Children's Health Defense
More people see what is going on than we know. The world is waking up to the government-corporate fascism agenda.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Why is the woke mob so scared?
The no-platforming of yet another academic raises uncomfortable questions about free speech
unherd.com
Why is the woke mob so scared?
The no-platforming of yet another academic raises uncomfortable questions about free speech
BY DOUGLAS MURRAY
. Uncomfortable questions still deserve an answer (Photo credit should read Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
Douglas Murray is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist based in London.
February 26, 2021
Filed under:
Cancel cultureEducationEugenicsFree SpeechGeneticsRaceScotlandTransgenderUniversity
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Whenever a person is “cancelled” or “no-platformed”, a public battle is inevitably waged. On one side, there are those who uphold the value of free speech; on the other, those who insist free speech depends on what is being said, or believe the whole debate is some kind of smokescreen for smuggling extremist ideas into society. What goes unnoticed, however, is that there is a pattern to these eruptions.
The recent cancellation of Professor Gregory Clark at the University of Glasgow is a case in point. Yesterday, it was reported that Clark — a professor of economics at the University of California and visiting professor at the London School of Economics — was last week unable to give a lecture in Glasgow because of its title: “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750-2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes”. The reference to John Donne’s poem, later appropriated by Ernest Hemingway, was not the problem. The allusion to the work of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein clearly was.
The Bell Curve, a 1994 book by Murray and Herrnstein, remains one of the most controversial pieces of analysis in the modern era. Though its critics tend not to have read the work, they insist that it not only argues for but positively rejoices in the idea that intelligence is largely determined by a person’s race. It is a misunderstanding that has rumbled on for over a quarter of a century, and every discussion of the book usually ends in acrimony. And so when Professor Clark hinted at the work in his lecture’s title, the university asked him to change it.
https://unherd.com/2020/12/how-the-mob-can-silence-you/?=refinnar
In some ways, this was to be expected. The University of Glasgow had recently published a new report titled “Understanding Racism: Transforming University Cultures”, which sets out an action plan to make the university “an inclusive space for all”. As Clark himself put it: “My talk was regarded as a provocation in this situation. I had a half-hour Zoom meeting with the dean. He would reschedule the talk if I agreed to change the paper title to not have any reference to ‘bell curve’. I have refused.”
As soon as the disagreement was publicised, the online mob did what it always does and swiftly became an expert on a person previously unknown to them. Clark was slandered — just like Noah Carl and other academics before him — as a “eugenicist”, with one critic suggesting that the talk was due to be “a thinly disguised piece of book promotion by an economist who manipulates and misrepresents genetics to advance his pseudoscientific opinions”.
Indeed, the claim of Clark’s critics to know not only the content of his undelivered talk but also his intentions is all too characteristic of contemporary pile-ons. Today, it is not enough just to claim foresight, it is also necessary to pretend that you have complete insight into the motivations of those with whom you disagree.
No doubt this row will continue to roll on, with the university continuing to deny that it had “cancelled” Professor Clark’s lecture; its administrators claim that they will “continue to be in discussions” with him about finding “a suitable event” for his talk. Meanwhile, critics of cancel culture will add his name to the growing list of academics who have been uninvited from events due to their views.
Yet it is worth pausing for a moment to reflect that, following this most recent incident, a pattern in the cancel-culture conflict has started to emerge.
If today’s censors only attempted to cancel events about one particular subject or historical individual, it would be easy to discern their motivations. But because the prevailing ethos of the age is so all-pervasive, we appear to be less able than we should be to discuss it and dismantle it in turn. However, as Professor Clark’s treatment shows, that ethos has become increasingly clear. It goes something like this: human beings are born with equal abilities, and any sub-optimal outcomes in their lives are caused by societal factors beyond their control but which can be adapted with enough collective effort.
The fact that this mantra prevails goes a long way to explaining why transgenderism has become such a focal point in the culture wars in recent years. For if you are able to move between the sexes at will, then it’s only natural to conclude that nothing about the situation we are born into can or should limit us. You may have been born with male chromosomes and have male genitalia, but if you wish to become a woman any day then you can. And vice versa.
Whether you are male or female isn’t determined — it’s something you can choose.
And this is where Professor Clark’s cancellation is extremely revealing. Given we know little about his speech beyond its title, you could be forgiven for thinking that the university’s fearful authorities were simply scared about the prospect of activist pressure and a toxic fall-out.
But this approach fails to explain why a talk that references Murray and Herrnstein’s book would inspire such vitriol in the first place. The university was not simply concerned that the content of Clark’s lecture may have been racist. It is about something far more profound: the fear that he would touch on another aspect of the The Bell Curve’s thought that goes against the emerging ideology of the time. The reason why so much energy is dedicated to shutting down any discussion of the issues addressed by Murray and Herrnstein in their book is that, just like with transgenderism, it raises an undeniably fearful spectre — the possibility that our life-outcomes are to a great extent reliant on factors over which we have no control.
Of course, there are dangerous avenues in discussions over the relationship between race and IQ. Eugenics poses one of the worst moral nightmares imaginable. But there are only two things you can do to tackle it. The first is to shut down all debate; a prospect incompatible with modern democracy. The other is to allow responsible discussion of it, along with many other uncomfortable subjects. And if this cannot take place in a university, it is hard to know if it can take place at all.
Still, Professor Clark’s cancellation reveals there is also a deeper discussion that we need to have — one that questions what our attitude should be towards the situation we are born into. The ethos of our era holds that if we organise society well enough, everyone can be whatever they like. And ultimately, the fact that the counter-position — that we are all to some extent dictated by factors outside of our control — is so little heard is an ominous sign. For if it is false then we need not be troubled by it. But if it is true, surely it is better that we find out now, while some semblance of rational discussion is still possible.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Bi-racial student is failed for refusing to admit 'white dominance'
William Clark, a bi-racial high school senior, whose mom is black (pictured), was allegedly failed by his teacher after he refused to confess his 'white dominance' during a class at his Las Vegas school.
Bi-racial high school senior who can pass for white receives failing grade after refusing to publicly confess his 'white dominance' and 'attach derogatory labels' to his race, gender, religious and sexual identity
- William Clark received a failing grade in a critical race theory course after he refused to categorize and label his racial, religious and sexual identities in class
- He was asked to publicly reveal his race, gender, religious and sexual identities and 'then attach derogatory labels to those identities,' according to lawsuit
- The lawsuit was filed in December 2020 against his school Democracy Preparatory Academy at Agassi Campus in Las Vegas
- According to a lawsuit filed by his mother, Gabrielle Clark, William is described as having 'green eyes and blondish hair' and 'regarded as white by his peers'
PUBLISHED: 17:25 EST, 11 March 2021 | UPDATED: 18:22 EST, 11 March 2021
A bi-racial high school senior, who can pass as white, was allegedly failed by his teacher after he refused to confess his 'white dominance' during a class at his Las Vegas charter school.
William Clark received a failing grade in his Sociology of Change class after he refused to categorize and label his racial, religious and sexual identities, according to a press release from Schoolhouserights.org, which supports civil rights litigation in defense of students' freedom of conscience in public education.
According to a lawsuit filed by his mother, Gabrielle Clark, in December 2020, William is described as having 'green eyes and blondish hair' and 'generally regarded as white by his peers'.
His mother is black and his deceased father was white, according to court documents.
During the class, William was reportedly asked to publicly reveal his race, gender, religious and sexual identities and 'then attach derogatory labels to those identities'.
A bi-racial high school senior, who can pass as white, was allegedly failed by his teacher after he refused to confess his 'white dominance' in class, according to his mother, Gabrielle Clark (pictured)
Scribd doc on website
'Students were then asked to "undo and unlearn" their "beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that stem from oppression,"' the statement says.
Now, according to his mother, Gabrielle, who sued his school Democracy Preparatory Academy at Agassi Campus in Las Vegas, they're unsure if he'll be able to graduate after being handed a failing grade.
The lawsuit targets Democracy Prep for violating their constitutional free speech and due process rights. William and his mother, who is a single parent, says that he was compelled 'to make professions about his racial, sexual, gender and religious identities in verbal class exercises and in graded, written homework assignments which were subject to the scrutiny, interrogation and derogatory labeling of students, teachers and school administrators'.
The lawsuit says that by asking him to reveal his identities, he was coerced 'to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm'.
When the lawsuit was filed in December 2020, the Clarks, who are being represented by New York-based lawyer Jonathan O'Brien, claimed that William was threatened with 'material harm including a failing grade and non-graduation if he failed to comply with their requirements'.
The court document says that his school 'rejected his requests for reasonable accommodation and acted on their threats'.
Another image presented in the suit is one of SpongeBob SquarePants that reads: 'Reverse racism doesn't exist'
Students were shown this slide that reads: 'Racism = Prejudice + Power. Therefore, people of color CANNOT be racist'
+7
William Clark attends school at Democracy Prep (pictured) in Las Vegas
One of the exhibits that the lawsuit includes is a presentation slide that reads: 'Racism = Prejudice + Power. Therefore, people of color CANNOT be racist.'
Another image presented in the suit is one of SpongeBob SquarePants that reads: 'Reverse racism doesn't exist.'
The suit says that the Clarks are seeking 'monetary damages, including compensatory and punitive damages, for the damage done to William Clark’s future academic and professional prospects, and for the Defendants' deliberate and protracted harassment, emotional abuse, and violation of Plaintiffs' Constitutional Rights'.
They also want the court to prevent the school from denying William a high school diploma and accommodate him with 'an alternative non-discriminatory, non-confessional class'.
Others named in the lawsuit include, the Nevada State Public Charter School Authority, the civics teacher, several school administrators, the school’s board of directors and the school’s Manhattan-based charter management organization, Democracy Prep Public Schools.
Democracy Prep said in a statement that the school could not comment on pending litigation.
However, a spokeswoman said that 'Democracy Prep stands firmly against racism'.
'Our curriculum teaches students about American democracy and movements for social change throughout our history. We strongly disagree with how the curriculum has been characterized in this filing.'
marsh
On TB every waking moment
A Generation Conditioned to Give Up Their Freedom
There is a generation coming that has been conditioned to willingly give up their freedom. Introducing Gen C.
thelibertyloft.com
A Generation Conditioned to Give Up Their Freedom
Meet 'Gen C,' the generation that may never know American freedom.
by Jared Dyson
March 12, 2021
Charlotte, NC — As I scrolled through some news articles on Thursday, one particular article caught my attention. CNN ran the article and it was talking about a new generation that is being referred to as Gen C or Generation COVID. The concept is that the global pandemic which has struck our world is creating changes among a generation of kids that are growing and developing through all the craziness.
Throughout the article, several examples were shared of how this pandemic is affecting this ‘Gen C’ in ways that others may have not experienced in the past. It spoke of canceled birthday parties, the inability to see family, and more. Images filled the page showing kids that were in masks, in contact with other people behind glass doors, and images of a child where the parent was creating a TikTok video explaining how the child had yet to know what a playdate was really about.
As I sat and read through the article and saw the images, there were two things that came into my mind vividly. The first was the statement that we continue to hear from the Left that our world has changed forever. The idea continues to be shared that our world will never be the same post-COVID as it was before COVID. Mainstream media says that work is changed forever, as some may never return to regular offices or even return to their jobs.
Others say that school has been changed forever. Some have suggested children may never return to the classroom fully, but rather with a hybrid model that includes at-home learning. Even the Left’s anointed expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has indicated that he believes we can get back to “normal” but what is that normal? They have planted the seed in everyone’s mind so that many across our society is already using the language and saying similar things.
Now that they have the idea in everyone’s mind that things may never be the same, everyone will be more accepting of what their ultimate goal is. That’s not to push us into universal income or housing necessarily. Those are part of the plan, but it’s not the ultimate plan. The ultimate plan is that Democrats across the country realized they needed to take the indoctrination of young people a step further than simple “socialism.”
For this exercise, they went directly after American freedom through public health. They convinced Americans that they must give up their rights to free enterprise, religion, speech, and more amid this “health crisis.” They convinced them they were safer at home, relying on government intervention. They convinced them that they were better off relying on the government for income, food, housing, and more. They have worked to convince Americans that the government must be trusted and that anyone who is not focused on their health is spreading disinformation and cannot be trusted.
Enter Gen C, a generation that may never know American freedom. These children have witnessed Americans that willingly gave up their freedom for a bit of personal security. They have heard the stories about how a former President and his supporters were crazy to say that lockdowns, mandatory orders, and more were unconstitutional. They have heard that if someone is not interested in your personal health and willing to sacrifice for your comfort, they are not religious, concerned, or perhaps they deserve to be silenced and cut off from society.
We have a generation that is coming up that has been conditioned by the Left that government intervention is the best. They are convinced that “experts” always have the best ideas and that you simply should not think for yourself. They are convinced that they should willingly give up their freedom, for a little comfort.
This brings me to the second thing that comes to my mind. Back in 1967, there were words to a speech that were given that ring ever true today. On January 5, a governor stood and said these words:
As he gave the speech, Ronald Reagan was imploring his state to continue the fight for freedom. He was encouraging his generation to continue pressing for freedoms in order to secure them for future generations. I wonder how surprised he would be to see just how close we are to losing those freedoms he loved so dearly?
He said freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. Meet Gen C, the generation that the Left has conditioned to willingly give up their freedoms believing it to be normal. Now, it’s our generation’s time to stand up and fight for freedom before it is lost. Because if we continue down this same path, our future generations will never know freedom again.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Identity Politics Goes Too Far, by R. Emmett Tyrrell
Washington — Years ago, I had a great coach in high school who was given to Solomonic apothegms. One of his favorites was,
www.creators.com
Identity Politics Goes Too Far
By R. Emmett Tyrrell
March 11, 2021 5 Min Read
Washington — Years ago, I had a great coach in high school who was given to Solomonic apothegms. One of his favorites was, "Forget your grandparents." By that, he meant forget the arguments that issued from your grandparents' grudges with other grandparents. The high school he coached at was highly diverse, sufficiently diverse to have frequent warfare among the differing ethnic groups. My coach, Tony Lawless, thought we should forget our ethnic or racial conflicts — simply forget them and move on.
The high school that Mr. Lawless coached at and that I attended was a high-diversity high school. We had Italians, Irish, Polish, Latinos (though they were not called Latinos then, probably Mexicans or Puerto Ricans) and even a few Blacks. It was the early 1960s, and diversity was not a sacred, unassailable value. I remember one Saturday at a football game, the Italian students who were sitting together in the stands began chanting, "Benito, Benito, Benito Mussolini." They were not chanting it in a friendly way. I doubt they knew their fathers had fought Benito Mussolini 20 years before.
Mr. Lawless recognized that diversity bred animosity. He thought we ought to forget our origins and aspire to something higher. He suggested an alternative, namely that we were all Americans. I thought of Mr. Lawless decades later when I was visiting war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina to cover the Serbs' shelling of Mostar, once possibly the most diverse city in the area.
There were streets in Mostar where a block of tidy homes was suddenly interrupted by gutted homes and burned-out cars. In this diverse city, when the fighting started, neighbor turned on neighbor, and a lot of homes and public buildings were turned into rubble. A 16th-century Ottoman bridge — a United Nations World Heritage Site — was turned into ruins. I know that our progressives stress diversity in our schools and communities, but there has got to be a more enduring goal for society than diversity. How about civil order, or maybe even patriotism? Too often in world history, diversity has led to open warfare.
Yet it is not just ethnic and racial diversity that the progressives would impose on us. It is sexual, and I guess you would say post-sexual, diversity that they would impose on us. What is post-sexual diversity, you may ask? Well, it is when a boy objects to being classified as a boy and claims another identity. He wants to be a girl or a transgendered person. It is only a matter of time before he can legally claim to be an orangutan or a gorilla. That is what I would call being post-sexual and maybe post-species. Of course, American girls can make similar decisions. Only, I hope the boys and girls who claim to be great apes are not placed in a public zoo. At least not placed in a public zoo against their will.
Now this is all a part of what began as identity politics, and now it is taking on ever more, shall we say, controversial consequences. Yet possibly this erosion in public thinking is coming to an end. An Oklahoma state senator, Shane Jett, has joined a growing movement to outlaw a manifestation of identity politics that is clearly nonsensical. More importantly, it is being pushed in schools where it is dangerous to students and, Jett claims, fosters racial antagonism. It is called critical race theory. And last week, The Washington Times distilled the essence of critical race theory as "a new trend in racial education, which teaches that the legal and governance systems in the U.S. are inherently racist and retain economic and political power for White people by oppressing people of color." Jett calls the curriculum abusive to the students who are exposed to it, and he has introduced a bill in the Oklahoma legislature to ban it from public and charter K-12 schools in Oklahoma.
Jett is aware that he runs the hazard of being called a racist and even a white supremacist, but he has an ace in his sleeve. Jett is a Cherokee American, as are his three daughters. He thinks identity politics have gone far enough. What is more, critical race theory is based on ideas that are clearly untrue. America is not a racist country. Educators can, thanks to the First Amendment, spout critical race theory all they want. But if Jett has his way, not in the curriculum of Oklahoma schools. That goes too far.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Power to Make War, by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
Two weeks ago, while the House of Representatives was finalizing its 700-page legislation authorizing the Treasury to borrow and spend $1. 9 trillion in the next six months, and the Senate was attempting to confirm more of President Joseph R.
www.creators.com
The Power to Make War
By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
March 11, 2021 6 Min Read
Two weeks ago, while the House of Representatives was finalizing its 700-page legislation authorizing the Treasury to borrow and spend $1.9 trillion in the next six months, and the Senate was attempting to confirm more of President Joseph R. Biden's cabinet nominees, Biden secretly ordered the Pentagon to bomb militias in Syria.
The United States is not at war with Syria. It is not at war with the militias that were bombed, and it didn't seek or have the permission of the Syrian government to enter its air space and engage in deadly military activities. Biden later claimed that the bombing was conducted as "a lesson to Iran," another country with which the U.S. is not war.
His campaign promises to the contrary notwithstanding, Biden has followed in the footsteps of his immediate predecessors. They bombed civilians in an aspirin factory in Kosovo (Clinton), bombed civilians in Iraq (G.W. Bush), bombed military targets and government buildings in Libya and bombed a cafe in the Yemen desert targeting an American who was having tea (Obama), bombed the same location as Biden in Syria, and bombed a convoy of trucks in Iraq targeting an Iranian general who was on his way to lunch with an Iraqi counterpart (Trump).
All of these bombings and targeted killings violated the U.S. Constitution, the U.N. Charter — which is a treaty largely written by the U.S., and to which the U.S. is a signatory — and international law.
What is going on with American presidents and war?
The Constitution specifically separates the power to make war from the power to wage war. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 spent more time debating this than any other topic — beside the makeup of Congress. In the end, they were adamant and unanimous that only Congress can declare war and only the president can wage war.
Congress cannot tell the president how to deploy the military, and the president cannot use the military against foreign targets without a congressional declaration of war.
James Madison — the scrivener at the Convention — famously offered that if a president could declare war and wage war, or even use the military to target any foreign entity he wished, then he would be a king, not a president. He argued that war exacerbates the president's "strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses." And when he drafted the Bill of Rights, Madison had the presidency in mind when he wrote in the Fifth Amendment that the government may not take life, liberty or property without due process of law.
Taken together, the exclusive constitutional delegation of war-making to Congress and the Due Process Clause absolutely restrain the legal ability of the president to use violence in another country without a declaration of war from Congress; and in the case of violence against an American, without a conviction by a jury and all the constitutional protections attendant upon that. And, against civilians — never.
When President George W. Bush decided to invade Afghanistan in retaliation for what he argued was providing haven and resources for those who planned, paid for and carried out the attacks on 9/11, he first went to Congress. Congress did not declare war on Afghanistan.
Instead, it enacted a resolution called the Authorization to Use Military Force of 2001. That authorized Bush and his successors to use the military to target the perpetrators of 9/11 wherever and whenever they found them.
Unlike traditional declarations of war, the AUMF of 2001 did not have an endpoint, and that is its fatal flaw. Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden disingenuously cited it as their legal authority to bomb Middle Eastern targets that had no conceivable relationship to the perpetrators of 9/11.
When Bush sought to invade Iraq to locate and destroy what he claimed were weapons of mass destruction, Congress enacted another AUMF in 2002. It, too, has no endpoint.
Last week, a bipartisan group of senators offered legislation to repeal both AUMFs and Biden has indicated that he will sign the repeal. That is a good start toward taming the executive appetite for military violence, but it is not enough.
Under international law and the natural law, the U.S. may only use force defensively. That means it may attack the military of a foreign country or group that has attacked the U.S. or an ally, and it may attack the military of a foreign country or group that is imminently about to attack the U.S. or an ally. Those are the only instances in which the president may deploy U.S. forces for violent purposes without a congressional declaration of war.
Congress must do more than just repeal the two AUMFs if it believes that the Constitution means what it says. Congress needs to repeal the War Powers Resolution of 1973 — which purports to permit presidents, upon notification to Congress, to wage 90-day offensive wars, in violation of the Constitution and international law.
Congress needs to prohibit absolutely the unauthorized presidential expenditure of money and deployment of armed personnel on any nondefensive violent actions. I say "personnel" rather than "military" because modern presidents have often used the CIA to fight wars and argued that because those wars did not involve the military, no congressional approval or notification was needed.
Congress should criminalize such presidential violence and the expenditures of resources to support it, as it is a crime to kill without lawful authority. And Congress should call nondefensive killings — by the government or anyone — by their legal name: Murder.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It
There’s a reason no government has done a cost-benefit analysis: The policy would surely fail.
Philippe Lemoine
March 11, 2021 12:56 pm ET
An empty street amid Covid-19 restrictions in São Paulo, March 6.
PHOTO: MIGUEL SCHINCARIOL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced last week that his state is ending its mask mandate and business capacity limits. While Democrats and many public-health officials denounced the move, ample data now exist to demonstrate that the benefits of stringent measures aren’t worth the costs.
This wasn’t always the case. A year ago I publicly advocated lockdowns because they seemed prudent given how little was known at the time about the virus and its effects. But locking society down has become the default option of governments all over the world, regardless of cost.
https://archive.fo/o/0bFdT/https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/opinion-potomac-watch 24;47 min
More than a year after the pandemic began, vaccination is under way in both Europe and the U.S. Yet stringent restrictions are still in place on both sides of the Atlantic. Germany, Ireland and the U.K. are still in lockdown, while France is two months into a 6 p.m. curfew that the French government says will last for at least four more weeks. In many U.S. states, in-person schooling is still rare.
This time last year we had no idea how difficult it would be to control the virus. Given how fast it had been spreading, people made the reasonable assumption that most of the population would be infected in a few weeks unless we somehow reduced transmission. Projections by the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team in London projected that more than two million Americans could die in a few months. A lockdown would cut transmission, and while it couldn’t prevent all infections, it would keep hospitals from being overwhelmed. It would “flatten the curve.”
We have since learned that the virus never spreads exponentially for very long, even without stringent restrictions. The epidemic always recedes well before herd immunity has been reached. As I argue in a report for the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, people get scared and change their behavior as hospitalizations and deaths increase. This, in turn, reduces transmission.
I’ve looked at more than 100 regions and countries. None have seen exponential growth of the pandemic continue until herd immunity was reached, regardless of whether a government lockdown or other stringent measure was imposed. People eventually revert to more-relaxed behavior. When they do, the virus starts spreading again. That’s why we see the “inverted U-shape” of cases and deaths everywhere.
Sweden was the first to learn this lesson, but many other countries have confirmed it. Initially held up as a disaster by many in the pro-lockdown crowd, Sweden has ended up with a per capita death rate indistinguishable from that of the European Union. In the U.S., Georgia’s hands-off policies were once called an “experiment in human sacrifice” by the Atlantic. But like Sweden, Georgia today has a per capita death rate that is effectively the same as the rest of the country.
That isn’t to say that restrictions have no effect. Had Sweden adopted more-stringent restrictions, it’s likely the epidemic would have started receding a bit earlier and incidence would have fallen a bit faster. But policy may not matter as much as people assumed it did. Lockdowns can destroy the economy, but it’s starting to look as if they have minimal effect on the spread of Covid-19.
After a year of observation and data collection, the case for lockdowns has grown much weaker. Nobody denies overwhelmed hospitals are bad, but so is depriving people of a normal life, including kids who can’t attend school or socialize during precious years of their lives. Since everyone hasn’t been vaccinated, many wouldn’t yet be living normally even without
restrictions. But government mandates can make things worse by taking away people’s ability to socialize and make a living.
The coronavirus lockdowns constitute the most extensive attacks on individual freedom in the West since World War II. Yet not a single government has published a cost-benefit analysis to justify lockdown policies—something policy makers are often required to do while making far less consequential decisions. If my arguments are wrong and lockdown policies are cost-effective, a government document should be able to demonstrate that. No government has produced such a document, perhaps because officials know what it would show.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
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The Columbia Bugle
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Glenn Greenwald's Full Opening Statement Today At The Subcommittee On Antitrust, Commercial, And Administrative Law
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5:07 min
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1:28 min
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The Columbia Bugle
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Glenn Greenwald's Full Opening Statement Today At The Subcommittee On Antitrust, Commercial, And Administrative Law
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1370420249950965768
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View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1370430432077099008
1:28 min
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
How California Is Embracing Mandatory Racial-Injustice Study For All Of Its 1.7 Million High Schoolers
FRIDAY, MAR 12, 2021 - 22:20
Authored by John Murawski via RealClearInvestigations (emphasis ours),
California has struggled for five years to create a politically palatable “ethnic studies” curriculum that would teach high schoolers how systemic racism, predatory capitalism, heteropatriarchy and other “structures of oppression” are foundational to American society.
Now, after more than 82,000 public comments, and four major rewrites, the state Board of Education is expected to approve the latest version next week, clearing the way for lawmakers to make a semester-long course in the material a graduation requirement for all of California’s 1.7 million high school students.
The latest curriculum, however scaled back, still shares similarities with an earlier, rejected draft that a top state official said failed to comply with state law, and the Los Angeles Times editorial board characterized as a jumble of “politically correct pronouncements” that feel like “an exercise in groupthink, designed to proselytize and inculcate more than to inform and open minds.”
When all is said and done, the material emphasizing whites’ subjugation of non-whites is not a conventional textbook subject, but an ideology with an activist political agenda. Revisions may never satisfy parents and teachers who believe public schools shouldn’t be in the business of teaching kids how to develop a “social consciousness” or using class time to pinpoint a student’s intersectional identity to determine where they fit on a hierarchy of power.
At the same time, ethnic studies activists are furious that their efforts at promoting social justice, and centering “voices of color” are being diluted by, as they put it, power structures such as “whiteness,” Zionism and assimilationism.
Passage of the landmark curriculum at the board’s scheduled meeting on March 18 should mark a hard-fought victory for the half-century-old ethnic studies movement and help advocates promote their movement across the country. But it will not end the conflict in California, where the issue will be forced to the local level to be decided by local schoolboards or in individual classrooms.
The reason: The state’s guidelines grant teachers wide flexibility in how they teach the subject. Ethnic studies activists -- including those who wrote the first, rejected draft of the curriculum -- say high school teachers will have an escape clause to teach a watered down version that the activists deride as a “Foods, Heroes & Holidays” and “all lives matter” pabulum. These advocates insist on hewing to a heroic narrative about how people of color have suffered from and fought against European capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism.
White privilege, as defined by the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum InstitutePractitioners have formed their own organization – the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute – to promote an “authentic” ethnic studies, a discipline born in the late 1960s out of student campus protests led by the Third World Liberation Front to end Eurocentrism in education.
For the past year, these activists have been meeting in online sessions to hash out strategy, expound upon their “liberatory” and “transformational” ideology, and encourage educators to teach the full-strength curriculum that the state has flunked. Their unguarded comments in numerous videos convey the combative tone and spirit of ethnic studies already evident in some California classrooms, and likely to be adopted by many more teachers regardless of the model curriculum approved by the state.
“Inside of the United States, native people have been actively fighting a long war to dismantle the United States,” said Stevie Ruiz, who teaches in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the California State University, Northridge, during a May 2020 online strategy session.
“So then we can actually think about what happens if we honor native people’s acknowledgements and begin to tear apart the United States internally,” continued Ruiz, who was listed as one of the leaders of the Liberated group until February.
“What if we decide to call this place the United States no longer?”
'A Way of Life'
The Liberated Ethnic Studies group includes many of the original authors of the 2019 Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum that the state has gutted, as well as 50 scholars, teachers, practitioners and students, according to Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, an Asian American Studies professor at San Francisco State University, speaking during a Feb. 2 online event. The advocates say that many state officials fail to grasp that ethnic studies is not a traditional school subject, but a movement and a philosophy best described as “narrative medicine,” “radical healing” and even a “way of life.” It’s distinguished from traditional classroom instruction by its emotional, immersive pedagogy designed to deprogram kids from European cultural assumptions, to make teenagers conscious of systemic inequities, and to reconnect them with forgotten ancestral knowledge.
According to one of the Liberated institute leaders, Theresa Montaño, a professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at the California State, Northridge, the group’s K-12 lesson plans should be available online for free this spring.
According to the group’s web site, the material will be based on five themes: racialized intersectional identity, collective narratives, systems of power and oppression, resilience and resistance, and solidarity among people of color. And the Liberated institute is open for business: “We have packages and experts that can help you with your Ethnic Studies professional learning needs.”
“We know that when districts begin to implement their ethnic studies programs, they’re not going to go to the state of California and say, ‘Excuse me, state of California, can you come to L.A. and help me implement my ethnic studies program?’” Montaño said last August. “No, they’re going to come to us. And so we are continuing the work that we need to do to develop ethnic studies while simultaneously holding on to some critical hope that we can still influence what the state of California does.”
In repeated expressions of frustration, the advocates attribute the state’s political compromises to a common enemy: “whiteness” – what they call the oppressive force that their movement and its precursors have been seeking to disempower for 500 years. “All of the attacks against the ESMC [Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum] came from the realms of whiteness and authoritarian whitesplaining,” read a statement Los Angeles public school intervention counselor Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona posted during her May presentation on ethnic studies and teacher preparation.
“Well-funded attempts at whitewashing the ESMC ranged from right wing white nationalists at Breitbart, to Wall Street Journal white capitalists who deny the climate crisis, to white moderates who superficially may say they support ethnic studies, but only if it’s done in the way they ‘as gate-keeping white moderates’ say it needs to be done.”
The model curriculum that Cardona, Montaño, Tintiangco-Cubales and others wrote in 2019 hit a tripwire with references to Palestinian resistance to the state of Israel as an example of ethnic studies in action. The removal of those references from the state’s revised curriculum, and the addition of lessons about anti-Semitism, is seen by the advocates as emblematic of the way white power structures erase the histories of those they oppress.
Cardona, one of the founding members of the Liberated Ethnic Studies group, said by phone that she expects an anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions lesson to be included in the Liberated materials that the group is developing.
Cardona is a longtime public school teacher and a veteran of California’s ethnic studies skirmishes, having been fired from a teaching position three years ago after some parents found out she was a member of a Marxist organization that advocates for political revolution, emulates Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, and vows “to crush all forms of oppression and reactionary tendencies.”
Rejecting the state’s assimilationist bent, Cardona suggested that ethnic studies has a totally different focus than the current equity push to get people of color into middle management positions.
"They just want little youth to want this little piece of this American pie because that's what they think social justice is: put black, brown, indigenous bodies in college, put them into these corporate positions and have them do the same old thing that this country does,” she said in a May podcast. “And we're saying, No, there's something wrong with this system. We want black, brown and indigenous bodies in universities to learn about it and to transform and to end all of this oppression, not to continue the roles of the oppressor."
Another flash point in the 2019 model curriculum was the exclusive focus on people of color, with no mention of European ethnicities that were subject to discrimination and genocide. The experiences of European groups, including Jews and Armenians, deserve to be studied, the advocates say, but they have no connection to the ethnic studies movement, whose true focus is the worldview and struggle of people of color against white supremacy.
The sweeping 1,000-plus pages of the state’s revised model curriculum and appendices have toned down the language of the original version, but the public comments cite a number of concerns.
Judea Pearl, father of the late Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter beheaded by Al Qaeda terrorists, wrote: “I am particularly alarmed by its attempt to depict inter-ethnic relationships as a[n] irreconcilable struggle between racially-defined ‘oppressed’ and [‘]oppressors,’ and by the way it associates ‘whiteness’ with ‘oppression’ and ‘colonialism.’”
According to one of several definitions of “race” provided, American society comprises two opposing racial factions: “In the United States today, races very broadly break down as people of color (POC) and white people.” That definition comes from Rethinking Ethnic Studies, a primer co-edited by R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, a consultant and one of the authors of the rejected 2019 version of the model curriculum.
Breaking New Ground
The state’s Department of Education described its ethnic studies undertaking in the previous draft as “a groundbreaking project – the first of its kind among the 50 states.” And given California’s outsize influence in the textbook industry and educational trends, it is assumed by many in the field that California’s standards could serve as a national model for years to come.
California’s push to make a semester-long ethnic studies class a graduation requirement for all of its 1.74 million high school students in 1,322 high schools would be an exponential expansion for a course taught to 20,500 students in 314 high schools during the 2018-19 academic year.
Ethnic studies advocates believe that after four years of President Donald Trump, a pandemic that hit minorities hard, and a summer of Black Lives Matter demonstrations, Americans are ready to grapple with the moral implications of the nation’s origins and history.
“All the horrific shit that white people have been doing to us, has now began to haunt them,” Ruiz told his colleagues in the May video. “Because they’ve been experimenting on us for 500 years, it’s no longer something you can contain anymore.”
They also see encouraging signs in President Biden’s choice of education secretary, Miguel Cardona, considered a champion of the cause who will be well positioned to put federal muscle behind it. As Connecticut’s commissioner of education last year, Cardona oversaw that state’s adoption of a requirement that all high schools offer courses in African American, Black, Puerto Rican, and Latino studies.
“For Ethnic Studies advocates, that’s really encouraging and suggests that maybe we might see some national efforts that are encouraging folks to implement Ethnic Studies in the K-12 setting,” said Ravi Perry, chairman of Howard University’s political science department and immediate past president of the Association for Ethnic Studies.
“Education is a local issue,” Perry said. “But perhaps like they’ve done with transgender bathroom directives in the Obama administration, they can provide some incentives, some strongly worded language to districts, to encourage them to adopt this curriculum while working behind the scenes in the House and Senate to get a bill passed that would perhaps require this [nationally].”
There’s no way of getting around the fact that ethnic studies is going to make some people uncomfortable.
“It’s an explicit, straight-out confrontation with power,” said Ron Scapp, professor of humanities and teacher education at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, in New York, and past president of the Association for Ethnic Studies. “And the power in the U.S. is predicated on the white supremacist, Christian nationalist, unfettered capitalist caste system.”
Scapp, who was editor of the journal Ethnic Studies Review for a decade until last year, said the strident tone of some advocates can sound extreme, but that rhetoric is part of the spirit of resistance.
, the suffering, and the longing for home, the longing for validity and legitimacy,” he said. “But in that expression of pain and hurt – and maybe a bit of, like, ‘**** you, white man’ – I actually think they do a disservice because they wind up participating in a discourse of violence.”
Conversely, the movement’s culture is capable of expressing an almost utopian exuberance. Advocates repeatedly say that ethnic studies has “saved” their life and that it “saves” the lives of students.
Part 1 of 2
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On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
In a Feb. 2 organizing session online, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University, hyperbolically declared that Western knowledge stands in awe of the wisdom contained in ethnic studies.
“There isn’t even a debate in the medical field, in neurobiology, in psychology, in social epidemiology, and in public health, about how important an ethnic studies framework and project is to the wellness of the nation,” he said.
Still, confronting complicity in or victimization by European colonialism, imperialism and genocide can take a toll on teenagers, and the California Department of Education’s proposal initially advised schools to have trained counselors on standby to assist distraught students. Indeed, the language in California’s third draft of the proposal read like a surgeon general's warning: "Engaging topics on race, class, gender, oppression, etc. may evoke feelings of vulnerability, uneasiness, sadness, guilt, helplessness, or discomfort.”
The fourth draft removed the warnings, saying instead: “Given the unique and often sensitive material and discussions that may unfold in an ethnic studies course, being able to establish trust and building community within the classroom are essential.”
'Proselytizing' in Public Schools
Some warn that the ethnic studies curriculum amounts to political indoctrination, violates state anti-discrimination policy, and at times borders on child abuse.
These critics are concerned that kids won’t be required to just study the material, take a multiple-choice test, write a paper and move on; they may be required to espouse progressive politics as a condition of passing the class and graduating from high school.
“It’s a totalitarian worldview that is every bit as much a faith community as any religion,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, an anti-Semitism watchdog group in Santa Cruz, Calif.
“In a public school, it really is the imposition of a state religion,” she said. “This kind of proselytizing has no place in public schools.”
Even though California offers flexibility on teaching the material, the advocates say a state curriculum reflecting their outlook would provide an important tactical advantage: the necessary political cover to advance their agenda against the expected public backlash.
“If it's watered down in that curriculum, yes, it's just a model, you can adjust it,” Cardona said in a December podcast interview. “But you don't have that sort of political coverage that you could have if it was already in the model curriculum."
According to local news coverage, local residents began to voice concerns about Cardona’s involvement in several activist organizations, including Unión del Barrio. According to the organization’s website and 17-page political manifesto, the group is committed to dislodging European imperialists from the Western Hemisphere and regaining political sovereignty for people of color from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, forming a single geopolitical unit called Nuestra America, “ultimately advancing Simón Bolívar’s dream of a unified continent.”
“We will never unite with bourgeois, capitalist, neo-colonialists, who actively unite with imperialism, exploit their own people, and choose to advance their individual self-interest over the interests of all others,” the group declares.
Cardona said by phone that she subscribes to the revolutionary philosophy of Unión del Barrio, but she does not mix her extracurricular political activities with her day job as a teacher. And she does not hide it: To this day her personal website declares: “She is a proud member of the socialist political organization, Union del Barrio.”
Guillermo Gómez, who teaches ethnic studies at Lincoln High School in San Diego, declared himself in May 2020 as “actually accountable and responsible” to Unión del Barrio, which has “developed my political ideology in order to continue the work that we do.”
In the May webinar, Gómez gave a detailed account of the step-by-step process used to introduce teachers and students to the Ethnic Studies worldview. “It’s important to ground ourselves in this concept of love, of revolutionary love,” he described the initiation.
The training starts by establishing that ethnic studies is grounded in social justice, Gómez said, astutely noting: “Who can argue against social justice, right?”
The process advances through progressive stages of buy-in.
For example, students are taught to see themselves not as individuals but through their identity. And after they start seeing themselves through the prism of race, gender and other intersectional modes of power and oppression, they are taught that their identity is exposed and vulnerable to malevolent external forces.
“Once they’re grounded and they’re very strong about what their identity is, then we start bringing the teachers and students into ideas and attacks against their identity,” he explained. “And once they’re able to analyze and identify the systems of oppression, the question becomes, Well what can we do now?”
Some teachers and students become totally committed.
“Ethnic studies is not just an academic discipline – it’s like your whole life – it’s life, period,” Gómez said in the webinar. Gómez did not respond to an email, but Scapp said Gómez represents something very encouraging in ethnic studies: He uses the language of love rather than confrontation, and he’s helping students declutter their minds of toxic ideas.
“It’s the opposite of indoctrination,” Scapp said. “The starting point is that people are already indoctrinated, even if they are not white, by white supremacy.”
In the video, Gómez said that teaching effectively ultimately comes down to trust.
“Once you have a strong, positive loving community in the classroom,” Gómez said, “you pretty much can teach anything.”
In a Feb. 2 organizing session online, Jeff Duncan-Andrade, professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University, hyperbolically declared that Western knowledge stands in awe of the wisdom contained in ethnic studies.
“There isn’t even a debate in the medical field, in neurobiology, in psychology, in social epidemiology, and in public health, about how important an ethnic studies framework and project is to the wellness of the nation,” he said.
Still, confronting complicity in or victimization by European colonialism, imperialism and genocide can take a toll on teenagers, and the California Department of Education’s proposal initially advised schools to have trained counselors on standby to assist distraught students. Indeed, the language in California’s third draft of the proposal read like a surgeon general's warning: "Engaging topics on race, class, gender, oppression, etc. may evoke feelings of vulnerability, uneasiness, sadness, guilt, helplessness, or discomfort.”
The fourth draft removed the warnings, saying instead: “Given the unique and often sensitive material and discussions that may unfold in an ethnic studies course, being able to establish trust and building community within the classroom are essential.”
'Proselytizing' in Public Schools
Some warn that the ethnic studies curriculum amounts to political indoctrination, violates state anti-discrimination policy, and at times borders on child abuse.
These critics are concerned that kids won’t be required to just study the material, take a multiple-choice test, write a paper and move on; they may be required to espouse progressive politics as a condition of passing the class and graduating from high school.
“It’s a totalitarian worldview that is every bit as much a faith community as any religion,” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of AMCHA Initiative, an anti-Semitism watchdog group in Santa Cruz, Calif.
“In a public school, it really is the imposition of a state religion,” she said. “This kind of proselytizing has no place in public schools.”
Even though California offers flexibility on teaching the material, the advocates say a state curriculum reflecting their outlook would provide an important tactical advantage: the necessary political cover to advance their agenda against the expected public backlash.
“If it's watered down in that curriculum, yes, it's just a model, you can adjust it,” Cardona said in a December podcast interview. “But you don't have that sort of political coverage that you could have if it was already in the model curriculum."
According to local news coverage, local residents began to voice concerns about Cardona’s involvement in several activist organizations, including Unión del Barrio. According to the organization’s website and 17-page political manifesto, the group is committed to dislodging European imperialists from the Western Hemisphere and regaining political sovereignty for people of color from Tierra del Fuego to Alaska, forming a single geopolitical unit called Nuestra America, “ultimately advancing Simón Bolívar’s dream of a unified continent.”
“We will never unite with bourgeois, capitalist, neo-colonialists, who actively unite with imperialism, exploit their own people, and choose to advance their individual self-interest over the interests of all others,” the group declares.
Cardona said by phone that she subscribes to the revolutionary philosophy of Unión del Barrio, but she does not mix her extracurricular political activities with her day job as a teacher. And she does not hide it: To this day her personal website declares: “She is a proud member of the socialist political organization, Union del Barrio.”
Guillermo Gómez, who teaches ethnic studies at Lincoln High School in San Diego, declared himself in May 2020 as “actually accountable and responsible” to Unión del Barrio, which has “developed my political ideology in order to continue the work that we do.”
In the May webinar, Gómez gave a detailed account of the step-by-step process used to introduce teachers and students to the Ethnic Studies worldview. “It’s important to ground ourselves in this concept of love, of revolutionary love,” he described the initiation.
The training starts by establishing that ethnic studies is grounded in social justice, Gómez said, astutely noting: “Who can argue against social justice, right?”
The process advances through progressive stages of buy-in.
For example, students are taught to see themselves not as individuals but through their identity. And after they start seeing themselves through the prism of race, gender and other intersectional modes of power and oppression, they are taught that their identity is exposed and vulnerable to malevolent external forces.
“Once they’re grounded and they’re very strong about what their identity is, then we start bringing the teachers and students into ideas and attacks against their identity,” he explained. “And once they’re able to analyze and identify the systems of oppression, the question becomes, Well what can we do now?”
Some teachers and students become totally committed.
“Ethnic studies is not just an academic discipline – it’s like your whole life – it’s life, period,” Gómez said in the webinar. Gómez did not respond to an email, but Scapp said Gómez represents something very encouraging in ethnic studies: He uses the language of love rather than confrontation, and he’s helping students declutter their minds of toxic ideas.
“It’s the opposite of indoctrination,” Scapp said. “The starting point is that people are already indoctrinated, even if they are not white, by white supremacy.”
In the video, Gómez said that teaching effectively ultimately comes down to trust.
“Once you have a strong, positive loving community in the classroom,” Gómez said, “you pretty much can teach anything.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Left’s Transformation From Anti-Establishment Free Speech Advocate to Government Control and Lockdowns ⋆ Politicrossing
The days of the 1960s are long gone when the left was known as the defender of free speech and resisting government control. Since the leftists eventually […]
politicrossing.com
The Left’s Transformation From Anti-Establishment Free Speech Advocate to Government Control and Lockdowns
March 12, 2021
By
Rachel Alexander
The days of the 1960s are long gone when the left was known as the defender of free speech and resisting government control. Since the leftists eventually got their way, transforming government into a vehicle promoting their version of values — which consists of few morals combined with requiring everyone to bend over backwards in order to comply with this attitude, no matter the damage — they now seek to defend the status quo. Can you imagine the hippies of the ‘60s at outdoor rock concerts wearing masks and social distancing? Of course not. Now the left attacks the right for gathering in crowds without obeying the lockdowns. Hollywood stars proudly virtue signal by posting photos of themselves wearing masks on social media.
Why did the left desert its principles? It’s because the left’s nonconformist behavior in the 1960s was never really about freedom and free speech. The left’s “principles” were really about forcing people to agree with their ideas, which can be boiled down to making everyone else as uncomfortable as they are. If you understand that about the left, you can explain any of their behavior, no matter how erratic. For example, they don’t appreciate evidence of our Judeo-Christian heritage, so they don’t want to let you enjoy it. Now that they’re fully entrenched in power, they love it and it’s made them want more power, which is why they are expanding the size and control of big government.
Their ideas have never been compatible with free speech and minimal government. Prominent Democratic presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt both pushed through a massive expansion of government power in the early 20th century. The 1960s was an aberration, which emerged because a faction on the left was too impatient to usher new radical changes through the usual political processes.
So for a brief period of time, the left appeared to care about free speech and opposing big government. This may explain why so many intelligent neocons were leftists in the 1960s. But as we’ve seen in hindsight, it was mostly a facade. The hippies opposed the government because it didn’t give them the radical agenda they wanted — not because it was too big and controlling.
They engaged in controversial free speech so they could ultimately force unpopular viewpoints on others. Marching for abortion rights carrying coat hangers paved the way to make abortion legal everywhere.
Notice you rarely hear about the ACLU anymore? The left won most of their free speech battles during the years following the 1960s. These included legalizing pornography and virtual child pornography, and what used to be considered obscene by getting the courts to narrow the definition of obscene. So the free speech battles now are on the right, which the leftist ACLU doesn’t want to defend. Once in a while the ACLU will defend neo-Nazis or white supremacists, in order to show it’s being “fair.” Well, that’s not being fair, those offensive groups aren’t “conservative,” they’re radicals who often have ties to the left. The most prominent white supremacist today, Richard Spencer, voted for Biden. Nazism is actually socialism, which is on the left.
Today, the left is in overdrive stamping out free speech everywhere. Can’t criticize transgenders, can’t discuss that objections to election fraud could lead to civil disobedience, can’t post satirical memes because they’re fake news, etc. At first, the left tried to defend the censorship by saying it was merely private big tech censoring conservatives. While big tech is taking the lead here, the censorship is occurring at all levels of society.
The left films people carrying signs or speaking in public places that results in terrible treatment by the left, including death threats. The left shows up at the right’s rallies and drowns out their speech with noise or hassles the police into making the rallies inoperable. A man posted a voting meme and was prosecuted by the DOJ — he wasn’t merely banned from social media.
The left showed up at talk show host Tucker Carlson’s home and banged on his door threatening “We know where you sleep at night.” Rep. Maxine Waters (R-Calif.) instructed people to harass Trump officials in public.
Conservative intellectual Dennis Prager explained concisely why the left fears free speech: “One articulate conservative can undo years of left-wing indoctrination in a one-hour talk or Q&A.” Facts, logic and reason are on our side. With technology now advancing so fast, young people are quickly finding ways around censorship, forcing the left to get big tech involved and expanding the censorship to every segment of society.
A moderate friend told me he could deal with the left if they would just back off on the lockdowns. He thinks they’ve finally gone too far. But the left will not allow people to pick and choose their viewpoints, they are required to adopt the whole slate or risk the consequences. A good friend of mine who voted for Biden hides her activities from her more radical friends because she disagrees with the masks and extreme measures. Who wants to be associated with the party of perpetual masks and social distancing, which is what the Democratic Party has become lately? Even some European countries to the left of us have backed down there.
No one in the U.S. even attempts to claim anymore that the Democrats are the anti-establishment and free speech party. Generation Z has grown up without any remnant of the ‘60s left. They’ve never known anything other than Democrats as the party of Big Brother. Thanks to hindsight, they naturally see the ‘60s as the vanguard to the Democrats’ big government today, not the idyllic mirage the left created.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
With Politicized Lending, Biden Aims to Revive 'Operation Choke Point'
In one of the last executive actions of the Trump administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published an important final “Fair Access to Financial Services” rule&n
With Politicized Lending, Biden Aims to Revive 'Operation Choke Point'
.
By Benjamin Zycher
February 17, 2021
In one of the last executive actions of the Trump administration, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published an important final “Fair Access to Financial Services” rule requiring that large banks and federal savings associations make lending decisions based upon “individualized, quantitative risk-based analysis and management of customer risk.” Translation: The lenders are not to make such decisions on the basis of the political unpopularity (among leftists) of certain businesses, obvious examples of which are producers of fossil fuels or firearms, operators of for-profit colleges or private prisons, and payday lenders, and perhaps others engaged in entirely legal business activities.
Under that finalized rule, such politicized lending criteria as “reputational risk”---a wholly circular construct devoid of analytic content---were to be excluded as determinants of the allocation of capital. This constraint would enhance the productivity of financial capital by both lenders and borrowers, by making economic value the central driver of lending decisions and the use of borrowed funds. The strengthened role of economic value would help to preserve the soundness of the banking/financial system, and more generally would engender a number of aggregate economic benefits flowing from the strengthening of economic factors and the weakening of political factors in the capital market.
As discussed below, the rule---ostensibly aimed at the lending decisions of the financial institutions---in reality is designed to constrain the behavior of bureaucrats and politicians pursuing politicized agendas. That is why no one can be surprised that the Biden administration has announcedthat “it has paused publication of its rule to ensure large banks provide all customers fair access to their services.” (The rule was to have taken effect on April 1.) Here is the explanation for the pause:
Pausing publication of the rule in the Federal Register will allow the next confirmed
Comptroller of the Currency to review the final rule and the public comments the OCC
received, as part of an orderly transition.
That is an explanation that explains little even as it is highly revealing, as the “orderly transition” rationale could be applied to any rule promulgated during the Trump administration but not yet published in final form. It is not difficult to conclude that many high-level members of the Biden administration prefer politicized lending, as a short journey down memory lane illustrates.
Remember Operation Choke Point? That was the blatant effort by the Obama administration to exclude several legal industries from the banking system. This clearly was illegal and unconstitutional, having been based upon no law or any other kind of legal authority; it simply reflected the political biases of the senior Obama decisionmakers.
There is no evidence that then-Vice President Biden opposed it, and such arbitrary exercises of power are constrained by no obvious limiting principle. Any industry can become a target, and it is obvious that the discriminatory practices inexorably will expand over time as new bureaucrats and politicians come to occupy the various desks and offices, imposing their own views of what is good. The efficient allocation of capital? Who in the Beltway has an incentive to care about that?
The central value of the Trump rule was straightforward: Far from constraining the lenders, it imposed a short leash on the bureaucrats and politicians, in that new efforts to politicize lending could be challenged in court by the prospective borrowers disfavored by government officials. With or without a rule, the reality is that the banks and savings associations as a practical matter cannot take the public officials to court, as doing so would expose them to a vast array of punitive retaliations from the regulators. The lenders have to deal with the regulators on a daily basis on a vast array of their operations. It is no trick at all for the regulators to cause a given lender no end of legal and operational problems. Can anyone seriously deny this reality?
Accordingly, litigating politicized lending standards is vastly more problematic without the new rule than with it because such lending constraints inevitably are predominantly an informal system based upon letters and phone calls and hints and winks and sighs and frowns. Without the rule, the borrowers against whom the discrimination is directed would not have standing to sue, and the lenders would not do so for the reasons just delineated.
That is why Choke Point and similar gameplaying in the capital market is ideal for the political left: No formal rule is being violated, the banks are in no position to resist, and the borrowers have no recourse. Equality under the law is thrown out the window because the left fundamentally believes in nothing as much as its own political power, while the bureaucracy---much ignored in the reality that it is an important interest group---is left to enhance its own powers at the expense of market forces.
The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation may have created vast perversities for the U.S. financial system, but Title III charges the OCC with assuring fair access to financial services and fair treatment of customers by the institutions subject to its jurisdiction. In short, we have had for a decade a law supposedly constraining the ability of public officials to politicize lending, and they were happy to ignore it. The Trump fair access rule was wholly justified as a regulatory matter; and by constraining in a way enforceable in court the ability of public officials to impose their ideological preferences upon the lenders, it would have yielded a more efficient allocation of capital over time. That the Biden administration is in the process of discarding it does not bode well for a policy-driven strengthening of U.S. economic performance, in the capital market and many others.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
For Two Years UK Testing New Surveillance Technology that Tracks and Stores Web Browsing for Every British Citizen | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
For two years now the UK has been testing a surveillance technology that will track and store all of your web browsing activity.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
For Two Years UK Testing New Surveillance Technology that Tracks and Stores Web Browsing for Every British Citizen
By Jim Hoft
Published March 14, 2021 at 9:09am
For two years now the UK has been testing a surveillance technology that will track and store all of your web browsing activity.
The new program will track browsing for every single person in the country.
It is not a stretch to see the government use this technology to abuse its citizens — and not just in Great Britain.
This is a really scary development.
Wired.co.uk reported
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Free Speech: And... It's Gone
SATURDAY, MAR 13, 2021 - 21:30
Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,
It’s no surprise to me that the war against speech is accelerating. There’s desperation in the air everywhere.
From the barricading of the U.S. Capitol since January 6th to the shrill calls for continued lockdowns over a virus mostly behind us, we see those with power lashing out trying to hold on to it.
And it’s no more obvious than in the lockdowns on speech. In the past week we’ve seen another major assault on Twitter-alternative Gab. A massive attack on its security architecture handing out the passwords and information of millions of users to the dark web.
Then Texas Governor Greg Abbott, you know the guy who let millions of Texans freeze last month rather than order the coal-fired plants brought online in defiance of the DoE, piles on calling Gab “anti-semetic.”
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1369822393678594061
.19 min
Abbott’s just doing what he’s paid to do, serve everyone but Texas.
Gab CEO Andrew Torba then informed us that the attacks on Gab are far deeper than even a putz like Abbott’s. The relentless pressure to cut his company off from the doing business continues, with bank after bank refusing to do business with them.
Torba’s invoking Operation Chokepoint is important here. It reminds us that Biden is a cypher put in place to restore Obama to the White House as functional president.
Honestly, taking a step back, is this at all rational? All Torba and Gab want to do is operate a social media platform that conforms, ruthlessly, to the first amendment. Nothing more, nothing less.
It’s not like Gab is funded by foreign intelligence services spreading obvious agitprop and propaganda. No, sorry, that’s the job of the mainstream media and Twitter.
I thought if we didn’t like the treatment we got on Twitter we could go ‘build our own’ and that would be fine. Separate but equal, freedom of and from association and all that.
But, no, any competition that doesn’t adhere to the current orthodoxy of what constitutes ‘acceptable speech’ is now no longer tolerated. Free Speech is not an option.
It’s an obvious coordinated assault from every angle to extend ‘cancel culture’ into a cultural revolution. Because it’s not enough to hound people whose opinions you don’t like from the public square, they have to be beaten out of society entirely, even if the means employed to do so are patently hypocritical.
And don’t think that doesn’t tie right into what’s coming from Operation Chokepoint vis a vis gun ownership in the coming weeks, but I digress.
Then there’s Amazon’s abrupt turn into the Ministry of Information Gating. From removing a documentary about Clarence Thomas from its streaming service — during Black History Month — to making it verboten to talk about gender dysphoria as a mental illness, which it may well be.
Amazon is lurching quickly from refusing to publish certain topics under its Kindle Direct Publishing platform to denying authors space on their virtual shelves. I think we’re close to the point where keeping Orwell’s 1984 on the shelves is tolerated because It’ll soon be looked on as children’s literature.
Speaking of which, the long march of communists through our educational institutions has now led to pulling sales of six classic stories by Dr. Seuss by its publisher and President Biden banning Dr. Seuss from “Dr. Seuss Day.”
Attacking Dr. Seuss, even in the mildest way, is yet another tactical move to outrage anyone with a connection to their past. It’s done to create a false discussion of racism and force people to take up the defense of something that needs no defense.
It’s done to undermine parental choices of what stories they should read their children at night and adding more divisive fodder for family get-togethers (remember those?) where the kids come home from school and blame their racist parents for programming them from birth because Dr. Seuss.
We’re dealing with people who have no ability to parse nuance or engage in any reasonable discussion of the past. As opposed to turning the depictions of Asians or blacks in Dr. Seuss into a teaching moment about how far we’ve come their impulse is to remove it from ‘polite society’ for the good of everyone.
And that’s what’s truly shameful.
Frankly, I’m ambivalent about Dr. Seuss because when I re-read The Cat in the Hat recently I couldn’t tell if it was a cautionary tale about child predation or programming children to accept it?
I’d go on some long-winded rant about Jung and these malformed people being unwilling to accept and integrate heir shadows, but what’s the point in 2021?
We’re now dealing with an acceleration of the erasure of the past that will not abate until it consumes most of the people perpetrating it in the first place. So, my advice to you is duck where you can and drink heavily.
I’ve only covered a couple of these recent events here, because there are too many to list. But it was this post on RT which caught my attention in light of the growing attacks on alternative speech platforms and journalists.
Because in the days after Buzzfeed fired one-third of the staff at the former Prom Queen of the Woke, the Huffington Post, we’re treated to this fake spat between ‘journalists’ over something Tucker Carlson said.
This manufactured harassment controversy over his showing a publicly-available picture of some chick (yes, I’m a misogynist, but hey I’m protecting her identity!) who works at the New York Times is on its face laughable. It won’t do anything other than improve Carlson’s ratings.
Because it isn’t enough to be a disgraced plagiarist fired by that pillar of responsible journalism, Buzzfeed, to try and keep the lights on this incel Broderick pens a piece going after, of all people, Glenn Greenwald.
First they came for Gab and no one listened. Then they came for Parler who knuckled under. And now they’ve driven the best investigative journalists to Substack and that’s too much free speech?
But it’s part of the pattern of behavior that continues well beyond Gab’s persecution.
Because the most disturbing thing I’ve seen this week isn’t any of this. It is the now zero-tolerance for anyone on platforms like YouTube or Patreon who voice any skepticism from the WHO and/or the CDC about COVID-19, the vaccines or anything related.
Fearless people like The Last American Vagabond, Whitney Webb and now Venessa Beeley have all been canceled by Patreon. My subscribers keep wondering when I’m going to be canceled. I guess we’ll find out soon enough. I continue to get notes from Patrons telling me they won’t support Patreon because ‘they suck’ or ‘they’re evil.’
And I don’t blame them one bit. Vote with your dollars, force me to consider alternatives (which there are if you are interested).
But, at the same time, the more Patreon or Twitter or YouTube acts the way they do the more opportunity there is for someone else to build something better.
That’s what Torba did in 2016 and he’s paid a terrible price for it. He lived by one of Jordan Peterson’s new rules when he built Gab in the first place: “Notice where opportunity lurks when responsibility has been abdicated.”
Our responsibility to free speech has been abdicated by our professional journalists for decades. In fact, I’d argue, outside of the people I’ve mentioned so far in this article, there are precious few people writing today who could even rise to the level of ‘yellow journalist,’ present company included.
I’ve been saying since Torba started Gab in 2016 that what is needed is a blockchain-based, censorship-proof platform with inviolable property rights in that which you create. That would disempower gatekeepers like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and ensure the costs of government censorship would rise to the point of failure.
And Torba is absolutely right that this assault on free speech in the U.S., and really the world over, is driving the industry towards that eventuality when he mentions bitcoin. Early attempts at this have been a mess — Steemit, Minds, etc. — but the basic concept is sound.
What these folks are doing with Operation Chokepoint is no different than Trump going Sanctions Slap Happy for four years on our national rivals. Trump tried to raise costs on Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela to the point where they would cry in submission.
And it didn’t work. And I told you (and Trump) it wouldn’t work. Repeatedly.
Because the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility is universal in all human endeavors.
There is an upper limit to the efficacy of any particular activity, simply because accumulating more of one thing lowers its marginal return on your investment of time and/or capital. it’s why Pareto is the law of the land, ultimately.
In the case of censorship or economic starvation (same thing), when you make the cost of doing business in one arena too expensive — selling oil for dollars, for example — you make the transition away from that medium of exchange (the dollar) relatively more attractive.
Russia now does more than half of its business in local currencies. Iran is empowering Iranians to mine bitcoin to evade sanctions and procure things from overseas. Both are working with trading partners to bypass the dollar and the euro to effect international trade.
And soon, all the dissident journalists of exceptional character will be the ones who validate new business models and publishing platforms that do the same. In the same way that we helped validate Patreon’s business model in the first place, which helped us bypass the traditional publishing firms like Buzzfeed and which drove the HuffPo to irrelevancy.
That’s what’s coming with all of this censorship and marginalization of dissident voices — the proliferation of new platforms that are hardened against cancellation. The people like George Soros who believe they can drive the truth back underground to the days where publishing materials and disseminating them were hideously expensive are living a lie.
And they are wasting everyone’s time pursuing this in their sick, pathetic attempts to maintain and solidify societal control at a level that is the very definition of unsustainable.
Today it’s the opposite of that. Today it’s cheaper and easier than ever to produce and disseminate superlative work to an audience. Finding the audience is the hard part. And that’s what they are trying so desperately to keep us from achieving.
But we will achieve it because total surveillance and the complete abolition of our property right in the work we produce is a fantasy of the deranged and the arrogant. And that’s why their fear is so real you don’t need to be a dog to smell it.
In the face of planned economic and societal destruction which is driving up the cost of everything, free speech is the most precious commodity of all.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
Newt Gingrich Locked Out Of Twitter For Criticizing Biden's Immigration Policy
SATURDAY, MAR 13, 2021 - 19:30
Authored by Annaliese Levy via SaraACarter.com,
Former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich was locked out of his Twitter account for over a week after he published a tweet that criticized the Biden administration’s approach to the southern border and raised concern over immigrants crossing the border illegally who may be infected with COVID-19.
Twitter promptly sent Gingrich a message explaining that his account was locked for “violating rules against hateful conduct.”
In an opinion piece published in The Washington Times, Gingrich defended his tweet saying that he was reacting to a recent story that said federal officials had no way of testing people who are picked up by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol — or forcing them to quarantine.
In order to unlock his account, Gingrich was required to delete his tweet or go through an appeals process. Gingrich assumed he received this message by accident.
Twitter reiterated to Gingrich that his tweet had broken their rules of conduct.
“There was no reason to censor my tweet or lock my account,” Gingrich continued. “Nothing in the flagged tweet “promotes violence against, threatens, or harasses” anyone. It is simply pointing out the fact that those entering the country illegally are not tested for COVID-19 and could be a health risk.”
In an open letter to Twitter officials, Gingrich posed the following questions:
Gingrich noted that the vast majority of those being silenced online are conservatives.
“This entire experience has made it even more clear to me that Twitter is only interested in censoring conservatives,” Gingrich said.
“I hope Twitter will stop its aggressive and biased censorship, and return to the spirit and ideals of free speech which allowed it to prosper in the first place.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Clay Travis testifies before congress on totalitarian Big Tech (excellent)…
Clay Travis opening statement before Congress on Friday Who checks the fact-checkers — Travis has two interesting stories to relate
citizenfreepress.com
Clay Travis testifies before congress on totalitarian Big Tech (excellent)…
Posted by Kane on March 14, 2021 7:30 pm
4;54 min
Clay Travis opening statement before Congress on Friday
Who checks the fact-checkers — Travis has two interesting stories to relate
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Some teachers, parents upset over profane anti-Biden flag hanging near elementary school
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (FOX 46 CHARLOTTE)- Some neighbors say they are bothered by a flag with graphic language directed at President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s hanging on the front …
www.wspa.com
Some teachers, parents upset over profane anti-Biden flag hanging near elementary school
by: Emma Withrow
Posted: Mar 12, 2021 / 09:53 PM EST / Updated: Mar 12, 2021 / 09:53 PM EST
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (FOX 46 CHARLOTTE)- Some neighbors say they are bothered by a flag with graphic language directed at President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s hanging on the front of a home right down the street from Mallard Creek Elementary School.
FOX 46 originally heard about the flag from a teacher who drove by it every day. She said the profane language and blatant disrespect for the president and vice president was a terrible example to set for kids.
Parents say the street is a route for all the busses to get to Mallard Creek Elementary School so children will be exposed to the flag daily.
Your $1,400 stimulus check could be seized by private debt collectors. Here’s why
“It’s not hidden, it’s very large, and the remark at the bottom that says f you too, that’s ridiculous,” teacher Kristine Morrow said.
A neighbor across the street from this flag didn’t seem to mind it though. He said he thought it was funny.
“If she’s concerned about that, then she needs to be getting on these raps songs and everything else,” the neighbor told FOX 46.
Benfield also added that it makes sense Trump supporters aren’t willing to support the new president.
“I also believe that what goes around comes around. Trump didn’t get much respect when he was president, so I guess his supporters aren’t going to give him [Biden] support either,” he said.
But teacher Kristie Morrow disagrees.
“Whether they support Trump or not, I know there’s freedom of speech, but I think they’re not letting me have my right [to] not to view something like that,” Morrow said. [emphasis mine]
One parent didn’t really care either way.
“If it’s not really causing harm or any danger, it’s just a sign. We all really know who our president is,” he said.
FOX 46 reached out to Mallard Creek Elementary School and Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools but did not hear back. As for the legality of it, FOX 46 chief legal correspondent Seema Iyer said as of now it is completely legal.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Glenn Greenwald congressional testimony on Hunter Biden media coverup…
Glenn Greenwald is one of the few liberals who speaks truth to power
citizenfreepress.com
Glenn Greenwald congressional testimony on Hunter Biden media coverup…
Posted by Kane on March 13, 2021 7:21 pm
5:06 min
Glenn Greenwald is one of the few liberals who speaks truth to power
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Why the 'Freedom of Conscience' Is Folly and Fallacy
townhall.com
Why the 'Freedom of Conscience' Is Folly and Fallacy
Kevin McCullough
|
Posted: Mar 14, 2021 2:07 PM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: Enterline Design Services LLC/iStock/Getty Images Plus
This past week there was much dropping of the jaw and feigned shockery by some in the evangelical community.
Locally in the New York City area pastors newly and suddenly disturbed by the pending so-called Equality Act began writing mass emails to their congregations and communities about the dangers that said act would present to people of religious conscience.
Nationally, the so-called “Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden” issued a letter via their website as to the surprising lack of involvement or even invitation to the discussion of abortion policy stemming from President* Joe Biden’s executive orders, as well as the language in the new stimulus legislation that crudely eliminates the protections of the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment had been what primarily liberal Democrats had always pointed to as law when pro-lifers would claim tax monies were being used for public financing of abortion—as to the reason why their fears and claims were illegitimate.
Traditionally-minded parents have had their concerns multiplied infinitely since the beginning of this administration in its hostile and aggressive approach to planting biological (and anatomical) males into the showers, bathrooms, and locker rooms of their daughters. This week, via the stroke of a pen, President* Biden decided to make the taxpayers suddenly responsible for the costs of any and all military members who want to have parts of their bodies removed or added on to, in order to create the dishonest appearance of being born the opposite sex. It should be noted that such surgery makes the member of the military non-deployable for months to years following the surgery. Hence, we pay for people in uniform to not be available to defend us in the event of hostilities or basic defense needs.
To humanists, none of these issues seem very important — but pastors have a different value set and worldview, as do their congregants and doctrines.
Which is why it is so disingenuous for the caterwauling that is taking place now.
When evangelical icons like Dr. Tim Keller and long-time teacher Dr. John Piper released scribs immediately prior to the 2020 election, providing cover for pastors across the nation to more or less take no stand in the election or, even worse, give wink/nod permission for pulpits to defacto campaign in favor of the Biden campaign they did so at an expensive cost.
In only 50 days its cost—purely in moral compromises—are what the first three paragraphs of this column describe.
The term that Keller/Piper used became a bit of a flashpoint across pulpits: “the freedom of conscience.”
In Keller’s case, he attempted to argue that the text of scripture provided clarity on some issues like abortion. Yet then he dishonestly claimed that scripture provided no wisdom as to how to reduce its practice, and because of that argument, he was incapable of deciphering the election any more critically for anyone who listened to his teaching or followed him on social media.
For Piper, he argued that actions that may or may not have occurred with Donald Trump prior to his public life compromised him so badly that there was no moral distinction between himself and Biden. Of course, to come to that conclusion he had to ignore the four years of Trump’s stewardship of the nation—not to mention ignoring Biden’s 47 years in public life. But by invoking the “freedom of conscience” he again gave pastors and believers permission to skate on any real confrontation of having to think critically about the bigger picture.
That term “freedom of conscience” in fact was adopted by the Pro-Life Evangelicals for Biden, and pastors across the nation who simply hated Trump for his personality flaws (as opposed to public policy matters).
Pastors also contributed to the confusion by being at minimum unaware of faulty media coverage, at best or willful ignoring facts in issues like the death of George Floyd and the related issues of Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory. Both of these causes are based on abject godless Marxism. Very few churches pointed it out and even fewer stood humbled but accurate on the matters.
Now there is an all-out assault to erase Christians, Christianity, traditional Christian doctrine, and to do so with the power of a gun backed by the authority of new “laws.”
Adding to this was an American’s church more or less forced capitulation into non-existence due to the pandemic. Yes, virtual “church” happened but not like it would have if the body had been able to meet in person.
As reopenings are underway, masks, forced vaccination, and submission to authority will once again be thrust upon church leaders nationwide.
Will they allow those who need “freedom of conscience” to remain as part of the body of Christ? Or will there be a false obedient bending of the knee to a worldview that has used that phrase to co-opt an election, silence the church, and now sees many of its basic principles be erased?
I wish someone could get Keller and Piper to speak to that mess. Especially since they were so eager to create it.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Facebook BigWig Calls for Big Tech Break Up: 'They Must be Stopped.' » The National Pulse+
Project Veritas released undercover conversations with Facebook’s Global Planning Lead Benny Thomas, who repeatedly calls for the government to “step in and break up Google and Facebook.” “Facebook and Google are no longer companies, they’re countries,” Thomas reveals during a conversation with...
thenationalpulse.com
Facebook BigWig Calls For Big Tech Break Up: ‘They Must Be Stopped.’
Project Veritas released undercover conversations with Facebook’s Global Planning Lead Benny Thomas, who repeatedly calls for the government to “step in and break up Google and Facebook.”
“Facebook and Google are no longer companies, they’re countries,” Thomas reveals during a conversation with a Project Veritas journalist.
“They must be stopped,” he adds before insisting “the government needs to step in and break up Google and Facebook. It’s a better thing for world.”
Thomas, who also advocates for the removal of Mark Zuckerberg as CEO of Facebook, notes how “no king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Marck Zuckerberg is.”
Thomas also discusses artificial intelligence and the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative, claiming that “data is very powerful,” and if you “give me five things about you, and I can pretty much figure out everything else.
WATCH:
17:06 min
marsh
On TB every waking moment
CNN's Lemon: To Help End Racism, America Has to Start Teaching that Jesus Was Not White
CNN anchor Don Lemon said Monday on ABC's "The View" that to begin a process of addressing racism in America, it was time to "present the true identity of Jesus," which he said was "a black or brown person." | Clips
www.breitbart.com
CNN’s Lemon: To Help End Racism, America Has to Start Teaching that Jesus Was Not White
PAM KEY15 Mar 2021320
CNN anchor Don Lemon said Monday on ABC’s “The View” that to begin a process of addressing racism in America, it was time to “present the true identity of Jesus,” which he said was “a black or brown person.”
Lemon said, “People ask me all the time, especially young mothers, young white mothers, they say what can I do? How can I fix this after George Floyd? I don’t have the vocabulary to teach my kids. What can I do? I thought about that and offered some advice. That’s what the book is about. It’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. We have to start, as I said earlier in the show, we have to teach the true history of this country, the history that African-Americans brought to this country.”
“We have to start being realistic about God and the Bible,” he continued. “If you are a person of faith in this country, and we know America is built on faith and religious freedom, a good way of starting is to present the true identity of Jesus. That is a black or brown person, rather than someone who looks like a white hippy from Sweden or Norway. We should start with that and put that in your home, either a Black Jesus or Brown Jesus. Jesus looked more like a Muslim or someone who is dark, rather than a blonde-looking carpenter.”
Lemon added, “When your children ask you who is this, say this is Jesus. Jesus does not look like the popular depiction we have in our churches and our homes, and we see all over the media. That is a good place to start. That’s a good place that your kids will ask questions, and then you can go from there, and then we can — then we can come to a true reality about what America really is and then try to figure out how we fix this issue of racism in the country. It is a spell that must be broken.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Tyranny of Woke Capital
Traditional American values have long been under attack by social justice warriors, cultural Marxists advancing the insidious tenets of critical theory. Their “long march through the institutions” has infiltrated schools, universities, en...
March 15, 2021
The Tyranny of Woke Capital
By Janet Levy
Traditional American values have long been under attack by social justice warriors, cultural Marxists advancing the insidious tenets of critical theory. Their “long march through the institutions” has infiltrated schools, universities, entertainment, the mass media, the courts, politics, and beyond. One might assume that business, adhering to the Milton Friedman doctrine of maximizing returns for shareholders, would be insulated from their malign agenda. But that assumption is no longer valid, according to Stephen Soukup’s recent book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital: How Political Correctness Captured Big Business. He illuminates how ‘progressive’ forces have insinuated themselves into regulatory agencies, the finance industry, and corporate America, jeopardizing capital markets and the free-market system itself.
The book traces the genesis of American progressivism to Richard Ely (1854-1943) of Johns Hopkins University. Believing in a confused amalgam of religion, socialism, white superiority, and a paternalistic state, Ely advocated that the state should be harnessed to fix social problems like poverty, alcoholism, racial tension, and child labor in G-d’s name. He never presented himself as a socialist, but believed G-d works through the state, which should heal the ills of capitalism through labor reform and compulsory education. With little faith in the canaille to vote in society’s and their own best interests, he favored a “third way”: employing professional administrators to manage society rationally, guard against laissez-faire economics, and make socialism unnecessary. This new progressivism looked at the American state as the natural, necessary “administrator” of civic life.
Political scientist Dwight Waldo, the defining figure of modern public administration, refined Ely’s ideas and propounded that public servants should be “value advocates,” “agent of change,” and stewards of “social equity, democratic administration, and proactive, non-neutral public administration.” Voters and their elected representatives were to be superseded by unelected, unaccountable experts -- with ostensibly better values than the people. Though it was seen as being in violation of the Constitution, Waldo wanted a central bank with an administrative elite controlling monetary policy to maintain stability.
Soukup goes on to explain how contemporary left-leaning liberalism elevates these ideas of working through institutions. While Marx presumed that history was about economic conflict, the Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued that the key struggle was cultural. To inspire revolution and liberate the working class, it was necessary to vanquish the church and other enablers of bourgeois culture. Herbert Marcuse, a key figure of the Frankfurt School and proclaimed father of the New Left, fused Marx, Gramsci, and Freud to conclude that capitalism crushed human capacity for creativity, spontaneity, critical thought, and oppositional behavior. The Frankfurt School became the spark for Cultural Marxism to shift its focus to Critical Theory, which aims to critique power structures and undo the cultural and psychological hegemony of the bourgeois. This philosophy paved the way for the 1960s’ radical student movement. It was these alienated youths who initiated the subversion of the American university. The idea that traditional American culture was a selfish and inhibiting bourgeois false reality took hold in academia. The “march through the institutions” had begun, spreading from the universities to the professions and other domains.
At this point, according to Soukup, a major obstacle to the cultural revolution was America’s rootedness in business, with its dependence on and responsibility for structure, order, production, investment, and prosperity. But a slow change began in the 1970s, with the ideas of socially responsible investment and stakeholder interests -- rather than shareholder interests -- taking precedence. Religious groups had wielded such influence on businesses in the 1950-60s by avoiding “sin stocks.” But now, there
was a political dimension: the clout of the shareholder was used to pressure companies to accommodate social or political goals. Over the decades since then, managers have come to focus on ethical and social issues, capital markets have become politicized, and strategic business planning is mired in conflicting ideas of social justice. From the early 2000s, businesses have been gravitating towards incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues into investment policy.
The Big Three investment management companies -- BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street -- are well-aligned on ESG goals. Together holding about 22% shares of the typical Standard & Poor’s 500 company. Soukup gives readers an idea of the clout they command with the example of asset manager Larry Fink of BlackRock, who manages more than $7 trillion in passive assets and $2.5 trillion in active assets. Such firms can operate independently of the will of the people, effecting change at whatever companies they choose.
Their cynicism and hypocrisy are on shameless display. BlackRock is a member of Climate Action 100+, an investor group aligned with the Paris Agreement, but is one of the biggest American investors in Communist China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter. It plans to expand operations and become China’s leading foreign asset manager. Ironically, in America BlackRock speaks of sustainability goals that put our companies at competitive disadvantage to Chinese ones. Many hedge funds are players in this politicization of capital markets: they cheer autocratic China and are harshly critical of American capitalism.
Government pension funds too are politically compromised: promoting progressive activism and focusing on ESG, they end up performing subpar instead of maximizing returns for pensioners. The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest pension fund in the U.S., has $3 billion invested in China, including in Chinese military contractors.
Soukup charts how activists realized in the late 1980s that they could influence capital markets to advance their political agendas and impose their moral framework on the business world. Many powerful activist nonprofits use shareholder resolutions, disavowal of pro-business trade groups, and arbitrary reports or public ratings of companies’ social responsibility policies (such as the Corporate Equality Index) to push their own goals.
Even government agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the CFA Institute, the Federal Reserve, and central banks are in the game. The SEC has abandoned objectivism to approve of the activist, interventionist stakeholder model; the CFA has included material on ESG in its curriculum; the Fed has set up a financial infrastructure that rewards progressive interests and sees the climate change issue as one of its fiduciary responsibilities.
Several major U.S. companies contribute to the “woke capital” dictatorship. Apple, with its largest manufacture base and second largest consumer market in China, is a staunch ESG advocate when convenient. It donates to egalitarian causes and promotes a carbon-free future, but powers just 5% of its operations with renewables, has a planned obsolescence policy that uses minerals mined through child labor in Africa, and avoids $77 billion in U.S. taxes by using slave labor in China. Disney is unwilling to displease China, one of the biggest film-watching countries, but is happy to needle state government at home for legislation that serves its woke interests. AmazonSmile relies on the hate-mongering Southern Poverty Law Center, which defunds conservative organizations by mislabeling them as “hate groups,” to approve its charitable donations.
Soukup warns that we must fight to “preserve the spirit of innovation and expression that harnesses liberty to create wealth and prosperity.” The free-market economy and the American way of life are in danger. It’s time, he says, to “depoliticize business, depoliticize markets, get back to neutral.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Joe Biden Fires Attorney Trump Appointed to Protect Americans' Religious Liberties - LifeNews.com
President Biden fired Equal Employment Opportunity Commission general counsel Sharon Fast Gustafson on Friday after she declined to resign under pressure from the White House. “At the time I was nominated, I was asked if I would commit to do my best to fulfill my four-year term, and I answered...
www.lifenews.com
Joe Biden Fires Attorney Trump Appointed to Protect Americans’ Religious Liberties
NATIONAL LEAH BARKOUKIS MAR 15, 2021 | 7:48AM WASHINGTON, DC
President Biden fired Equal Employment Opportunity Commission general counsel Sharon Fast Gustafson on Friday after she declined to resign under pressure from the White House.
“At the time I was nominated, I was asked if I would commit to do my best to fulfill my four-year term, and I answered yes,” Gustafson said in a letter to Biden. “Unless prevented from doing so, I intend to honor that commitment. I have confidently given this advice to countless embattled clients of the last 25 years: hold your head high, do your best work, and do not resign under pressure. In solidarity with them, I will follow that advice.”
Gustafson was appointed in March 2018 by former President Trump and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2019 to a four-year term, which Biden wanted cut short. The EEOC is an independent agency within the federal government.
“So far as I know, no previous General Counsel has been fired for being appointed by the wrong political party,” Gustafson wrote.
Andrea Lucas, who was also appointed to the EEOC by Trump, blasted the White House’s decision.
“I find the action taken today by the White House against our independent agency to be deeply troubling, a break from long-established norms respected by presidents of both parties, an injection of partisanship where it had been absent, and telling evidence of what ‘unity’ actually means to this President and his Administration,” Lucas tweeted.
“That, however, does not seem to apply to Sharon Gustafson. And if such a principle does not apply to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—the very agency charged with preventing and remedying discrimination and retaliation—where else does it apply?” she continued. “In the days leading up to the President’s decision to fire Ms. Gustafson, a report and related materials dealing with religious discrimination were removed from the EEOC’s website shortly after inauguration.”
At the beginning of that report appeared letters from Lucas and Gustafson. In it, Lucas said she was “deeply concerned that today, religious liberty has become a disfavored or second-class right in many areas of our society and culture.”
On Twitter, she said the administration’s move “proves” her point. “The actions taken by this Administration are quite telling as to their priorities . . . and one can safely assume that combating religious discrimination—or retaliation, frankly, given Ms. Gustafson’s firing—is not one of them,” she pointed out. “Instead, it appears that this Administration intends to achieve unity through uniformity by removing all dissenting actors, thought, and content from the federal government, the public square, and the marketplace.”
Though Biden’s request offered no reason for wanting her to resign, Gustafson had been known for being a strong defender of religious liberties.
“Your request that I resign provided no reason for the request, and I do not know which of your advisors recommended that you make the request,” she said. “But please be aware that there are those who oppose my advocacy on behalf of employees who experience religious discrimination and on behalf of constitutional and statutory protections for religious entities. I would like to continue my work on the EEOC’S mission to prevent and remedy illegal employment discrimination.”
In response, Gautum Raghavan, the deputy director of the Office of Presidential Personnel, told her that she would be terminated, effective by the close of business on Friday.
Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx blasted the White House’s decision.
“This is a pattern. President Biden calls for the end to ‘partisan warfare,’ only to turn around and demand that Senate-confirmed officials resign so he can make room for his left-wing friends,” she said in a statement. “President Biden should take a note from General Counsel Gustafson, who stuck to her commitment and refused to cave to partisan pressure. This unprecedented firing of an honorable public official which occurred just hours after she was asked to resign is unwarranted and should be immediately rescinded. General Counsel Gustafson should be reinstated so she can complete her four-year term, independently and free from undo political influence.”
Biden pulled a similar stunt with Peter Robb, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. Like Gustafson, Robb was in a Senate-confirmed position to serve a four-year term at an independent agency when Biden fired him.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Biden’s Judiciary: A Tower of Babel - The American Conservative
In the new administration, identity politics and career advancement for judicial nominees take priority over justice.
www.theamericanconservative.com
Home/Articles/Politics/Biden’s Judiciary: A Tower Of Babel
POLITICS
Biden’s Judiciary: A Tower Of Babel
The new administration seeks to further politicize the courts and revise the justice system.
300 year old statue of Lady Justice overseeing the Well of Justice at Frankfurt's Roemer Square, Germany.
MARCH 15, 2021
GEORGE LIEBMANN
Dana Remus, President Biden’s White House counsel, has addressed a letter to Democratic senators asking for their recommendations of candidates for appointment to the 40 or so vacancies on the federal district courts. She has asked for persons “whose legal experiences have been historically under-represented on the federal bench,” including those who are “public defenders, civil rights and legal aid attorneys including those based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, veteran status and disability.” Maturity and long experience are not a criterion.
District judges, however—unlike appellate judges, who sit in panels and are in some measure restrained and socialized by their fellows—are equipped with the awesome power of criminal sentencing, as well as the power to enjoin statutes. They do not function as representative bodies. The Trump administration perversely sought youth in its judicial appointees. To its credit, it usually looked for academic excellence, too, but even for district judges, it overly stressed ideology.
Our contemporary senators have little interest in permanent things: enforcement of horizontal and vertical separation of powers, protection of procedural due process, and predictability in the civil law. Yet for a series of classical writers, from Aristotle to Aquinas to Montesquieu, the central function of judges was corrective justice, involving restoration of the status quo and punishment of deviations from it; distributive justice, changing society, was a matter for the legislature.
Judge Bork, beset with five days of questioning about “privacy” and abortion, escaped from the hearing room without a single question being asked about criminal procedure, criminal sentencing, or federal criminal jurisdiction.
To use today’s burning issues in assessing nominees is folly. Justice McReynolds owed his appointment to his record as an antitrust crusader; Justice Sherman Minton’s appointment was due to his consistent support of the New Deal. Their prior records did not predict McReynolds’s hostility to the welfare state or Minton’s conservatism on civil liberties issues.
Advocacy groups favor appointment of federal appellate judges with known positions on fashionable issues. State court judges know about criminal cases and family law and private practitioners know about legal costs and the private economy, but senators do not care about such things.
This is something new. Justices Holmes, Cardozo, and Brennan came from state courts; Justices Hughes, Stone, Jackson, Black, Powell, and Rehnquist from political offices; Justices Brandeis and Powell from private practice; Justice Frankfurter from the legal academy. The second Justice Harlan was appointed from the federal appellate bench, but he had served there for barely a year.
Federal judicial appointments were once terminal appointments, not steps on a career ladder. Trimming for office is sometimes quite visible. Judge Bork was accused of it, at least in his speeches, if not opinions; the judges of the District of Columbia circuit, almost all candidates for promotion, have not been profiles in courage in terrorism cases. Indeed, they have virtually nullified the writ of habeas corpus.
An inordinate number of judicial appointees to lower courts have been either U.S. Attorneys or federal magistrates; one study revealed that 175 out of President Obama’s 300 appointments to the District Courts had these backgrounds, 49 of them as magistrates, whose work involves passing on search or arrest warrants or setting bail; they become effectively part of the prosecutorial establishment in their daily associations. The work is repetitive and those who embark upon it at an early age do so with future promotion in mind. Unfortunately, they become walled off from the preoccupations of the citizenry at large.
Two other factors poison the selection process. The first is political partisanship, departed from in recent times only by Gerald Ford, with the advice of Attorney General Edward Levi, 25 percent of whose District Court appointees and 10% of whose appellate court appointees were Democrats. Remus seeks the advice of only Democratic senators. Yet Winston Churchill, in his address to the Italian people in 1944, enunciated seven “simple practical tests” by which freedom could be known in the modern world, the third of which was: “Are the courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free of all association with particular political parties?”
A second peril is the new vogue for what is called diversity, which already has produced judicial impeachments. Judges who think of themselves as members of representative bodies are apt to be unrestrained in the exercise of their powers. But George Orwell once declared: “The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horsehair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England.” The Attlee government’s judicial appointees were almost all products of Eton and Oxford, with long experience at the private bar, who regarded themselves as neither revolutionaries nor counter-revolutionaries and who left social reforms unobstructed. Justice Holmes once said: “in the state courts at least, there has been too little rather than too much [Back Bay in appointments]. Men to whom all ideas and all books come easy rarely are found outside that class.” Although the detached Holmes is remembered as an apostle of majority rule, and tolerance of controversial speech and legislation, people forget that he also wrote the first opinion, Moore v. Dempsey, applying the Bill of Rights to state criminal procedure.
It was idle to hope that President Biden would look to the state courts and to private practitioners with varied experience, and even to some Republicans, for his judicial appointments. That would have rescued the federal courts from the political mire into which they are sliding and would have helped restore government by consent of the governed. Instead, the District Courts are to be populated by young and narrowly experienced lawyers from legal aid and public defender offices and liberal advocacy groups. The institution of a federal civil action thus will resemble a game of Russian roulette. Forum-shopping and manipulation of chamber-judge designations and related-case forms will become endemic, and the tolerance that comes with age and experience becomes a positive disqualification, as does experience with the non-federal parts of the federal system. While the collegial nature of appellate courts will somewhat mitigate the impact of an influx of inexperienced and partisan judges, the full brunt of their entry will be felt in the District Courts. There we will have civil righteousness in criminal cases and plaintiff orientation in civil cases. The ideal of impartial justice is at war with identity politics; Biden’s judge-pickers are in search of professionals who Theodore Roosevelt would have stigmatized as “hyphenated Americans.” Far from putting to rest or mitigating controversies, the traditional function of the judiciary, Ms. Remus’ approach will aggravate and stimulate them.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
He's Ba-ack! Former Soviet Alexander Vindman Wants Conservative Media Sued to Shut Down Opposing Views | The Gateway Pundit | by Jim Hoft
Spoken like a true Soviet Marxist– Failed impeachment star witness Alexander Vindman wants conservative media to be sued into oblivion in order to silence opposing voices in the United States.
www.thegatewaypundit.com
He’s Ba-ack! Former Soviet Alexander Vindman Wants Conservative Media Sued to Shut Down Opposing Views
By Jim Hoft
Published March 16, 2021 at 10:56am
Spoken like a true Soviet Marxist–
Failed impeachment star witness Alexander Vindman wants conservative media to be sued into oblivion in order to silence opposing voices in the United States.
Vindman wrote about this at the Lawfare blog on Tuesday.
After the failed impeachment Vindman later admitted he was a “Never-Trumper” and that Trump was a “useful idiot” for Vladimir Putin.
Breitbart.com reported:
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.), a key figure in the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, published an op-ed Monday at the Lawfare blog in which he proposed suing conservative media outlets to make them less “radicalized.”
Vindman wants the First Amendment restricted so that leftists who believe as he does can shut down unapproved speech in America.
This guy took a little bit of the Soviet Union with him when he moved to America.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
UK
We Willingly Gave Up Liberty, Yet Are Shocked To Find Out We Are Less Free
TUESDAY, MAR 16, 2021 - 03:30 AM
Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,
Many have been shocked by the scenes in Clapham on Saturday night, where the Metropolitan Police used extremely heavy-handed tactics to break up what appears to have been a peaceful protest and vigil, held in memory of Sarah Everard, who was brutally murdered just days earlier. The reason they did this was because the protest contravened the rules on public gatherings, introduced by the Government and supported by almost all Parliamentarians, as part of apparent efforts to keep us all “safe”.
I confess I am not especially shocked by these scenes. It was clear to me that we gave up on being a free country in March last year when millions of people supinely accepted the apparent need for the curtailment of liberties, ostensibly (but absurdly) aimed at “controlling a virus”. Together with a very few other voices, I warned many times that Lockdowns, and their wide acceptance as an appropriate policy, marked another nail in the coffin of the free Britain we knew, and would likely herald the start of a slide into a far more despotic society and police state.
The Metropolitan Police’s actions were indeed disgraceful, but they were entirely consistent with the powers granted to the authorities under the Coronavirus Act, and entirely in keeping with the treatment meted out to those who peacefully protested against that very legislation in numerous demonstrations last year. In short, they are inseparable from Lockdown laws, which millions accepted with supine acquiescence last year.
If you supported the despotic Lockdown policy, copied straight from the totalitarian Chinese State (as Professor Neil Ferguson candidly admitted), which included curtailments of the right to peacefully protest, why are you shocked at what happened in Clapham? What did you expect? Did you seriously think that freedom and liberty can be turned on and off like a tap: off, when politicians say it needs to be turned off; on, when they say it’s safe to do so? Did you seriously think that the path to freedom required you to first give up your freedoms?
If so, perhaps you are finally discovering that this is not actually how freedom works. In the grand scheme of things, the kinds of liberties enjoyed by millions over many decades in this country are an aberration. They are a historic abnormality, granted by the grace and providence of God, through people who were far wiser than our generation — people who understood that the only way to grant and ensure the liberties of a people is to first and foremost put limitations on those holding power.
In the last year, because of irrational and wholly disproportionate fears of a virus which is not deadly to around 99.8% of people, we have allowed these ancient freedoms and laws to be taken away by those who have seized the opportunity to increase their powers. Indeed, the Government and so-called opposition, far from trying to allay people’s fears, as one would hope from good and responsible leaders, deliberately ramped up an extraordinary campaign of fear and hysteria, the likes of which have never been seen before. Why? The late Tony Benn can help us here:
It’s as if we had all been handed a great and marvelous forest, which had grown up over a thousand years, and which we were asked to preserve and hand on to the next generation. But because of a threat that was in reality no greater than the 1957 and 1968 influenza outbreaks, we agreed to give our leaders carte blanche to burn it down, which they have done very effectively, in just a few months.
And we wonder why the police now look like a militia. We wonder why peaceful protests are broken up. We wonder why perfectly lawful activities are increasingly penalised. And as if that weren’t enough, The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is to be brought before the House of Commons this week, which if passed will expand police powers to stop protests, with criminal penalties for those who cause “serious annoyance” or “serious inconvenience” (whatever that means) of up to 10 years in prison (see section 59 (2) c here).
As a nation, we supinely let the Government tear up our ancient liberties for a virus, which we could have dealt with by concentrating resources and efforts on protecting the vulnerable. Instead, the nation was put under house arrest, the vulnerable were not protected (the UK has the 4th highest deaths per million, despite having one of the most stringent Lockdowns), and we now begin to see just how much we look like another country entirely. More like the country we copied our Lockdown from, in fact.
CS Lewis made the following comment in The Abolition of Man:
We Willingly Gave Up Liberty, Yet Are Shocked To Find Out We Are Less Free
TUESDAY, MAR 16, 2021 - 03:30 AM
Authored by Rob Slane via TheBlogMire.com,
Many have been shocked by the scenes in Clapham on Saturday night, where the Metropolitan Police used extremely heavy-handed tactics to break up what appears to have been a peaceful protest and vigil, held in memory of Sarah Everard, who was brutally murdered just days earlier. The reason they did this was because the protest contravened the rules on public gatherings, introduced by the Government and supported by almost all Parliamentarians, as part of apparent efforts to keep us all “safe”.
I confess I am not especially shocked by these scenes. It was clear to me that we gave up on being a free country in March last year when millions of people supinely accepted the apparent need for the curtailment of liberties, ostensibly (but absurdly) aimed at “controlling a virus”. Together with a very few other voices, I warned many times that Lockdowns, and their wide acceptance as an appropriate policy, marked another nail in the coffin of the free Britain we knew, and would likely herald the start of a slide into a far more despotic society and police state.
The Metropolitan Police’s actions were indeed disgraceful, but they were entirely consistent with the powers granted to the authorities under the Coronavirus Act, and entirely in keeping with the treatment meted out to those who peacefully protested against that very legislation in numerous demonstrations last year. In short, they are inseparable from Lockdown laws, which millions accepted with supine acquiescence last year.
If you supported the despotic Lockdown policy, copied straight from the totalitarian Chinese State (as Professor Neil Ferguson candidly admitted), which included curtailments of the right to peacefully protest, why are you shocked at what happened in Clapham? What did you expect? Did you seriously think that freedom and liberty can be turned on and off like a tap: off, when politicians say it needs to be turned off; on, when they say it’s safe to do so? Did you seriously think that the path to freedom required you to first give up your freedoms?
If so, perhaps you are finally discovering that this is not actually how freedom works. In the grand scheme of things, the kinds of liberties enjoyed by millions over many decades in this country are an aberration. They are a historic abnormality, granted by the grace and providence of God, through people who were far wiser than our generation — people who understood that the only way to grant and ensure the liberties of a people is to first and foremost put limitations on those holding power.
In the last year, because of irrational and wholly disproportionate fears of a virus which is not deadly to around 99.8% of people, we have allowed these ancient freedoms and laws to be taken away by those who have seized the opportunity to increase their powers. Indeed, the Government and so-called opposition, far from trying to allay people’s fears, as one would hope from good and responsible leaders, deliberately ramped up an extraordinary campaign of fear and hysteria, the likes of which have never been seen before. Why? The late Tony Benn can help us here:
Which is precisely what has happened. Through fear and hysteria, millions actually believed the authorities when they put forward the absurd suggestion that they could “Control the Virus.” In fact, what they then proceeded to do was “Control the People.” The idea that Lockdowns “Control the Virus” and reduce mortality has been shown by more than 30 studies to be a fallacy; whereas the truth that Lockdowns “Control the People” is blindingly obvious, and should be apparent to everyone after a year of often mad restrictions that have curtailed perfectly normal activities.
It’s as if we had all been handed a great and marvelous forest, which had grown up over a thousand years, and which we were asked to preserve and hand on to the next generation. But because of a threat that was in reality no greater than the 1957 and 1968 influenza outbreaks, we agreed to give our leaders carte blanche to burn it down, which they have done very effectively, in just a few months.
And we wonder why the police now look like a militia. We wonder why peaceful protests are broken up. We wonder why perfectly lawful activities are increasingly penalised. And as if that weren’t enough, The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill is to be brought before the House of Commons this week, which if passed will expand police powers to stop protests, with criminal penalties for those who cause “serious annoyance” or “serious inconvenience” (whatever that means) of up to 10 years in prison (see section 59 (2) c here).
As a nation, we supinely let the Government tear up our ancient liberties for a virus, which we could have dealt with by concentrating resources and efforts on protecting the vulnerable. Instead, the nation was put under house arrest, the vulnerable were not protected (the UK has the 4th highest deaths per million, despite having one of the most stringent Lockdowns), and we now begin to see just how much we look like another country entirely. More like the country we copied our Lockdown from, in fact.
CS Lewis made the following comment in The Abolition of Man:
We have removed that which made us free, and yet still demand freedom. We have castrated our liberties, and yet still expect to live in the Britain that was free. I don’t think so. Those who ridiculed or dismissed the warnings some of us gave a year ago would do well to reflect on their complacency.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
BLM and the limits of propaganda
donsurber.blogspot.com
Don Surber
Monday, March 15, 2021
BLM and the limits of propaganda
Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic is worried that liberals are pushing the Black Lives Matter movement too hard in school.
In a piece titled, "What Happens When a Slogan Becomes the Curriculum," he warned readers of the indoctrination of kindergarteners by BLM.
Friedersdorf wrote, "In Evanston, Illinois, parents are asked to quiz their kids on whiteness and give them approachable examples of 'how whiteness shows up in school or in the community.' In its focus on 'whiteness' and its invitation to readers to challenge racism by interrogating and rejecting it, the worldview of Not My Idea is similar to that of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, now a staple of diversity-and-inclusion programs and anti-racism training. Not My Idea is also a jarringly didactic assignment for kindergartners.
"The BLM at School movement is gaining momentum in Democratic strongholds around the country, where millions have felt impelled to respond to the high-profile police killings of Black Americans and the inequities that such incidents expose. Parents and educators in these enclaves are largely united in believing that Black lives matter, and that schools should encourage students of all ages to reject racism and remedy its injustices, much as previous generations of schoolchildren were taught to 'Just Say No to Drugs' and to 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.' "
Therein lies the problem with propaganda. It is limited by a person's self-interest. It's easy for a fellow like Michael Moore to denounce white men. He has made a living off it since his book Stupid White Men debuted in 2001.
Does Moore believe his nonsense? Not when it applies to him. He does not believe he is stupid. In fact, he does not see himself as a white man. He sees himself as Michael Moore, genius millionaire.
What BLM is selling is self-hatred to white people. Good luck with that. It is Hitler trying to sell Nazism to Jews.
Which is why Friedersdorf wrote, "In all such campaigns, a distinction can be drawn between the galvanizing slogan, which by design is popular and difficult to oppose, and the ideological and policy goals of the people promoting it. In other words, people might believe deeply that Black lives matter while disagreeing with Black Lives Matter organizers about specific claims. But for the BLM at School movement, agreeing with the broad slogan implies a particular approach to anti-racist activism—one that draws on academic approaches such as critical race theory and intersectionality; rejects individualism and aspirational color-blindness; and acts in solidarity with projects including decoloniality, anti-capitalism, and queer liberation."
The key words are "rejects individualism."
The propagandist's argument is always the same: we would have a fine society for everyone if only people stopped being individuals.
Friedersdorf is OK with the message and the aim. His only misgiving is that BLM is over-the-top.
He wrote, "As an alumnus of 14 years of Catholic education, I know that a few dogmatic teachers do not reliably yield lifelong believers. And I happen to agree that, on certain basic questions, educators should not be evenhanded. Do the lives of all of their students have value? Yes. Should students be acculturated to participate in civic life to improve the world?
Yes. Should they be discriminated against because of their race or religion or gender or disability status? No. The list goes on. But educators should be neutral as to the question 'Should my students embrace the narrative and policy agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement and become activists on its behalf?' "
His piece gave me hope because it pointed out two past failures. The Straight A's kids said no to drugs and recycled. Everyone else went through the motions and in the end we legalized pot and kept building landfills.
50 years ago, when I was 17 and in high school, I thought we would be rid of racism because all the old stupid white men -- Bull Connor and his ilk -- would be dead.
I did not realize at the time that they would be replaced by old black men -- Jim Clyburn and his ilk -- who profit from racial politics.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The Great Con Pt 4: The Racism Con ⋆ Politicrossing
America is the least racist we have ever been!
politicrossing.com
FAITH
The Great Con Pt 4: The Racism Con
America is the least racist we have ever been!
March 3, 2021
By
Chris Widener
PolitiCrossing Founder Chris Widener explains the Great Con the left uses to convince races to hate each other so they can be separated into voting blocks. Yet America is the least racist we have ever been!
Mic.com has this to say about a recent survey:
“The study was aimed at discerning a correlation between a country’s level of economic freedom and its racial tolerance. The latter was defined by one simple question, as asked in the World Values Survey: Whom would you not want as a neighbor? Those who selected “people of other races” were categorized as intolerant for the purposes of this investigation.
Countries were then ranked by percentage of responses: the fewer “intolerant” respondents, the more tolerant the country. While the Swedish researches found no conclusive results regarding any strong correlation between economic development and tolerance, a recent Washington Post article article went back to the original survey source and compiled a greater sample of data for the purposes of determining other potential relationships between a country and its perceived level of tolerance.
“According to this infographic, the U.S. falls into the most tolerant category, with only 0-4.9% of those surveyed responding that they would not want to live near people of other races. Our neighbor to the north responded in kind, while Mexico ranked in the second-tier of tolerance, making the totality of North America look like a big amalgamation of racial harmony.”
Here is Chris Widener on the Great Racism Con:
Rumble video 7:25 min
marsh
On TB every waking moment
California Bill Proposes Removing Cops Who Express Religious Or Conservative Beliefs
A new bill in California would arbitrarily define "hate groups" and "hate speech," resulting in Christians and conservatives being targeted.
thefederalist.com
California Bill Proposes Removing Cops Who Express Religious Or Conservative Beliefs
MARCH 16, 2021 By Gabe Kaminsky
A new bill introduced by California State Assembly Member Ash Kalra in San Jose would prohibit police officers from serving if they have used arbitrarily defined “hate speech” or are affiliated with a “hate group.”
The bill, known as the California Law Enforcement Accountability Reform Act (CLEAR Act), claims to combat “the infiltration of extremists in our law enforcement agencies” and would mandate a background check for all officers who have “exchanged racist and homophobic messages.”
Kalra claims that AB 655 is necessary to prevent “the apparent cooperation, participation, and support of some law enforcement” in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
The bill defines hate speech as “as advocating or supporting the denial of constitutional rights of, the genocide of, or violence towards, any group of persons based upon race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability.”
Pacific Justice Institute Senior Staff Attorney Matthew McReynolds said this broad and purposefully arbitrary definition could give way for Christians and conservatives to be classified as “hateful” based on the premise of rejecting abortion or supporting Proposition 8 in California, a same-sex amendment that passed in 2008.
McReynolds also questioned how this would affect those of the Muslim faith — since many religious mosques and followers have taken a stance against homosexuality.
“Under the guise of addressing police gangs, the bill at the same time launches an inexplicable, unwarranted, and unprecedented attack on peaceable, conscientious officers who happen to hold conservative political and religious views,” wrote Reynolds. “Indeed, this is one of the most undisguised and appalling attempts we have ever seen, in more than 20 years of monitoring such legislation, on the freedom of association and freedom to choose minority viewpoints.”
The California GOP currently states in its platform that it believes in traditional marriage and does not believe that Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark Supreme Court case on same-sex marriage decided in 2015, can “coerce a church or religious institution into performing marriages that their faith does not recognize.”
According to this new Democratic bill, disagreeing on moral or religious grounds with homosexuality would technically mean the state GOP is espousing hate speech.
“Should the state now ban from public service qualified, fair-minded people who happen to hold religious or political views that conflict with controversial Supreme Court decisions on marriage and abortion?” asks Greg Burt, Director of Capitol Engagement with the California Family Council. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional violation of religious liberty and freedom of speech. It is also a tyrannical abuse of power from a politician seeking to ruin the lives of those he disagrees with.”
On April 6, AB 655 will head for a vote before the Assembly Public Safety Committee.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Charlie Kirk: Bari Weiss Shines a Light on the Elite’s Well-Hidden Dissident Movement.
The former New York Times journalist educates us all on wokism with brilliant investigative reporting.
humanevents.com
CHARLIE KIRK: BARI WEISS SHINES A LIGHT ON THE ELITE’S WELL-HIDDEN DISSIDENT MOVEMENT.
By Charlie Kirk | March 15, 2021
This past week, former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss wrote an enlightening, albeit poorly titled, piece in the City Journal, a publication of the highly respected Manhattan Institute. The lengthy piece, published under the headline “The Miseducation of America’s Elites” would better have been titled “The Secret Society Plan to Take Back Private Schools.”
The choice of weak headline is the only deficit to be found in what is a very telling piece of investigative journalism. Weiss was able to get up close and personal with parents and students, both in Los Angeles’ fashionable Brentwood area and in New York City, and discover an emerging dissident movement within “privileged” white communities.
Weiss discovered that the very same families who helped to invent and promote “wokism” are now starting to recoil, at least privately, as they are beginning to see the results of their ideals reflected in their own children’s education. The opening paragraph is so powerful you are forced to read the piece in its entirety. It opens: “The dissidents use pseudonyms and turn off their videos when they meet for clandestine Zoom calls. They are usually coordinating soccer practices and carpools, but now they come together to strategize. They say that they could face profound repercussions if anyone knew they were talking.”
Remove the reference to current technology, and this paragraph could just as easily have opened an exposé on East German dissidents meeting beyond the eyes of the Stasi back in 1968. Only this time, these parents are not discussing the lives of others. This time, it is their own lives—more specifically, the lives of their children.
Weiss shares conversations with students, parents, and even a New York teacher who says,
“I am in a cult. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s that the cult is all around me and I am trying to save kids from becoming members. I studied critical theory; I saw Derrida speak when I was in college, so when this ideology arrived at our school over the past few years, I recognized the language and I knew what it was. But it was in a mutated form. I started seeing what was happening to the kids. And that’s what I couldn’t take. They are being educated in resentment and fear. It’s extremely dangerous.”
One of the great revelations to the parents Weiss interviews was that wokism could even be happening in a school system that explicitly (and nobly) embraced social justice. The Los Angeles area group she spent time with are parents of students, or students themselves, attending Harvard-Westlake, what Weiss labels as the most prestigious private school in the city. She quotes one father as saying that he understands the school might have had diversity issues that needed to be addressed, but he objects to his child being taught America is a bad country, and that white children bear collective racial guilt.
Another parent, a mother, shared anonymously (all of the parents interviewed asked to remain anonymous) that “they are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin.” These are the kinds of quotes found throughout Weiss’ piece.
While I only had the written word to consider in reading these parent’s thoughts, I felt as though I could somehow hear the intonation in their voice. The sound I kept hearing was the non-verbal inflection of surprise and shock over what’s been happening.
That’s the problem. This isn’t new! Not only is it not new, I would be willing to wager that, over the past twenty-plus years, most of these parents actually were voting for the politicians, from President of the United States down to their local school board members, who were promoting and instituting these kinds of policies. Now that they are seeing their children suffer the sins of the parent, they are upset—but not upset enough to speak up publically. Why?
Out of fear that Johnny or Janey won’t be eligible for Harvard or Brown after graduation.
HATE MOB.
THE KIDS ARE SCARED OF OTHER KIDS
That’s the parents’ story. In terms of the students themselves, it gets even darker; they are the ones actually having their lives ruined by the bigotry of critical race theory and other “woke” educational ideologies. Weiss notes that not only are they worried about not being able to get good grades from their teachers or get into the right college if they express their belief in contraband notions (e.g., capitalism), they also worry about “social shaming.”
Weiss quotes one student as saying, “if you publish my name, it would ruin my life. People would attack me for even questioning this ideology. I don’t even want people knowing I’m a capitalist. The kids are scared of other kids.”
This excellent piece of investigative journalism came out the same week that a story broke, covered in Human Events, about the Grace Church School in New York, an Episcopal elementary school that charges a tuition of $57,000 per year, announcing its new speech code for students. The code includes the following sort of intolerant, woke messaging:
- Instead of “sweetheart/honey/similar pet names” say, “child’s name or ‘child/friend in the blue shirt.”
- Instead of “assuming gender based on stereotypes,” people should “respectfully ask how they identify if familiar, establishing a culture of sharing affirming pronouns in class.”
- Instead of “mom and dad,” say “grown-ups,” “folks,” or “family.”
- Instead of “parents,” say “grown-ups,” “folks,” “family,” and “guardians.”
- Instead of “husband,” “wife,” “boyfriend,” “girlfriend,” say “spouse/partner/significant other.”
- Instead of “diverse/minority,” say “person of color, marginalized identity/population.”
- Instead of asking “what religion are you?” ask “are any religious/faith traditions important to you?”
- Instead of saying “Merry Christmas!/Happy Holidays!” say “have a great break!”
These parents would do well to remember that intelligence and wisdom are not synonyms. What they are allowing their children to be taught through their acquiescence might give them high levels of book smarts, but they will not turn into the kind of human being that lives a rich and fulfilled life.
The parents have been complicit in this. They have been the ones responsible, either deliberately or through their passivity in allowing this cancerous culture war to spread throughout our schools and then into society. They might be waking up, but they are waking up slowly and if they want to really reverse what has been happening they are already quite late for work.
The last paragraph in Weiss’ piece so moved me that it is included here to summarize the true insidiousness of this entire “wokism” ideology. Weiss writes:
“I have a friend in New York who is the mother to a four-year-old. She seems exactly the kind of parent these schools would want to attract: a successful entrepreneur, a feminist, and a diehard Manhattanite. She’d dreamed of sending her daughter to a school like Dalton. One day at home, in the midst of the application process, she was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly: ‘I need to draw in my own skin color.’ Skin color, she told her mother, is ‘really important.’ She said that’s what she learned in school.”
General George S. Patton once said, “moral courage is the most valuable, and usually the most absent characteristic in men.” If these closeted dissident parents don’t start coming out of hiding, if they don’t start sharing their names when giving quotes to Bari Weiss, then they will have shown a lack of moral courage. The only thing that can then allow them to save face will be that since their children will not be taught about the authoritative, white, male, Christian, General who was Geroge Patton, they may never actually be held accountable.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Going Galt: Something Conservatives Must Do
Going Galt is the only choice conservatives have. It is our only chance to get away from the anti-American lunacy of most corporations and the media!
genzconservative.com
Going Galt: Something Conservatives Must Do
Going Galt is really the only choice we have. Although at this point, the Going Galt prescription for curing the ills of this country is like prescribing an aspirin for a case of brain cancer. I have been trying to practice this method solo for years ( I don’t know how long exactly but since before Trump) and I will admit that it is difficult. As it turns out, two of the biggest offenders of ‘anti-American politics’ and Capitalism are two of its biggest beneficiaries, and two of modern society’s biggest work savers and distractions.
Amazon and social media (media in general, but MSM is just PRAVDA at this point, though I do see hope) have such enormous sway over American society. In fact, their influence is limited not just to American society, but Global extends to society. I have long marveled at Amazon’s business model and the efficiencies they are able to achieve. More than once I have remarked that they must employ psychics because my order seems to appear before I hit send.
And China has stolen the idea, added totalitarian paradigms and is exporting their model with gov’t backing, which is their business model, which means they aren’t beholden to a profit motive to the world. The CCP will play nice with the world until it perceives that it no longer needs to, and then will use force to remake everything; shopping, living conditions, energy consumption, dietary allowances, everything will be reworked in the totalitarian model( look up Agenda21/2030). And they won’t have far to go because they have already used their lackeys in our government and news media to convince us that by destroying our economy we will save the planet. All the while, China will be allowed to grow using any means available.
Social media has been a big part of this transformation by allowing points of view that show Globalism in a positive light and by denying points of view that see American freedom and exceptionalism as good, going as far as banning President Trump for his Pro American Point of View. Corporatists, such as Google, NFL, NBA (to name a very few) have knelt down for BLM (an admittedly Marxist organization) to gain access to their enormous markets in order to grow their organizations and sell sneakers.
Going Galt means getting away from all those anti-American companies. For my part, I buy books at local book stores when possible or lacking that Barnes and Nobel although I really haven’t had time to check out their provenance as far as politics. I support conservative candidates (when I am sure of their politics) but I have been fooled by quite a few. (Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Amanda Chase are the real deal) I support conservative news organizations, Just The News, Daily Wire, OANN, and of course my favorite GenZconservative.com.
There are so many things that can be done, learn the conservative platform, inform yourself on your local politics and write letters to politicians, great and small, you never know who will hear your voice. Learn about your politics and get involved, run for office or learn so you don’t have to back down in conversations at the coffee shop.
A Hat Tip to GenZ for penning the original article. I plan on expounding on this idea so keep reading this newsletter.
I only meant this to be a short comment reply but it is such a rich field to plow it got away from me.
By: David Gignac
marsh
On TB every waking moment
At Atlantic Council, Koch-Funded Effort to Marginalize Human Rights Causes Uproar
The drama that unfolded at the Atlantic Council last week as nearly two dozen scholars wrote to dissociate themselves from the work of their colleagues is likely to be the opening skirmish in a broader war over the funding for American foreign policy research playing out in academia and in some...
freebeacon.com
At Atlantic Council, Koch-Funded Effort to Marginalize Human Rights Causes Uproar
Battle likely to spread across Washington as aggressive Koch effort has seeded programs at numerous think tanks
-
Charles Koch / AP
The drama that unfolded at the Atlantic Council last week as nearly two dozen scholars wrote to dissociate themselves from the work of their colleagues is likely to be the opening skirmish in a broader war over the funding for American foreign policy research playing out in academia and in some of Washington, D.C.'s most influential think tanks.
The source of the drama was an analysis published earlier this month by Emma Ashford and Mathew Burrows, who argued that putting human rights at the center of the U.S.-Russia relationship undermines American interests. The piece was published under the aegis of a new national security strategy center funded by the Charles Koch Institute, which has advocated for an isolationist foreign policy—or, as the Kochs and the scholars they fund are now terming it, "a grand strategy of restraint"—with a long tradition in Republican politics from the America First Committee of the 1940s to the Buchananites of the 1980s and '90s.
Intellectual disagreement is standard fare in both worlds. What happened at the Atlantic Council, as more than two dozen scholars issued a terse note dissociating themselves from the work of their colleagues, points to a much deeper conflict. A Politico report published Thursday offered a window into the brouhaha, with several Atlantic Council fellows alleging that the Koch money was corrupting the scholarship or, as one anonymous expert put it: "The Koch industry operates as a Trojan horse operation trying to destroy good institutions and they have pretty much the same views as the Russians."
Simmering beneath the surface, according to interviews with a dozen experts across a half-dozen D.C. think tanks, including the Atlantic Council, is a debate that has roiled American think tanks over the past decade: how these institutions are funded and what, exactly, the donors who underwrite them are getting for their money.
The controversial view that caused last week's kerfuffle—that the United States should look the other way on the human rights violations of its adversaries—is espoused by the scholars who sit atop virtually every Koch-funded program, the result of an aggressive and explicit push to undermine what remains of the country's foreign policy consensus and replace it with a different one.
Over the past several years, Charles Koch Institute vice president William Ruger, President Donald Trump's failed nominee to be ambassador to Afghanistan, has approached virtually every major think tank in the city offering to fund proponents of "restraint," according to a dozen think-tank sources familiar with the situation.
One think-tank expert on the receiving end of a Koch pitch described it this way: "They said to us, ‘The debate is not diverse, the restrainers are not respected, and … our wisdom is ignored.'"
Ruger did not respond to a request for comment, though he himself has written—in an essay in the Koch-funded National Interest—to endorse "restraint," arguing, "Any such perestroika, or new thinking, will be resisted among our regnant elites."
Organizations from the Atlantic Council to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the International Crisis Group, the Center for the National Interest, and the Eurasia Group Foundation have taken Ruger and the Charles Koch Institute up on the offer. The list goes on: the Cato Institute, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and, as of last year, even the government-funded RAND Corporation.
That explains why a recent RAND Corporation report, titled "Implementing Restraint," stipulates that "advocates of restraint believe that the United States should adopt a less confrontational policy toward Russia," including "accepting a Russian sphere of influence."
The report continues: "Advocates of restraint do not argue that Russia poses a significant threat to vital U.S. interests," nor do they believe that Russian disinformation represents "a serious threat to U.S. interests."
A $1.19 million Koch grant is also behind polling from the Eurasia Group Foundation that purportedly demonstrates the American public's support for this approach. "When confronting human rights abuses, consistently across party affiliations, restraint was the first choice, U.N. leadership was the second choice, and American intervention was the last choice," the report found, concluding that "the public desire for a more restrained U.S. foreign policy is significant and diverse."
And that funding helps to explain why Center for the National Interest president and CEO Dimitri K. Simes argues that through a "restrained" foreign policy, the United States should allow Russia and other human rights abusers to "live more or less according to their own standards."
These views caused controversy at the Atlantic Council in particular in part because the organization was founded in the early 1960s to support transatlantic cooperation, and several scholars argued privately that the isolationist views espoused by Ashford and Burrows undermine that ethos with what one fellow described as "red pill pieces."
"That isn't ‘realism,' it's cold indifference to freedom masquerading as realism," said Elliott Abrams, the former assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs.
"It is particularly disgusting to see Alexei Navalny attacked—at exactly the moment when anyone interested in human rights should be protesting the kangaroo court conviction that has sent him to a labor camp for years."
A handful of D.C. think tanks, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, have turned down the Koch money, pointing privately to the Kochs' insistence on approving the scholars who would be hired with the funds. "They clearly dictate who you take, there's no doubt about it, in a much more intrusive way than other donors who fund fellowships and chairs," said a source familiar with the CSIS negotiations.
A spokesman for CSIS, Andrew Schwartz, told the Washington Free Beacon that the organization has "on occasion performed some small project work that has been funded by Koch" and that while Ruger did approach the think tank about a subsequent project, "We never got far enough in the conversation to discuss anything about hiring."
A spokesman for the Atlantic Council, Alex Kisling, said that the Atlantic Council’s Burrows approached the Charles Koch Institute about funding and that the Atlantic Council "has full hiring independence."
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
The Consent Of The Governed
TUESDAY, MAR 16, 2021 - 08:45 PM
Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
In Holland Sunday, a protest demonstration against government Covid policies provoked a emergency order from that same government against thousands of people gathering in a place to … protest. The police and government had only “allowed” 200 demonstrators. So the government “allowed” a protest against itself, but demanded the right to determine where, how, and with how many people it could take place. But that’s not really a protest, is it? The police deployed dogs, horses and water cannons to disperse the crowd.
In Greece, a video appeared last Sunday of a policeman severely beating a man.
Protests against that have occurred daily since. The prime minister spoke out against the protests, not the policeman. That made people even angrier. And then he proposed a “police reform” law. Yeah. And everybody lived happily ever after. But under heavy restrictions.
In the UK, a peaceful vigil for a woman kidnapped and murdered -by a policeman!- was broken up by police Saturday because there was “no permission” given for it. Several women were handcuffed and dragged across the pavement. Meanwhile, the government is introducing a “police reform” law (they’re popular these days!) that would impose conditions even on one-person protests. And protesters can’t make noise. And so much police will be deployed that it may become too costly to “allow” the protest.
In Canberra, capital of Australia, 10s of 1000s protested because of a rape scandal inside government buildings. Good thing the restrictions were recently eased, or the same government that’s so busy trying to hide the scandal would have not “allowed” the protest.
It’s perfectly safe to call this extremism. It all takes place against the background of one year of failed Covid measures and restrictions. Though of course governments will always claim the pandemic would have been much worse without them. But after a year, what right do they still have to impose restrictions? What right did they ever have in the first place to tell people they cannot travel, assemble, see their family or go to work? And how has that right, if they ever had it, changed after a year-long “emergency”?
I’ve talked about legal issues before, but I still don’t see them discussed. I see no supreme courts testing laws or calling governments back. People in democracies are told they have basic and inalienable rights. But not anymore. Joe Biden talked about how Americans could, if they were good and obedient, maybe invite a few friends over for the Fourth of July. How many inalienable rights does that trample on in one go?
Where did these governments all go wrong? Well, here:
And here:
They’re not benign public servants, they’re drug pushers -in this case vaccines- with armies and bodyguards. They protect corporations and institutions, not the rights of their people. They’re not democrats, they’re authoritarians. We are ruled by ideologies, not principles. The only rights we have are those that they “allow” us to have. There are no basic or inalienable rights left. Our politicians represent, and serve, long established parties and systems that have ruled for at least decades, in a symbiosis with corporations.
If there’s one lesson to learn from the sordid never-ending Covid episode it must be that: your human rights are just a thin veneer that serves to make your reality look nice and shiny, but may be scraped off at any moment. What does that say about our forefathers and -mothers who fought, and died, in order to provide us with inalienable rights? Do we really owe those people less than we owe our current ruling classes?
I read yesterday that the health minister of Jordan has resigned because 6 Covid patients died due to a failing oxygen supply in a hospital. I think that’s the first time I’ve seen a politician being held to account for Covid failure. And even he is probably just a scapegoat.
I’ve seen a few reports on the damage the lockdowns and other measures do to children’s minds. They mostly talk about schools being closed, as if schools are every child’s happy place. Of course not. Children simply need other children, so they can find their place in the world, it has nothing to do with a school. But this goes far beyond children, untold millions of adults also will come away with mental traumas. People need people.
We have a few questions we should ask ourselves. History teaches us that rights being taken away are awfully hard to regain. That the Constitution talks about the Consent of the Governed also means that the governed were considered to be able to make proper, just decisions about their own lives, and had the right to do that, without goverment intervention.
But you are not.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
What Happens When a Slogan Becomes the Curriculum
A curriculum inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement is spreading, raising questions about the line between education and indoctrination.
www.theatlantic.com
What Happens When a Slogan Becomes the Curriculum
A curriculum inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement is spreading, raising questions about the line between education and indoctrination.
MARCH 14, 2021
Conor Friedersdorf
Staff writer at The Atlantic
ADAM MAIDA / BETTMANN / GETTY / THE ATLANTIC
Last month, a public-school district that serves mostly elementary and middle-school students in Evanston, Illinois, held its third annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action—using a curriculum, created in collaboration with Black Lives Matter activists and the local teachers’ union, that introduces children as young as 4 and 5 to some of America’s most complex and controversial subjects. For example, parents of kindergartners in District 65 were asked to spend time at home discussing a book on race that teachers had read aloud to their children.
Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, by Anastasia Higginbotham, begins with a white mother turning off a television set to prevent her little daughter from seeing footage of a white policeman shooting a Black man. “You don’t need to worry about this,” the mother says. “You’re safe. Understand? Our family is kind to everyone. We don’t see color.” The book corrects the mother: “Deep down, we all know color matters,” it states. “Skin color makes a difference in how the world sees you and in how you see the world … It makes a difference in how much trouble seems to find you or let you be.” The book teaches that the truth about “your own people, your own family” can be painful. Next to an illustration of the mother locking her car door and grasping her wallet while driving in a neighborhood where Black children are standing on the street, the narrator notes, “Even people you love might behave in ways that show they think they are the good ones.” Later, the little girl castigates her mother for trying to hide the police shooting and other racism. “Why didn’t anyone teach me real history?” she yells. “I do see color … You can’t hide what’s right in front of me. I know that what that police officer did was wrong!”
The book instructs a young white reader that she doesn’t need to “defend” racism, and it presents her with a stark decision. An illustration depicts a devil holding a “contract binding you to whiteness.” It reads:
In Evanston, parents are asked to quiz their kids on whiteness and give them approachable examples of “how whiteness shows up in school or in the community.” In its focus on “whiteness” and its invitation to readers to challenge racism by interrogating and rejecting it, the worldview of Not My Idea is similar to that of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, now a staple of diversity-and-inclusion programs and anti-racism training. Not My Idea is also a jarringly didactic assignment for kindergartners.
The BLM at School movement is gaining momentum in Democratic strongholds around the country, where millions have felt impelled to respond to the high-profile police killings of Black Americans and the inequities that such incidents expose. Parents and educators in these enclaves are largely united in believing that Black lives matter, and that schools should encourage students of all ages to reject racism and remedy its injustices, much as previous generations of schoolchildren were taught to “Just Say No to Drugs” and to “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”
In all such campaigns, a distinction can be drawn between the galvanizing slogan, which by design is popular and difficult to oppose, and the ideological and policy goals of the people promoting it. In other words, people might believe deeply that Black lives matter while disagreeing with Black Lives Matter organizers about specific claims. But for the BLM at School movement, agreeing with the broad slogan implies a particular approach to anti-racist activism—one that draws on academic approaches such as critical race theory and intersectionality; rejects individualism and aspirational color-blindness; and acts in solidarity with projects including decoloniality, anti-capitalism, and queer liberation.
Indeed, with the educational resources it creates and curates, the national BLM at School coalition unapologetically aims to create a new generation of allied activists. And that influence shows in Evanston, where, starting in the spring of 2019, the District 65 Educators’ Council––the local teachers’ union––proposed to work with administrators to develop a local BLM at School curriculum. By autumn, the school board had approved a week of lessons. The curriculum—which district leaders say aligns with Illinois social-studies standards and guidelines—draws on the materials and guiding principles of the national initiative while also adding texts such as Not My Idea, which doesn’t appear on the national BLM at School’s current list of recommended books.
Both in the material recommended by the national movement and in uniquely local lessons, some prompts to think critically are presented alongside other material that crosses a line from education into indoctrination. Educators should inform students and teach them how to think for themselves about how to improve the world, not inculcate any particular faction’s agenda or viewpoints as if they were presumptively good and true. The flaws in BLM at School curricula in Evanston and elsewhere aren’t a failure of activism––national and local Black Lives Matter advocates have promoted their worldview quite effectively. They are failures of the public-school system—albeit failures that would require extraordinary effort and skill to avoid, given a curriculum built atop an activist movement.
I say that as a strong proponent of significant ideas dear to Black Lives Matter activists. My prior reporting and commentary on BLM has focused on its many interventions in the police-reform debate. I have praised the sophisticated reform agenda set forth under the auspices of its Campaign Zero faction. More recently, I’ve watched the ascendance of a separate BLM faction that wants to “defund the police.” Although I prefer the police-reform approach, activists of all sorts should get a hearing when they put forth ideas that might improve public policy or the public-education curriculum. And after I reviewed District 65’s BLM at School curriculum, my impression was that educators aligned with the movement had recommended some valuable material, including lessons about restorative justice and the underappreciated benefits of living in households where members of three or more generations are all in routine contact with one another.
Much of the curriculum is an easy fit with community values in Evanston. The overwhelming majority of the city’s roughly 75,000 residents are liberal and progressive. Joe Biden won 91 percent of the vote there in November. (One of the 18 schools in District 65 is in neighboring Skokie, another strongly Democratic-leaning Chicago suburb.) Yet even in a resolutely Democratic area, some self-described liberals and progressives, who are happy to have their children taught that Black lives matter, have misgivings about public schools encouraging their children to adopt the expansive agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement.
“There’s a lot of things to love in this BLM week—such as teaching empathy and tolerance, helping students recognize bias,” one parent told me in an email. “I know the district, and the people behind this are well intentioned. They want to build a better, more just world. But this curriculum crosses a line that public school educators, regardless of political views, need to respect.” He continued,
This parent requested anonymity because he fears the potential career repercussions of publicly criticizing an initiative touted as combatting racism. In his telling, his school district’s leadership frames any criticism of its “equity” curricula as “white supremacist thinking.” Superintendent Devon Horton declined my requests for an interview, but District 65 put me in touch with Stacy Beardsley, the assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction. Parent feedback, she told me, is one of the factors that will inform the review of the entire District 65 social-studies curriculum currently under way. Beardsley also argued that the district wants students to think critically about what they’re taught. “We are not in the business of telling kids what to think and to feel,” she said. “We want to put out information and give kids the skill to interrogate those sources, to drive inquiry, to ask questions, and ultimately to be critically conscious.”
The idea that became Black Lives Matter at School dates back to October 19, 2016, when thousands of Seattle educators went to school in black lives matter T-shirts. That news reached a group of educators in Philadelphia, who were inspired to develop a week-long curriculum grounded in their understanding of the principles of the decentralized activist movement. Soon, educators and schools in more than 20 cities from Los Angeles to Boston participated in what the BLM at School website calls a “national uprising” involving “lessons about structural racism, intersectional black identities, black history, and anti-racist movements.” The initiative has been spreading ever since.
The committee that formulated the current national BLM at School classroom resources is chaired by Christopher Rogers, a veteran of organizing work in the Philadelphia public-education system who is now pursuing a doctoral degree in literacy studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Rogers grew up in nearby Chester, a city of 34,000 that frequently ranks as one of Pennsylvania’s poorest and most crime-plagued, and he attended public schools still shaped by the segregation of bygone eras. “We went through every type of educational reform that the state threw at our schools,” he told me in a phone interview. “There was a lot of local corruption, the schools were a part of the dysfunction, and we never really recovered.” As he watched a series of state-appointed private contractors fail to improve local schools, he began to feel that forces beyond the control of his community were keeping it down. When he moved to Philadelphia in 2012, those failures made him wary of efforts driven by education consultants to close troubled public schools in the city. “This was hitting Black and brown communities,” he said, “and it’s where my inroads into organizing began.”
Today, he wants kids to be taught about housing rights, eviction, redlining, police abuses, urban pollution, and all of the other systems that harm the lives of Black people, in the hope that theirs will be the generation that fixes those problems. “When we say Black lives matter,” he said, “how are we articulating that in rooms and institutions that govern people’s lives?”
To help educators shape their lessons about such wide-ranging matters, the BLM at School website lists 13 “guiding principles.” They include values such as empathy and diversity, an embrace of restorative justice, a rejection of ageism, and commitments to lift up LGBTQ people, Black women, and Black families. The “Black villages” principle declares that “we are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, and especially ‘our’ children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.”
The national curriculum itself is expansive, broken down by grade level, from kindergarten through adult education. “It accumulates year over year,” Rogers told me. “We’re inviting educators from all across the country to think about resources they’ve utilized in the past within their own classrooms and thinking about how to share those ideas, lessons, and suggestions.” An all-volunteer committee has the final say on what makes the cut. Local districts and individual teachers can then adapt those recommendations to their own classrooms. They can and do add unapproved material too. Rogers described the BLM at School curriculum as a starting point. “We know this isn’t the full package, so to speak,” he said, “but it can give a trajectory that moves educators in a proper direction toward finding content that can teach the legacies of Black resistance.”
Although the version of BLM at School adopted by Evanston’s District 65 is too expansive to discuss exhaustively here, zeroing in on particular lessons underscores the difficulty of casting complex historical and social issues in doctrinaire terms.
Not My Idea, for example, seems to teach children with white parents that they should not count on their goodness or trustworthiness. And as someone whose profession requires watching awful videos of police killings, I would strongly urge parents to switch off a TV rather than let their young child see one—a choice that the book seems to criticize. Many parents will also find the book’s subject matter too mature for kids not yet in the first grade.
Denisha Jones, a Sarah Lawrence College scholar active in the BLM at School movement, articulated a related concern in a 2020 Zoom discussion with other educators. Teachers must be careful about exposing young kids to horrific material, she said, because the movement’s goal is “to affirm Blackness in children, especially young children,” and “that needs to happen before we even get to America’s history of slavery … It is not appropriate for really young children that they only hear about Black history through a lens of slavery and civil rights.”
Some books chosen for the Evanston BLM at School curriculum are inspired responses to the question of how to introduce sensitive subjects to young children. When developing an explicitly queer- and trans-affirming curriculum, per the BLM at School guiding principles, for instance, what does one teach kindergartners? A book in the national and Evanston curricula, Julián Is a Mermaid, makes its point gently, with gorgeous watercolor illustrations and storytelling that casts the title character’s identity in positive, nondogmatic terms. The publisher’s plot summary captures the gist:
Part 1 of 2
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2
The story would be a blessing in a home with a gender-nonconforming child or parent, and just as useful for children who feel different from their peers in any other way.
More heavy-handed is a lesson called “Empathy, Loving Engagement, and Restorative Justice,” included in a slide deck from Evanston’s third-grade curriculum. The lesson begins with a “teaching point” that states, “Today I’m going to teach you about what the Black Lives Matter movement is and why it’s necessary.” Later slides show photographs of local Black Lives Matter protests. A leading question near the end of the lesson asks students, “Why is it important to learn about Black Lives Matter in school?” In most circumstances, public schools should help students understand significant protest movements that are shaping their world, and Black Lives Matter easily crosses that threshold. But flatly describing the movement as “necessary” is a value judgment.
Americans pursue racial justice through a variety of political ideologies, policy agendas, and tactics. Kids should know that a “correct” approach cannot be identified objectively. One might agree that Black lives matter and that Black people have been unfairly harmed by historical racism without also endorsing, say, “Black villages” or other distinct ideas embraced by activists. The Evanston curriculum elides that distinction. The only critique of the Black Lives Matter approach to social-justice activism that students get is literally a caricature. In the first panel of a cartoon included in the lesson materials, a person says, “Well I think that all lives matter.” In panel two, while holding a fire hose, he says, “We should care exactly equally at all times about everything.” In panel three, he stands in front of two houses, one that’s burning, one that isn’t, and sprays water on the house that isn't on fire. “All houses matter,” he says.
This reference to “all lives matter” is included only to tee up a rejection of it. Students shown just that cartoon wouldn’t understand why the San Francisco 49ers player Richard Sherman, who is Black, used the phrase “all lives matter” and expressed some discomfort with BLM. But they should.
Another lesson, taught to seventh graders, even more clearly illustrates the shortcomings of operating within the ideological confines of the Black Lives Matter movement rather than combining insights from it and other sources. The lesson asks, “Why is it important to recognize that black women and girls matter?” This slide follows:
(School District 65 instructional materials)
The lesson goes on to introduce the concept of intersectionality—defined as a system of “oppressions and privileges that overlap and reinforce each other”—then moves on to a list of Black women who have been killed by police. In an accompanying video, the legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw says, “Police violence against Black women is very real. Why is it that their lost lives don’t generate the same amount of media attention and communal outcry as the lost lives of their fallen brothers?” By asking that question, activists help draw attention to some police killings that warranted close press scrutiny.
Cases in which police officers violate the civil rights of Black women are indeed worthy of study. But sitting through the slideshow, which asserts that to be Black and female is to be “the most unprotected person in America,” many students might come away with the impression that Black women are the demographic group most likely to be killed by police in America. That is false.
According to a 2019 paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the lifetime risk is highest for Black males: About 96 in 100,000 are killed by police. Latino men have an estimated lifetime risk of 53 per 100,000; white men, 39 per 100,000. For Black women, the authors find, the lifetime risk of being killed by police is 2.4 to 5.4 per 100,000. That’s higher than the comparable figure for Latina and white women (2 per 100,000), but much lower than the rate for men.
The Black Lives Matter movement is within its rights to focus exclusively on Black people killed by police—regardless of whether one believes, as I do, that Americans should also know names such as Daniel Shaver, a white man killed by police in 2016. Speeches by Black Lives Matter activists need not include the disclaimer that white men are far more likely to be killed by police than Black women are. But the public-school system should tell the whole truth to those in its care, even if it undermines a narrative that activists champion.
“I believe in the importance of every school district, including my own, moving away from a traditionally white-centric voice to a broader and more truthful view of history that acknowledges the wrongs of both past and present, recognizes white privilege and honors the black experience and the experience of other minority groups,” one Evanston parent told me in an email. “I think we’ve come to the point, however, where our children (all children) are being used as pawns … I feel we can and should work together for a more just, equitable world,” the parent continued, “but don’t believe that one political organization with its own idea of how to get there should be the arbiter of that progress.” This parent, too, requested anonymity, writing, “There is no room for that position right now in this town.”
I emailed all seven members of the District 65 school board for comment. One member, Joseph Hailpern, replied, emphasizing that he spoke only for himself. On the matter of parental unease, he wrote, in part,
As in any school district, the best teachers in Evanston likely improved on many of the prepared lessons. (The worst, of course, might have degraded them.) But one cannot simply presume that all teachers want to approach this material without imposing their own views. Indeed, many teachers aligned with Black Lives Matter explicitly reject a neutral posture.
This issue was the subject of a 2020 webinar titled “Black Lives Matter at School: A Discussion With Educators on the Intersections of Activism and Pedagogy.” As one participant asked, “How do you talk and teach about the historical moment, massive Black Lives Matter protests, and uprising and rebellion with your students? How do you do that in a way where you’re wearing the educator hat and also an activist hat?”
Answers varied, but most participants seemed to reject the model of the neutral educator. Typical of the discussion were comments by Matthew Vaughn-Smith, a Baltimore-area assistant principal, who said, “I don’t believe in a neutral educator … You, as an anti-racist educator, have to take a stance.”
As an alumnus of 14 years of Catholic education, I know that a few dogmatic teachers do not reliably yield lifelong believers. And I happen to agree that, on certain basic questions, educators should not be evenhanded. Do the lives of all of their students have value? Yes. Should students be acculturated to participate in civic life to improve the world? Yes.
Should they be discriminated against because of their race or religion or gender or disability status? No. The list goes on. But educators should be neutral as to the question “Should my students embrace the narrative and policy agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement and become activists on its behalf?”
And educators should not be neutral as to the question “Should my students be taught what to think, or how to think?” Schools should do the latter. They should promote truth seeking and diversity of thought. They should recognize the imperative in a pluralistic democracy of understanding others’ beliefs and the importance of subjecting one’s own beliefs to scrutiny, given society’s complexity and the fallibility of well-intentioned judgments. And they should understand the folly of treating profound disagreements as if they foreclosed the possibility of cooperation.
Those goals could conceivably be advanced with an improved BLM at School Week of Action curriculum in future years, but they would be easier to achieve if District 65 broadened its focus and dedicated a week to all the contrasting civil-rights approaches taken by other people who believe that Black lives matter.
Students could learn, as they do now, about the activism practiced by Martin Luther King Jr., by the Black Power movement, and by adherents of critical-race-theory traditions. But lessons could also discuss the present-day approaches of Black churches; Barack Obama’s criticism of “wokeness” and his embrace of democratic persuasion; the Black conservatism of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele; the aspirational color blindness advocated by Ward Connerly; Barbara and Karen Fields’s critique of “racecraft”; the entrepreneurial successs of Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Jay-Z; and many more besides.
In fact, while curricula and teachers will always warrant scrutiny, perhaps the quality of Evanston students’ education during the district’s three Black Lives Matter at School action weeks is best measured by parents asking whether their kids can now accurately explain not only the values and beliefs of Black Lives Matter but also the strongest criticisms of the movement’s approach. Can children describe how it compares with other forms of civil-rights activism, why many anti-racists embrace it, and why other anti-racists partly or wholly reject it? In persuading Evanston educators to adopt a BLM at School curriculum, Black Lives Matter activists did their job. Did the District 65 public schools do theirs?
The story would be a blessing in a home with a gender-nonconforming child or parent, and just as useful for children who feel different from their peers in any other way.
More heavy-handed is a lesson called “Empathy, Loving Engagement, and Restorative Justice,” included in a slide deck from Evanston’s third-grade curriculum. The lesson begins with a “teaching point” that states, “Today I’m going to teach you about what the Black Lives Matter movement is and why it’s necessary.” Later slides show photographs of local Black Lives Matter protests. A leading question near the end of the lesson asks students, “Why is it important to learn about Black Lives Matter in school?” In most circumstances, public schools should help students understand significant protest movements that are shaping their world, and Black Lives Matter easily crosses that threshold. But flatly describing the movement as “necessary” is a value judgment.
Americans pursue racial justice through a variety of political ideologies, policy agendas, and tactics. Kids should know that a “correct” approach cannot be identified objectively. One might agree that Black lives matter and that Black people have been unfairly harmed by historical racism without also endorsing, say, “Black villages” or other distinct ideas embraced by activists. The Evanston curriculum elides that distinction. The only critique of the Black Lives Matter approach to social-justice activism that students get is literally a caricature. In the first panel of a cartoon included in the lesson materials, a person says, “Well I think that all lives matter.” In panel two, while holding a fire hose, he says, “We should care exactly equally at all times about everything.” In panel three, he stands in front of two houses, one that’s burning, one that isn’t, and sprays water on the house that isn't on fire. “All houses matter,” he says.
This reference to “all lives matter” is included only to tee up a rejection of it. Students shown just that cartoon wouldn’t understand why the San Francisco 49ers player Richard Sherman, who is Black, used the phrase “all lives matter” and expressed some discomfort with BLM. But they should.
Another lesson, taught to seventh graders, even more clearly illustrates the shortcomings of operating within the ideological confines of the Black Lives Matter movement rather than combining insights from it and other sources. The lesson asks, “Why is it important to recognize that black women and girls matter?” This slide follows:
(School District 65 instructional materials)
The lesson goes on to introduce the concept of intersectionality—defined as a system of “oppressions and privileges that overlap and reinforce each other”—then moves on to a list of Black women who have been killed by police. In an accompanying video, the legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw says, “Police violence against Black women is very real. Why is it that their lost lives don’t generate the same amount of media attention and communal outcry as the lost lives of their fallen brothers?” By asking that question, activists help draw attention to some police killings that warranted close press scrutiny.
Cases in which police officers violate the civil rights of Black women are indeed worthy of study. But sitting through the slideshow, which asserts that to be Black and female is to be “the most unprotected person in America,” many students might come away with the impression that Black women are the demographic group most likely to be killed by police in America. That is false.
According to a 2019 paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the lifetime risk is highest for Black males: About 96 in 100,000 are killed by police. Latino men have an estimated lifetime risk of 53 per 100,000; white men, 39 per 100,000. For Black women, the authors find, the lifetime risk of being killed by police is 2.4 to 5.4 per 100,000. That’s higher than the comparable figure for Latina and white women (2 per 100,000), but much lower than the rate for men.
The Black Lives Matter movement is within its rights to focus exclusively on Black people killed by police—regardless of whether one believes, as I do, that Americans should also know names such as Daniel Shaver, a white man killed by police in 2016. Speeches by Black Lives Matter activists need not include the disclaimer that white men are far more likely to be killed by police than Black women are. But the public-school system should tell the whole truth to those in its care, even if it undermines a narrative that activists champion.
“I believe in the importance of every school district, including my own, moving away from a traditionally white-centric voice to a broader and more truthful view of history that acknowledges the wrongs of both past and present, recognizes white privilege and honors the black experience and the experience of other minority groups,” one Evanston parent told me in an email. “I think we’ve come to the point, however, where our children (all children) are being used as pawns … I feel we can and should work together for a more just, equitable world,” the parent continued, “but don’t believe that one political organization with its own idea of how to get there should be the arbiter of that progress.” This parent, too, requested anonymity, writing, “There is no room for that position right now in this town.”
I emailed all seven members of the District 65 school board for comment. One member, Joseph Hailpern, replied, emphasizing that he spoke only for himself. On the matter of parental unease, he wrote, in part,
To concerns that parts of the curriculum look like indoctrination by activists, he responded that teachers know how to “passionately bring about the next generation of great citizens” without imposing any viewpoints of their own. Some people understand a curriculum as a textbook or set of materials, he wrote, while for others, “it is the sequence of big ideas, enduring understandings, and essential questions” that guide learners. “This week is filled with huge questions for children and teachers about what kind of world we want to share together,” he continued. “It is current social studies rather than what parents are used to. In that it is very different, but highly relevant and necessary.”
As in any school district, the best teachers in Evanston likely improved on many of the prepared lessons. (The worst, of course, might have degraded them.) But one cannot simply presume that all teachers want to approach this material without imposing their own views. Indeed, many teachers aligned with Black Lives Matter explicitly reject a neutral posture.
This issue was the subject of a 2020 webinar titled “Black Lives Matter at School: A Discussion With Educators on the Intersections of Activism and Pedagogy.” As one participant asked, “How do you talk and teach about the historical moment, massive Black Lives Matter protests, and uprising and rebellion with your students? How do you do that in a way where you’re wearing the educator hat and also an activist hat?”
Answers varied, but most participants seemed to reject the model of the neutral educator. Typical of the discussion were comments by Matthew Vaughn-Smith, a Baltimore-area assistant principal, who said, “I don’t believe in a neutral educator … You, as an anti-racist educator, have to take a stance.”
As an alumnus of 14 years of Catholic education, I know that a few dogmatic teachers do not reliably yield lifelong believers. And I happen to agree that, on certain basic questions, educators should not be evenhanded. Do the lives of all of their students have value? Yes. Should students be acculturated to participate in civic life to improve the world? Yes.
Should they be discriminated against because of their race or religion or gender or disability status? No. The list goes on. But educators should be neutral as to the question “Should my students embrace the narrative and policy agenda of the Black Lives Matter movement and become activists on its behalf?”
And educators should not be neutral as to the question “Should my students be taught what to think, or how to think?” Schools should do the latter. They should promote truth seeking and diversity of thought. They should recognize the imperative in a pluralistic democracy of understanding others’ beliefs and the importance of subjecting one’s own beliefs to scrutiny, given society’s complexity and the fallibility of well-intentioned judgments. And they should understand the folly of treating profound disagreements as if they foreclosed the possibility of cooperation.
Those goals could conceivably be advanced with an improved BLM at School Week of Action curriculum in future years, but they would be easier to achieve if District 65 broadened its focus and dedicated a week to all the contrasting civil-rights approaches taken by other people who believe that Black lives matter.
Students could learn, as they do now, about the activism practiced by Martin Luther King Jr., by the Black Power movement, and by adherents of critical-race-theory traditions. But lessons could also discuss the present-day approaches of Black churches; Barack Obama’s criticism of “wokeness” and his embrace of democratic persuasion; the Black conservatism of Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele; the aspirational color blindness advocated by Ward Connerly; Barbara and Karen Fields’s critique of “racecraft”; the entrepreneurial successs of Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Jay-Z; and many more besides.
In fact, while curricula and teachers will always warrant scrutiny, perhaps the quality of Evanston students’ education during the district’s three Black Lives Matter at School action weeks is best measured by parents asking whether their kids can now accurately explain not only the values and beliefs of Black Lives Matter but also the strongest criticisms of the movement’s approach. Can children describe how it compares with other forms of civil-rights activism, why many anti-racists embrace it, and why other anti-racists partly or wholly reject it? In persuading Evanston educators to adopt a BLM at School curriculum, Black Lives Matter activists did their job. Did the District 65 public schools do theirs?
[Marsh has been adding multiple posts that will scare the living snot out of you. You really need to spin through all her posts. Make sure you’re strapped-in though. You’ll be in a white-hot fury by the time you read them all - Dennis]
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
Leftists Call For New "Secret Police" Force To Spy On Trump Supporters
WEDNESDAY, JAN 20, 2021 - 18:45
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Perhaps channeling the spirit of the Soviet NKVD, leftists are now literally calling for a new “secret police” unit to be created at the federal level to spy on Trump supporters.
In an article published by the Daily Beast, Jeff Stein argues that existing federal agencies like the FBI are ill-equipped to stop “white terror” because they missed signs of the the pre-planning of the Capitol building siege.
The solution is to create a new “secret police” (yes, he literally uses those words) in order to “infiltrate and neutralize armed domestic extremists,” which according to the media’s latest narrative potentially includes 70 million Trump voters.
Stein even compares the Capitol breach to 9/11, an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, and argues that a similar response to that should be directly inwardly against American citizens directed by a new “domestic spy agency.”
“One response to the 9/11 tragedy may well get renewed attention after the Capitol assault—especially if armed white nationalists are successful in carrying out more attacks in the coming days and weeks: The call for a secret police,” he writes.
The existence of a “secret police” force that subverts constitutional norms to repress the population is of course a hallmark of all dictatorial regimes, but that doesn’t appear to bother self-proclaimed “progressives.”
He also hits the nail on the head about the real reason why the creation of a new secret police unit would be necessary.
As we highlighted yesterday, in addition to a new secret police, some are calling for the creation of a Stasi-like citizen spy network that would recruit Biden supporters to spy on Trump supporters and grass them up to the authorities.
Presumably, this is all part of the national “healing” and “unity” that Joe Biden has called for.
Obviously, Jerk Stein forgets that 9/11 was an inside job just like the Capitol breach. With 9/11 it was the Bush cabal and with the Capitol breach, it was the Pelosi cabal.[Marsh has been adding multiple posts that will scare the living snot out of you. You really need to spin through all her posts. Make sure you’re strapped-in though. You’ll be in a white-hot fury by the time you read them all - Dennis]
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
Leftists Call For New "Secret Police" Force To Spy On Trump Supporters
WEDNESDAY, JAN 20, 2021 - 18:45
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,
Perhaps channeling the spirit of the Soviet NKVD, leftists are now literally calling for a new “secret police” unit to be created at the federal level to spy on Trump supporters.
In an article published by the Daily Beast, Jeff Stein argues that existing federal agencies like the FBI are ill-equipped to stop “white terror” because they missed signs of the the pre-planning of the Capitol building siege.
The solution is to create a new “secret police” (yes, he literally uses those words) in order to “infiltrate and neutralize armed domestic extremists,” which according to the media’s latest narrative potentially includes 70 million Trump voters.
Stein even compares the Capitol breach to 9/11, an attack that killed nearly 3,000 people, and argues that a similar response to that should be directly inwardly against American citizens directed by a new “domestic spy agency.”
“One response to the 9/11 tragedy may well get renewed attention after the Capitol assault—especially if armed white nationalists are successful in carrying out more attacks in the coming days and weeks: The call for a secret police,” he writes.
The existence of a “secret police” force that subverts constitutional norms to repress the population is of course a hallmark of all dictatorial regimes, but that doesn’t appear to bother self-proclaimed “progressives.”
He also hits the nail on the head about the real reason why the creation of a new secret police unit would be necessary.
As we highlighted yesterday, in addition to a new secret police, some are calling for the creation of a Stasi-like citizen spy network that would recruit Biden supporters to spy on Trump supporters and grass them up to the authorities.
Presumably, this is all part of the national “healing” and “unity” that Joe Biden has called for.