GOV/MIL Leftists Call For New "Secret Police" Force To Spy On Trump Supporters (AN ABSOLUTELY MUST-READ THREAD)

marsh

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Internal Divisions Plague The ACLU As Leftist Activism Trumps Free Speech Advocacy

JUNE 7, 2021 By Spencer Lindquist

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an organization whose original mission was to defend free speech, is currently facing internal divisions as adherence to liberal causes takes precedence over their support for the First Amendment.

Concern is mounting as progressivism comes into conflict with the ACLU’s original values, with many on the left fearing that free speech, rather than existing as a neutral value of a free society, is a vehicle by which those they disagree with can peddle hate and intolerance.

Others on the left have argued that the First Amendment is more frequently used by those who are seeking to maintain their current power, with Dennis Parker, the ACLU’s former director of the Racial Justice Program telling The New York Times “First Amendment protections are disproportionately enjoyed by people of power and privilege.”

David Goldberger, a Jewish lawyer who defended the free speech rights of Nazis in the 1970s, has become uneasy at the direction of the ACLU, voicing his concern that “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind,” and commenting that “I got the sense it was more important for ACLU staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” the New York Times reported.

Former Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser shared Goldberger’s concerns noting that there is a wealth of organizations advocating for “racial justice” and “immigrant rights,” but that “there’s only one ACLU that is a content-neutral defender of free speech. I fear we’re in danger of losing that,” in a quote to the New York Times.

The tone and mission of the ACLU have shifted significantly since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, having filed more than 400 lawsuits against his administration.

The tension at the ACLU highlights an ongoing theme within our society, with the once widely agreed-upon value of free speech as it is enshrined in our First Amendment becoming a deeply partisan topic.
 

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Taxpayer-Funded NPR Caught Spewing Communist Propaganda

By J.D. Rucker • Jun. 7, 2021

Over the weekend, taxpayer-funded NPR posted an article and attached Tweet attacking the Republican Party for their general opposition to Critical Race Theory. The easily debunked manifestation of Cultural Marxism has been spreading like wildfire across America as “woke” politicians, companies, and individuals promote it as their new gospel.

The Tweet was disingenuous and engages in the logical fallacy of begging the question:
“Republicans across the country are decrying critical race theory, an academic approach of examining U.S. institutions through the lens of race. Some experts say it’s the latest GOP effort to use cultural issues to drive voters to the polls.”
Journalist and filmmaker Christopher F. Rufo called them out, comparing it to hypothetical rhetoric during the Cold War:
National Propaganda Radio strikes again. It’s like a headline from 1981 saying: “Republicans across the country are decrying communism, a political approach that emphasizes sharing resources and caring for one another.” Don’t let them fool you.
There has been a rise in attacks against those who speak out against Critical Race Theory, particularly by White radical leftists who build up their “woke cred” by condemning those who speak the truth about Cultural Marxism. A perfect example was highlighted today by Twitchy:
Critical Race Theory is poison. Period, the end.
And the people pushing it are some of the worst, especially white male boomers shaming people of color for NOT supporting it. This guy actually claimed they couldn’t think for themselves even. Perhaps he was trying to prove his own racism?
Critical Race Theory IS institutionalized racism. It teaches that the only way to compensate for sins of racism, which were being drastically reduced for decades, is to revive and reverse racism against Caucasians and East Asians. NPR is a fraud.
 

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Here We Go: The CDC Labels Racism a ‘Serious Threat’ to Public Health
BY STEVE MACDONALD / 7 JUNE 2021

CDC


Once they let the “Public Health Trumps Everything” Donkey out of the basement, we knew this would happen. Using Public Health threats for whatever they can imagine, and they have. The CDC has announced that racism is a threat to public health.

“Confronting the impact of racism will not be easy,” Walensky said. “We must recognize that we are working to overcome centuries of discrimination. We will only be successful in undoing the entrenched systemic and structural barriers if we work in collaboration with our public health partners, and deeply within our communities, across the country.”

In addressing racism, the CDC shared an interactive map created by the American Public Health Association that depicts communities in the United States that have declared racism a public health crisis or emergency. Currently, there are 170 declarations nationwide, including 19 in Massachusetts.

Here’s a link to the map and a screengrab. The green dots are a declaration concerning a supposed threat to public health by racism (NH has zero, by the way).




These are all guaranteed, liberal virtue signalers working in Blue cities, responsible for the “racism” they are declaring a public health threat – probably to dip into federal funds if I had to guess. But is it justified? The CDC declaration?

Should we be on the lookout for racism that poses a threat to human health and life?
Yes, but not in the way that they would like us to imagine.

“We are pushing an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a head for a head, and a life for a life.”

“Once they die (white people), we must understand that we can never give them the pain that they gave us,” he insisted. “So once they get buried … once they are buried, we must bury them, dig them up and kill them again. Bury them. Dig them up. And kill them again.”

“Because that time will come when there’s a rat-a-tat-tat. Black Americans will kill everything white in sight,”

Now, I think it’s safe to say that guy is not indicative of the class (he’s not Republican). But he has been indoctrinated by race hate programs like CRT, which pose a threat to public order and by extension, individual health. And he’s not alone.

“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f–king favor.”

No digging them up to kill them again? Hmm.

This is a New York City psychiatrist speaking to an audience at the Yale School of Medicine. Any bets on whether the CDC goes fishing for their staff there. You know, to ensure that the Racism public health threat remains in the news and is addressed through policy that includes heaps of additional funding.

Not that the Centers for Democrat Control (CDC) cares.

If Democrats cared about people of color, they would not have deliberately trapped millions of them on urban plantations shorn of faith and family, un or under-educated, generationally dependent on government, and surrounded by crime and poverty.

Oh yeah, they’re fighting for you!

So, the “problem,” what of it there is, is progressive politics. All the left-wing protests and riots harmed the lives and livelihoods of people of color. Matters are made worse by people claiming to be their advocates.

A growing faction of race-haters, fomenting a race war, using racism (blaming whitey) over something Democrats of all races and sexes are almost entirely responsible.

Projection, plain and simple. But it’s working. And the CDC has set a table that every able-bodied leftist will sit at as quickly as they think they can.
 

marsh

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Why is the Solution to So-Called “White Supremacy” – A Culture of Black Supremacy?

BY STEVE MACDONALD / 31 MAY 2021
Gear, machine

Defenders of the inculcation of Critical Race Theory (CRT) into children’s minds (public employees, politicians, and corporate sheepherders) call it necessary to end discrimination. How does replacing an alleged White Supremacy with an institutionalized Black Supremacy do that?

It can’t, yet no advocate can or will admit this. Asking the question is “racist.”

It is possible that some of the activists pushing these divisive concepts have no clue what they are doing—useful idiots like NH Gov. Chris Sununu, who are unwilling or incapable of thinking that far ahead. To them, CRT is the grease for a squeaky wheel. Progressive appeasement without regard to consequence.

It was a wheel that had been moving forward smoothly until the first black president (no, not Bill Clinton) jammed a piece of rebar into it and ground it backward with the force of government.

Obama, like his progressive ideological forebear’ Woodrow Wilson almost a century before, took race relations back decades in just a few years.

Obama militarized the police while agitating for the federal control of policing while blaming the police for racial violence as a means to that end.

BLM was created, encouraged, funded, and rose in Obama’s shadow. To what end? Revolution (and the militarization of a national police force). Yes, ironic, it is.

Antifa, a militant organization approaching one hundred years of action, uses violence and protest to attract their fascist cousins a few more steps to the left. A place from which they can facilitate the demoralization of the middle-class using violence and intimidation unchecked by those elected to help keep the peace. The Democrat-run-cities experiencing an exodus as people flee that madness for less-urban landscapes.

It’s all connected, deliberate, and with one collective purpose.

So, back to the question: How does replacing the alleged White Supremacy with an actual Black Supremacy end discrimination?

It doesn’t. It creates discrimination to open up space for the only real goal; government supremacy. A nation that is so divided, culturally shorn, and war-weary that taking their rights and property becomes child’s play.

Robbed of natural rights by the very people whose policies created systemic dependency, crime, poverty, scarcity, violence, injustice, indignity, and racism.

CRT teaches hate. Self-hate, loathing for people with different colored skin. Not to end discrimination but institutionalize it. To define the world between two classes, without regard for race or sex, or age.

There will be those with power and those without.

Mr. Sununu’s indifference to the problem identifies where he thinks he’ll land. And he has a higher probability than most of being on the side holding the stick. But the teachers, unions, workers, rank and file Dems, and most of the Sununu Homers will be on the other end of whatever is left of our culture and government.

Like I said, useful idiots. Happy to do their bidding because they either lack the vision to see the end it brings or arrogant enough to think they’ll be holding the stick instead of getting beaten with it.

CRT is not about discrimination. It is a tool of cultural revolution whose end is chaos, violence, and the undermining of the American Republic.

You are not greasing a wheel; you are lubricating a slope.
 

marsh

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No, Western Culture Is Not About 'White Supremacy'
Rob Jenkins
Rob Jenkins

|Posted: Jun 06, 2021 12:01 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.


No, Western Culture Is Not About 'White Supremacy'

Source: (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

Chief among the Big Lies currently being promulgated by the American Left is that Western culture is inherently racist, a manifestation of White Supremacy. This is not only nonsense but pernicious, dangerous nonsense.

Before we go on, perhaps we should define “Western culture.” It is essentially the marriage of Judeo-Christian morality with classical (that is, Greek and Roman) intellectualism. It privileges reason over emotion and the individual over the state. Its central tenet is that, through their own efforts, a person can rise above their circumstances.

Western culture is not now nor has it ever been perfect. But it has given us a wealth of great ideas: that all men (and women) are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with natural rights, that we can learn much (if not everything) about our world through careful observation and experimentation, and that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. It has produced the technological advances that have made modern life so relatively carefree and comfortable--such that, in the West, our “poor” now live better (and longer) than the royalty of years past.

Western culture has also given us much beauty, in the form of art, music literature, and architecture, as well as an appreciation for the even greater beauties of nature. For those reasons, Western culture represents the best that humanity has yet produced.

Still, we are told that Western culture is racist because Western nations once practiced slavery. Yes, they did. But what that indictment ignores is that virtually every culture in the history of the world practiced slavery, including in Africa and North America long before Europeans showed up. For most of recorded human history, slavery was the status quo. One group of people conquered another, and those that weren’t killed were captured and enslaved.

It was Western culture, in Europe and North America, that eventually put an end to that abominable practice (although it still exists in some parts of the world). And the reason the West was motivated to do so was that slavery is ultimately incompatible with our core belief in the worth of the individual. It took us a few hundred years to get to that point, true, and many thousands perished in the effort. But we did finally get there—precisely because of our cultural heritage, not in spite of it.

Furthermore, contrary to the popular narrative, Western culture has never been tied exclusively to “whiteness.” Its roots can be traced back to North Africa and the great library at Alexandria, as well as to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. It has also absorbed and incorporated, over the centuries, the best that other cultures have to offer, as is readily apparent in today’s music, literature, and fashion.

That is not, as some would have it, “cultural appropriation.” Rather, it is a tribute to those other cultures and the good they bring. It also reflects the open-mindedness and liberalism (in the best sense of the word) of the Western ethos, which naturally seeks truth and beauty wherever they can be found.

Finally, Western culture in its current incarnation is expressly not racist because it is not limited to any particular race. It’s not just for White people or those whose ancestors were European. In fact, it is not exclusive at all. Far from it. All are invited to participate. And many do, all around the world, flocking if they can to Western Europe, the United States, and Canada specifically because they wish to be part of our culture and enjoy the individual freedoms and opportunities it presents.
 

marsh

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GOOD NEWS: Teacher Placed on Leave For Speaking Out About School’s Ridiculous Pronoun Policy Has Been Reinstated

By Cassandra Fairbanks
Published June 8, 2021 at 1:40pm
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Tanner Cross, the elementary school teacher in Virginia who was placed on leave after disputing that a “biological boy can be a girl and vice versa,” during a school board meeting has been reinstated.


The Loudoun County physical education teacher had spoke up at a school board meeting in May, saying that allowing children to change their genders on a whim is harmful — and goes against his Christian faith.

“I love all of my students but I will never lie to them regardless of the consequences. I’m a teacher but I serve God first and I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it’s against my religion. It’s lying to a child, it’s abuse to a child, and it’s sinning against our God,” Cross said.

View: https://youtu.be/1NLAQ3H_a28
.57 min

Of course, outraged ensued and he was placed on leave.

On Tuesday, news broke that Cross has been reinstated at Leesburg Elementary School and can return to teaching.

“Tanner Cross, a Virginia elementary school teacher and ADF client who was suspended for raising concerns to the board about a proposed gender policy, has won a temporary injunction and the judge has ordered his reinstatement. A massive victory for freedom of speech,” the Alliance Defending Freedom, who was representing Cross, wrote in a statement.

ADF President and CEO Michael Farris added that “Nobody should be punished for expressing concern about a proposed government policy, especially when the government invites comment on that policy. For that reason, we are pleased at the court’s decision to halt Loudoun County Public Schools’ retaliation against Tanner Cross while his lawsuit continues.”

“Educators are just like everybody else—they have ideas and opinions that they should be free to express,” Farris continued. “Advocating for solutions they believe in should not cost them their jobs. School officials singled out his speech, offered in his private capacity at a public meeting, as ‘disruptive’ and then suspended him for speaking his mind. That’s neither legal nor constitutional. Dozens of other teachers have shared their beliefs on various policies without retaliation; Tanner deserves to be treated with the same respect.”
 

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MSNBC Analyst and NY Times Editor Mara Gay: The Sight of American Flags is “DISTURBING”

By Jordan Conradson
Published June 8, 2021 at 1:30pm
DC9D8CA5-FC6B-4D45-880C-5892476FCB92.jpeg


On Tuesday, MSNBC analyst and New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay told the leftist audience, “I was really disturbed,” after she saw several American flags on Long Island over the weekend.

These people hate their country. They don’t even hide it.

She was so deeply disturbed because “just dozens of American flags” were seen flying and she then claimed, “Essentially the message was clear.”

Gay added, “I think that as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with Whiteness, this is going to continue.” What?

This is a disgusting display of hate for the very nation that gives her the freedom to talk about just how “disturbed” she is by others practicing their first amendment.
Mara Gay: The reality is here that we have a large percentage of the American population — I don’t know how big it is, but we have tens of millions of Trump voters who continue to believe that their rights as citizens are under threat by simple virtue of having to share the democracy with others. I think as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue. We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy, but how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness. Until we can confront that and talk about that, this is really going to continue.

I was on Long Island this weekend, visiting a really dear friend and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with expletives against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases, just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing, which essentially the message was clear, this is my country. This is not your country. I own this.

And so until we’re ready to have that conversation, this is going to continue. What really is concerning to me as well is, it’s not just Democrats in Congress. I think there’s a large percentage of Americans, even some of my colleagues in journalism, who are invested in some way in pretending that this isn’t the threat that it is. That is the real concern. Because, you know, the Trump voters who are not going to get onboard with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them, long-term. But if we don’t take the threat seriously, then I think we’re all in really bad shape.
Clearly, Dems and their operatives in the media HATE America.

1623189828967.png

Mara, if you’re so deeply disturbed and offended over our nation’s flag please leave.

Gay is paid to attack her country on TV and she lives in the freest country in history. She should go find a home where she’s not at such a disadvantage.


1623189781660.png
 

marsh

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Dems Intro Bill Teaching ‘Hate Crime Prevention’ To Fifth Graders.
hate crime
Eight House Democrats sponsored a bill that would introduce taxpayer-funded “hate crime prevention” and “prejudice reduction” training into middle and high school classrooms.

The “Education Against Hate Crimes Act of 2021” would empower the Secretary of Education to distribute grants capped at $1.5 million to fifth through 12th-grade classrooms.

“Beginning not later than one year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Education shall award grants, on a competitive basis, to eligible entities to assist such entities in conducting hate crime prevention and prejudice reduction education for secondary school students and students in middle grades,” the bill outlines.

The bill defines “hate crime and prejudice reduction education” as intended to “prevent, address, deter, and dissuade crimes against persons or an individual’s property due to the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, disability, age, or sexual orientation of any person.”

The legislation was introduced on April 14th, 2021 and has been referred to the Committee on Education and Labor.

READ: Scribd doc on website

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marsh

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CIA (Dis)Information Operations Come Home To The US

MONDAY, JUN 07, 2021 - 11:00 PM
Via WeMeantWell.com,

Reporters joke the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions and say “No comment’ before heading to Happy Hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information about itself. They meanwhile choose to profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.

Leon Panetta, the Director CIA from 2009 to 2011 explained bluntly his CIA did influence foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method, Panetta said, was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.”

The CIA has been running such information ops to influence foreign elections since the end of WWII. Richard Bissell, who ran the agency’s operations during the Cold War, wrote of “exercising control over a newspaper or broadcasting station, or of securing the desired outcome in an election.” A report on the CIA in Chile boasts the Agency portrayed its favored candidate in one election as a “wise, sincere and high-minded statesman” while painting his leftist opponent as a “calculating schemer.” At one point in the 1980s foreign media insertions ran 80 a day.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, simply paying a reporter to run a story, or, as was done in Iraq, simply operating the media outlet yourself (known as the Orwellian Indigenous Media Project.) The problem is such direct action is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

A more effective strategy is to become a source for legitimate media such that your (dis)information inherits their credibility. The most effective is an operation so complex one CIA plant is the initial information source while a second CIA plant acts seemingly independently as a confirming source. At that point you can push information to the mainstream media, who can then “independently” confirm it, sometimes unknowingly, through your secondary agents. You can basically write tomorrow’s headlines.

Other techniques include exclusive true information mixed with disinformation to establish credibility, using official sources like Embassy spokesmen to appear to inadvertently confirm sub details, and covert funding of research and side gigs to promote academics and experts who discredit counter-narratives. The academics may never know where their money comes from, adding to their credibility.

From the end of WWII to the Church Committee in 1976, this was all just a conspiracy theory. Of course the US would not use the CIA to influence elections, especially in fellow democracies. Except it did. By its nature reporting on intelligence always requires one to work with limited information. Always give time a chance to explain.

Through Operation Mockingbird the CIA ran over 400 American journalists as direct assets.

Almost none have ever discussed their work publically. CIA documents show journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations. The New York Times alone willingly provided cover for about ten CIA officers over decades and kept quiet about it. Such long term relationships are a powerful tool, so feeding a true big story to a young reporter to get him promoted is part of the game.

Don’t forget the anonymous source who drove the Watergate story was an FBI official who through his actions made the careers of cub reporters Woodward and Bernstein. Bernstein went on to champion the Russiagate story. Woodward became a Washington hagiographer.

Ken Dilanian, formerly with the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and now working for NBC, maintains a “collaborative relationship” with the CIA.



That’s the tradecraft and the history. The problem for America is once again the tools of war abroad have come home. The intelligence community is currently operating against the American people using established media.

Some of it can’t be more obvious. The CIA always planted stories in foreign media for American outlets to pick up. The Agency works directly with Hollywood to control movies about itself.

Turn on any of the advocacy media outlets and you see panels of former CIA officials. Journalist Matt Taibbi even created a list (and since ex-‘s need agency clearance to speak, all are of the officially approved class.) None is more egregious than John Brennan, former Director CIA, who for years touted Russiagate when he knew from information gathered while he was still in office it was all a lie. The uber-lie that Trump was dirty with Russia was leaked to the press most likely by Brennan in January 2017 as the kick off event to the info op still running today.

Brennan’s role is more than speculation. John Durham, the US attorney leading the ongoing “how it happened” Russiagate investigation into the intelligence community, has requested Brennan’s emails and call logs from CIA. Durham is also examining whether Brennan changed his story between his public comments (not under oath, say anything) and his May 2017 testimony to Congress (under oath, watch out for perjury) about the dossier. Reporter Aaron Mate is less delicate, laying out the evidence Brennan was “a central architect and promoter of the conspiracy theory from its inception.” Even blunter is Senator Rand Paul, who directly accuses Brennan of trying “to bring down a sitting president.”

Let’s see how that worked to understand how info ops intertwine with covert ops. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report shows the FBI unleashed a full-spectrum spying campaign based on the root of the information op, the Dossier. Horowitz’s report shows it was a team effort among the 5 Eyes — Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, a man with ties to his nation’s intel services, arranged a meeting with Trump staffer George Papadopoulos to set in motion FBI FISA surveillance. Trump officials were also monitored by British GCHQ. The op used CIA assets, the shadowy academics Mark Halper and Joseph Mifsud, as dangles. We see a honey trap run in classic style, with a female FBI undercover agent inserted into social situations with a Trump staffer. Dossier author and ex-British intel officer Christopher Steele created a textbook officer’s information loop, secretly becoming his own corroborating source.

It was all based on nothing but disinformation and the American press swallowed every bit of it, turning the op into a three year tantrum falsely convincing a vast number of citizens their nation was run by a Russian asset. Robert Mueller, whose investigation was supposed to propel all this nothing into impeachment hearings, ended up exercising one of the last bits of political courage Americans will ever see in walking right to the edge of essentially a coup and refusing to step off into the abyss.

The CIA is a learning institution, and recovered well from Russiagate. Details can be investigated. That’s where the old story fell apart. The dossier wasn’t true. But the a-ha discovery was since you’ll never formally prosecute anyone, why bother with evidence.

Just throw out accusations and let the media fill it all in for you. The new paradigm included let the nature of the source — the brave lads of the intelligence agencies — legitimize the accusations this time, not facts. Go overt and use the new, unexpected prestige of the CIA as progressive heros to substantiate things.


Part 1 of 2
 

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Part 2 of 2

So in December 2017 CNN reported Donald Trump, Jr. had advance access to the WikiLeaks archive. Within an hour, NBC’s Ken Dilanian and CBS both claimed independent confirmation. It was a complete lie, based on fabricated documents. How do you confirm a lie? Ask another liar.

In February 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) briefed the House Intelligence Committee the Russians were election meddling again to favor Trump. A few weeks earlier, the ODNI briefed Bernie Sanders the Russians were also meddling in the Democratic primaries in his favor. Both briefings were leaked, the former to the New York Times to smear Trump for replacing his DNI, the latter to the Washington Post ahead of the Nevada caucuses to damage Sanders.

In June 2020 The New York Times stated CIA officials concluded the Russians “secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops.” The story ran near another claiming Trump had spoken disrespectfully about fallen soldiers. Neither story was true. But they broke around the same time Trump announced his plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, aimed at discouraging pro-military voters.

Earlier this month The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, claimed the FBI gave a defensive briefing to Rudy Giuliani in 2019, before he traveled to Ukraine. Giuliani supposedly ignored the warning. The story was “independently confirmed” by both NBC and The New York Times. It was totally false.

The American system always envisioned an adversarial role for the media. One of the earliest challenges to freedom of the press was the Colonial-era Peter Zenger case, which established the right of the press to criticize politicians free from libel charges. At times when things really mattered and even as other journalists hid under their beds, men like Edward R. Murrow worked their craft to preserve democracy. Same for Walter Cronkite finally reaching his opposition to the Vietnam War, and the New York Times reporters weighing imprisonment to publish the Pentagon Papers.

In each of those instances the handful of reporters who risked everything to tell the truth were held up as heroes. Seeing the Times fighting for its life, the Washington Post co-published the Pentagon Papers to force the government to make its case not just against a rival newspaper, but the 1A itself.

Not today. Journalism is today devoted to eliminating practitioners unwilling to play the game. Few have been targeted more than Glenn Greenwald (with Matt Taibbi as runner up.) Greenwald exploded into a journalistic superhero for his reporting on Edward Snowden’s NSA archive, founding The Intercept to serve as a platform for that work (Greenwald’s downfall parallels Julian Assange, who went from liberal hero for exposing the foundational lies of the Iraq War to zero when his Wikileaks was demonized for supposedly helping Donald Trump.)

Greenwald’s criticism of the media for accepting Deep State lies as truth, particularly concerning Russiagate, turned him into a villian for progressives. MSNBC banned him, and other media outlets ran stories critical of him. Then something very, very odd happened to make it appear The Intercept outed one of its own whistleblower sources. Evidence suggests the source was a patsy, set up by the intel community, and exposed via Matt Cole, one of The Intercept journalists on this story. Cole was also involved in the outing of source CIA officer John Kiriakou in connection with torture claims. Either way new whistleblowers will think twice before turning to The Intercept. Greenwald recently quit the site after it refused to publish his article on Hunter Biden’s ties to China unless he deleted portions critical of Joe Biden.

Greenwald seems to have figured out the intel community’s game, writing “the most significant Trump-era alliance is between corporate outlets and security state agencies, whose evidence-free claims they unquestioningly disseminate… Every journalist, even the most honest and careful, will get things wrong sometimes, and trustworthy journalists issue prompt corrections when they do. That behavior should be trust-building. But when media outlets continue to use the same reckless and deceitful tactics — such as claiming to have ‘independently confirmed‘ one another’s false stories when they have merely served as stenographers for the same anonymous security state agents while ‘confirming’ nothing — that strongly suggests a complete indifference to the truth and, even more so, a willingness to serve as disinformation agents.”

Democracy has no meaning if people simply vote uninformed, as they are propagandized.

It will be sport for future historians to mark the thing that most pushed America into decline. Seeing decades of success abroad in using info ops, the CIA and others turned those weapons inward. So seeing her Deep State meddle in presidential politics, simultaneously destroying (albeit mostly with their cooperation) the adversarial media, while crushing faith in both our leaders and in the process of electing them, will certainly be a top qualifier.
 

marsh

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Conservative Think Tank Provides Guide to Help Fight Critical Race Theory in Schools
Acting OMB Director Russ Vought speaks during a press briefing at the White House, Monday, March 11, 2019, in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
AP Photo/ Evan Vucci
HANNAH BLEAU8 Jun 202117

Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank, has provided a comprehensive A-Z toolkit for educators, parents, and school board members who seek to stop the advancement and embrace of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in their schools and communities.

Russ Vought, president of the Center for Renewing America, served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under former President Trump’s administration and was instrumental in banning its use in government agencies.

“Combatting Critical Race Theory is where the cultural fight is, and at the Center for Renewing America we are helping to pick the fight, execute and win it,” Vought said in a statement.

“Winning the debate happens by educating at a national level, and as that national debate unfolds, you will have an outpouring of legislative activity at the county, school board, the state legislature level and who knows, we may have a leverage point to get something done at the federal level,” he added.

The toolkit contains a section devoted to identifying CRT, describing it as an ideological system that “holds that racism is not just a belief held by individuals; rather, it is a system of oppression that has been built into the very structure of our society.”

“In the same way that all the roads in a city interlock to form a system of roads, Critical Social Justice believes that individual racism, cultural racism, and institutional racism overlap to form a system of racism that is present through all of society,” the guide reads.

CRT and Critical Social Justice (CSJ) activists, the guide continues, are advancing a “takeover ideology with an end goal of completely controlling all institutions that are a part of American life.”

“This includes everything from higher education, government, health care, military, law enforcement, and much of corporate America,” the guide continues, explaining why it is essential to stop it at its early stages.

The guide adds that many advocate for CRT materials out of fear and encourages parents and educators to review training, programs, curricula, and school system budgets to see if they are promoting CRT. The guide emphasizes coordination with others to review the materials, providing further tips on how to make a difference, particularly at the school board level, via local community network mobilization as well as launching successful school board campaigns.

“We think of our work as win the national debate, educate at a national level, and, as you have a national debate on the issue, you will have an outpouring of legislative activity at the county level, the school board level, the state legislature level and who knows, we may have a leverage point to get something done at the federal level,” Vought said, according to Fox News.

Republicans are also addressing this at the national level, as three GOP senators, Rick Scott, (FL), Marsha Blackburn (TN), and Mike Braun (IN), introduced a resolution Monday condemning CRT in K-12 schools.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Health Care Journal Publishes Research Calling Whiteness A ‘Parasitic Condition’ Without ‘Permanent Cure’

JUNE 7, 2021 By Spencer Lindquist

The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published a research article in May that describes being white as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition,” and a dangerous, discriminatory, and perverse mental condition.

Written by Donald Moss, an author and activist, the article entitled “On Having Whiteness,” explains that whiteness establishes an “entitled dominion” that enables the “host” of “parasitic whiteness” to have “power without limit, force without restriction, violence without mercy,” adding that it has a drive to “hate, and terrorize.”

Moss claims whiteness “easily infiltrates even groups founded on the protection of individuals, on democratic principles.”

While Moss opens his paper by claiming that “No clear path links my argument to that of my predecessors,” his article is not by any means the first time that scholars have endeavored to establish “whiteness” as an institutionally recognized pathology that requires treatment or a cure.

Take for example, Noel Ignatiev, a now-deceased historian, Harvard lecturer, and former member of the Communist Party who founded a journal titled “Race Traitor,” whose motto was “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

Ignatiev wrote an article for the Harvard Magazine entitled “Abolish the White Race,” in which he argued that “The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.”

Ignatiev, who believed that race was a socially constructed pathology rather than a biological reality, contended that “whiteness is not a culture but a privilege.”

Moss told The Federalist that there is a clear distinction between white people as a race and whiteness as an alleged pathology.

“I write about ‘Whiteness,’ a condition that generates racism and I explicitly distinguish it from ‘whiteness,’ a marker of racial identity. I write that white people are particularly susceptible to the pathology of ‘Whiteness.’”

This story comes just after it was discovered that the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Child Study Center hosted a racist lecturer who fantasized about “unloading a revolver into the heads of any white person that got in my way” and burying them “like I did the world a f-cking favor.”

The abstract of Moss’s article “On Having Whiteness” concludes with an ominous line, referencing whiteness and noting that “There is not yet a permanent cure.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Tuesday, June 08, 2021
Minneapolis citizens file a mostly peaceful lawsuit

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A Minneapolis couple and their neighbors sued the city and Democrat Mayor Jacob Frey for failing to keep residents safe amid a 21% spike in violent crime over the past year.
Defund the Police may prove to be very expensive.

The George Floyd riots created a wave of lawlessness, as well as the departure of police officers en masse because they now know the city does not have their back. Minneapolis is a zoo. George Floyd Square is at times a shooting gallery. A mostly peaceful shooting gallery.

The city had 48 homicides in 2019.
It had 84 in 2020, a 75% increase.
Hence the legal action.

Fox reported, "The lawsuit accuses the city of operating outside a charter that requires a minimum threshold of police officers per citizen in Minneapolis. The petitioners say the city council’s move to defund the police, have caused officers to quit in droves, which in turn has contributed to an escalation in crime.

"Doug Seaton, who is representing petitioners, told Fox News, his clients are long-time Minneapolis residents who are deeply engaged in the community.

"He said their view – which, he believes is representative of the wider community – is that 'although we support certain reforms of the police, we are absolutely opposed to defunding the police and reducing their numbers.'"

Seaton told the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, "The city, based on census population, should have 743 sworn officers ready to respond to call.

"We've asked the city to tell us how many available officers there are right now to answer calls but we have not received that information, and the plaintiffs think the number of officers on the street is well below the required 743."

He said the city charter requires a minimum of 743 officers based on the city's population.
The city began 2020 with 877 officers.

It ended the year with 638 officers.

The city also defunded the police budget by $8 million.

The city gave George Floyd's family $27 million.

Seaton also said, "My clients have just had enough and they don't feel safe and their families don't feel safe. They've had bullets flying around their homes, and not just around their homes, some have had bullets actually go into their homes."

The local paper said in February, "Violent crimes soared by 21% in Minneapolis last year, adding a painful coda to the city's struggles in coping with a deadly pandemic and widespread protests against racial injustice.

"The city recorded 5,422 violent crime incidents, including homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, according to preliminary year-end Minneapolis police statistics. That is a dramatic jump over the previous five years, which averaged roughly 4,496 such crimes. Property crime saw a more modest 10% increase."

Make no mistake. Last summer's riots were sanctioned by the city. I consider the destruction of small businesses the 21st century version of pogroms.

For whatever reason, Mayor Frey and the Democrat Party want violent crimes. Residents do not. I hope they get $27 million each because they, too, are victims of an incorrigible City Hall.

Posted by Don Surber at 6/08/2021 11:00:00 AM
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Totalitarian Threat of Critical Race Theory Rears Its Ugly Head

BY TYLER O'NEIL JUN 07, 2021 2:05 PM ET

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Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File

Last week, a black Amazon delivery driver sucker-punched an elderly white woman after the victim rejected the driver’s snide remark about the “white privilege” of getting annoyed while waiting for a package. A few months back, a Yale lecturer spoke about her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way.” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot complained that too many of the journalists reporting on her are white.

A noxious leftist ideology links all of these racist incidents, and it is already wreaking tremendous havoc on American society. This ideology justifies blatant racism in the name of promoting “equity.” It is spreading throughout American classrooms, corporate boardrooms, and legacy media outlets. One of its architects has even called for a totalitarian bureaucracy to enforce his vision of “equity.” This new racism masquerades as “anti-racist,” but it judges people according to the color of their skin, not the content of their character.

Marxist thinkers invented critical race theory (CRT) in order to upend society by claiming that hidden racism pervades American institutions. CRT teaches people to seize on any racial disparity as ipso facto proof of racial discrimination, despite the clear prohibitions on racial discrimination in federal law. Advocates claim that the American status quo is racist — if not “white supremacist” — so extreme measures to reverse historic injustices are the only “anti-racist” option.

Since American society must be secretly racist, CRT advocates attribute various aspects of society to the nefarious impact of “whiteness.” The Smithsonian briefly published a “teaching tool” infographic on “whiteness.” That infographic claimed that the nuclear family, science, capitalism, the Judeo-Christian tradition, individualism, “objective, rational linear thinking,” and even values such as “be polite” are aspects of oppressive whiteness. The Smithsonian rightly removed the graphic after facing criticism, but this incident illustrates just how mainstream CRT has become.

CRT has led teachers and authors to make comments about white people that would be universally condemned if directed against any other race.

In February, a New York City high school principal sent white parents a “tool for action” encouraging parents to fight America’s “regime of whiteness” and become “white traitors” and “white abolitionists.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that Capitol rioters chose “their whiteness over democracy.”

CRT proponents do not claim that only white people can espouse “whiteness.” In fact, a New York University professor attributed black and Latino support for former President Donald Trump to “multiracial whiteness.”

CRT proponents equate “whiteness” with racial oppression, subtly branding all white people racist oppressors. Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes, an associate professor of practical theology at Mercer University, published a devotional that included a prayer asking God to “please help me to hate white people. Or at least to want to hate them.”

Yet this pales in comparison to recent remarks from Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a psychiatrist who gave a lecture at the Yale University School of Medicine. Katie Herzog, writing for the substack Common Sense with Bari Weiss, alerted the world to Khilanani’s remarks at a lecture entitled, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” Yes, even the title suggests that white people are all psychopaths.

“White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time,” Khilanani declared. “We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen.”

Khilanani did not necessarily endorse violent attacks against white people, but she did fantasize about them.

“I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f***ing favor,” she said.

Imagine if anyone had dared to say such a hateful thing about anyone of a different race. If a white scholar had said such a thing about killing a black person, he would rightly receive a permanent black mark on his record. He would get fired and never be able to find a job again. Yet Khilanani delivered these remarks at Yale back in April, and Yale did not condemn the remarks until Sunday, after the news broke. Yale belatedly said Khilanani’s remarks were “antithetical to the values of the school.”

Yet these remarks echo critical race theory, and they have arguably inspired violent attacks against white people.

On Thursday, Amazon driver Itzel Ramirez violently attacked a white woman who had been waiting for her package. The woman received a notification that her package had arrived, so she went to the front door of her apartment complex but failed to see the package. She asked Ramirez, who was wearing an Amazon vest, about the package.

Ramirez told the woman she would have the package shortly, but the woman reportedly waited for about 15 minutes in the lobby. When she asked Ramirez about the package again, the driver reportedly told her to “check her white privilege.” The woman reportedly said, “Well, you don’t have to be a b***h about it.” As she started walking away, Ramirez punched her from behind, hitting her in the face and breaking her nose.

PJ Media’s Kevin Downey, Jr. noted that black offenders murder twice as many white victims as white offenders murder black victims, a statistic that is wildly out of proportion given the fact that white people outnumber black people 5 to 1. He reported multiple incidents in which a black man assaulted a white woman, most recently when a 350-pound black man violently attacked two women, unprovoked. Downey also noted that Colin Flaherty has written three books about how the legacy media not only ignores black-on-white crime but also claims that white people are oppressing and attacking black people.

Indeed, CRT dominates the legacy media echo chamber. Two years ago, The New York Times launched “The 1619 Project,” which tried to flip American history on its head by arguing that America’s “true founding” came with the arrival of the first slaves in Virginia, not with the Declaration of Independence. Scholars immediately raised objections and the Times has issued a series of stealth corrections tacitly admitting that its project was based on a lie.

Even so, the 1619 Project founder, Nikole Hannah-Jones, enjoys immense prestige. She won a Pulitzer Prize, is working with Oprah Winfrey to develop a television series on the 1619 Project, and gained a controversial teaching position at the University of North Carolina.

Meanwhile, when vandals toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland, they spray-painted “1619” on it. When Claremont’s Charles Kesler wrote in The New York Post, “Call them the 1619 riots,” Hannah-Jones responded (in a since-deleted tweet) that “it would be an honor” to claim responsibility for the destructive riots.

This episode illustrated a broader theme: CRT inspired much of the destruction of the Black Lives Matter and antifa riots last summer. While many Americans protested after the death of George Floyd, many of those protests devolved into arson and looting. In a tragic irony, this violence in the name of helping black people destroyed black lives, black livelihoods, and black monuments.

Now, CRT drives policy and even classroom instruction. Dan Grotting, the superintendent of the school district in Beaverton, Ore., suggested that teachers who disagree with the “anti-racism” CRT movement should seek work elsewhere. “I do want the message to get out there that this [anti-racism training] isn’t optional anymore,” he said. Members of the local school board and the Oregon Department of Education defended Grotting after his statements made national news.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot lamented that her local “press corps is overwhelmingly White in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American.” To address this alleged disparity, Lightfoot announced that she would only grant one-on-one interviews with journalists of racial minorities.

The Biden administration has also endorsed CRT and implemented “anti-racist” policies. A COVID-19 loan forgiveness program specifically aimed to help “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers who are Black, American Indian, Hispanic, Alaskan native, Asian American or Pacific Islander.” White Midwestern farmers are suing the administration for discrimination because they were denied equal treatment due to the color of their skin.

Biden echoed critical race theory when he falsely characterized Georgia’s election integrity law as “Jim Crow on steroids.” When businesses condemned the law and Major League Baseball pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta, the president called these moves “reassuring.”

In a chilling speech on the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Biden explicitly compared the January 6 Capitol riot to the racist white mob that killed dozens in Tulsa 100 years ago. “What happened in [the] Greenwood [neighborhood of Tulsa] was an act of hate and domestic terrorism, with a through-line that exists today,” Biden declared. He went on to announce new initiatives to combat domestic terrorism, using the Tulsa massacre to justify what appears to be a crackdown on dissent from Biden’s leftist narrative.

Critical race theory is pitting neighbor against neighbor — or Amazon delivery driver against Amazon customers. The Left is using it as a wedge issue to demonize political opponents and silence dissent. Biden has even brought back explicitly racial policies that grant people benefits based on their skin color.

Yet the most frightening proposal came from Ibram X. Kendi, the mind behind the “anti-racism” movement. As PJ Media’s Mark Tapscott noted, Kendi has called for an amendment to the Constitution that would enshrine “anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals.” The Amendment would ban “racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials.”

His amendment would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA), which would be independent of the voters. This totalitarian bureaucracy “would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.”

In other words, Kendi — an extremely influential author and Harvard University scholar who has established “anti-racism” centers at American University and Boston University — is demanding a totalitarian bureaucracy to root out “inequity” and “racist ideas,” which include any opposition to CRT.

Such a proposal is wildly unconstitutional — for now. Yet as CRT entrenches itself in corporate America, the education system, and the legacy media, this proposal may become a very viable threat.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXNTSlXtN9I
33:18 min

NYT Staff On MSNBC Denounces American Flags As Disturbing, Democrats Don't Share Reality With GOP

•Jun 8, 2021


Tim Pool

NYT Staffer On MSNBC Denounces American Flags As Disturbing, Democrats Don't Share Reality With GOP. Democrats have embraced a paranoid delusional worldview and don't share reality with the GOP anymore. While certainly the right has its weirdos, those people have little to no institutional power. meanwhile Democrats are openly calling the American flags disturbing on national television and ascribing insane views to people simply for driving trucks. The hatred between the tribes in the culture war is at the highest levels yet and this cold civil war could escalate into overt hot war soon. Conservatives like the American flag and what it represents but Democrats are pushing for historical revisionism with the 1619 project and flying BLM flags at our embassies
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

New York Times Defends Editorial Board Member Who Called American Flags ‘Disturbing’

By Cassandra Fairbanks
Published June 9, 2021 at 9:39am
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The New York Times is defending their editorial board member who called American flags “disturbing.”


Their staff member, Mara Gay, caused a firestorm after her appearance on MSNBC Tuesday.

“I was on Long Island this weekend visiting a really dear friend, and I was really disturbed. I saw, you know, dozens and dozens of pickup trucks with explicatives [sic] against Joe Biden on the back of them, Trump flags, and in some cases just dozens of American flags, which is also just disturbing … Essentially the message was clear: This is my country. This is not your country. I own this,” Gay said.

Gay went on to trash white people and “whiteness.”

“I think that as long as they see Americanness as the same as one with whiteness, this is going to continue,” she said, adding that many people don’t understand the “danger” of “whiteness.”

“That is the real concern. Because, you know, the Trump voters who are not going to get onboard with democracy, they’re a minority. You can marginalize them, long-term. But if we don’t take the threat seriously, then I think we’re all in really bad shape,” Gay said.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1402218237048279041
2:34 min

In response to the outrage, the New York Times released a statement claiming that people defending the flag are acting in “bad faith.”

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“New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay’s comments on MSNBC have been irresponsibly taken out of context. Her argument was that Trump and many of his supporters have politicized the American flag. The attacks on her today are ill-informed and grounded in bad-faith,” the publication wrote.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

China Is Paying US Mainstream Media Outlets to Promote Chicom Propaganda

By Joe Hoft
Published June 9, 2021 at 8:45am
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To no one’s surprise, China has been paying US mainstream media outlets to publish Chicom propaganda.

InfoWars reported last week that China is paying US companies to push their Chicom propaganda through the China Daily.

China Daily, a Chinese state-run media outlet, is currently paying multiple U.S. news agencies millions of dollars to publish Chicom propaganda.

According to Justice Department documents, Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Foreign Policy magazine are all currently receiving money from the Chinese outlet.

For example, as part of a $700,000 advertising campaign paid for by China Daily, Time published 75 online articles from the outletin the past year.

The lucrative deal resulted in Time posting content promoting a Chinese drone maker that provided products to surveil Uyghurs being held captive, an article promoting China’s five-year plan, and several other pro-China pieces.

However, unlike The Wall Street Journal who once took money from China Daily, Time magazine failed to disclose the fact that the outlet is funded by the Chinese government.

Below is the DOJ document related to China’s payments to US media outlets:

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Scribd doc on website

3457 Supplemental Statement… by Jamie White

We’ve observed over the past few years how American media has pushed Chicom propaganda.

A year ago we reported how US media was pushing the narrative that COVID-19 came from a wet market. This was important to China. If COVID-19 was an event that happened naturally then China could claim they were a victim too. If created in a lab, then China is liable for trillions in damages.

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CNN pushed Chinese propaganda that China was doing so much better with their COVID-19 than the US.

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Of course, who could forget Rep. Swalwell repeating in the media the lie that Trump was a pawn of Russia while Swalwell was having an affair with a Chinese spy?

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Unfortunately, the US media and many US politicians have stronger commitments to China than the US.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Barack Obama Admits "Cancel Culture" Has Gone Too Far

WEDNESDAY, JUN 09, 2021 - 01:24 PM
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

During an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, former president Barack Obama said that cancel culture has gone too far in American society.


A lot of the dangers of cancel culture and ‘we’re just going to be condemning people all the time,’ at least among my daughters, they’ll acknowledge that among their peer group or in college campuses, you’ll see people going overboard,” said Obama.

Although he said individuals and institutions should be called out if they engage in “cruel” behavior, Obama warned that expecting everybody to be “perfect” was futile.

“We don’t expect everybody to politically correct all the time,” he added.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1402248381003599875
.42 min

Obama’s opinion on ‘woke’ puritanism hasn’t shifted since 2019, when he asserted that calling people out on social media for not being politically correct is “not activism.”
“This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly,” said Obama, adding, “The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws.”
He also warned leftists that trying to one up each other in terms of political correctness would lead to a “circular firing squad.”

Meanwhile, many on the left still continue to claim that cancel culture doesn’t even exist, even as sports stars continue to be canceled for edgy tweets posted when they were teenagers.

View: https://youtu.be/dlmWZcouy-g
3:23 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
BEHIND THE BERET: Battalion Commander Reportedly Tells Troops ‘White People Are Part of the Problem’
A Human Events Exclusive Story
By Jack Posobiec | June 09, 2021

Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Rhodes, commander of the 1-8 Infantry – “Fighting Eagles“, has a message for all serving in the military: if you’re white, you’re the problem.

It was recently discovered that Rhodes, who holds a position of authority and responsibility, runs a private, “woke,” left-wing Twitter account under the name “Dru.”

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If the Twitter account wasn’t enough to convince you of his radical beliefs, his comment at a military function should do the job.

“If you’re a white male, you are part of the problem,” Rhodes reportedly said.
He also reportedly added that only .01 percent of racist accusations are false, and that he would always believe someone coming forward about an uncomfortable situation.
The story began circulating on social media, with one Instagram post catching some important attention.

“Looks like Fort Carson got themselves a real gem of an unbiased commander,” the post reads.

“I hope you’re not white or ever accused of anything while you’re in his command. You’re already guilty and you didn’t even know it!”
The post caught the eye of the current Sergeant Major of the Army, Michael A. Grinston.

“Looking more into this,” he wrote. “Thanks.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Radical Reshaping of K-12 Public Education (Part 1): Gender Redefinition & Self-Selection

KERI D. INGRAHAM JUNE 2, 2021 INDOCTRINATIONORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR
[Editor’s Note: This is Part One of a three-part article. Click to read Part Two: Civics & History and Part Three: Critical Race Theory & Woke Academics.]


Extreme ideologies are quickly taking root in U.S. K-12 public schools through new school policies, practices, and curriculums — with devastating effects on students. Unfortunately, Americans are mainly turning a blind eye instead of speaking up against political and social indoctrination that threatens our children’s education and the very fabric of our nation.

One radical development is in the area of sex/gender. Although the terms are historically used interchangeably, a shift has occurred in recent decades, with sex primarily referring to a biological category or anatomy, and gender referring to a person’s thinking or feelings about who they are. Over the past several years, schools have increasingly embraced the cultural redefinition of gender – from male and female to a host of created alternatives. Despite the biological reality of only two distinct sexes formed in the womb and birthed, schools embrace, and in some cases actively promote, student questioning and then self-selecting their gender based upon how they feel.

The Gender Unicorn
Starting as early as preschool and kindergarten, taxpayer money is funding radical sex education content. Just one example is the Gender Unicorn (an iteration of the Genderbread Person), a purple cartoon image featuring hearts and rainbows. Adopted in 2016 by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in Charlotte, North Carolina, Gender Unicorn use has spread nationwide and into Canada. The Washington State ASCD Curriculum in Context Spring/Summer 2020 lists the Gender Unicorn as one of several “educational materials” for teachers. The Alberta Teacher’s Association includes the Gender Unicorn in their 152-page teacher toolkit aimed at cultivating LBGTQ-inclusive classrooms.

The character is designed to look endearing to young children, similar to the popular Barney or Boz. However, this unicorn walks students through self-selecting their gender identity, their gender expression, the gender they’re physically attracted to, and the gender they’re emotionally attracted to. Each option includes not only categories such as women/men and feminine/masculine but also “other.” Even their “sex assigned at birth” is open to interpretation — it includes female and male, but also “other/intersex.”

According to Ely Sanders, the Sexual Health and School Health Specialist for the Oregon Department of Education, “We have more and more kindergartners coming out and identifying.” Show young students the purple unicorn and ask them to choose from various options, and you’ll undoubtedly receive all sorts of interesting answers. Talk to any five-year-old for ten minutes, and you will be entertained and likely given misinformation on any number of topics. But without prompting or exposure to these concepts from adults, young students would surely not form the suggested conclusions.

Most kindergarteners don’t know how to read, tie their shoes, or recite their home address. But instead of teaching the academic basics, schools are now actively promoting identity confusion, emotional harm, and insecurity — negative impacts that last a lifetime. It’s no wonder that child and adolescent mental health issues are on a steep rise when students are taught to question their own identity and select from an ever-growing list of confusing options.

Meanwhile, parents are widely uninformed about what’s occurring in classrooms related to this material. For example, a concerned parent of a second-grade student in Oregon reached out to the teacher after her child was exposed to the Genderbread Person without any prior communication. (Tragically, the teaching of gender identity and fluidity and other LGBTQ concepts in social studies and science often come with no warning or option for parents to opt their students out). Her concerns were dismissed and the request for a meeting with the teacher to discuss was denied. Instead, the teacher directed the parent to the principal, who responded that gender identity is something our society historically has failed to talk about and declared it a positive development that students are being taught about this topic now.

Furthermore, the principal stated that gender identity teaching could occur throughout the school year in all subject areas. And while Oregon allows opt-out in health classes, the principal reminded the parent that the opt-in option does not apply to non-health classes. This deceptive strategy by the school evidently meets the letter of the law by providing parent communication and opt-out privileges regarding “sensitive health content.” However, it clearly violates the spirit of the law and circumvents parental control over the indoctrination of their children.

Another example of this type of indoctrination is from Bethel School District in Washington State. Recently students were assigned to complete a survey related to COVID-19, in which students in grades six to twelve (i.e., as young as ten years old) were asked to select their gender. Options included “male, female, transgender, questioning/not sure of my gender identity, or something else that fits better.” Next, the survey asked students to indicate their sexual orientation from the provided options: heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or “something else that fits better.” Parents were not informed of the survey content, which plants seeds regarding sexual orientation gender identity confusion. When questioned, the district spokesperson refused to respond other than to pass the buck, saying people could talk to the survey creators. One Washington parent fittingly asked, “is the state’s intent to inject transgender and hyper-sexuality into everything they do?”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Radical Reshaping of K-12 Public Education (Part 2): Civics & History
KERI D. INGRAHAM JUNE 4, 2021 INDOCTRINATIONORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

[Editor’s Note: This is Part Two of a three-part article. Click to read Part One: Gender Redefinition & Self-Selection and Part Three: Critical Race Theory & Woke Academics.]


Six former U.S. education secretaries, serving both Democratic and Republican Presidents, are sounding the alarm about the grave danger our constitutional democracy faces. Years of political polarization have culminated in riots in our cities spanning months, and the storming of the U.S. Capitol. They point to a root cause of our plight: our failure to provide sound civics and history teaching in our K-12 schools.

Even when civics and history are taught, there is discord concerning the content and how to teach it. And too often, teacher unions, rather than modeling positive social behavior, instead promote indoctrination of students on partisan political viewpoints. They also make outlandish demands in exchange for teachers returning to the classroom to provide the services they’ve been hired to fulfill — in-person schooling for our children.
This is far more than a slippery slope — it's an outright abandonment of a fact-based education in exchange for an agenda-based indoctrination.
KERI D. INGRAHAM
Failure to Teach Civics
Civics, defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a social science dealing with the rights and duties of citizens,” is nonexistent in most American schools today. Forty-two of our 50 states don’t require civics for graduation. This was not always the case. Civics used to be foundational to a public education. As Charles Salter points out in an article for Education Week, since its beginnings, public education’s basic purpose was to “preserve and perpetuate a functioning democratic society by educating citizens in the ways of that democracy.” Thomas Jefferson wisely noted public education’s aim to “educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

Salter goes on to say that without civics, we are producing “an electorate that has not been taught to think deeply about how a democracy is supposed to function, the public’s role in making it function, or how to assess the information it receives before making decisions.” This lack of education results in an inability to self-govern effectively. Look no further than mob rule that has been commonplace in America’s largest cities during the last year for a dramatic example of this ignorance of civics playing out.

This deficiency is especially problematic in an age of the proliferation of news based not on a balanced and objective presentation of facts, but rather intended to trigger emotion and manipulate public beliefs. Flipping between polar news stations will result in widely conflicting summaries of the day’s events — with a given event spun to fuel the larger narrative the station promotes.

Students are usually not prepared to make an independent knowledge-based assessment of what is being presented from the media and through social media. A prime example is the reporting on the “mostly peaceful” rioting in American cities throughout the summer of 2020 and beyond, which caused billions of dollars of damage to public and private properties and numerous injuries and deaths of law enforcement personnel. But depending on what media outlet you follow, your impression of the destructive events may vary greatly.

Another example is the conflating of a phrase that virtually everyone supports — that black lives, do in fact, matter — with the Black Lives Matters (BLM) organization. Protesting in cities across America by the millions, many of these BLM supporters were unaware that they are championing Marxism — let alone what Marxism is at its core:
Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after Karl Marx. It examines the effect of capitalism on labor, productivity, and economic development and argues for a worker revolution to overturn capitalism in favor of communism…. As a result of the revolution, Marx predicted that private ownership of the means of production would be replaced by collective ownership, under socialism first and then communism. In the final stage of human development, social classes and class struggle would no longer exist.
Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of BLM, confirmed the connection between BLM and Marxism, explaining that she and fellow organizers are “trained Marxists. We are super-versed.” In her book When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir, Cullors describes her introduction to Marxism as protégé of Eric Mann. She devoted years to studying Marxism under the former agitator of the Weather Underground domestic terror organization.

Today, leaders holding high government offices at the federal and state levels are quickly exploiting an underlying principle: The less educated our citizens are regarding civics, the more pliable they are to the acceptance of radical philosophies and agenda, and the more government power can grow. The end result will be a loss of the American Dream — life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Don’t believe this? Take a look at the citizens of today’s socialist and communist countries around the world. According to Ben Shapiro, “while advocates of Marxism today disown the Stalinists and the Maoists and the Castro regime and Venezuela and North Korea, all of those nations thought they were fulfilling Marx’s dream, too.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The Radical Reshaping of K-12 Public Education (Part 3): Critical Race Theory & Woke Academics

KERI D. INGRAHAM JUNE 9, 2021 INDOCTRINATIONORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

[Editor’s Note: This is Part Three of a three-part article. Click to read
Part One: Gender Redefinition & Self-Selection and Part Two: Civics & History.]

A form of reverse racism is not only dominating the national conversation but also quickly becoming a bedrock of teacher training and student academics. Critical Race Theory and woke education are sweeping schools. White teachers and students are labeled as racist and required to denounce their alleged white supremacy. Even basic mathematics is under attack for its perceived racism.

Those championing Critical Race Theory and woke education are reversing the heroic and historic work of King and many others who fought for equality in America.
KERI D. INGRAHAM
Critical Race Theory Teacher Training
What is Critical Race Theory? It is defined as an “intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. ” Critical Race Theorists assert that “the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.”

The Frankfurt School, comprised of researchers in Germany connected with the Institute for Social Research and dating back to 1923, used Marxist concepts to “analyze the social relations within capitalist economic systems.” This approach was termed Critical Theory. Critical Theory produced Critical Legal Theory, which brought about Critical Race Theory.

More specifically, Critical Race Theory “teaches people that their individuality is not based on their intrinsic worth as human persons, but as members of a group based on their perceived outward appearance.” The theory intentionally “seeks to divide American society into two classes, the oppressors and the oppressed. It labels people based on the color of their skin.”

In an effort to ensure “fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States,” President Trump signed an executive order on September 22, 2020, that prohibited federal workplace training on “diverse concepts” which included “race or sex stereotyping” as well as “race or sex scapegoating.” The executive order expanded on a September 4, 2020, letter by the Director of the Office of Management and Budget within the White House, banning federal spending on any training involving Critical Race Theory, white privilege, and un-American propaganda. This came as the result of these toxic ideologies sweeping through federal agencies, including the FBI. Sadly, President Biden rescinded the order on his first day in office, allowing Critical Race Theory to reign supreme, spurring further division within our nation.

Critical Race Theory entered into our schools in the form of Critical Race Theory-based teacher training even as classrooms were closed during the fall of 2020. The emotional backdrop was a nation in disarray following a dark summer of violent protests, the defacing and destruction of historic statues, looting, and the burning of police vehicles and buildings following the death of George Floyd.

One example of many comes from Fairfax County Public Schools, Virginia, the tenth largest school district in the U.S. In August 2020, when the district should have been intently focused on equipping teachers with skills and best practices for online classroom learning, teacher training time was instead devoted to Critical Race Theory indoctrination. The district paid activist Ibram Kendi $20,000 for a one-hour training session ($333.33 per minute). The one-hour training was only the beginning of the indoctrination. The district doled out another $24,000 to purchase his books for K-12 student required reading. Kendi’s books promote a vast array of radical ideas in support of “anti-racism” — such as the assertion that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist” (only discrimination by whites against blacks is), the proposal of a constitutional amendment against any “racial inequity,” and the establishment of an authoritarian “Department of Anti-racism” with the power to reject any local, state, or federal policy it deemed would further racial inequities in society.

Fairfax County is not alone in its Critical Race Theory teacher professional development. In December, during teacher training in San Diego, white employees were told, “you are racist…upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.” They were warned that they would experience “guilt, anger, apathy [and] closed-mindedness” due to their “white fragility.” Masquerading as anti-racism, Critical Race Theory training makes blanket assertions about people based solely on their race — which is the very definition of racism.

Clearly, for Fairfax Country and San Diego, preparing teachers to indoctrinate their students on radical Critical Race Theory concepts takes priority over getting teachers back in classrooms or training teachers in best practices for remote learning.

Even as classrooms began to open (at least partially) in the early months of 2021, the Critical Race Theory training had not let up. Instead, it spread like wildfire nationwide, not only in classrooms but into state legislatures, which sought to pass legislation requiring it. For example, Washington State Senate Bill 5044, which has passed both the Senate and the House, would mandate Critical Race Theory training every year in public school as part of required teacher professional development. Claiming to bring equity and justice to non-white school personnel and students, the legislation will hurt the very groups it professes to champion.

Liv Finne, Director of the Center for Education at the Washington Policy Center, describes the harmful and divisive impact of this indoctrination in schools: “Critical Race Theory teaches black children they are not responsible for their own innate abilities, but instead are structural victims of someone else. What proponents are hoping to achieve by this indoctrination is dependency and low-performance, and they seek to encourage political activism over authentic student development.” In other words, it lowers the standard for black students, which is ultimately discrimination against them.

Some states are pushing back against the training. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has banned its teaching in the public schools in his state. Likewise, the Idaho House of Representatives is also taking a stand, refusing to allow Critical Race Theory to permeate the state’s public school classrooms. Idaho Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin announced that she would form an indoctrination task force to identify where critical race theory, socialism, communism, and Marxism “are lurking and excise them from our education system.”

But the vast majority of states are giving way to Critical Race Theory teacher training and implementing this damaging doctrine within their classrooms. Sometimes this even involves unethical and illegal actions on the part of school district leaders. For example, in Texas, Carroll Independent School District President Michelle Moore and Vice President Todd Carlton worked secretively to push their racial training plan ahead despite a judge issuing a restraining order to restrict it. The proposed plan would cost $425,000 in the first year alone with the heavy price tag of $35,000 for speakers. A grand jury indicted Moore and Carlton as a result of their malicious, illegal actions.

Hopefully government leaders in other states will follow the lead of Idaho and Florida, stopping Critical Race Theory from taking root. Currently, seven states — Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, Arkansas, South Dakota, Arizona, and North Carolina — are proposing legislation to ban Critical Race Theory from their public schools. Immediate action is needed by all state and local leaders to protect students and staff of all skin colors, as the invasion of this divisive, racist dogma is fully underway.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society

by Richard Bernstein
June 9, 2021

Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society
A broad revolution is underway in the United States as traditional standards used to measure achievement and provide opportunity are being rejected by schools, corporations, and governments in favor of quotas based on race and gender.

Article by Richard Bernstein from Real Clear Investigations.

On just his sixth day in office, President Biden signaled that the nation’s long held principle of equality for all had come to an end, signing an executive order declaring that “racial equity is not just an issue for any one department of government; it has to be the business of the whole of government” — equity referring to the idea that merely treating everybody the same is not enough, and that an equal outcome for all people has to be the goal.

Over the last few months, many Ivy League and flagship state universities have moved away from a seemingly neutral measure long used to assess applicants – standardized test scores – to give minorities a better shot at admissions.

In May, Hewlett-Packard, the technology company with 50,000 employees worldwide, decreed that by 2030 half of its leadership positions and more than 30% of its technicians and engineers have to be women and that the number of minorities should “meet or exceed” their representation in the tech industry workforce.

That same month, United Airlines announced that half of the 5,000 pilots it would train at its proprietary flight school between now and 2030 will be women or people of color, with scholarships provided by United and JPMorgan Chase helping with tuition. There was nothing in the United announcement showing that there were enough qualified blacks and women in the pipeline so that a black/female quota of 2,500 new pilots could be filled, and nothing about what the company would do if there weren’t enough qualified candidates.

Delta Airlines, Ralph Lauren, and Wells Fargo are among other major American companies to announce hiring quotas recently as a way to redress racial imbalances, according to Bloomberg News.

These are just some of the many “woke” initiatives embraced by many of the pillars of American society in the year since social justice protests erupted across the country in response to the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Supporters argue that racial preferences and quotas are necessary to end deeply entrenched disparities. Critics say that they are a new form of discrimination, no more justified than old forms that are widely rejected. And while the stated goal of affirmative action was to simply eliminate unfair discrimination, the equity movement is rooted in a far more expansive and pessimistic view of the United States as irredeemably white supremacist, a view meant to continually challenge American institutions and values.

The rapid transition from equality of treatment to equality of outcomes tests one of the basic post-civil rights principles of American life, namely that the same standards should be applied to all people. Once a measure is applied, not to the unique individual but to that individual’s group identity, the idea that there are neutral, common, universally applicable standards gives way to something else, something subjective and political, with different measures applied to different people, depending on their sex, race, or other characteristics.

The issue of standards, moreover, is not just a matter of values or fairness. With the United States falling behind other countries in math and science, most notably China, standards are matters of competitiveness and national security — even as the military, CIA and other federal agencies embrace equity.

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From the President’s Jan. 26 remarks explaining his racial equity order. whitehouse.gov
But discontent over the pace of racial progress, fueled in the past year by the Black Lives Matter movement, has led to an explicit rejection of meritocracy and a call for old standards to make way for new ones. Explaining the company’s adoption of quotas, Hewlett-Packard Chief Diversity Officer Lesley Slaton Brown said the COVID-19 epidemic and the George Floyd murder has “really allowed us to do the double-click down on racial equality and the systematic and structural discrimination that exists.”

In the recent past, that effort often involved working with the existing ideological framework of equality of opportunity and merit to identify worthy candidates. Now, the trend is to reject and redefine those standards.

“As a community, we need a more comprehensive framework for what constitutes ‘best’ in hiring faculty and staff,” Gregory Washington, the president of George Mason University in Virginia, wrote in an email sent recently to the entire school. Washington, who is GMU’s first ever black president, denied that his call for greater diversity amounted to a quota system; instead, he said, “it is a recognition of the reality that our society’s future lies in multicultural inclusion.”

Certainly it is true that the American future is multicultural. Still, to say that the concept of “best” needs to be redefined in racial terms is already a significant departure from the idea of neutral standards. To go from there to the notion that meritocracy is a racist stratagem is a sea change, but there is a lot of evidence that that is exactly where society is going, in both small ways and large.

In May, the Princeton University classics department announced that in an effort to combat “systemic racism,” it would no longer require classics majors to take Latin or Greek. This may be a good thing or a bad thing, but certainly it says that what was until recently a foundational qualification for the study of “the classics” — the ability to read texts in their original language — no longer applies, because some students, especially minority ones, didn’t have the opportunity to study Latin or Greek in high school. But is it really OK for future professors of classics not to know Latin? Is that simply a new standard or a decline in standards?

From a very different area of American life, none other than the very august American Medical Association announced in May a new Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity in medical education and practice.

The 80-page plan calls for, among other things, an expansion of “medical school and physician education to include equity, anti-racism, structural competency, public health and social sciences, critical race theory, and historical basis of disease.” It doesn’t say whether adding those subjects to the medical school curriculum, which sounds a lot like instruction in the indelibly racist nature of America, will take away time from such other subjects as anatomy,
microbiology, and genetics that are clearly more germane to the practice of medicine.

“Scientific evidence tells us that racism has caused significant harm to people – and their health – throughout our nation’s history,” Gregory E. Harmon, M.D., the AMA’s president elect, who is white, said in an email to RCI, explaining the initiative.

Perhaps the most striking passages in the AMA document are those that have to do with equality and meritocracy, which it calls “malignant narratives.”

“Seeking to treat everyone the ‘same’ ignores the historical legacy of disinvestment and deprivation,” the document says of equality, while meritocracy is “a narrative that attributes success and failure to individual abilities and merits. It does not address the centuries of unequal treatment that have historically robbed communities of the vital resources needed to thrive.”

Some critics have noted that the Strategic Plan says nothing about competency; several doctors posting to the blog Legal Insurrection asked if members of the AMA would be comfortable allowing them or their families to be treated, as one of them put it, “by those who have MD attached to their names solely in the name of equity … not because of meritocracy or qualification.”

The AMA rejects that view. “Not only must we follow our oath to do no harm,” Harmon said in his email to RCI, “we must also prevent the harm that that inequity inflicts on communities and our nation.”

There is, of course, some truth to the assertion that standards have been misused in the past. There was a time not that long ago when social connections, a genteel manner, even just having an Anglo-Saxon name, not to mention being white, were deemed to be qualifications in themselves, while to be black, female, or gay was disqualifying.


But what the AMA document, like “woke” doctrine in general, ignores is that the national effort to redress past wrongs has been going on for a long time in American life, making the matter of racial advantage and disadvantage more a matter of multivariable calculus than simple arithmetic. To be sure, there are racial imbalances. Only 3.2% of senior corporate executives, for example, are black. It’s easy to see the demand for this number to increase, but there are many questions, involving both practicality and principle, about the use of racial quotas to achieve that goal.
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Blacks are just 5% of those in engineering and sciences. How can that share rise dramatically? National Science Foundation

On the practical side are the people hurt by them, both those unprepared for the roles as well as the qualified passed over. There is also the question of whether efforts like those at United and HP may simply run into the inconvenient fact that, for many complicated reasons, there simply aren’t enough qualified minority candidates around to meet goals for rapid increases in their representation.

According to the National Science Foundation, black men and women, who are 12% of the general population, make up just 5% of working engineers — this despite affirmative action programs and numerous other efforts over the years to recruit minorities into engineering programs in colleges and universities. How dramatic increases in a very short period can happen now remains unexplained.

As for American medicine, it’s been a very long time since it was a white male preserve, as just about any visit to a large urban hospital, with their many Filipino and Indian physicians both male and female, will show. For several years now, more women have been accepted to medical schools than men, but while the numbers of blacks going to medical school has also increased, only 5% of physicians in the country are black or African American.

This is the case even though black students are now accepted into medical school at almost the same rate as whites, 41% of black applicants compared to 45% of whites. Medical schools, like other professional schools, have, moreover, been eager to increase these numbers for years, so that blacks, whites, and Asians are already being admitted under different criteria. In 2018, Princeton Review reports, blacks accepted at medical schools scored an average 505.7 on the MCAT, the standardized med school admission test – putting them in the 69th percentile of all test takers. By comparison, the average score for admitted whites was 512.2 (the 86th percentile) and 513.8 for Asians. Average undergraduate GPAs: 3.53 for blacks, 3.77 for both whites and Asians.

The Strategic Plan offers no concrete suggestions for further increasing the numbers of blacks in medical school, and it makes no analysis of whether it’s even possible to do that. Is there a pool of qualified candidates that, somehow, is not being considered? Should medical school admission committees admit some of the applicants rejected in the past, even though that would increase the gap in test scores and GPAs between them and other students? Will teaching critical race theory to existing medical students increase minority representation?

Asked about medical school admissions, Harmon pointed to studies showing that medical students with “midrange” scores on the MCAT “mostly succeed in medical school,” though “there is a tendency to overlook these applicants in favor of those with higher scores.”

The authors of the studies argue that admitting students with lower MCAT scores would “diversify the physician workforce.” But given that black students are already being admitted at a significantly lower standard, at least as defined by MCAT, than whites and Asians, how much lower can the standard go? The studies give no answer to that question.

Part 2 of 2
 

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Part 2 of 2

The AMA Plan also fails to address the question of principle raised by applying different standards to different groups. Is it fair to effectively prevent some qualified individuals from becoming doctors because their gender or race requires them to score higher than other genders or races? It’s the same question that applies to the different standards applied to Asians, compared to both whites and blacks, in school admissions, a matter that is the subject of several lawsuits.

“We are taught to study for the test, to get good grades,” Kenny Xu, author of a forthcoming book “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy,” said in an email. “Why? Because those good grades and test scores will, and should, lead to rewards in the future.

“How would you feel if someone who studied a third as much as you did got an opportunity you’ve been wanting for years? That would be absolutely unfair. And yet, that is what woke ideology does.”
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In Alexandria, Va., an anti-Asian bias suit over who gets into elite Thomas Jefferson High. (AP Photo/Matthew Barakat, File)

Despite views like those, standardized tests have been under assault for years as obstacles to minority advancement, especially tests for elite high schools in such cities as New York, Boston, and San Francisco, and the SAT used for college admissions.

Elite schools including Lowell High School in San Francisco have dropped their admissions test in favor of a lottery system. This may increase racial diversity, but will the school be able to maintain its high academic standards? The same question applies to other elite schools such as the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia, rated by U.S. News as the best high school in the country, which is also jettisoning its former standardized test in favor of “holistic” admissions.

Similarly, last year, in what might prove to be a watershed decision, the regents of the University of California voted to phase out the SAT in admissions for the entire system, whose nine campuses make up the largest public university in the country.

All of this raises the possibility that the elimination of common, neutral standards will bring an end to the existence of elite schools for very gifted, very high-achieving students of the sort who will ensure American competitiveness in the future.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if in two or three years standardized testing is eliminated altogether,” William Jacobson, a law professor at Cornell who runs the Legal Insurrection website, said in a Zoom interview. “You see people saying that the whole concept of meritocracy is a device to maintain white supremacy. But if you eliminate testing that has commonality to it, how do you judge people?”

A similar rejection of the idea of merit lies behind another initiative in California, where the state Board of Education has adopted a “Framework” proposing that all gifted programs in math instruction be eliminated, along with all “acceleration” and “tracking” – that is, grouping students in different classes according to their math aptitude.

“The subject and community of mathematics has a history of exclusion and filtering rather than inclusion and welcoming,” the Framework states. “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents … and the cult of genius.” Very early on, women and minorities get “fixed labels of ‘giftedness’ and are taught differently” in a system “designed for privileged white boys,” the Framework says.

No doubt, there’s truth to the idea that some children are discouraged early when it comes to math, and that that holds them back. But the idea, as the Framework puts it, that “all students are capable of becoming powerful mathematics learners and users” seems utopian at the very least. Can all students become great mathematicians, violinists, or professional athletes, or is the very difference in natural abilities due to labels arbitrarily applied to children largely on the basis of their sex or race?

Moreover, the assertion that the system is “designed for privileged white boys” runs into someinconvenient facts: one is that plenty of “privileged white boys” can’t do math to save their lives; another is that Asians, both boys and girls, many of them immigrants from very modest circumstances, outperform these privileged white boys by considerable margins. In addition, overall, girls get at least equal or higher grades than boys in math from elementary to high school, despite the stereotyping “labels” that, according to the Math Framework, hold them back.

As for gifted programs favoring whites while keeping minorities out, according to the very statistics included in the Math Framework, 32% of Asian boys and girls in California are in “gifted” programs, compared to 8% of whites and 4% of blacks. So it would seem indisputable that to eliminate these programs would have the effect of placing many Asians, but not many whites, in slower classes.

The solution to math disparities, according to the Framework, is to group all students of all aptitudes in the same class and for teachers to give “differentiated work and more open math questions” to all of them.

The Framework doesn’t say exactly why this would be better than grouping more proficient math students in their own classes. Emails asking that and other questions were acknowledged by the Board of Education press office, but it did not respond to the actual questions.

American high school students have steadily been falling behind their Asian and European counterparts in math and science, most recently ranking 37th in the PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, which gives a test to 15-year-olds in countries around the world. China’s Shanghai ranks No.1.

The California Math Framework does not acknowledge that in Shanghai, the entirely opposite ideas about testing and standards are followed and implemented, with students tested early and often and placed into classes in accordance with their scores.

“Regarding minorities in particular, public K-12 education all too often produces students unprepared to compete, thus leading to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs and faculty positions,” three math professors recently wrote in the online journal Persuasion.

“This disparity is then condemned as a manifestation of structural racism. Resulting in administrative measures to lower the evaluation criteria. Lowering standards at all levels leads eventually to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, and so on in a downward spiral.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Medical Journal Labels “Whiteness” a “Malignant, Parasitic-like Condition” and there is “Not Yet a Permanent Cure”

By Jim Hoft
Published June 9, 2021 at 9:51pm
A new article published in the Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association labels “whiteness” a “malignant, parasitic-like condition that is “nearly impossible to eliminate.”

Moss argues there is “not yet a permanent cure.”

The article was written by Donald Moss who has written extensively on masculinity and whiteness issues.

donald-moss.jpg

Donald Moss — Another nutcase pretending to be an expert.

Newsweek reported:
A research article published last month in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association called whiteness “a malignant, parasitic-like condition.” That description, along with other language in the article, has caused public anger, and the backlash against the author was evident on social media.

The article, titled On Having Whiteness, was written by Dr. Donald Moss, a white man who is a faculty member of both the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
In the article, Moss wrote that “‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility” to the “parasitic” condition, which he claims “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.” He explained he believed whiteness establishes “entitled dominion” that enables the “host” to have “power without limit, force without restriction, violence without mercy,” and increases one’s drive to “terrorize.”
 

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On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxoo3VuR5u8
18:00 min
Wake Up America! Have people finally had enough?
live 5 hours ago


Wake Up America! Podcast


In this episode of Wake Up America! we will dive into the Andrew Brown charging decision and how that DA kicked butt. Also, it seems people are finally tired of masks. House Republicans refuse to comply with Pelosi's orders and Texas Governor Abbott outright bans masks in schools and government facilities. Is America back!
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP2noq3a0u4
15:36 min

Glenn’s FIERY response to President Obama for ‘planting’ America’s MARXIST seeds

•Jun 9, 2021



Glenn Beck


Former President Barack Obama sat down with CNN’s Anderson Cooper recently for an interview scheduled to air in full on Friday. During it, Obama called out the right-wing media for ‘stoking fears and resentment’ of white Americans. So, in this clip, Glenn sets the record straight: the right-wing media’s efforts to call out the far-left have NOTHING to do with race in America, but rather everything to do with protecting our way of life that is being threatened more and more each day by the radical, Marxist ideology seeping into government. Glenn says Obama is a liar, somebody who spied on reporters and political enemies to get his way, but more importantly, the worst thing President Obama did was plant and water the seeds of Marxism in our nation by constantly calling out 'race!'
 

marsh

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WATCH: Survivor Of Mao’s China Stuns School Board With Chilling Warning About Critical Race Theory

By Hank Berrien
•Jun 9, 2021 DailyWire.com•

Chinese woman at Loudon County meeting.
Loudoun County Public Schools

A Chinese woman who suffered under the brutal Communist Chinese regime of Mao Tse-Tung vehemently denounced Loudoun County’s School board in Virginia for its championing of Critical Race Theory, charging, “All of this seems very familiar … the only difference is they used class instead of race. … This is, indeed, the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

Given one minute to speak, the Chinese woman wasted no time getting to the point, asserting, “I’ve been very alarmed by what’s going on in our schools. You are now training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history. Growing up in Mao’s China, all of this seems very familiar. The Communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people; the only difference is they used class instead of race.”

“During the Cultural Revolution, I witnessed students and teachers turn against each other,” she recalled. “We changed school names to be politically correct. We were taught to denounce our heritage. The Red Guards destroyed anything that is not Communist: old statues, books, and anything else.”

She pointed out that in China during the Cultural Revolution, students were also encouraged to report on each other: “We were also encouraged to report on each other, just like the Student Equity Ambassador program and the Bias Reporting System.”

She concluded, “This is, indeed, the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The Critical Race Theory has its roots in cultural Marxism. It should have no place in our schools.”

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1402647901738881027
1:02 min

WTOP reported on June 3 that Loudoun County parents had filed suit in federal court against the Loudoun County School Board, claiming that school leaders were violating students’ free speech right.

WTOP continued:
The lawsuit aims to do away with the school system’s “Student Equity Ambassador Program” and “Bias Reporting System,” both of which encourage students to observe and discuss incidents of racist behavior in their school communities. Under the ambassador program, schools select a handful of students who meet with principals and other school leaders to discuss such incidents, while the reporting system urges students to anonymously report observations using a form online.
The Guardian explained of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which began in May 1966:
… the Cultural Revolution crippled the economy, ruined millions of lives and thrust China into 10 years of turmoil, bloodshed, hunger and stagnation.
Chinese students sprung (sic) into action, setting up Red Guard divisions in classrooms and campuses across the country. By August 1966 – so-called Red August – the mayhem was in full swing as Mao’s allies urged Red Guards to destroy the “four olds” – old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. Schools and universities were closed and churches, shrines, libraries, shops and private homes ransacked or destroyed as the assault on “feudal” traditions began. … Historians believe somewhere between 500,000 and two million people lost their lives as a result of the Cultural Revolution.
Mao had published a letter indicting some Communist Party leaders on May 16, 1966. On May 25, philosophy professor Nie Yuanzi put up a propaganda sheet denouncing the university president and other administration figures, which triggered a chain reaction, as research attorney James David Banker noted.

He added, “That chain reaction was accelerated by ‘working groups’ of ideologues sent to administer schools. Under their tenure, schools became centers of activism rather than learning.

Students were encouraged to create big-character posters exposing their own teachers, officials, and even parents.”
 

marsh

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Columbia Prof John McWhorter Calls on Parents to Pull Kids from New Jersey Prep School over CRT
101
Columbia Professor John McWhorter
Neilson Barnard/Getty
ALANA MASTRANGELO10 Jun 2021305
3:29
Columbia University professor John McWhorter is calling on parents to pull their kids from the prestigious Dwight-Englewood prep school in Bergen County, New Jersey, after a teacher resigned over what she described as a “hostile culture of conformity and fear” due to Critical Race Theory taking over the school.

“All hail Dana Stangel-Plowe, who has resigned from the Dwight-Englewood school, which teaches students ‘antiracism’ that sees life as nothing but abuse of power, and teaches that cringing, hostile group identity against oppression is the essence of a self,” tweeted professor John McWhorter on Tuesday.

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“Truly antiracist parents, in the name of love of their kids, should pull them from the Dwight-Englewood school as of next fall. Only this will arrest these misguided Elect parishioners from their quest to forge a new reality for us all,” McWhorter added in a follow-up tweet.

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In her resignation letter, English teacher Stangel-Plowe called out Dwight-Englewood School administrators for “failing our students” by embracing the Critical Race Theory agenda, and changing “in ways that undermine its mission and prevent me from holding true to my conscience as an educator.”

Critical Race Theory is an academic movement teaching children that the United States is fundamentally racist, and they must view every social interaction and person in terms of race in order to be “antiracist.”

“Over the past few years, the school has embraced an ideology that is damaging to our students’ intellectual and emotional growth and destroying any chance at creating a true community among our diverse population,” Stangel-Plowe wrote.

“I reject the hostile culture of conformity and fear that has taken hold of our school,” the teacher added.

Stangel-Plowe went on to explain that “the school’s ideology requires students to see themselves not as individuals, but as representatives of a group, forcing them to adopt the status of privilege or victimhood.”

“As a result, students arrive in my classroom accepting this theory as fact: People born with less melanin in their skin are oppressors, and people born with more melanin in their skin are oppressed,” Stangel-Plowe said.

The teacher explained that “this orthodoxy hinders students’ ability to read, write, and think,” as she now finds that her students “recoil from a poem because it was written by a man,” and “approach texts in search of the oppressor.”

Stangel-Plowe added that the Head of School “told the entire faculty that he would fire us all if he could so that he could replace us all with people of color,” and described a recent faculty meeting “segregated by skin color,” in which teachers with light skin were asked to “remember” that they are “white,” and “take responsibility for [our] power and privilege.”

McWhorter and Stangel-Plowe are not the only educators to speak out against Critical Race Theory in academia.

On Tuesday, Fairfax County school teacher Lilit Vanetsyan slammed the Loudoun County School Board over Critical Race Theory, and encouraged students not to allow “anybody to tell you that you cannot accomplish anything because of your skin color, or to hate yourself because of your skin color.”

Loudoun County Public Schools is facing what is likely the first major pushback against Critical Race Theory in America’s academic world, as parents and teachers rally against the race-based curriculum.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

This is part of an ongoing series by the Jason Rantz Show exploring equity and critical race theory training in Washington schools.

Middle school students in the Northshore School District were forced into a Critical Race Theory lesson plan in their science class. Parents weren’t notified ahead of time, and one mother is pushing back.

Students in an eighth-grade class at Canyon Park Middle School watched a video on privilege. In it, adults were identified as privileged based on their identity. Afterward, the teacher asked her students to select their own identities and privileges so that they can “figure out ways to dismantle systems of oppression.”

When one parent complained to the school, she says she was brushed off. What’s worse, she says she was told parents won’t be given notice of future lessons.

View: https://youtu.be/yzSDICA1-2s
7:49 min

Indoctrinating middle schoolers on privilege and oppression
Though it’s a science class, the teacher took time out of her May 25 remote classroom to lecture students on power, privilege, and oppression, and how they’re connected to identity.

Students were shown a BuzzFeed-produced video titled, “What is privilege?” Adult subjects were asked to take a step forward or backward based on their responses to prompts. One prompt asked if the subjects could “show affection for your romantic partner in public without fear of ridicule or violence.” Another asked, “if you are able to move through the world without fear of sexual assault.”

By the end of the exercise, a Black, gay woman had the least privilege. A Black man was not far behind. The most privileged? A white man.

“Just looking back and seeing like a bunch of people behind you is not a good feeling,” the white man said.

You’re marginalized, middle schooler!
The teacher then gave students a worksheet called “Wheel of Power/Privilege.” Students were asked to either identify their own privileges or declare themselves marginalized and oppressed.
“This really is a good visual of intersectionality,” the teacher declared.

The wheel shows several different identities with the word “power” in the middle. Students were asked to circle their identities. Some identities, like “white skin,” are close to “power,” indicating the identity gives privilege. Others like “dark skin” or “undocumented” are farthest away from “power,” indicating the identities make one marginalized. The teacher offered up two of her identities: cis-gendered woman and American citizen. She has some privilege.

The teacher explained that the identities that are “marginalized by systems of oppression” are what the class should be “working to dismantle.” To that end, the teacher then offered a questionnaire. Students were asked to list the identities that give them power and privilege or caused them to be oppressed.

The goal of Critical Race Theory
While the Wheel of Power and the subsequent questionnaire were optional, the teacher pressured the students to do it anyway.

“This work is not required. It is optional. I will excuse it if you don’t turn it in,” she said.

“However, it is highly, highly recommended. I think it’s really important to know this stuff before we can figure out ways to dismantle the systems of oppression. And I think this will also just set you up nicely for high school and just the world. And when you look at someone, remember that you know we all have all of these intersecting identities.”

The teacher doesn’t explain how one might dismantle systems of oppression after identifying someone as white or a cis-gendered male. She does not connect the dots for the students.

Instead, they’re taught to singularly focus on one’s identities, not their character or actions.

Why were students offered this lesson? What did it have to do with science? Neither the Northshore School District nor the teacher explained when asked by the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. But one parent who filmed the lesson met with the school for answers.

One parent pushed back (Link to audio on website 10:37 min)

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Julie Barrett happened to be near her daughter’s remote learning session when she overheard the lesson on privilege. She immediately started to record it on her cell phone.
“I am having a difficult time understanding how teaching students about privilege and oppression has anything to do with science, which is the subject of your class,” Barrett emailed the teacher and the principal. “Naturally, the fact that I was hearing about something totally unrelated to the subject of the class got my attention and I started watching what was going on.”

Barrett explained what she found objectionable with the lesson plan. She criticized CRT and antiracism training as “not something we will allow our children to be taught in school.”
“Our children will not be taught to feel guilt and shame for the color of their skin or the family into which they were born,” the mother explained.

“Our daughter will NOT be taught to be a victim, nor will she be taught that she is an oppressor,” she continued. “She is a 14-year-old girl with autism just trying to figure things out and doesn’t need all this garbage being put into her head.”

Barrett ended the email with a reasonable request: “I would like to know HOW this fits into your science curriculum and when and how many other lessons like this you plan to teach this school year.”

The school responded to the mom
The school’s principal, Myra Arnone, set up a phone call to discuss Barrett’s concerns.

“She explained that this kind of teaching is now being incorporated into all subjects at the teacher’s ‘professional discretion,'” Barrett explained to the Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. “If the teacher feels that there is something along the racial, social justice, LGBTQIA+, equity/diversity, et cetera – they can incorporate that however they want into their lesson plans.”

Like many districts, Northshore is leaning heavily into CRT training, even before a state mandate begins. It staffs a Racial and Educational Justice Department, and each school in the district has an equity team. It offers students “white allyship” resources, including an anti-police video that suggests cops kill Black people with impunity.

Barrett left feeling rejected.

“[The principal] very much just wanted to shut me up and be done with the conversation,” she explained. “It was crystal clear to me more than ever before that these people do not care about what parents like me think about this CRT crap. They just want us out of the way.”

More is coming
CRT is a toxic framework that forces kids to judge people by their perceived and actual identities, not by their character. It’s the exact opposite societal ideal. It’s institutionalized bigotry passing as a woke attempt at equity.

If this CRT training worries you, brace yourself for more of it. The Democrat-controlled Legislature passed a trio of bills forcing CRT training on all public school teachers. This, in turn, will be passed along to your children.

It’s much easier to indoctrinate kids into an extremist ideology than adults.

These schools intend to churn out left-wing students to fundamentally change our society — to “dismantle systems of oppression” that ideologues pretend to exist. That’s how you make societal change.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin: ‘We Have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Focus in the Military’
Sec. Lloyd Austin Answers Tom Cotton
Senate Armed Services Committee
KRISTINA WONG10 Jun 2021292

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Thursday said although he did not think the military is “fundamentally racist,” there is a focus on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) grilled Austin on whistleblower complaints from service members who said they were essentially being taught critical race theory.

Cotton said he and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) have received “several hundred” such complaints about the Pentagon’s extremist and diversity training, which Austin ordered earlier this year.

Cotton said one Marine told them that a “military history training session was replaced with mandatory training on police brutality, white privilege, and systemic racism,” and that several officers are now leaving his unit because of that training.

He said another service member told them their unit was required to read “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo which claims, “white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist world view.”

Another complaint they received is from a member of the special operations community who said they have been told, “The U.S. Special Operations Community is racist.” An Army officer told them that his general officer told him the entire Army is racist.

And one airman told them their unit was forced into a racist exercise called a “privilege walk” where members of the wing were ordered to separate themselves by race and gender in order to stratify people based on their perceived privilege.

Cotton said: “Soldiers have come forward to tell us that they have been forced to watch videos about systemic racism and documentaries that rewrite America’s history as a fundamentally racist and evil nation.” Cotton added:
Mr. Secretary, we’re hearing reports of plummeting morale, growing mistrust between the races and the sexes where none existed just six months ago, and unexpected separations and retirements based on these trainings alone. And again, these are not my words these are the words of your own troops.
Austin said he did not believe the military is a fundamentally racist organization or that anyone in the military should be treated differently based on their skin color or sex, adding, “That is why we have Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion focus in the military.”

Austin also said he would recommend that service members report to their command or to the inspector general when they are subjected to trainings that draw on critical race concepts, such as that America or its military is inherently racist or that certain races are inherently privileged or victimized. He added:
I would also say that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is important to this military now and it will be important in the future. We are going to make sure our military looks like America and that our leadership looks like what’s in the ranks of the military.
Cotton closed out his questioning with: “This is not about diversity in general, though. This is about a very specific kind of anti-American indoctrination that is seeping in to some parts of our military based on the whistleblower complaints we have received.”

After the hearing, Cotton said in a statement, “Secretary Austin and I agree that core tenets of Critical Race Theory have no place in our military, which must remain an institution that welcomes patriotic citizens of every race and background.”

“I want to echo the Secretary’s comment that servicemembers who encounter any anti-American beliefs, or training which singles out troops based on the color of their skin, or teaches that one race discriminates while others do not, or that America or the military is a fundamentally racist place, or that one race is inherently privileged while others are inherently oppressed, ought to report them up the chain of command, the Inspector General, or directly to me through the whistleblower website hosted by Congressman Crenshaw,” he added.

Watch the questioning here:
View: https://youtu.be/rBeynho0_vQ
6:12 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Corporatism Will Snuff Out Individual Rights Unless We Stop It

Lori Roman
Lori Roman

|Posted: Jun 09, 2021 12:01 AM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.


Corporatism Will Snuff Out Individual Rights Unless We Stop It

Source: AP Photo/Nick Wass


For too long, conservatives have blindly supported corporations. While trying to support “free markets” we might inadvertently be supporting corporatism, a form of economic totalitarianism where government and corporations collude to destroy individual rights.

When I moved to Washington DC in 2002 to accept a position in the Bush Administration, I thought that corporations might be allies of conservatives who were promoting free markets. I was wrong. Over many years working in public policy, I have been disgusted by corporate attempts to utilize the government to destroy fair competition by any means necessary.

Am I a conservative Pollyanna? No. I came from the business world, have a master’s degree in business and public administration, and taught business and ethics at a private college for many years. I understand business.

It is bad enough when companies lobby to get public policy favors from politicians to crush their rivals, but when the private sector colludes with the government to limit the freedoms of individual Americans it is time to fight back with every legal method we can find.

America was founded on the concept that individuals have natural rights that come from God, not government…and certainly not from corporations. This is why Americans were not as likely to fall into economic fascism as Italians were in the early 1900’s. Yet, it gained a foothold. And in the last couple of years, it seems to have taken that foothold and marched right into every facet of our lives.

Corporations may feel they have a pass to censor speech since the First Amendment was written to constrain government, but when the private sector conspires and colludes with the government, they have breached that divide and left themselves open to litigation. Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Ron DeSantis, and Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo have publicly sounded the alarm, but few conservatives seem willing.

Just this week, thanks to a lawsuit by BuzzFeed, we have seen emails that strongly indicate that Dr. Fauci and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg were likely colluding to control and censor information on COVID-19. On March 15, 2020, Zuckerberg emailed Fauci suggesting they partner on COVID information. Within this email there is a portion that is redacted. Does Zuckerberg have a security clearance that would protect his communication to a government official from the public? It is more likely that the redaction is hiding a First Amendment violation.

Senator Cruz told Maria Bartiromo, “…these latest breakthroughs have real consequences because it is now clear that Facebook was operating at the direction of and in the direct benefit of the federal government and operating as the government censor, utilizing their monopoly position to censor on behalf of the government.”

COVID “passports” or, as we call them at the American Constitutional Rights Union, COVID “handcuffs” are another example of the government using the private sector to restrict movement, assembly, and commerce. The Biden Administration has indicated they may be using the private sector to enact these draconian tools.

This week, my organization took action in support of a lawsuit against Major League Baseball. It may seem like a stretch for a constitutional rights organization to get involved in a lawsuit against a private company, but it is part of growing pushback against corporations doing the bidding of government to control the political playing field to the detriment of Americans.

Not long ago, President Biden suggested that Georgia’s new voter integrity law was “Jim Crow on steroids” and he encouraged Major League Baseball (MLB) to move the All-Star Game away from Atlanta in protest. Less than 48 hours later, MLB did exactly that.

At the moment, we have no way of knowing whether there was any discussion between government officials and MLB executives, but a lawsuit by Job Creators Network (JCN) against MLB could expose the truth.

JCN is suing Major League Baseball (MLB) to force them to reverse their decision to move the MLB All-Star game from Atlanta. The American Constitutional Rights Union and our founding board member Attorney General Edwin Meese III filed an amicus brief in support of JCN.

MLB’s move will cause major economic consequences to the greater Atlanta community. This has led to complaints that Major League Baseball is not representing the interests of its owners as it appears to do the bidding of leftist government officials who maintain that voter identification is racist.

MLB is beholden to the government. They are essentially a government sanctioned monopoly protected from antitrust laws. Maybe this clouds their business decisions. Why else would they come out against voter identification, a common-sense measure that is supported by 77% of Americans and 61% of Black Americans?

Do private businesses have the right to conduct their operations as they see fit? In most cases the answer is yes. Unless they are in breach of contracts or unless that private business is really acting as the pseudo arm of the government to trample on the rights of Americans.

The rise of corporatism, or economic totalitarianism, should cause conservatives to rethink their knee-jerk defense of corporations. Whether we lose our liberties because of government actions or corporate actions they may still disappear forever. It is time to fight back.

Lori Roman is the president of the American Constitutional Rights Union and ACRU Action Fund.
 
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