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

vestige

Deceased

Rand Paul's Warning to Americans: ‘Be Afraid of Your Government'

BY MATT MARGOLIS OCT 07, 2021 11:51 AM ET

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Stefani Reynolds/The New York Times via AP, Pool

In the wake of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement that he plans to sic the FBI on concerned parents who speak out at school board meetings against critical race theory and COVID restrictions, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blasted the Biden administration and said Americans should “be afraid of your government.”

“Moms at school boards are being told that they’re criminals, potential domestic terrorists, for the crime of dissent, and I think criminalizing dissent is something that we should all be appalled with,” Paul told Fox News.

Garland claimed that there has been a “disturbing trend” of teachers being threatened or harassed. PJ Media’s Megan Fox looked into these allegations and concluded they’re mostly bunk.

When asked what he would tell Americans concerned that they’ll end up on some government list if they “say the wrong thing” at their local school board meeting, Paul didn’t mince words.

“I would say be afraid. Be afraid of your government,” he responded. “That’s a sad thing from someone in the government to say, but the thing is, is those lists already exist.”

“I think the problem is, it’s become so normalized to use government to search out and seek out your opponents,” Paul continued, before citing the abuse of FISA warrants to illegally spy on the Trump campaign as an example.

“If you go to a school board meeting and you’re disruptive and you don’t obey the rules of the school board meeting, then there will be local punishment,” Paul said. “But that has nothing to do with the federal law, it has nothing to do with the Department of Justice. What Merrick Garland did is, he’s attempting to stifle dissent, and he’s attempting to say, ‘Beware, or Big Brother’s coming after you if you speak out against my policies or against the Biden policies.’”

Rumble video on website 4:37 min
Mitch...

Where the hell are you?
 

marsh

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BREAKING EXCLUSIVE: Clayton Missouri School District Is Using US AG Garland’s Son-In-Law’s Panorama Books Pushing CRT – Is Your District Too?

By Joe Hoft
Published October 8, 2021 at 7:30am
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We have uncovered that the Clayton Missouri Board of Education is using the conterversial Panorama literature in the school district’s educational curriculum. How many school districts around the country are paying for this racist garbage?

On Monday US Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered his FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose the racist critical race theory (CRT) at school and other local board meetings across the country.

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Then yesterday we revealed the fact that AG Garland’s son-in-law runs a company that sells CRT literature across the country. This is big business and very profitable. His company is named Panorama.

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To determine the extent of the Panorama material being used across the country, we looked into one St. Louis School District that had a School Board meeting this week. Clayton, Missouri, a city in St. Louis County, has rapidly embraced all things ‘Equity’. This is code for pushing the Critical Race Theory (CRT). The timeline has been breathtaking.

We watched the September 29, 2021, Clayton School Board Meeting to see what is happening in regards to CRT and Panorama. The Chief Equity and Diversity Officer presented a quarterly update. In his update, Panorama is mentioned numerous times. Notably, the Equity Officer states:
…it’s a marathon not a sprint. I think we’re changing up entirely how we create a educational experience for a student using our Panorama data… I think right now we’re in kind of a reset mode in terms of changing a mindset, in terms of what professional learning and growth looks like. I think you know like I said in terms of setting up these systems, it’s a 5 year system in setting up curriculum in terms of building capacities…”
The School District of Clayton’s September 29, 2021, School Board Meeting is on Youtube. The comments above start at the 2:29:02 mark and can be viewed in the video below.

Note that over a third of the three-hour meeting was devoted to ‘Equity’. At no time in the meeting is there a discussion of excellence or actual academics in the entire three hours per our review. There appears to be no discussion of costs, despite the calls to provide Masters Certificate training for staff thru McDaniel University. The Board and the Equity Officer expressed a desire to create “Equity Leaders” in each building who would receive a “stipend” for their efforts (undoubtedly pushing CRT.)

One board member also stated he could see a day when they would mandate the certificate discussed above. The same board member joked that he would mandate the program if he was superintendent. Panorama-related assessments that are given to staff and students are clearly driving this train and providing the “data” to justify the programs.

Listen to the discussion below from the Clayton School District’s Board of Education Meeting on September 29, 2021. At the 2:28:42 mark, the discussion turns to ‘Panorama’ and its use in the district.

View: https://youtu.be/takd8ix1AZA
3:06:50 min

This is just one school district in Missouri.

There are thousands of school districts around the country. AG Garland’s family is getting rich pushing this garbage. No wonder he wants to quash any resistance to his family’s future fortune.
 

marsh

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REVEALED: Letter with Insider Information Shows the Teachers Union, AG Merrick Garland and the FBI’s Plan to Monitor Parents was a Political Setup for Midterms

By Jim Hoft
Published October 8, 2021 at 9:24am
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On Thursday Mark Levin broadcast a letter with insider information on the teachers union, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the FBI who met and organized how to combat America’s parents who were speaking out at local school board meetings across the country. The parents were outraged at the COVID masking and vaccination rules, critical race theory indoctrination and open porn disguised as literature promoted in American schools today.

America First Legal published a letter to Inspector General Michael Horowitz to investigate improprieties related to Merrick Garland’s October 4th threats to American parents of school children.

Mark Levin called this the biggest scandal of his lifetime on his radio show last night.

The letter by America First Legal is fascinating. According to the letter the Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized American parents’ fundamental liberty interest in and Constitutional right to control and direct the education of their own children.

** Key Biden Administration stakeholders, including the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and others, have combined to oppress, threaten, and intimidate parents to chill and prevent them from exercising the rights or privileges secured by the Constitution.5 To date these efforts, though extensive, have generally proven ineffectual.

The Biden administration and the teachers unions knew this would be a problem for the midterm elections. They knew they must act.

So there were meetings in the White House on how to target American parents of school children!
** In early September, Biden Administration stakeholders held discussions regarding avenues for potential federal action against parents with a key Biden Domestic Policy Council official (Jane Doe #1) and White House staff (John Doe #1). Stakeholders also held discussions with senior department officials, including at least one political appointee in the department’s Civil Rights Division (Jane Doe #2). Jane Doe #1, John Doe #1, and others in the White House separately expressed concern regarding the potential partisan political impact of parent mobilization and organization around school issues in the upcoming midterm elections.
This illicit group came up with a plan to chill and deter American parents of school children from speaking out.
** Upon information and belief, at the express direction of or with the express consent of Jane Doe #1, Jane Doe #2 and other Biden Administration officials developed a plan to use a letter from an outside group (“not the usual suspects”) as pretext for federal action to chill, deter, and discourage parents from exercising their constitutional rights and privileges.
The liberal group then drafted and released a letter urging the government to use the Patriot Act to spy on American parents of school children.
** On or about September 29, citing legal authorities including the Patriot Act, the “National School Boards Association” made public a letter demanding federal action against parents citing authorities including the Patriot Act. The justification for federal action included, inter alia, parents were “posting watchlists against school boards and spreading misinformation (sic) that boards are adopting critical race theory curriculum and working to maintain online learning by haphazardly attributing it to COVID-19.”6 It is not yet clear whether and to what extent drafts of this letter were shared with Biden Administration officials, including Jane Doe #1 and Jane Doe #2, and whether changes were suggested or made by them, prior to the ostensible public release date.
Then just days later AG Merrick Garland released his new plan to target and silence American parents of school children. Obviously, this was coordinated.
** On or about September 29, citing legal authorities including the Patriot Act, the “National School Boards Association” made public a letter demanding federal action against parents citing authorities including the Patriot Act. The justification for federal action included, inter alia, parents were “posting watchlists against school boards and spreading misinformation (sic) that boards are adopting critical race theory curriculum and working to maintain online learning by haphazardly attributing it to COVID-19.”6 It is not yet clear whether and to what extent drafts of this letter were shared with Biden Administration officials, including Jane Doe #1 and Jane Doe #2, and whether changes were suggested or made by them, prior to the ostensible public release date.
This attack on American parents of school children was hatched and implemented between teachers unions and Biden officials. It was all coordinated to silence anyone who speaks out against this immoral regime.
Here is a copy of that letter.

America First Legal (AFL) to the United States Inspector General by Jim Hoft on Scribd America First Legal (AFL) to the United States Inspector General | PDF | Meyer V. Nebraska | United States Department Of Justice

PJ Media also reported on this shocking new low by our Democrat overlords.
 

marsh

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Chris Rufo Unleashed: “They’ve Now Targeted Our Kids – Classified Our Parents Domestic Terrorists. We’re NOT Going to Back Down” (VIDEO)

By Jim Hoft
Published October 8, 2021 at 12:36pm
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Chris Rufo joined Steve Bannon on The War Room on Friday to discuss his recent report in The New York Post over critical race theory in American schools.
The far-left demons pushing their racist filth on children were losing their argument so they joined with the teachers unions and the Biden Administration and called in the FBI to harass and abuse American parents of school children.
As reported earlier today there were witnesses to this crime.

Chris Rufo on Friday went off on the people pushing the critical race theory filth on children as young as 3-years-old.

Chri Rufo: “I found the facts… Critical race theory is not the dominant ideology in our public institutions including many of our K-12 school districts in dozens of our big cities… Parents know what’s happening at these public schools is wrong. It’s morally a transgression against kids, it’s a violation of their conscience and basic rights. And parents are now up in arms. We see this everywhere. And I see this as one of the greatest grassroots rebellions of our time… We are poised for a tsunami because the radical left has overstepped itself. They’ve now targeted our kids. They’ve now classified our parents as domestic terrorists. We’re not going to back down.”

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

We’re Seeing One Of The Greatest Grassroot Rebellions Of Our Time 8:28 min

We’re Seeing One Of The Greatest Grassroot Rebellions Of Our Time
Bannons War Room Published October 8, 2021
 

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Fairfax County, Virginia Public Schools Have Also Signed on to a Million Dollar CRT ‘Education’ Package with AG Garland’s Son-In-Law’s Company Panorama

By Joe Hoft
Published October 8, 2021 at 1:45pm
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Another school district is using the Panorama material distributed by the Attorney General’s son-in-law and it’s spending more than a million in doing so.

On Monday US Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered his FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose the racist critical race theory (CRT) at school and other local board meetings across the country.

Then Wednesday we revealed the fact that AG Garland’s son-in-law runs a company that sells CRT literature across the country. This is big business and very profitable. His company is named Panorama.

Then last night we found out Panorama material is being used in the Clayton, Missouri School District in St. Louis County.

Now we find out that the large county next to Washington DC, Fairfax County in Virginia is paying millions for Panorama material used to poison the minds of children there as well.

The Fairfax Times reported in late September.
Fairfax County Public Schools quietly signed a five-year contract to pay an out-of-state consulting firm, Panorama Education, $1,845,600 from COVID emergency funds for a “Social Emotional Learning Universal Screener” program that will collect personal and private data on 190,000 students districtwide and implement “interventions.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his physician wife Priscilla Chan are investors in Panorama Education, raising concerns among northern Virginia parents about the consulting firm collecting confidential student information and engaging in the controversial practice of “data mining,” on the pretense of “social and emotional learning,” known as “SEL.”

What’s more, in fine print in the contract, Fairfax County Public Schools says that Panorama Education, listed as “the Company,” has special status with the school district, stating: “…the Company and its Authorized Representatives shall be deemed to be school officials of the School Board, and shall maintain FCPS Confidential Student Records in accordance with all federal state and local laws, rules and regulations regarding the confidentiality of such records.”

The news of the “SEL Screener” has angered parents, already struggling with COVID-19 challenges. “It’s outrageous FCPS is collaborating with a for-profit company funded by Mark Zuckerberg – a fact not transparently relayed to parents,” said Tiffany McCaslin, a Fairfax County mother. “Any involvement by a social media giant with surveys examining students’ mental health is reprehensible.”
Here is a page from Panorama’s web page.

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Who else is receiving this ‘education’?
 

marsh

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Based moms vs the FBI… Biden declares war on parents…
Posted by Kane on October 8, 2021 3:41 pm
View: https://youtu.be/MuEiecmBmFg
5:47 min

Virginia mom and Parents Defending Education member Asra Nomani

Outstanding interview — Asra Nomani is a former Georgetown professor

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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xtai-rMG9g
13:16 min

Biden admin’s ’SICKENING’ connection to CHILD data mining in schools

Oct 8, 2021


Glenn Beck


It seemed bad enough when US Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered the FBI to develop ‘strategies’ to handle alleged harassment from anti-CRT parents toward school board members. But Asra Nomani, Vice President of Parents Defending Education, joins Glenn to detail a sinister, ‘sickening’ layer to the story: Garland’s family connections to a government-contracted company that is reaping insane profits from child data mining in schools. And, even worse, many parents aren’t aware it’s happening…
 

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'We have to pull them out': Florida mom calls for mass exodus of children from woke public school system after 'final straw' of AG Garland threatening to criminalize complaining parents
  • Quisha King was speaking on a panel for the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Virginia on Thursday night
  • She is a mother and activist from Jacksonville, Florida, who regularly speaks out against CRT in schools
  • She said it had become so pervasive in public schools across the country that the only way to stop it was to pull kids out of classrooms
  • King said the final straw is AG Merrick Garland's warning to parents that they may face FBI investigation and prosecution for protesting woke agendas
  • The order came from Garland in an FBI memo earlier this week and it stunned and horrified parents across America
  • King said that CRT teaches kids that America is intrinsically racist when it is not
  • She said teachers no longer bother to teach math or science and instead want to turn kids into 'mini Marxists'
  • SCROLL DOWN FOR HER FULL SPEECH
By JENNIFER SMITH, CHIEF REPORTER FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 09:03 EDT, 8 October 2021 | UPDATED: 13:25 EDT, 8 October 2021

A Florida mother has called for a 'mass exodus' from the increasingly liberal public school system, saying it is parents' only choice to avoid their kids being indoctrinated with CRT.

Quisha King made the remarks on Thursday night at the Pray Vote Stand Summit, an event by the Family Research Council in Leesburg, Virginia. She was one of many speakers and panelists who spoke on stage about their efforts to squash woke agendas being pushed in schools and the military.

King lives in Jacksonville, Florida, with her three children. The 40-year-old is an outspoken CRT critic who campaigns against it with her activist group, Moms for Liberty. She previously worked as a regional coordinator for the Republican National Committee (RNC) and describes herself as a communications and marketing expert.

She voted Democrat until 2016, when she says she found God and stopped seeing her life purely through the lens of 'being Black'. She started voting Republican afterward.

On Thursday, she said the Biden administration had become so forceful in its fight against conservative families that parents now face the prospect of having the FBI knock on their door while they're making sandwiches for their kids if they disagree with woke school boards.

She was referring to the recent memo by Attorney General Merrick Garland that the FBI must now investigate reports of parents 'threatening' teachers they disagree with.

Garland issued the memo on Monday in a shocking move that had Republicans across the board up in arms. They said it was the worst overreach yet on parents' free speech.

He has since been accused of a conflict of interest because his son-in-law founded an education group that promotes CRT.

Scroll down for video

[See website for more of the article
Florida mom calls for mass exodus from the public school system ]
 

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AG Garland’s Son-In-Law’s Company ‘Panorama’ Also Pushes CRT in Texas and Georgia, and a Deceitful Article Equating MAGA to the KKK

By Joe Hoft
Published October 9, 2021 at 1:00pm
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School Districts in Georgia and Texas are using the Panorama material distributed by the Attorney General’s son-in-law which equates MAGA to the KKK.

On Monday US Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered his FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose the racist critical race theory (CRT) at school and other local board meetings across the country.

Then Wednesday we revealed the fact that AG Garland’s son-in-law runs a company that sells CRT literature across the country. This is big business and very profitable. His company is named Panorama.

Then we found out Panorama material is being used in the Clayton, Missouri School District in St. Louis County.

Then we found that the large county next to Washington DC, Fairfax County in Virginia is paying millions for Panorama material used to poison the minds of children there as well.

Overnight we received more information on where Panorama material is used across the country. We learned that it is used in Texas.
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We also learned that Panorama is used in Georgia per a report on Cherokee County’s Schools approval of next year’s budget:
CCSD has used Panorama for an optional, anonymous survey of students to help guide the focus of future SEL lessons. For example, the survey data shows growth in areas including: how well students can persevere through setbacks to achieve important long-term goals; how well students consider the perspectives of others and empathize with them; and how well students deliberately use strategies to manage their own learning processes generally. Parents can opt their child out of surveys and are given opportunities to do so.
We also have some additional information on Panorama material that pushes garbage lies that equate MAGA to the KKK.
The left-wing education company co-founded by Merrick Garland’s son-in-law used a training session for teachers focused on “systemic racism,” recommending an article that referred to Trump rally-goers as “examples of white supremacy” akin to the Ku Klux Klan.
Panorama Education, co-founded by Xan Tanner, who is the group’s president, claims it has made its way into thousands of schools in the U.S., selling race-focused student and teacher surveys and conducting training on systemic racism and oppression, white supremacy, unconscious or implicit bias, and intersectionality, all under the rubric of “Social-Emotional Learning.” The company makes it clear that “SEL” is just a “vehicle” for achieving its goals related to “equity.”
Biden’s corrupt AG Garland directive to the FBI, to mobilize against American parents who want to stop racism being taught to their children, is anti-American and a material conflict of interest for the AG. Never before have we seen a US Attorney General act in such a conflicted manner.
 

marsh

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Minnesota high school is committed to ‘Dismantling Whiteness’…
Posted by Kane on October 9, 2021 2:06 pm

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1446342352314974211
1:17 min

Teachers and staff at Richfield High School begin all of their meetings by committing to dismantling “processes that benefit whiteness.” — At Richfield High School we believe in providing a rigorous and equitable education reflecting the strengths and experiences of our community. We believe students learn best when they feel safe and affirmed in who they are. Therefore, we commit to dismantling policies and processes that benefit whiteness and other systems of privilege.”
 

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California Becomes the First State that Requires High School Students to Pass a CRT-Based “Ethnic Studies” Course in Order to Graduate; New Law will Also Apply to Charter Schools

By Julian Conradson
Published October 9, 2021 at 6:30pm
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On Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill – AB 101- into law that makes it mandatory for high school students to pass “ethnic studies” indoctrination courses as a part of their graduation requirements. The new law makes California the first state in the US to make learning marxist CRT ideology compulsory for teenage students to graduate.

In addition to every public school in the state, charter schools will also have to follow the new guidelines – Only Private schools are exempt from the new law – Which is very conveinent for the Governor, seeing that his 4 children all attend lavish private schools.

Not to mention all of his wealthy eliteist friends and their children.
Rules for thee but not for me.
This bill would add the completion of a one-semester course in ethnic studies, meeting specified requirements, to the graduation requirements commencing with pupils graduating in the 2029–30 school year, including for pupils enrolled in a charter school. The bill would expressly authorize local educational agencies, including charter schools, to require a full-year course in ethnic studies at their discretion.
The bill would require local educational agencies, including charter schools, to offer an ethnic studies course commencing with the 2025–26 school year, as specified.
Newsome rejected a previous version of the bill last year, but the timing must have been better now. It’s probably just a coincidence that it passed in the wake of his questionable escape in the *rigged* recall election.

The course cirriculum for these ethnic studies classes is – no surprise – a cesspool of Marxist CRT garbage. The material will be based on California’s currently in-use “model cirriculum in ethnic studies” and/or any “existing ethnic studies course” (including college-approved courses). Educators will also be able to come up with their own cirriculums as long as the content is approved by their local woke school board.

Some of the anti-American lesson plans that have already been approved for high schoolers include: “#BlackLivesMatter and Social Change,” “Afrofuturism: Reimagining Black Futures and Science Fiction,” “US Undocumented Immigrants from Mexico and Beyond,” and “This is Indian Land: The Purpose, Politics, and Practice of Land Acknowledgment,” among countless others.
The bill would authorize a pupil to satisfy the ethnic studies course requirement by completing either (A) a course based on the model curriculum in ethnic studies developed by the commission, (B) an existing ethnic studies course, (C) an ethnic studies course taught as part of a course that has been approved as meeting the A–G requirements of the University of California and the California State University, or (D) a locally developed ethnic studies course approved by the governing board of the school district or the governing body of the charter school.

The bill would prohibit a course that does not use ethnic studies content as the primary content through which the subject is taught from being used to satisfy the ethnic studies course requirement.
The new law provides so much flexibility to the radical local school boards that the liberal LA Times Editorial Board opposed its passage – Even they could see the problem with handing over that kind of unchecked power to Activist educators who view children as pawns for their political goals.

Just take a look at this boot-licking marxist scumbag that was busted by an undercover journalist from Project Veritas. These people are psychopaths.

Thanks to Newsom, Teachers like that will be running the show and California high schoolers will officially no longer be students – just activists in training.

Homeschooling is looking better and better each day.
 

marsh

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Alan Dershowitz to Newsmax: AG Garland 'Over the Line,' Chilling Speech

(Newsmax's "Saturday Report") Video on website 6:07 min
By Eric Mack | Saturday, 09 October 2021 11:13 AM

Civil liberties legal expert Alan Dershowitz vowed on Newsmax to defend nonviolent protests at school board meetings after Biden administration Attorney General Merrick Garland mobilized the FBI and U.S. attorneys to "investigate and prosecute" school board protests.

"I'll defend anybody who is chilled in their free speech," Dershowitz told "Saturday Report," denouncing the politicization of the ACLU. "Anybody who wants to protest at school boards and is going to do it nonviolently, can count on me.

"It used to be we were able to count on the American Civil Liberties Union, but they're dead in the water when it comes to issues like this. They ought to be protesting this as well."

While there have been some threats of violence at local school board meetings, Garland should "pull back" on his memo this week threatening to investigate and prosecute school board meeting protests by parents.

"There have been some threats of violence, but not enough to, in my view, justify the extreme measure of sending letters out and calling for FBI investigations," Dershowitz told host Carl Higbie. "So, I think the attorney general – who I generally like and admire – ought to pull back and ought to leave it to local authorities, unless they can make a very strong case of violent denial of civil liberties."

Dershowitz, who has self-described himself as avowed "liberal Democrat" in past Newsmax appearances, came out strongly against race-based teaching in schools, calling it "propaganda" and protests of it should not be considered "domestic terrorism" as some groups have attempted to argue.

"We all think the attorney general should have the right to prevent violence if it's in violation of civil rights; on the other hand, protests about Black Lives Matters, if I had a kid in school, I'd be among the protesters. Black Lives Matter, critical legal studies shouldn't be taught in school," Dershowitz said.

"Critical race theory is anything but critical. It's uncritical of anything that has to do with racial theory and it's propaganda. And I would be among the protesters and I would be vociferous in expressing my views on propagandizing my children, and I'm certainly not a terrorist."

Dershowitz added Garland "in perception, at least, he's gone over the line" in mobilizing the federal Justice Department to investigate local crimes and protests.

Dershowitz made a final note, as he often does, his legal opinions are not necessarily a reflection of his personal or political views.

"My job as a First Amendment civil libertarian is to defend the views of people I despise –defend the views that I disagree with," Dershowitz concluded. "So, I will defend the views of people who say some of the most absurd things because once you can censor absurd things, you can then move on to censor more rational things."
 

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by Natalie Winters

October 11, 2021
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AChinese state-run oil and gas company linked to the son of the President of the United States, Hunter Biden, hit record levels of production amidst President Biden’s decision to halt the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Sinopec, also known as China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, is a Chinese Communist regime-controlled oil and gas enterprise. Its “fully-owned subsidiary” Sinopec Marketing Company enjoyed nearly $1 billion in investment from Hunter Biden’s private equity firm BHR Partners.

Finalized in March 2015, the investments from the controversial investment fund led to BHR Partners amassing a nearly 30 percent stake in Sinopec.

Hunter reportedly still owns a 10 percent stake in BHR Partners.

China First.

Under the Biden government, Sinopec’s Fuling Shale Gas Field hit a country-wide record for production quantity.

A company press release notes:

Fuling Shale Gas Field – the first commercially developed and operated large-scale shale gas field in China – announced on October 8 that it has produced 40 billion cubic meters of shale gas, setting a new record for the cumulative production of shale gas in the country.

BHR Partner’s LinkedIn profile highlights its Sinopec investment, revealing it was involved “in the pilot state-owned enterprise reform deal involving the segregation and capitalization of Sinopec Group’s non-oil business into Sinopec Marketing Corporation.”

Sinopec’s record-breaking success follows the Biden regime’s assault on American energy independence, including the cancellation of the critical Keystone XL Pipeline and shutting down oil and gas lease sales from federal land in his first days in office.
 

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Learning To Fear Free Speech: How Politicians Are Moving To Protect Us From Our Unhealthy Reading Choices

MONDAY, OCT 11, 2021 - 07:40 PM
Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the Hill on the increasing calls for censorship and speech regulation on the Internet. The most recent push on Capitol Hill surrounds the testimony of former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen who alleges that Facebook has been knowingly harming children through promotion and access to certain sites. For some, the testimony follows a type of Trojan Horse pattern where anti-free speech measures are packaged as public safety measures. Before embracing the proposals of these senators, the public needs to think long and hard over what is being lost in these “reforms.”



Here is the column:

“Caution: Free Speech May Be Hazardous to Your Health.” Such a rewording of the original 1965 warning on tobacco products could soon appear on social media platforms, if a Senate hearing this week is any indicator. Listening to former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen, senators decried how Facebook is literally killing people by not censoring content, and Haugen proposed a regulatory board to protect the public.

But before we embrace a new “ministry of information” model to protect us from dangerous viewpoints, we may want to consider what we would lose in this Faustian free-speech bargain.

Warnings over the “addiction” and “unhealthy” content of the internet have been building into a movement for years. In July, President Biden slammed Big Tech companies for “killing people” by failing to engage in even greater censorship of free speech on issues related to the pandemic. On Tuesday, many senators were enthralled by Haugen’s testimony because they, too, have long called for greater regulation or censorship. It all began reasonably enough over concerns about violent speech, and then expanded to exploitative speech. However, it continued to expand even further as the regulation of speech became an insatiable appetite for silencing opposing views.

In recent hearings with social media giants, members like Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) were critical of limiting censorship to areas like election fraud and instead demanded censorship of disinformation on climate change and other subjects.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) has repeatedly called for “robust content modification” to remove untrue or misleading information.

Haugen lashed out at what she said was the knowing harm committed against people, particularly children, by exposing them to disinformation or unhealthy views. Haugen wants the company to remove “toxic” content and change algorithms to make such sites less visible. She complained that sites with a high engagement rate are more likely to be favored in searches. However, the problem is that sites deemed false or harmful are too popular. Haugen said that artificially removing “likes” is not enough because the popularity or interest in some sites will still push them to the top of searches.

It was a familiar objection. Just the week before, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called for Amazon to steer readers to “true” books on climate change. Her objection was that the popularity of “misleading” books was pushing them to the top of searches, and she wants the algorithms changed to help readers pick what she considers to be healthier choices — meaning, more in line with her views.

Similarly, Haugen’s solution seems to be … well, her:
“Right now, the only people in the world who are trained to analyze these experiments, to understand what is happening inside … there needs to be a regulatory home where someone like me could do a tour of duty after working at a place like [Facebook],and have a place to work on things like regulation.”
Censorship programs always begin with politicians and bureaucrats who — in their own minds — have the benefit of knowing what is true and the ability to protect the rest of us from our harmful thoughts.

Ironically, I have long been a critic of social media companies for their rapid expansion of censorship, including the silencing of political critics, public health experts and pro-democracy movements at the behest of foreign governments like China and Russia. I am unabashedly an internet originalist who favors an open, free forum for people to exchange ideas and viewpoints — allowing free speech to be its own disinfectant of bad speech.

Facebook has been running a slick campaign to persuade people to embrace corporate censorship. Yet, now, even the Facebook censors are being denounced as too passive in the face of runaway free speech. The focus is on the algorithms used to remove content or, as with Haugen and Warren, used to flag or promote popular sites.

Haugen describes her approach as a “non-content-based solution” but it is clearly not that. She objects to algorithms like “downstream MSI” which tracks traffic and pushes postings based on past likes or comments. As explained by one site, it is “based on their ability to engage users, not necessarily its usefulness or truthfulness.” Of course, the objection to those “un-useful” sites is their content and claimed harm.

Like Warren, Haugen is calling for what I have criticized as “enlightened algorithms” to protect us from our own bad choices. Our digital sentinels are “non-content-based” but will magically remove bad content to prevent unhealthy choices.

There is no question that the internet is fueling an epidemic of eating disorders and other great social problems. The solution, however, is not to create regulatory boards or to reduce free speech. Europe has long deployed such oversight boards in removing what it considers harmful stereotypes from advertising and barring images of honey or chips — but the results have been underwhelming at best.

It is no accident that authoritarian countries have long wanted such regulation, since free speech is a threat to their power. Now, we also have U.S. academics writing that “China was right” all along about censorship, and public officials demanding more power to censor further. We have lost faith in free speech, and we are being told to put our faith into algorithmic guardians.

We can confront our problems more effectively by using good speech to overcome bad speech. When it comes to minors, we can use parents to protect their children by increasing parental controls over internet access; we can help parents with more or better programs and resources for mental illnesses. Of course, it is hard to advocate for restraint when the image of an anorexic child is juxtaposed against the abstract concept of free speech. However, that is the siren’s call of censorship: Protecting that child by reducing her free-speech rights is no solution for her — but it is a solution for many who want more control over opposing views.

Free speech is not some six-post-a-day addiction that should be cured with algorithmic patches.

There is no such thing as a content-neutral algorithm that removes only harmful disinformation — because behind each of those enlightened algorithms are people who are throttling speech according to what they deem to be harmful thoughts or viewpoints.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Stephen Miller says OIG request into Garland memo meant to 'expose' it as attack on parents
Stephen Miller says, 'Quite obvious that it is meant to chill free speech'

Video on website 6:55 min

By Emma Colton | Fox News

The conservative legal group set up by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller requested that the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General investigate the circumstances surrounding Attorney General Merrick Garland’s memo last week pledging to mobilize the FBI and other DOJ entities against parents protesting critical race theory in public schools.

"Targeting parents in local school boards is atrocious. There’s no lawful basis for doing so. There’s no federal nexus that’s even connected to such an investigation," Miller told Fox News on Sunday of America First Legal’s OIG request. "There’s not even a half-hearted attempt to suggest this was done for a legitimate law enforcement purpose."

"It seems quite obvious that it is meant to chill free speech and intimidate parents into silence and into obedience."

Garland ordered federal law enforcement authorities last Monday in a memo to meet with local leaders and discuss what he described as a recent "disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence" against teachers and school board members. Garland's memo directed the FBI to lead a task force to address threats against school officials, including creating a centralized way to report the threats.

The past year has been marked by viral videos of parents protesting during school board meetings over the implementation of critical race theory curriculum as well as mandates stemming from the coronavirus, such as face mask requirements. Garland’s memo came just days after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to President Biden saying clashes between school boards and parents may amount to "domestic terrorism."

"The purpose of our request is to expose the document of this attack on concerned parents. And to both produce the public evidentiary record to make sure that the responsible parties can be held accountable," Miller added in his comments to Fox News. "Also, it will empower parents who are persecuted, to have remedies, legal remedies."

"But additionally, the inspector general's investigation can then engage in the kinds of investigations that can lead to an internal disciplinary action. And of course, as is always the case in any investigation, other legal remedies, as appropriate."

Miller described CRT as the "animating principle of the American left" in 2021, which has touched most aspects of policies in the country.

"CRT’s fingerprints are everywhere. Health care policy, education policy, economic policy, social policy. Just take a moment and think for a second: The left talks now about every issue in the context of critical race theory."

"You've seen in congressional hearings, recently, members of the left make the incredibly bizarre point," Miller said, pointing to abortion, "that anything that limits access to abortion is, and is evidence of, systematized racism. Aside from being facially untrue and a false point, it's particularly ironic, given the racist origins of the abortion movement and the eugenics history of the abortions movement, which denied the fundamental truth of human equality."

Garland’s memo has also come under fierce criticisms from other conservative politicians and pundits. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even wrote a letter to the attorney general asking what his recent memo on "harassment" and "intimidation" of school officials by parents means.

"Your memorandum's ominous rhetoric doesn't reflect the reality of what we have seen at schoolboards across the country in recent months," McConnell wrote.

Author and radio show host Mark Levin also addressed the memo during a scathing monologue on "Life, Liberty & Levin" on Fox News.

"The Bill of Rights is under attack by Attorney General of the U.S. Merrick Garland and his staff, and now we’ve learned, it’s also under attack by Joe Biden’s staff as well as others at the White House in a coordinated attack to try and silence parents and taxpayers, the citizens of this nation who elect their school boards, who send their children into these classrooms because they are challenging the poison, the rot, the radical Marxist propaganda taught to your children from kindergarten through twelfth grade," Levin said on his show Sunday, "and apparently that is too much for them to tolerate."

DOJ officials have defended Garland's memo in the last week during Senate hearings. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said the DOJ does not see parents as a threat, and that the memo is only focused on threats and intimidation.

"The First Amendment is a core value of our democracy," Clarke said. "The Attorney general's memo deals with threats against public servants and says that threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation's core values."
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
[COMMENT: This is supposedly the parental "violence" connected with school boards cited to AG Garland. This was a parent of a high school girl who was allegedly raped in the girl's bathroom by a biologically male transgender student. The parent was demanding justice and prosecution. He was hauled away roughly by LE. It had nothing to do with masks, vax or CRT.]


Loudoun County Schools covered up bathroom rape and sodomy of 15 year-old girl by skirt-wearing bisexual male…
Posted by Kane on October 12, 2021 11:22 am
SOURCE — DAILY WIRE

Scott Smith was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.

What people did not know is that, weeks prior, Smith says, a boy wearing a skirt, entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.

Scott’s attorney, Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio, related to an incident that day at that school.

As a result of the viral video showing his arrest, Smith became the poster child for what the National School Boards Association has since suggested could be a form of “domestic terrorism”: a white blue-collar male who showed up to harangue obscure public servants on his local school board.

“If someone would have sat and listened for thirty seconds to what Scott had to say, they would have been mortified and heartbroken,” Lancaster said.

Minutes before Smith’s arrest at the school board meeting, the Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) superintendent lectured the public that concerns about the transgender policy were misplaced because the school system had no record of any assault occurring in any school bathroom.

Then a woman wearing a rainbow heart shirt – a left-wing community activist – told Smith she did not believe his daughter, he says. His rage reached a boil and he had a heated exchange of words with the woman. A police officer, there to keep the peace in the meeting, pulled on his arm. Smith yanked it away. Before he knew it, Smith says, he was hit in the face, handcuffed and dragged across the floor, with his pants pulled down. Images of the incident were splashed on televisions and newspapers across the world.

Buta Biberaj, the county’s progressive, top elected prosecutor, who has close ties to the school board’s most liberal members, appeared in court to personally prosecute Smith for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Biberaj ran on a platform of ending “mass incarceration,” but she wanted to put Smith in jail for the misdemeanors.

As prosecutor, Biberaj would have known about the case involving Smith’s daughter. The suspect, juvenile court prosecutors assured Smith, was being held responsible: He was on house arrest, confined to his mother’s townhouse. According to Lancaster, a conviction was expected on October 14, likely in the form of a guilty plea to a lesser sexual assault charge.

But on October 6, according to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, a 15-year-old was charged with sexual battery and abduction after police said he forced a girl into an empty classroom, held her against her will, and touched her inappropriately.

Lancaster says the suspect is the same boy that allegedly attacked Smith’s daughter.

What follows, based on extensive, exclusive reporting from Loudoun County, is part of the developing story involving the Smiths and the school system.

Continue reading at Daily Wire…
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJVWuyMjmkE
12:01 min

Congressman: FBI is targeting anti-CRT parents to SILENCE THEM

Oct 12, 2021


Glenn Beck


Why is school board tension between locally, elected officials and anti-CRT parents a FEDERAL matter? Congressman Chris Stewart tells Glenn the federal government would only involve the FBI in such an issue IF its purpose is to silence and intimidate parents concerned about the ‘poison’ being taught to their kids in school. So, what can he — and other representatives who disagree with the Biden administration’s overreach of power — do to stop it? Rep. Stewart details to Glenn the letter that he — and 60 other representatives — recently sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding answers. And though a letter may feel like a weak UN reprimand, Stewart tells Glenn with Democrats in power it's one of the best tools at their disposal...
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

A woman holds a sign as board member Jeff Morse speaks at the Loudoun County Public Schools board meeting in Virginia on Aug. 11, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)
A woman holds a sign as board member Jeff Morse speaks at the Loudoun County Public Schools board meeting in Virginia on Aug. 11, 2021. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)

Time to Stop ‘Communism, American-Style’?
Roger L. Simon
Roger L. Simon


October 9, 2021 Updated: October 12, 2021

Commentary

Some will remember that comedy classic from 1961, “Divorce, Italian Style,” starring Marcello Mastroianni. Unfortunately, 60 years later, we seem to be moving toward, even living through, a far less funny, real-life “Communism, American Style.”

What is “Communism, American Style”? As yet one would think it bears little resemblance to the Soviet kind with its gulags and so forth.

Or does it?

On Oct. 6, the Los Angeles City Council proclaimed, nearly unanimously (11–2), COVID-19 mandates that require proof of vaccination to enter indoor restaurants, movie theaters, salons, shopping centers, and just about every other public indoor space you could think of in the entertainment capital.

Others, with the encouragement of our federal government, will soon be following suit in varying degrees or already have.

Maybe gulags aren’t needed when the entire society is living in one.

This occurred only a couple of days after Merrick Garland, the attorney general of our country—in what Mark Levin described as Stasi-like behavior—announced his jihad, apparently in cahoots with several other governmental education entities, against parents who deigned to criticize school boards for propagandizing their children with critical race theory (son of critical theory, son of Marxism).

Garland called these concerned parents, who are springing up seemingly everywhere, “domestic terrorists.”

It turned out the AG’s own children were, via the “education” company Panorama, profiting mightily off purveying this same inducement of race hatred, while pretending to be an anti-racist, totalitarian so-called theory.

Communism, despite its high-toned, ever-changing, moralistic rhetoric—more precisely thanks to it, when you think about it—is the most evolved system yet for preserving as much money as possible in the hands of elites (translation: communist leadership and their friends).

It’s no accident that Fidel Castro died a billionaire while his people live in squalor.

Or that Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, inhabits the opulent imperial redoubt Jade Spring Hill, partly a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Take a look. Mar-a-Lago may not have seemed all that impressive to him.)
Power to (some of) the People, indeed.

Nevertheless. China, Russia, and, no doubt, Cuba—had he known much about it—were considered too impoverished by Marx to be fecund opportunities for communism, especially then. Pol Pot’s Cambodia would probably have baffled old Karl.

Marx assumed his system would first come to that more modern industrialized state that was prepared for the transition, Germany.

He was wrong about that (at least until East Germany came along, but that was only due to the intervention of the Soviets. Yes, Nazism had elements of Marxism, too.).

Or was he? Perhaps he was just ahead of his time.

What modern industrialized state could be more fecund for communism than the United States of America, the country with the most-est of all?

And it wouldn’t even require a revolution. It could just walk in the door, especially since so many of its leaders seem ready for it.

Of course, they do not name what is happening communism, or even socialism.

That would just create dissension. Often, conveniently, they do not even admit what they are doing, or calling it, to themselves.

But they are doing it. And that is what is important.

Basic to this development is a one-party system, something more like China, which is communist in rhetoric and social control, but capitalist, in greater or lesser extents, economically. Socialism, most intelligent people know, ultimately doesn’t work as an economic system.

There’s nothing new about that. Lenin understood it when he instituted limited capitalism, the New Economic Policy (NEP), only a few years after assuming power.

But the one-party system is still attractive. It obviously can be successful when paired with capitalism of various degrees. The so-called Chinese miracle is an outgrowth of that when millions, largely in the more capitalistic era of Deng Xiaoping, were lifted out of poverty.

Virtually all the Democratic Party and an unfortunate portion of the Republican—the uni-party, as it’s known—believe the Chinese are the way of the future and, as I have said before, have consciously or unconsciously joined up with them in deeds, if not in words.

The premature, surprise lifting of the debt ceiling on Oct. 7 with notable Republican participation was but one example of this growing tendency toward one-party rule. Democracy, especially multi-party democracy, is just too unruly—too 18th Century, too Enlightenment, for the modern high-tech era.

Helping in this transition to crypto-communism, or whatever you would call it, are many in the populace who would rather be led than to think or, more importantly, act for themselves. It’s the part of human nature that makes for good communists. In fact, communism owes its existence to them.

They are the part of America that will allow, indeed are allowing, communism to walk in the door. Among them are some of our richest and most successful citizens, but that does not stop them from being fools.

They aren’t, moreover, the people that built this country. Those who built the country are from the folks who de Tocqueville saw when he wrote “Democracy in America,” the independent, self-starting citizens that formed so many non-governmental, patriotic organizations for the betterment of all.

Those people, thankfully, and here’s the good part, have not gone away. The ideological war is not over. The Fat Lady hasn’t even begun to sing. She hasn’t opened her sheet music.

Garland and his allies made a big mistake in their frontal assault on the parents of America, many of whom were already outraged. Just think how many they are, parents fed up with an already atrocious public school system that served no one and was now being used for indoctrination.

They are forming a literal army across the country. Running for school board is turning into the No. 1 vocation or avocation, depending on the situation, for patriotic, committed Americans.

But something even bigger is happening. And it doesn’t take Outkick’s Clay Travis to see it—although he clearly has and is talking about it daily on his radio show with Buck Sexton.

Football season is here and the country is fed up to an unprecedented degree with their pro-communist leaders for a variety of reasons from the totalitarian COVID mandates to the equally unprecedented national embarrassment of Afghanistan to a mainstream media that has done nothing but lie to them.

And more and more people are showing their displeasure for this state of affairs in football and NASCAR stadiums, in concert halls, and in the streets.

It’s a movement never seen before and it’s growing at an amazing clip. Crowds of Americans are banding together and shouting:
LET’S GO BRANDON!

Well, this is a family newspaper, but you know what I mean. “Let’s go Brandon!” is how an NBC reporter translated for her audience the expletive-laced rejection of Joe Biden being shouted by a NASCAR audience.

It’s another way of saying “Bye-bye, communism, good-bye. We love our freedom here.”

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Loudoun County Chinese Mom… Where have I seen this before, hmmm…
Posted by Kane on October 13, 2021 1:17 pm

View: https://youtu.be/ZCsivc-N5Hw
.49 min
Wise words from Chinese mom in Loudoun County

View: https://youtu.be/o5_VZDMTgSo
.23 min
Fairfax County mom was stunned — This is why McAuliffe may lose in 3 weeks

1634160798814.png
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Madison Cawthorn testifies from the mountains…[racism in the military]
Posted by Kane on October 13, 2021 3:09 pm

View: https://youtu.be/NuT758NTjdA
4:41 min

The mountain background is fitting for America

“There is no racism in our military. For people to say that white, evangelical Americans who are conservatives and are in our military are racists is disgusting and wrong. It is clear that the way Congress is trying to find extremism is anyone who would vote for a Republican. The only extremism that I’m aware of that exists inside our military is an extreme level of patriotism.”
 
Last edited:

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Republicans Warn Biden's IRS $600 Disclosure Plan Could Lead To "Surveillance State"

WEDNESDAY, OCT 13, 2021 - 09:03 AM
Authored by Masooma Haq via The Epoch Times,

Republicans are sounding the alarm over a proposal tucked inside the Democrats’ 2,500-page $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act that would expand the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and allow the agency to have access to any bank transaction of $600 or more.


The proposal would give the IRS further access to anyone’s financial information, which Republicans say amounts to federal overreach and a “surveillance state.”
“How can you possibly justify to the American people that the IRS should be snooping around in their bank, retirement, or investment accounts,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said on Oct. 7 from the Senate floor.
“There’s only one explanation, and it’s simply terrifying: The Democrats want to control how you spend your money.”
“I want to be very clear what President [Joe] Biden’s proposing here is as close to policy from communist China that we’ve seen in the United States,” Scott added.
“In oppressive regimes like Cuba and communist China we’ve come to expect the surveillance state, where the government has access to every part of a person’s life. Now Joe Biden wants to bring that to America.”
Rep. David Kustoff (R-Tenn.) during a Sept. 30 House oversight hearing questioned U.S. Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen about the new policy of increasing the number of IRS agents and the IRS’s ability to monitor low-level transactions.
“We have proposed both augmenting the resources of the IRS so that it can hire qualified auditors and augmenting the information flow so that the IRS gets insight opaque sources of income, and both together we believe can serve to greatly address the $7 trillion estimated tax gap that we’ll see in this country,” said Yellen.
When pressed by Kustoff about the $600 dollar disclosure policy, Yellen defended the new plan.
I don’t believe it’s an invasion of privacy and look, the IRS gets a great deal of information that it needs in order to make sure the taxpayers comply with the tax code,” Yellen said.
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has praised the $80 billion investment in the IRS and the agency’s ability to access small bank transactions, saying Democrats want to ensure tax fairness and to make sure the wealthy do not dodge their tax obligation under the new tax plan.

Sen. Mitch McConnell said he opposes the new tax plan in the Democrats’ budget of $80 billion of funding for the IRS.
“They want to finance their spending spree by effectively treating every ordinary American as if they were under IRS audit,” said McConnell.
“I must have forgotten when the president campaigned on giving everybody their own audit!”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) urged the Senate to pass his legislation, the Protecting Financial Privacy Act (S.2953), which would prevent the IRS from accessing financial transaction data of their customers, building on a pre-existing law, the Bank Secrecy Act.

“The bulk data collection they are proposing will do nothing to close the so-called tax gap,” said Tuberville in a press statement released Oct. 7. “All it does is violate the liberty of every freedom-loving American who values their financial privacy.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Two Americas: Poll Shows 44% of Voters Support FBI Targeting Anti-CRT Parents, 47% Oppose
75
People hold up signs during a rally against critical race theory (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. - Are you ready to take back our schools? Republican activist Patti Menders shouted at a rally opposing anti-racism teaching that …
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images
HANNAH BLEAU13 Oct 20211,103

A plurality of American voters oppose the Biden administration’s move to investigate parents publicly opposing school policies, such as Critical Race Theory (CRT), a Rasmussen Reports survey released Wednesday found.

This month, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced he is directing the FBI to investigate parents opposing radical school policies, such as CRT, in order to combat supposed “threats of violence” against administrators. The move followed example after example of impassioned parents directly confronting school boards over their radical agenda items.

However, a plurality of likely voters disagree with Garland’s move. According to the survey, 47 percent oppose the federal investigation. Of those, 39 percent “strongly” oppose it. Another 44 percent support the decision, and among those, just over a quarter “strongly” support it.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland holds a press conference to announce a lawsuit against Texas at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC on September 9, 2021 - The US Justice Department filed suit against the state of Texas on Thursday over its new law that bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
US Attorney General Merrick Garland. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images).
Predictably, opinions vary vastly on party lines:
Democrats are about twice as likely as other voters to support Garland’s order for a federal investigation of alleged threats against school officials. Sixty-four percent (64%) of Democrats support the FBI investigation, but Garland’s order is supported by only 31% of Republicans and 32% of voters not affiliated with either major party.
Fifty-four percent (54%) of GOP voters Strongly Oppose the federal investigation, as do 18% of Democrats and 49% of unaffiliated voters.
Respondents were also asked, “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: ‘The reported heated encounters between concerned parents and school boards often involve speech that is clearly protected by the First Amendment. Federal law enforcement muscle should never be used against protesting parents’?”

A significant majority, 68 percent, said they agree, and of those 48 percent “strongly” agree.

Across the board, 88 percent say it is “very important” for parents to be involved in their children’s education.

They survey, taken October 11-12, 2021, among 1,000 likely voters, has a margin of error of +/- 3 percent.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The War on Halloween Begins…
Posted by Kane on October 13, 2021 10:18 pm
1634181856132.png

A Seattle elementary school canceled its annual Halloween parade this year, saying it “marginalizes students of color who do not celebrate the holiday.” The decision to cancel the Pumpkin Parade, where students can dress up in Halloween costumes, came from the Racial Equity Team at Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary School after five years of discussion, the school district said.

School principal Stanley Jaskot confirmed that the parade was canceled.

“Halloween is a very complex issue for schools. Yes, I agree this event marginalized our students of color. Several of our students historically opted for an alternate activity in the library while the Pumpkin Parade took place. This was an isolating situation and not consistent with our values of being an inclusive and safe place for all our students — especially students of color and those with a sensitivity to all the noise and excitement of the parade,” Jaskot said.

Continue reading…

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1448436523381178372
3:50 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

MERRICK GARLAND Threat Against Parent’s 1st Amendment Right Backfires…Dad Serves Stunned School Board With $200 Million Lawsuit In Middle of Meeting [VIDEO]

By Patty McMurray
Published October 13, 2021 at 8:45pm

We are in serious trouble in the United States of America. We have a mostly incoherent “president” that over half of America doesn’t believe was elected fairly. Joe Biden is likely taking orders from unelected people working behind the scenes with an agenda that is so evil that, if exposed by our dishonest media, would shock our nation to its core.

100 Percent Fed Up reports – On October 4, Barack Obama’s failed Supreme Court nominee turned Joe Biden’s Barack Obama’s Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a threatening note to warn parents of his plan to plant federal law enforcement agencies in communities around America. The letter was likely meant to chill dissent against school boards or school administrators over mask mandates and the teaching of CRT. The letter was prompted by the National School Board Association (NSBA), who called on the Biden administration to take action against unruly parents who keep showing up at school board meetings; the Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland has taken up the cause against parents. The NSBA encouraged the Biden administration to classify the actions of concerned parents as “the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”

A lot has happened since our US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s threat against the First Amendment Right of parents to speak freely against the racist Critical Race Theory (CRT) being pushed on students in grades K-12 or against forcing our children to wear masks to school?

Shortly after Merrick’s threat against parents speaking out, it was discovered that Merrick Garland’s daughter is married to the co-founder of a company that provides schools with materials to teach CRT.

tanner.jpg


Rebecca Garland’s husband, Xan Tanner, is the co-founder of Panorama Education, a distributor of CRT materials

Parents were supposed to stop coming to school board meetings—but they haven’t. In fact, in many cases, they’re doubling down and showing up in even larger numbers.

On Monday, a father in Clark County, Nevada, showed up to a Clark County School Board meeting and stunned the board members when he served them with papers in the middle of his speech.

“This is segregation based off of your own fears and your own personal interests,” the unidentified father told the school board members. “The people in this country have had enough, and we are fighting back.”

“I have something to give you,” he said. He called security and asked them to do him a “favor,” asking “Would you please hand those forms to the board members?” As the security person was handing out the papers serving each member, the father announced, ” You’ve been officially served a $200 million lawsuit with six complaints and violations or multiple amendments.”

“Your job is not to be concerned with the children’s health,” he told them. “You’re not nurses. You’re not doctors. You are not responsible for their health organization. Your only focus is on our children’s education, and the education system here is 50th in the state, and you make almost more money than anybody else.”

“It is very clear that you have failed in doing that job,” he said. “This country is not alone. It’s time that we wake up. Now, we’re gonna do a lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. We can throw it out as much as you want. We’re gonna keep this paperwork on your desk and keep the problem going until we get exactly what we want.”

“This is not a negotiation, we will have our freedom of choice, and we’re gonna see you in court,” he added.

Watch:

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1448010919397707786
.58 min

As the members were being served, the parents sitting behind the brave dad, who are clearly undeterred by our United States Attorney General’s threats, erupted in cheers and applause.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
[Germany]


German Court Finds YouTube’s Removal of Videos About COVID Was Illegal and YouTube Must Restore the Videos

By Joe Hoft
Published October 14, 2021 at 10:22am

Censored-by-YouTube.jpg

German actors expressed their thoughts and feelings about the China coronavirus on YouTube, unfortunately, YouTube didn’t like their thoughts and so they were censored. But the courts in Germany decided that YouTube is not the purveyor of truth and mandated no more censorship from YouTube.

In Germany, a group of actors expressed their opinions of COVID and the government’s actions related to COVID:
Dozens of prominent German actors have banded together as part of the “allesaufdentisch” (everything on the table) freedom of expression campaign to demand a more open discussion on the Coronavirus and the controversial government policies, rules and regulations. Their statements were posted in the form of short videos on YouTube.
In recent months, views critical of government Corona policies and vaccines have been suppressed by the major media.

“Increasing concern” over political actions
At their allesaufdentisch site, the group of leading actors, performers, artists state: “We are watching the development of political action in the Corona crisis with increasing concern. Many experts have not yet been heard in the public Corona debate. We would like to see a wide-ranging, fact-based, open and factual discourse and also an equally wide-ranging discussion of the videos.”
Each actor posted a YouTube video criticizing the current suppressive policies. See background here.
German actor Filipp Piatov had much to share about YouTube’s actions:
When asked if the videos indeed contained controversial content justifying removal, Piatov said there was none, adding “A false fact is not reason for a deletion.” Otherwise, many video statements made by government authorities would need to be taken down as well.

YouTube “no Truth Commission”
“YouTube is not a factchecking platform, not a Truth Commission that gets to decide what’s right and what’s wrong,” said Piatov. “Who is YouTube? Is it a University? Is it a panel of virologists who sit and watch all these videos and say this one, from the 100 million that got uploaded, we’re going to delete?”
Yesterday a German court ruled against YouTube.
A group of German artists skeptical and critical of the government response to the COVID pandemic and promoting conversations around the topic, active online under the #allesaufdentisch (literally, “everything on the table”) hashtag, sued YouTube for deleting their videos – and won in court.

The two videos that got removed by the Google-owned giant consisted of interviews artists had with scientists and they did not take the censorship lying down but opted for legal action against YouTube.
The Cologne Regional Court has now found that the removals were illegal, ruling in the plaintiff’s favor with two preliminary injunctions, ordering YouTube to restore the videos.
Let’s hope these videos inherit the Streisand effect where they are now more popular because of YouTube’s action.
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment
[UK]


Watch: BBC Anchor Claims "People Are Over" Arguing Against Surveillance State

THURSDAY, OCT 14, 2021 - 03:30 AM
Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

An arrogant BBC News anchor lectured a privacy advocate Tuesday who argued that a rise in violent crime, particularly against women, cannot be countered by eroding freedom and further empowering the surveillance state.



Following the announcement that police in the UK are setting up a scheme to use CCTV cameras to watch women at night to make them ‘feel safer’, Madeline Stone of the privacy advocate group Big Brother Watch argued that there are already masses of surveillance cameras everywhere and they do not make people any safer or prevent crime.

Stone emphasised that adding more cameras strips away privacy and is in no way a solution to the problem, including harassment of and violence against women.

“But the woman is asking for the camera to be on them, so this is not a breach of civil liberties,” the anchor responded, referring to the scheme which uses an opt-in app.

Stone replied that having an anonymous stranger tracking a woman’s movements via a camera isn’t going to help, but was continuously interrupted by the anchor who repeatedly stated “if it’s something that’s going to make you feel safer,” it will be welcomed.

“Isn’t this really that Big Brother Watch is against all cameras watching us?” the anchor lectured.

He then declared “I mean this was a fair talking point in the 1990s, but we’ve moved on since then, people are over that now.”
“Cameras are everywhere,” he stated, arguing that it’s pointless to stand against the surveillance state.
“Cameras are on women anyway, whether they ask them to be or not,” the anchor further arrogantly declared.
Watch:

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1447893837024796676
2:53 min

Yes, that’s the WHOLE ****ING POINT of the problem mate.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

WALMART VS. WHITENESS
The company’s new training program tells hourly employees that they are guilty of “internalized racial superiority.”

October 14, 2021
Christopher F. Rufo

Walmart Inc. has launched a critical race theory training program that denounces the United States as a “white supremacy system” and teaches white, hourly wage employees that they are guilty of “white supremacy thinking” and “internalized racial superiority.”

According to a cache of internal documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, Walmart launched the program in 2018 inpartnership with the Racial Equity Institute, a Greensboro, North Carolina, consulting firm that has worked extensively with universities, government agencies, and private corporations. The program is based on the core principles of critical race theory, including “intersectionality,” “internalized racial oppression,” “internalized racial inferiority,” and “white anti-racist development.” Since the program’s launch, Walmart has trained more than 1,000 employees and made the program mandatory for executives and recommended for hourly wage workers in Walmart stores. When reached for comment, Walmart confirmed that the company has “engaged REI for a number of training sessions since 2018” and has “found these sessions to be thought provoking and constructive.”

The program begins with the claim that the United States is a “white supremacy system,” designed by white Europeans “for the purpose of assigning and maintaining white skin access to power and privilege.” American history is presented as a long sequence of oppressions, from the “construction of a ‘white race’” by colonists in 1680 to President Obama’s stimulus legislation in 2009, “another race neutral act that has disproportionately benefited white people.”

Consequently, the Walmart program argues, white Americans have been subjected to “racist conditioning” that indoctrinates them into “white supremacy,” or the view “that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.”

Following the principle that “diagnosis determines treatment,” the Walmart program seeks to create a psychological profile of whiteness that can then be treated through “white anti-racist development.” Whites, according to the trainers, are inherently guilty of “white privilege” and “internalized racial superiority,” the belief that “one’s comfort, wealth, privilege and success has been earned by merits and hard work” rather than through the benefits of systemic racism. Walmart’s program argues that this oppressive “white supremacy culture” can be summarized in a list of qualities including “individualism,” “objectivity,” “paternalism,” “defensiveness,” “power hoarding,” “right to comfort, “and “worship of the written word”—which all “promote white supremacy thinking” and “are damaging to both people of color and to white people.”

The training program recommends that “discussions about racist conditioning” should be conducted in racially segregated “affinity groups,” because “people of color and white people have their own work to do in understanding and addressing racism.” Walmart employees who are racial minorities, in the framework of the training program, suffer from “constructed racist oppression” and “internalized racial inferiority.” Their internal psychology is considered shattered and broken, dominated by internal messages such as “we believe there is something wrong with being a person of color,” “we have lowered self-esteem,” “we have lowered expectations,” “we have very limited choices,” and “we have a sense of limited possibility.” Minorities thus begin to believe the “myths promoted by the racist system,” develop feelings of “self-hate,” “anger,” “rage,” and “ethnocentrism,” and are forced to “forget,” “lie,” and “stop feeling” in order to secure basic survival.

The solution, according to Walmart’s program, is to encourage whites to participate in “white anti-racist development”—a psychological conditioning program that reorients white consciousness toward “anti-racism.” The training program teaches white employees that ideas such as “I’m normal,” “we’re all the same,” and “I am not the problem” are racist constructs, driven by internalized racial superiority. The program encourages whites to accept their “guilt and shame,” adopt the idea that “white is not right,” acknowledge their complicity in racism, and, finally, move toward “collective action” whereby “white can do right.”

The goal is for whites to climb the “ladder of empowerment for white people” and recreate themselves with a new “anti-racist identity.”

Walmart’s training program seems a study in opportunism. For years, activists have attacked the company’s business practices; the critical race theory program helps the giant retailer shift blame to forces beyond its control. As the company denounces “white supremacy culture”—with components including “objectivity,” “individualism,” and “hoarding”—its entire nine-member top executive leadership, except technology chief Suresh Kumar, is white, and its top six leaders made a combined $112 million in salary in 2019. Chief executive officer Doug McMillon, whom the whistleblower described as a “true believer” in critical race theory, hopes to export the ideology to every Fortune 100 company through his role as chairman of the Business Roundtable.

The formula is clear: American executives, among the most successful people on the planet, can collect accolades and social status by promoting fashionable left-wing ideologies. Meantime, their hourly workers, making between $25,000 and $30,000 yearly, are asked to undergo dishonest and humiliating rituals to confront their “white privilege” and “white supremacy thinking.” McMillon gets the social justice credit; his workers pay the price.

ORIGINAL SOURCE DOCUMENTS
(Document on website)

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marsh

On TB every waking moment

NOT MAKING HEADLINES – EXCLUSIVE: AG Garland’s Wife Is an Advisor Closely Linked to Brennan Center and Connected with Far-Left Groups Working to Prevent 2020 Election Audits — HE MUST RECUSE!

By Joe Hoft
Published October 15, 2021 at 12:53pm
AG-Garland-Family.jpg


Attorney General Merrick Garland is withholding more information and the fake news mainstream media is covering for him. Not only is his son-in-law making millions pushing CRT garbage to schools around the country, his wife is connected with election groups who are doing all they can to prevent audits of the 2020 presidential election.

We previously released information that US Attorney General Merrick Garland’s son-in-law is pushing material related to the Critical Race Theory (CRT) to schools around the US. Despite this AG Garland asked the FBI to step in an investigate parents who are complaining about the racist CRT being taught to their children.

Today we have uncovered information that Garland’s wife is an election specialist with connections to ‘non-profits’ attempting to prevent any election audits of the 2020 Presidential Election.

We first noticed there was very limited information on Lynn Garland and her background and work online.

Lynn Rosenman Garland was raised in New York and Redding, Connecticut, and attended the prestigious Brearley School, according to her wedding announcement.

She went on to graduate from Harvard University and from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a master’s degree in operations management.

At the time of her wedding she was working as the staff assistant to the vice president in charge of operations for the Melpar division of E-Systems, Inc., a defense elctronics contractor in Falls Church, Virginia. Details about her later career were not immediately available.
There was an announcement of Garland’s daughter’s marriage where it was noted that Garland’s wife “advises government and non-profit groups on voting systems security and accuracy issues.”

This led us to some material where Ms. Lynn Garland is noted in a report on individuals involved with Election Verification Network:
Lynn Garland has worked as an unaffiliated volunteer to improve the security and accuracy of election systems since 2004. She is a co-executive editor of “Principles and Best Practices of Post-Election Audits.” She served on a team evaluating optical scan systems for Maryland’s State Board of Elections. Previously, she worked in manufacturing operations management for a Fortune 100 electronics company. She majored in Physics at Harvard College and in Operations Management at MIT’s business school.”
Several of the other individuals connected with the ‘Election Verification Network’ work with far-left ‘non-profits’ that worked to prevent audits of the results of the 2020 Election.

We previously reported on Liz Howard (an observer representing Maricopa County in Arizona’s audit and a member of the National Task Force on Election Integrity – see below):

Mark Lindeman (with Verified Voting is also listed as a member of the Election Verification Network and was involved in the New Hampshire audit which was a joke. The investigators found nothing wrong despite conservatives losing races by machine error that they actually won),

Ms. Garland co-wrote an article on election audits with Mark Lindeman and Jennifer Morrel

Lynn-Garland.jpg


Ms. Morrell was all over the country before and after the 2020 Election:

Ms. Garland co-wrote an article with the Brennan Center and Verified Voting.

Lynn-Garland-w-Verified-Voting-and-Brennan-Center.jpg


The Brennan Center was involved in an attempt to stop the Maricopa County audit, along with Liz Howard, and they also are connected with Harri Hursti, who also audited New Hampshire, and who met with the UN.

Ms. Garland is substantially linked to the 2020 Election.

She co-authored articles with individuals and entities critical of audits after the 2020 Election who actually tried to stop these audits.

Ms. Garland was silent as her husband threatened those participating in the Arizona audit.


AG Garland is completely conflicted due to his family’s connections to school curricula and now national elections.

His wife’s connections with election advisors trying to prevent audits of the 2020 Election are a direct conflict.

AG Garland was very dishonest in not sharing this with the public and not recusing himself from the position of Attorney General because of it.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Pennsylvania Votes to Withdraw from National School Boards Association
By Human Events Staff | October 15, 2021

The Pennsylvania School Boards Association is one of 11 state boards that are officially withdrawing from the National School Boards Association following the infamous letter to the White House.

As previously reported by Human Events News, the National School Boards Association wrote a letter to the White House claiming that school boards face “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” from critics of mask mandates and promoters of “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory.”

In response, Merrick Garland said the FBI and U.S. attorneys would have meetings with federal, state and local leaders to form “strategies for addressing threats.”

The Justice Department said in a press release that it would create “specialized training” for school boards and administrators to identify threats, report it to law enforcement and “capture and preserve evidence” to aid in prosecutions.

In a statement following a vote to cancel membership, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association cited the letter as the “final straw” in their decision, per BizPacReview.

“The Pennsylvania School Boards Association was not consulted prior to the letter being sent by the National School Boards Association to President Biden,” chief communications officer Annette Stevenson said. “We were not asked for input nor discussion on its content.”

“PSBA has always encouraged local school boards to welcome input and remarks from community members and all stakeholders, and Pennsylvania has had a long history of relying on local school district control to ensure that the will of the community and parents is best represented,” Stevenson added. “PSBA is strongly adverse to the lack of civility and violence being witnessed in some districts, and we support that local districts need to be able to work with their local and regional law enforcement to address such safety concerns.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Achieving Equity Through Mediocrity: Why Elimination Of Gifted Programs Should Worry Us All

FRIDAY, OCT 15, 2021 - 05:10 PM
Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Below is my column in the Hill on the elimination of the gifted programs, proficiency requirements, and other performance-based elements in our public school system. This was highlighted recently by the elimination of the gifted and talents programs in New York City under Mayor Bill de Blasio, which were denounced as racist. I have long been critical of this trend which focuses on reducing disparities in performance by trimming the top rather than raising the bottom of a student body.


Here is the column:

Journalist H.L. Mencken once denounced public education as an effort “simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” Mencken’s fears may be coming true in a way that few of us thought possible just a few years ago.

While much of our public debate today has centered on the teaching of the concepts of systemic racism and white privilege, a far more worrisome trend is sweeping our public school system. Across the country, school districts are removing advanced programs and even standardized testing to achieve an artificial appearance of equity.

Indeed, it promises a kind of equity through mediocrity that all families should reject.

This movement was on display this week after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the elimination of the Gifted and Talented (G&T) program for the city’s school system. G&T programs have been denounced by some as racist because a disproportionate number of white and Asian students are in the advanced programs. The De Blasio panel previously declared such programs to be “segregation” due to the lower number of minority students. The move is part of a campaign to eliminate racial disparities not by elevating the performance of minority students but by removing standardized testing and special programs that highlight such disparities. Now those separate programs will be eliminated and the students returned to general student body. They can seek “accelerated” materials but will be taught in classes with other students in conventional schools.

Despite billions spent on public school systems, there remains a chronic failure to achieve bare proficiency in reading, writing and math for many public school students in cities like New York, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The response by many is to declare standardized testing or meritocracy as racist, while other districts eliminate special programs or schools for gifted students. In Oregon, the governor and legislature went further and eliminated any graduation proficiency requirement in reading, writing or math.

De Blasio’s move will do little to advance students, while likely accelerating the departure of many families from public schools. Gifted students are unlikely to get the attention or advanced work they need to stay intellectually engaged; some will underperform or drop out.

It also is not necessarily good for other students. Gifted students are likely to push down the scores and ranking of other students. Currently, students in the other programs can still excel and achieve high class rankings in seeking college positions. Now, they likely will find themselves less competitive if classes are dominated by gifted students, and teachers will struggle to keep both sets of students engaged.

Rather than improving the performance of minority students, these districts are eliminating testing, requirements and programs that recognize disparities in performance. It is like making your track team more competitive by eliminating the fastest runners or just eliminating the clock. Suddenly everyone is magically performing in perfect harmony.

This movement goes beyond grades.

Recently, a Virginia teacher denounced classroom discipline as a form of “white supremacy.” In a short video, Blacksburg High School teacher Josh Thompson described the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports — or PBIS — as “white supremacy with a hug”: “The idea of just sitting quiet and being told stuff and taking things in a passive stance is not a thing that’s ‘in’ with many cultures.

So if we’re positively enforcing these behaviors, we are by extension positively enforcing elements of white culture, which therefore keeps whiteness at the center, which is the definition of white supremacy.”

He is not alone. The Biden administration is looking at class discipline as an area of racial discrimination, and other schools districts have barred expulsion or suspensions due to classroom disruptions as racially inequitable. In one English school, teachers were banned this month from even referring to the conduct of students as “good” or “bad.” Headteacher Dr. Julian Murphy said that “I don’t want [teachers] to be shouty and make pupils feel guilty.”

The question is how all of these changes will shape a rising generation. There have long been complaints about the “trophy generation” — young people raised on the expectation that you get trophies for just participating. This new trend is the inverse, effectively eliminating any trophies for higher performers.

Consider the current trajectory of all these moves: Students will be taught in schools that increasingly are unable to enforce good classroom behavior (assuming they can even refer to “good” behavior) with suspensions or expulsions; standardized testing and basic proficiency requirements will be eliminated to remove performance rankings and tracking. Many institutions, like the California university system, are eliminating college standardized testing in order to address racial inequities. Some have even called for random selection for college admissions. As Alison Collins, vice president of the San Francisco Board of Education, stated recently, “When we talk about merit, meritocracy and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing … those are racist systems.”

The result is a perfectly equitable - and a perfectly irrational - educational system.

It is unclear how this country intends to compete in an already challenging global economy. Other countries like China must be delighted to see these moves to eliminate G&T programs.

The most immediate response is likely to be the increasing departures of families from public schools. School choice and vouchers are becoming a more widely supported cause, including by a huge number of Democratic and independent voters. Yet the abandonment of public schools would be a terrible loss for many of us who have been lifelong supporters of public education. (My parents helped found a group in Chicago in the 1970s to stop the “white flight” from public schools. There, the loss of white and affluent families was not just reducing diversity in the schools but leaving schools without political and economic support. My wife and I sent our kids to Virginia public schools and feel incredibly fortunate to have lived in Fairfax County, with exceptional schools and teachers.)

These trends are now reversing such efforts. Teachers’ unions and politicians often treat families like captives in these systems, with little to no voice on curriculum or policies. That issue is at the center of the close governor’s race in Virginia, after Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe declared:
“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Those parents ultimately can speak, however, by leaving public school systems. The result would be an educational system as divided as our society — racially, politically and economically. Moreover, we will have an increasing gap in the levels of performance between private and public schools, creating an image of public schools as the default educational option for students who are less competitive. That would be a disaster not just for minority families but for the entire country.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Tyrants Of The Nanny State: When The Government Thinks It Knows Best

FRIDAY, OCT 15, 2021 - 12:00 AM
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
- Simone Weil, French philosopher and political activist
We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.

We find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes.



The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; roving TSA sweeps; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.
Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy.

This certainly isn’t a constitutional democracy, however.

This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

Consider, for example, that businesses in California must now designate an area of the children's toy aisle “gender-neutral” or face a fine, whether or not the toys sold are traditionally marketed to girls or boys such as Barbies and Hot Wheels.

California schools are prohibited from allowing students to access websites, novels or religious works that reflect negatively on gays. And while Californians are free to have sex with whomever they choose (because that’s none of the government’s business), removing a condom during sex without consent could make you liable for general, special and punitive damages.

Up until a few years ago, Missouri required that anyone wanting to braid African-style hair and charge for it must first acquire a government license, which at a minimum requires the applicant to undertake at least 1500 hours of cosmetology classes costing tens of thousands of dollars. Tennessee was prepared to fine residents nearly $100,000 just for violating its laws against braiding hair without a government license. In Oregon, the law was so broad that you needed a license even if you were planning to braid hair for free. The mere act of touching someone’s hair could render you a cosmetologist operating without a license and in violation of the law.

It’s getting worse.
Almost every aspect of American life today—especially if it is work-related—is subject to this kind of heightened scrutiny and ham-fisted control, whether you’re talking about aspiring “bakers, braiders, casket makers, florists, veterinary masseuses, tour guides, taxi drivers, eyebrow threaders, teeth whiteners, and more.”

For instance, whereas 70 years ago, one out of every 20 U.S. jobs required a state license, today, almost 1 in 3 American occupations requires a license.

The problem of overregulation has become so bad that, as one analyst notes, “getting a license to style hair in Washington takes more instructional time than becoming an emergency medical technician or a firefighter.”

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

This is the mindset that tried to penalize a fisherman with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water.

That same overcriminalization mindset reared its ugly head again when police arrested a 90-year-old man for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public unless portable toilets are also made available.

It’s no coincidence that both of these incidents—the fishing debacle and the homeless feeding arrest—happened in Florida.

Despite its pristine beaches and balmy temperatures, Florida is no less immune to the problems plaguing the rest of the nation in terms of overcriminalization, incarceration rates, bureaucracy, corruption, and police misconduct.

A few years back, in fact, Florida officials authorized police raids on barber shops in minority communities, resulting in barbers being handcuffed in front of customers, and their shops searched without warrants. All of this was purportedly done in an effort to make sure that the barbers’ licensing paperwork was up to snuff.

As if criminalizing fishing, charity, and haircuts wasn’t bad enough, you could also find yourself passing time in a Florida slammer for such inane activities as singing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit, breaking more than three dishes per day, farting in a public place after 6 pm on a Thursday, and skateboarding without a license.

In this way, the Sunshine State is representative of the transformation happening across the nation, where a steady diet of bread and circuses has given rise to an oblivious, inactive citizenry content to be ruled over by an inflexible and highly bureaucratic regime.

America has gone from being a beacon of freedom to a locked down nation.

And “we the people,” sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, have allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

The problem with these devil’s bargains, however, is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all—the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.”

In exchange for the promise of an end to global pandemics, lower taxes, lower crime rates, safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to lockdowns, militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization, overregulation and government corruption.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

We relied on the government to help us safely navigate national emergencies (terrorism, natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) only to find ourselves forced to relinquish our freedoms on the altar of national security, yet we’re no safer (or healthier) than before.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives.

So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

A special report by CNBC breaks down the national numbers:
One out of 100 American adults is behind bars — while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government spend about $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.
We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

According to the Washington Post, these funds have been used to buy guns, armored cars, electronic surveillance gear, “luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.” Police seminars advise officers to use their “department wish list when deciding which assets to seize” and, in particular, go after flat screen TVs, cash and nice cars.

In Florida, where police are no strangers to asset forfeiture, Florida police have been carrying out “reverse” sting operations, where they pose as drug dealers to lure buyers with promises of cheap cocaine, then bust them, and seize their cash and cars. Over the course of a year, police in one small Florida town seized close to $6 million using these entrapment schemes.

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras—used in 24 states and Washington, DC—are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash.

One small Florida town, population 8,000, generates a million dollars a year in fines from these cameras. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in heft fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is what happens when the American people get duped, deceived, double-crossed, cheated, lied to, swindled and conned into believing that the government and its army of bureaucrats—the people we appointed to safeguard our freedoms—actually have our best interests at heart.

Yet when all is said and done, who is really to blame when the wool gets pulled over your eyes: you, for believing the con man, or the con man for being true to his nature?

It’s time for a bracing dose of reality, America.
Wake up and take a good, hard look around you, and ask yourself if the gussied-up version of America being sold to you—crime free, worry free, disease free and devoid of responsibility—is really worth the ticket price: nothing less than your freedoms.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
[Canada]

  • Issue: October 15, 2021
Alberta Judge gives compelled speech order to anti-lockdown protesters

As part of a probation sentence, three citizens are ordered to share the views of medical experts when they talk about COVID.

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Pastor Artur Pawłowski, and his brother Dawid, were in court on Wednesday for disobeying COVID restrictions in the province of Alberta. The judge punished them with fines and community service for “attempting to be martyrs” by taunting the court in the hope of more prison time. But the details of their punishment is an odd one and one that has frightening censorship implications.

The Pawłowski brothers are part of the Street Church in Calgary and were sentenced alongside Whistle Stop Cafe owner Chris Scott.

The judge said their actions made the already-concerning COVID situation in Alberta worse. He also noted that the brothers had a “fervent desire” to be martyred by taunting the court, hoping for a longer sentence.

“They are on the wrong side of science,” said Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Adam Germain.

“They are also on the wrong side of common sense.”

Instead of jail time, the judge punished them with fines, community service, and compelled speech.

Artur was ordered to pay a $23,000 fine and undergo 18 months of probation and Dawid was slapped with $10,000 and 12 months probation. Each of the brothers were also ordered to complete 120 hours of community service at charities, shelters, and food banks, as long as it is not for their own street ministries.

Scott must serve 18 months probation and pay $20,000 in fines.

The court also gave a compelled speech order and told them to indicate that their opinion contradicts medical experts when they speak about COVID restrictions and vaccines, whether they talk about COVID in person or online.

The judge said that, if they’re going to go against the official narrative or COVID, they have to share a disclaimer that their beliefs may not be held by medical experts when posting online.

The judge ruled, according to CBC, “that if the three pandemic-denying, anti-mask leaders continued to preach to their followers, they must also present the perspective of medical experts.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

October 15, 2021

Column
The Weaponization of Federal Agencies Against American Freedoms

by Larry Bell | Oct 15, 2021 | Constitution, Politics
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Unelected federal bureaucratic agencies are exercising increasingly expansive regulatory power and abusive control over broad aspects of our lives and liberties. In the process, we unconscionably surrender our national sovereignty, heritage, and freedoms to treacherously transformative control by tyrants. Here are a dozen examples of federal agencies run amuck:

Environmental Protection Agency:
EPA’s application of the Clean Air Act to declare CO2 (plant food) as a “pollutant” has had egregiously profound influences on regulatory anti-fossil policies impacting transportation, heating, and air conditioning, and industrial and agricultural production. These inflationary actions are escalating fuel, food, and commodity prices that impose the heaviest burdens on low-income individuals and families.

Department of Interior:
Federal Judge Terry Doughty has blocked Joe Biden’s executive order (EO) directing the department to suspend new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, stating that such power “lies solely with Congress.” In the interim, Interior Department permits issued for drilling on federal land declined to 171 in August from 671 in April, driving energy costs even higher.

Department of Transportation:
Biden EOs direct the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and EPA to propose raising corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards 8% annually for new 2024-2026 model year passenger cars and light trucks, along with more stringent greenhouse gas (GHG) tailpipe emissions for 2023 and later model years. This is intended to push more electric vehicles onto the already stressed U.S. power grid “as an issue of environmental justice.”

Security and Exchange Commission:
In September, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives voted to pass a party-line bill supporting Biden administration SEC plans to impose new Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) standards and disclosure rules requiring publicly traded companies to disclose “climate risks” allegedly caused by oil, gas, and coal production and use as part of their agenda to punish investors.

Housing and Urban Development:
The single biggest item in President Biden’s “infrastructure” bill, now being negotiated with Congress, is $213 billion he claims will be used to “increase affordable housing.” This will put the federal government in charge of local zoning to install apartment buildings throughout single-family-home neighborhoods as a condition for obtaining HUD community development block grants. This is near twice the amount proposed to be spent on roads, bridges, and other real infrastructure projects.

Internal Revenue Service:
Far-left Democrats desperate for revenue to offset trillions in planned new spending are earmarking $80 billion in new funding to hire an army of additional auditors to review every American’s bank account above a $600 balance, or with more than $600 of transactions in a year. Although the Biden White House has said it’s open to lifting the threshold to $10,000, the data dive would still apply to nearly every active checking account.

Federal Bureau of Investigation:
The FBI went to great lengths to con the FISA court into issuing spying warrants into the 2016 Trump presidential campaign based upon phony opposition research funded by the Clinton campaign and Democrat National Committee. By contrast, the agency sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop materials for a year revealing foreign influence-peddling kickbacks to Joe, “the big guy,” information that mainstream and social media blocked prior to the 2020 election.

Department of Education:
A coalition of 20 state attorneys general has called in a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona for the Biden administration to withdraw racist and propagandist proposals from the Department of Education that are meant to promote critical race theory (CRT) and the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in classrooms under American History and Civics Education programs teaching diversity and the effects of “systemic” inequality.

Department of Justice:
On October 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys to target any “threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment” by legitimately concerned K-12 parents directed toward school board members and other personnel regarding protests over the teaching of toxic CRT, essentially branding and intimidating those who dare to oppose such indoctrination as acts of domestic terrorism… a capricious pretext for federal criminal investigation and prosecution.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration
President Biden plans to impose an executive order COVID-19 vaccination mandate for all federal government employees, contractors, and military personnel… plus an OSHA ruling that directs all businesses with 100 or more employees to make vaccination a condition of employment. Irrationally, not even millions of individuals who have recovered from COVID with more robust and longer-lasting natural immunity are exempted.

Department of Defense:
A politicized Biden Pentagon has been weaponized against active-duty members of our own U.S. military with critical race theory indoctrination, intrusive surveillance of private social media accounts for any signs of “extremist” white supremacy statements, along with that imposition of involuntary COVID vaccine requirements regardless of natural immunity or potentially face “administrative or non-judicial punishment” including relief of duties or discharge.”

Department of Homeland Security:
Ironically, the same administration issuing vaccine mandates for government workers and military personnel imposes no requirements upon countless unchecked and unvaccinated illegal southern border crossers from all over the planet who are being transferred at taxpayer expense to infect neighborhoods and burden medical health care, school programs, and other community services near you.
 

Housecarl

On TB every waking moment
Posted for fair use.....

October 16, 2021
The Popularization of Political Repression
By W.R. Wordsworth


If social media material is any indication, the sheer ugliness of American political sentiment is increasing exponentially, and the ugliness is getting harder and harder to tune out. To the extent that its inner character shines through on the internet, it would seem American democracy isn't so apt to "die in darkness" as it is to succumb to a strangely garish death by suffocation, buried under an avalanche of anti-democratic sentiments, sentiments increasingly normalized and aggressively promoted with almost ghoulish glee.

Democracy is a disposition; it is a willingness to curb one's expectations regarding the good that mere politics can deliver. The democratic mentality refuses the temptation to see in politics a key to achieving some grand universal state of affairs satisfying to all; it calls for humility in the exercise of power and places this humility at the center of all political activity. This serves as perhaps the deepest check on the tyrannical impulse. The democratically inclined individual recognizes a necessity to tolerate the imperfection of the human condition (even while working continually to improve it) so as to avoid risking the Hell of a perverted "perfection" forcibly imposed. The tyrannical impulse falsely proclaims utopia to be within easy reach and takes its own insane ambition as adequate justification for the employment of radical and violent means to realize it. Democracy is anti-utopian and suspicious of power; it rejects the tyrannical impulse in principle, and it is this rather modest and unsensational disposition that is being effectively depopularized.

Anti-democratic sentiments are regularly blared at us by blowhards playacting as "journalists" at major media companies, but they're also offered up for online acclamation in a thousand little memes. Steeped in snark, suffused with an air of defiant self-congratulation (as though advancing something truly daring and clever) anti-democratic memes flow freely into one's feed like a stream of digital pollution, and in so doing attest to the gradual extinguishment of the democratic disposition. Let us examine just one of these memes. It reads as follows:

"Unbiased journalism is not pretending both sides are equally valid. Unbiased journalism is reporting the facts even if those facts include that one side is irredeemably awful. False neutrality is propaganda."

So speaks the wisdom of the mob. Tyrannies establish themselves through the perversion of language and the manipulation of sentiment. We are presented here with an avowedly principled rejection of press objectivity (or neutrality); journalists are enjoined to act as agents of political vilification. A decent media, the meme asserts, would identify one of two alternatives as "irredeemably awful." Since we operate within a two-party system, it seems only reasonable to assume that the two "sides" refers to the two parties. Simple math would suggest that if one of the two parties is rejected as "irredeemably awful," one is left with exactly one party. The meme effectively calls for a one-party state.
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The meme is a symptom -- and admittedly a rather small one -- but it is not unrepresentative. American political culture seems to be growing increasingly vindictive, with the avowed aim of politics being punitive. The meme effectively normalizes the spectacle of a significant portion of the American public demanding the vindictive repression of millions of other Americans. Vindictive political repression would appear to be a new group entitlement to which large numbers of people now seek to lay claim, with ample encouragement from demagogues in the media and elsewhere.

Perhaps social media merely amplifies and concentrates a vindictiveness that has been building for some time, the character of which may be seen in a comparison of the struggle for civil rights with the quest for gun control. In the civil rights struggle, the nation ultimately united behind efforts to extend rights to those who could not safely exercise them. In contrast to this, the advocates of gun control seek to revoke the rights of people who are not abusing the right in question. In the one case, Americans were urged to see themselves in those who had been unjustly deprived of their rights, and to wish for them to have full access to those rights. In the case of gun control advocacy Americans are urged to vindictively demand the disarming of people who have been effectively scapegoated for social problems to which they do not in any meaningful way contribute.

Gun control is -- at best -- a simpleminded non-solution to a social problem deliberately misattributed to a politically vulnerable class of people. Violent criminality cannot plausibly be pinned on legal firearms owners because legal firearms owners do not habitually engage in criminal activity. To attack gun owners for "gun violence" simply makes no sense. Such attacks are akin to blaming licensed pharmacists and physicians for the sale of illegal drugs, punishing them for their legal activities, and then citing this punishment as the solution to illegal drug sales. Yet the effort to incite public anger against these presumed malignant recalcitrants is a predictable expression of contemporary political vindictiveness.

One should also note the perversion of language in which the media as a whole is complicit: the media incessantly speaks of "gun violence" -- not "violent criminality," not "gang conflict" -- but "gun violence," thus ensuring the stigma of "violence" will be associated as a conditioned reflex in the popular mind with the word "gun," rendering gun ownership intuitively controversial and problematic in the minds of the impressionable. Word association is here wielded as a political weapon through the time-tested technique of constant repetition.

Of course, political repression in the form of large-scale firearms confiscation would be presented as a measure taken to ensure "public safety," but this would only make sense if legal firearms owners were first presented as a public danger. Millions of barely attentive bystanders would have to be encouraged to blame legal firearms owners for all social violence and to condemn them for refusing to yield to putatively reasonable demands. These bystanders would need to be persuaded that it is only the recalcitrance of Second Amendment enthusiasts that stands between a blissful state of public safety and all the decent people that seek it. The mere existence of a significant number of people who choose to arm themselves would be portrayed as an intolerable social menace. Under such conditions, the American Experiment in representative self-government collapses into a contest pitting vindictive mobs against their hapless scapegoats.


An independent, objective media could step in to adjudicate such an unseemly contest, of course. Responsible journalists could dispassionately and critically evaluate the attempted political indictment of the nation's millions of legal firearms owners and expose the unreasonableness and artificiality of the claims made against them, coming to the aid of the intended scapegoats and effectively breaking the momentum of the agents of their intended repression -- but one would have to be very naive to expect this. The media increasingly exists in an adversarial relationship to the nation as founded and to the people at large. The media exists largely to justify, promote, and celebrate the exercise of political repression against those deemed moral inferiors. Of course, once the repression they now cheer has been imposed and proves wholly ineffective in solving the problem, the blowhards will be quick to lament "we haven't done enough," thus driving the cycle of repression onward.

With a view to this discouraging dynamic, let us soberly assess our predicament, recognize the hostility with which our First and Second Amendment rights are now confronted, educate ourselves in defiance of a thousand meme-spouting idiots, and resolve to reject any calls for repression that might issue from a corrupt media that would pass off its own political bigotries as the reasonable demands of an elevated moral perspective.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

DHS seeks to track biometric data of workers in order to improve their ‘health and wellness’
Department will seek to monitor vital signs, “psychosocial information."

Updated: October 16, 2021 - 1:29pm

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is seeking proposals for a new system that will allow it to track the biometric data of its workers in order to monitor their physical and mental well-being.

DHS said in a call for proposals this week that it is looking to “find innovative technological solutions that will improve the overall health and wellness of those consistently placed in high-stress and dangerous conditions” under DHS employment.

“DHS is seeking capabilities that not only promote intervention action when necessary, but preemptively and in real-time optimize DHS personnel performance and resilience,” the agency added.

The window for proposals for the project extends until next April.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

“That’s What the Government Is Doing, It Wants to Intimidate Parents” – Professor Nicholas Giordano with Steve Malzberg on ‘Eat the Press’

By Joe Hoft
Published October 16, 2021 at 9:00pm
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Professor Nicholas Giordano was on with Steve Malzberg at ‘Eat the Press’.

He asks where are the conservatives in Congress and conservative groups in fighting back?


Giordana is a political science professor. He hosts the PAS Report Podcast. He’s been on Tucker as well.

He says there is a link from the Justice Department’s “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism”, unveiled in June, to the letter released aimed at parents at school board meetings. He also pleads with parents not to be afraid, but to continue to speak out or it will be too late.

He is noted in the video below on Malzberg’s ‘Eat the Press‘:

:50 into video-I NEVER THOUGHT I’D SEE THIS DAY–The memo issued by DOJ on parents as domestic terrorists is an extension of the National Strategy For Countering Domestic Terrorism announced by Garland in June. They are openly targeting people that dissent. Where are conservatives in Congress and conservative groups fighting back, he asks?

3:40 into video– The media is supposed to be the fourth estate, and watch for government abuse. He says they have become an extension of the government trying to cover up and hide abuse. They are now activists who want obedience and compliance to a certain political agenda.

5:30 into video on Steve Bannon, Giordana says Congress still hasn’t received subpoena requested info from FBI on the Boston Marathon bombing, and no one who has defied a Congressional subpoena has gone to jail since 1980’s. The message to all opponents of the administration they are sending is they will target you and take you down. It’s meant to instill fear.

7:18 into video– Parents need not be afraid, they must continue to speak out or it will be too late to do so.

Here is the video from Steve Malzberg at Eat the Press on RT America:

View: https://youtu.be/yQyaCKfOVSM
7:57 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden's 'Financial Surveillance State' Would Be More Intrusive Than Anyone Is Saying

BY RICK MORAN OCT 16, 2021 2:24 PM ET

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(IRS)
This is the reason that the words “comprehensive reform” are the most dangerous words in Washington. Anything “comprehensive” usually means “too complex and too large to understand.” And “reform” is entirely dependent on one’s point of view. One person’s “reform” is another person’s “catastrophe.”

So when radical Democrats start getting enthused about “comprehensive IRS reform,” grab your wallets, draw the shades, and lock the door. No one’s bank account will be safe from scrutiny. And it’s likely to cost everyone as banks pass on the costs of the new “Financial Surveillance State” to consumers.

Does the Biden administration really believe they’re going to catch billionaire tax cheats by surveilling inflows and outflows from accounts as low as $600?

Thankfully, there’s been a lot of pushback from banks and consumers as the pressure has Democrats talking about raising the threshold to $10,000. But there’s much more in the “American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda,” that’s radically intrusive and will massively increase the power and influence of the already powerful Internal Revenue Service.

Reason.com:
Ten grand is about how much you make working full-time in New York City on the minimum wage for four months, for eight months at the federal rate. It’s the average annual rent in West Virginia (the least expensive in the country), and less than half the average price paid for used vehicles in 2020. What $10,000—let alone $600—most decidedly is not is the preferred level of annual transactions among the tax-avoidant rich.
Yet that is how this surveillance is being sold on the left.
“Strengthening information reporting, as well as providing protected and sustained I.R.S. funding, would ensure that we focus enforcement on the biggest fish,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) claimed to The New York Times, presumably with a straight face.
The Obama administration tried to “close the tax gap” by requiring foreign financial institutions to report on transactions by Americans. What happened was predictable; the act brought in virtually no revenue and record numbers of Americans renounced their citizenship.
The Biden/Pelosi/Warren plan does not as of yet impose such steep self-reporting costs on individual taxpayers. To the extent that there are any details—many are being kicked down the road to future regulators—they have involved requiring banks and other third parties to cough up an annual number for inflows and outflows. But the negotiators have already agreed to Biden’s basic setup of giving the IRS an extra $80 billion over the next decade to hire 87,000 new employees and build out a “comprehensive financial account reporting regime” that would intrude into previously untrodden territory (such as Venmo accounts and cryptocurrency), so I’d take the over on regular Joes and Janes seeing a noticeable increase in scrutiny.
The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda is part of the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better bill. Even though a substantial part of that bill is going to be removed in order to meet the demands of Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, Biden and the Democrats are convinced that the plan is the linchpin of their tax agenda and some form of the plan will become law if the Democrats are successful in passing the Build Back Better bill.
 
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