If there’s one good thing that came out of school closures, it’s that parents finally had a window into what their kids were being exposed to in the classroom — and many were horrified by what they saw.
That’s exactly what happened in Carmel, Indiana, where parents learned the full scope of the perversion being peddled to their children. The school libraries there are filled with storybooks pushing radical transgender ideology, lessons on masturbation for middle schoolers, and novels with explicit sexual scenes including one describing a bloody rape.
At a meeting of the Carmel Clay School Board on Monday, outraged parents took turns reading excerpts from these materials. They are so objectionable that it’s necessary to issue more than our usual warning of graphic content. Watch at your own risk — but keep in mind, this smut is being made available to schoolchildren.
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
One parent spoke out against the “global campaign to promote sexualized material to grade school children which is heralded by the UN, championed by Planned Parenthood and is now making its way into the Carmel schools.”
She noted some of the titles available at elementary schools, including “Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story About Gender and Friendship,” which uses a teddy bear to teach kids that gender isn’t determined by biology. There is also “Sparkle Boy,” about a toddler’s cross-dressing tendencies, and “Call Me Max,” in which a kindergarten girl gets a teacher to call her by a boy’s name.
(Whatever happened to reading Dr. Seuss books to schoolchildren? Oh, right — canceled by the woke mob.)
Another parent read from a novel available to Carmel high schoolers that includes a pornographic scene explicitly describing characters engaged in various sex acts. It’s too obscene to even summarize.
A third parent read from the book “It’s Perfectly Normal,” which is available to middle school children and promoted by Planned Parenthood. It teaches kids how to masturbate and is filled with nitty-gritty details.
A book called “Crank” details a disturbing rape that transpires when a young couple goes into the woods to get drunk and high on meth.
“If I had known you were just going to lay there, I wouldn’t have bothered,” the rapist tells his victim on the car ride home.
The video of Monday’s school board meeting was uploaded to YouTube by the group Unify Carmel, which is raising the alarm on the wokeism pervading the city’s public schools.
Alvin Lui, a parent activist, told WIBC in May that he fled California to escape radical leftist ideology — only to find it in his new home in Indiana.
“If I [raised] my daughter in California, the schools and the culture there would teach her that her two most important things in life [are] that she’s Asian and she’s female,” he said.
Lui said he began to worry about his daughter’s new school when he saw ideas like critical race theory make their way into the curriculum, a change that no doubt came about when the district hired its first “diversity, equity and inclusion officer” in January.
“We saw a lot of little things before other people saw it because we’ve lived through it previously,” Lui said. “So for my wife and I, it kind of feels like we’re living through that same nightmare all over again except in the very beginning.”
Parents have already begun pushing back against other items on the woke agenda, but Monday’s meeting in Carmel revealed the sexual indecency introduced to children in public schools.
“If I were to read it to you, you wouldn’t be able to air it because it would be against FCC obscenity laws,” Lui told WXIN-TV. “Everyone was uncomfortable, and these are adults.”
To his credit, Carmel Clay Superintendent Dr. Michael Beresford said he wasn’t aware of the books until the meeting and pledged to look into them. Carmel certainly isn’t the only place where so-called educators are sexualizing children — leftists are hard at work across the country. They know that sexually active kids make great abortion clients for Planned Parenthood and turn into Democratic voters when they become impoverished single parents.
Transgender advocates know that if they can get a hold of kindergarten minds, they can recruit a generation of confused children. The doctors who prescribe the puberty blockers and perform the “transition” surgeries can get that much richer.
Beyond the political sphere, what we have here is a battle for the hearts and souls of American children. This perversion tailored to kids stems from a diabolical determination to spoil their innocence and set them up for a life of servitude to sin. Whether they know it or not, the teachers giving smut to their students are cooperating with the dark powers that would turn us away from God by shackling us to our basest desires. There’s no surer way to do that than to expose children to this filth early and often.
Americans now have the opportunity to see and hear exactly what’s going on in public schools — and it’s our job to do exactly what these parents did on Monday.
Christine earned her bachelor’s degree from Seton Hall University, where she studied communications and Latin. She left her career in the insurance industry to become a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother.@CFavocciFacebook
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that truth goes through three stages:
First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Guess what’s next for us?
*****
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? — Who watches the watchers?
Six months ago, I began my first article on scientific censorship during COVID-19 by introducing Dr. Anthony Fauci as a surprise character who had emerged unexpectedly while I dug through what were then 83,000 FOIA emails, published by US Right-to-Know over the course of the last year: see files related to Ralph Baric, Linda Saif, Rita Colwell, Colorado State/Rocky Mountain National Laboratory and the NCBI; other FOIA releases from Judicial Watch, BuzzFeed, and the Washington Post include NIH funding of the WIV and Dr. Fauci’s emails.
I’ve been trying for quite some time to get people to understand the full scope of the Dr. Fauci “situation,” but it’s clear that segments of our national leadership are preventing an honest and open inquiry into his actions because they fear the backlash or collateral damage that will result from the tarnishing of their sacred cow. It’s time Americans were told the truth: that the grant money sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is merely a footnote in this narrative. After all, Dr. Fauci controls nearly $4 billion of annual grant funding for the NIAID, the institute within the NIH he has directed since 1984. Over 37 years, more than 50,000 research projects have been supported with more than $50 billion (conservatively) of taxpayer funds that have been doled out to them.
“$4 billion of annual grant funding “
Photo by STEFANI REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
It’s reasonable to hold him accountable for the results of his organization’s efforts, but the direct funding received by the WIV for gain-of-function (GOF) research represents only a tiny fraction of Fauci’s involvement in enabling risky research. The 2017 repeal of the GOF ban was decided without the consultation of the Trump administration, even though news coverage during the pandemic blamed him for the decision. Neither Fauci nor his boss, NIH Director Francis Collins, bothered to clarify the record, which looks especially disgusting in the wake of persistent rejections of Sen. Rand Paul’s assertions (with accompanying evidence) that the NIH financially supported such research.
First, do no harm … to Fauci’s legacy
It’s important to plainly state that I’m aware of the intense politicization of virtually every aspect of the pandemic and the pandemic response. Since many readers may not be aware, I’ll point out that my specific motivation for building a COVID-19 website (later moved here to Substack) and speaking to a broader audience about the various facets of the pandemic was to offer unfiltered information to counter the disgusting polarization I observed:
I have chosen to offer this website as a forum for information about the current COVID-19 pandemic, in an effort to provide meaningful, factual and useful content during what will continue to be a destabilizing time. There is no indication that our media will soon get better at filling the knowledge void they’ve created; as a result, confidence in those who deliver our news has hit rock bottom at the exact moment in recent history when we need responsible media the most.
My past experience and current observations lead me to believe that the big picture of the pandemic is poorly understood, and there has been so much conflicting information floating around that it has been very difficult to see what awaits us beyond the immediate horizon. My goal is simply to provide resources so that each of us can approach the coming months with intention – as perspective widens, willpower to overcome circumstance increases. The opposite is also true, in that fear increases when awareness decreases, and in the aftermath of societal upheaval a vacuum appears that will be filled, by one voice or another.
Just as the Native American parable states, courage and fear are interrelated; now is the time to feed courage and starve fear.
My goal is to learn and prepare, because those who expect “normal” to return are going to be disappointed. The odds of future waves of infection are high, and a lot of changes will have to be made in order to keep the engine running once flu season arrives in the fall. The statistics paint a clear picture, in that the near-simultaneous global response saved millions of lives; it’s also clear that applying the same medicine several times will negate the economic prosperity that fuels innovation in medical technology. Being able to see a storm coming is meaningless if all you can do is watch and wait, and America’s economy has been even more critical during the last decade of malaise in a majority of the developed world. In particular, the last few years of higher growth gave a bigger cushion to land on, but after witnessing unemployment go from historically low to historically high in six weeks it would be foolish to expect us to fully recover before the re-emergence of a global peak in cases.
I feel obligated to reiterate my stance, because the nature and importance of the situation can’t be ignored any longer: Congress is now actively engaged in investigating the pandemic’s origins, and we must confront the truth if we are to gain meaningful insight that can help us prepare for future crises. There is no level of partisanship that justifies ignoring a tragedy of this magnitude.
‘Everything rises and falls on leadership’ — John Maxwell
It’s hard to place a dollar value on the impact of Fauci’s leadership decisions upon almost all aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why it’s not difficult to understand the willingness of some to avoid a legitimate inquiry into the issue altogether. After all, he sits at the nexus of:
A) The NIH’s role in supporting the research and development of mRNA technology and new antiviral drugs like remdesivir, and the resulting conflicts of interestthat the NIH continues to ignore.
B) His role in pushing those NIH-sponsored inventions; specifically, advocating for remdesivir on the basis of weak evidence while rejecting legitimate investigations into generic alternatives with no less statistical support, as well as …
C) … his role in obfuscating concerning data and censoring public debate over the risk/benefit evidence emerging about COVID-19 vaccines. Had Fauci been bluntly honest about the unknowns involving the new technology throughout the pandemic, Americans would still largely have assumed the risk — at least, assuming that antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) was not a likely outcome … oops.
D) His evolving stances on masking, lockdowns, school closures, and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI), largely the result of growing public awareness that those decisions have consistently been based upon reducing the accountability of cowardly officials, not the best interest of their constituents. (Note: This is a conclusion from my research focus last year, which I will return to once the origin issue allows me to do so.)
E) His refusal to address the blatant censorship of vaccine side-effect data — it takes a disturbing level of cynicism to witness the large-scale skepticism and uncertainty that has resulted from such censorship and then vilify those willing to speak up and blaming them for any future vaccine breakout, when one of the most likely causes would be ADE. ADE with SARS-CoV-2 would most likely result from the specific targeting of the mRNA vaccines, not vaccine hesitancy (in the absence of a simultaneous global administration of the shots, which was never feasible under the geopolitical and temporal constraints of the pandemic).
Each of those factors has contributed to the fading perception of Fauci as “America’s Doctor,” but each has also become a divisive litmus test for which the evidence for and against is hotly debated. My purpose here is not to offer judgment on those (self-evident) issues; rather, I want to highlight the fact that Dr. Fauci’s legacy includes elements far beyond the scope of my research — and the context of those debates is directly relevant for the proper framing of the failures illuminated here. The same hubris and gaslighting in defense of “Science” has plagued every facet of our government’s response to COVID-19.
My disgust doesn’t stem from casual reflection and an exaggeration of weak assertions to fan partisan flames. It stems from my analysis of 100,000 pages of FOIA documents, 1,000-plus research articles reviewed, and my own published analysis of the impact of Fauci’s censorship, which was the first of its kind.
My approach was external to science — from the perspective of a historian seeking to understand the “why” behind the further collapse of trust in our institutions during the pandemic. My conclusions were formed over six months of investigation and focused on the realization that one of the worst developments of the pandemic is the evaporation of public trust in scientists (see “Edifice Wrecks”). I’ve never sought to inflame conspiracy theories or ignore evidence in support of zoonosis, but I’ve personally entered into discussions with a half-dozen of the scientists highlighted below, and none of them ever addressed the emerging evidence that, under normal circumstances, would have been part of the open debate that Fauci pretends already took place.
Every additional moment spent in denial and suppression just adds fuel to the coming backlash, and thus far discussions have ignored what I believe is the largest and most consequential elephant in the room:
F) Fauci quietly but directly ensured that scientific censorship was implemented, in large measure to prevent public awareness of the extent of his role in GOF research and the controversies surrounding it. The evidence proves that, at the start of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci and many leading scientists moved to protect themselves — not us, who weren’t yet aware of the potential calamity at our doorstep. Fauci led the efforts to obstruct research into COVID’s origins, colluding with the president’s science adviser Kelvin Droegemeier and Wellcome Trust head Jeremy Farrar, to proactively undermine consideration of the evidence that directly tied their global research initiatives to the lab at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To date, all of their efforts have been focused on preventing disclosure of embarrassing connections — not preventing another novel pathogen from sparking a global pandemic; to prevent future scrutiny, not future tragedy.
Scientists, if you’re struggling to understand the distinction between degrees of commitment to truth, I offer the example of Thích Quảng Đức, pictured here protesting the corrupt South Vietnam regime in a prologue to the Vietnam War:
Photo by Keystone/Getty Images
You see, the message for scientists who believe that a threat is existential is that words gain true meaning when they are supported by the actions and sacrifices of the speaker. What message are we supposed to derive from the COVID-19 pandemic?
I’d recommend pausing for reflection — on the image above, specifically — because what the world is beginning to see is that the scientific establishment made a mockery of the trust it had been given. The world’s leading experts in virology and public health called attention to a threat by setting the world on fire, rather than themselves — and then blaming us for being too simple to believe their noble lie.
Priorities
The baseline assumption of the public at large has been that Dr. Fauci has earned the benefit of the doubt thanks to his five decades of public service and consistency in defending establishment science — the admiration of which has risen nearly to cult worship in recent decades. The cognitive dissonance between appearance and reality has created a situation where trust in “Science” has reached its sacred peak at the exact moment when such trust is least deserved.
At the center of this incestuous arrogance is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the recipient of unquestioned adulation by those in the political sphere who have spent more than a century arguing that a Platonic “philosopher-king” ideal must be forced upon intellectually vacuous masses who, left to their own devices, would inevitably self-immolate.
Scientists reached new heights in the ivory tower when they warned us that man’s evil nature had left previous generations protected only by the horrific death equation of Mutually Assured Destruction.Setting aside the obvious complicity of scientists in the creation of nuclear weapons, trusting science over many decades has simply led to a new formulation of that Faustian bargain — Mutually Assured Corruption.
A study in scarlet
Before heading down the long and winding road, it’s important to explain what zoonosis is and why Fauci’s denial of basic facts simply kicks the accountability can down the road. Should we really be surprised that Dr. Fauci is “confused” by the definition of “gain of function”? After all, not that long ago, he also ridiculed the idea that the virus could have come from a lab before finally admitting that it was a statistical possibility.
Zoonosis in the context of viral emergence doesn’t mean a virus originally sprang from nature — all viruses do. It means that the jump from animals to humans happened in the wild, as the result of a fortuitous combination of mutations that allow a virus to survive the switch. If human intervention artificially encouraged the process of adaptation by experimentation, or simply by virtue of bringing a virus to a lab and increasing the odds of such exposure, then the origin of a viral pandemic is a lab.
What’s sickening about his tortured twisting of language is that Fauci knows this better than almost anyone; thus his lies aren’t born of ignorance. What he’s done is use his scientific gravitas to pretend that observers’ understanding of literal definitions is flawed because we are too ignorant to appreciate the complexity of the issues. The truth, however, is that our generation’s most prominent infectious disease expert is gaslighting the citizens of the country he swore an oath to protect (one could also use the term epistemic injustice).
*****
We begin this story on Jan. 31, 2020, on the eve of a four-day stretch that seemingly made true believers out of serious skeptics:
The brief exchange above was a precursor to a conference call the next day, Feb. 1, 2020, organized by Jeremy Farrar and Dr. Fauci for the explicit purpose of addressing the swirling rumors that had emerged following the publication of an Indian pre-print that alleged the discovery of inserts identical to sequence segments within the HIV genome.
As far as sparking the intense reaction, the proof is in the pudding — between the various collections of FOIA emails, the Indian paper and Zero Hedge commentary are explicitly mentioned. The purpose of this meeting was to address several aspects of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that pointed toward an artificial origin, by means of generating adaptive changes through passaging and/or direct manipulation of the genome. Immediately afterward, Baric’s 2015 paper was investigated and shared among Fauci, his assistant Hugh Auchincloss, and others.
There’s no reason to discuss the meeting’s purpose as a hypothetical — the Indian paper proposed a possible method of tweaking, and the Sirotkins’ paper and Adrian Bond’s arguments, as later magnified via Zero Hedge, discussed the general outline of how the WIV would have approached it, based on published experiments. The assembled experts on the conference call knew this, and they also knew — by Feb. 1, 2020 anyway — that Baric’s chimaera and the methods within that paper needed to be compared and considered to determine what to do next. I took it as quite likely that the reference to “backbone” directly stems from that paper.
In retrospect, it makes sense for there to be questions about the love child from that 2015 experiment, because the full sequence wasn’t added to the article’s supplementary files until May 22, 2020 — three months after that conference call. Given that the experiments immediately triggered renewed debate about gain-of-function research, less than a year after the GOF ban began, pretending that repeated corrections (in this case, relatively minor sequence segments) are acceptable for the world’s leading coronavirologist publishing a landmark paper in the world’s most prestigious journal is stupid.
Also completely obscured is the fact that at least one, and very likely all, of the people on the conference call were aware of the existence of the FCS (furin cleavage site), since Bill Gallaher had pointed it out on Jan. 29, 2020, and Robert Garry reiterated it (just a day before the conference call): see Analysis of Wuhan Coronavirus: Deja Vu – SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus / nCoV-2019 Evolutionary History – Virological. There is some confusion as to whether or not Garry actually made it onto the call, given a comment just prior, but further emails show that Garry’s input nonetheless was received by Feb. 2, 2020.
Feb. 2 was also the day that Marion Koopmans mentioned a “backbone” and an “insert.”
Thus, just like Zheng-Li Shi, the Proximals (the five editors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,”plus their running mates in the virological community) already knew about the existence of the FCS, certainly by the end of the conference call. If not, then they lied later about “nothing emerging to change their mind about the possibility of engineering.” Then, they said nothing for two weeks and let Etienne Decroly and Co. break the news. That’s pretty s**tty, since the first notions of asymptomatic spread were also arising, and the implications for many scientific disciplines, diplomatic interactions, and public health interventions are profound.
It’s even worse when you consider that 18 months later, they still can’t explain it — the Proximals refuse to respond to the fact that the FCS doesn’t exist within the sarbecovirus sub-genus that SARS-CoV-2 falls under. This is a problem, because members of the sub-genus are too distinct to recombine with the varieties of SARS-like viruses from other branches that do contain the FCS.
In sum, having gone through now 100,000 pages of FOIA emails and all 600-plus articles on my origin-only reference list, I’d be comfortable testifying that:
The Proximals were gathered by Farrar and Fauci explicitly to compare emerging arguments with what was known of Baric’s work, the spectrum of experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Whatever specifics they covered that were pulled from the Indian paper and Zero Hedge included elements from Baric’s experiments with SHC014.
They were nervous about the claims within the Indian paper (even if not tied to HIV per se), even though it had already been pulled — it struck a nerve.
They were concerned that unrestrained interest would lead back to them directly.
They were concerned about transgenic mice (header for one discussion), the ZH article, the Indian retraction, a backbone, an insert, Baric/Shi’s SHC014 love child, and preventing further inquiries into all of them.
They almost certainly also knew about the FCS on Feb. 2, 2020, but Garry might never have made it to the conference call, per the emails, so it’s possible that (if no one saw the Virological.com posting) this news had to wait until Feb. 3, 2020, when the Proximals were summoned again.
Based on continuing conversations, the decision to censor might not have been formally made until Feb. 3, 2020.
Public alarm? No, that’s not the emotion they’re afraid of.
Why? Because the part that everyone is mostly missing is the far more important aspect of the Baric emails — one that got lost amid their 83,000 pages. The big news last fall was that Peter Daszak, et al., conspired to shape the narrative. Three months later, I found and pointed out that the biggest nugget had been missed. Sadly, it mostly stayed that way even after the Fauci emails, despite my efforts.
The Proximals’ Feb. 4, 2020, collusion efforts were spawned by the Feb. 3 OSTP meeting, of which the stated purpose was to combat “misinformation.” There were obviously still concerns among the Feb. 4 crowd, but they intentionally suppressed them for the OSTP letter. This wasn’t their own secret plan — Kelvin Droegemeier, the recipient of said letter, was a speaker at the meeting on Feb. 3, so they weren’t obfuscating for him or Fauci or the NASEM presidents in whose name the letter was being written.
That was a quick turnaround — this letter was emailed the morning of Feb. 3, 2020, and the meeting it called for took place that afternoon:
Note: NIAID Director Dr. Fauci coordinated this meeting with Kelvin Droegemeier, the presidential science adviser, and included WMD/PPP expert Chris Hassell and the National Academies’ policy director, Alexander Pope.
The meeting’s purpose:
In response to a request from OSTP, the NASEM will examine information and identify data requirements that would help determine the origins of 2019-nCoV, specifically from an evolutionary/structural biology standpoint. NASEM will also consider whether this should include more temporally and geographically diverse clinical isolates, sequences, etc. Although a widely-disputed paper posted on a pre-print server last week has since been withdrawn, the response to that paper highlights the need to determine these information needs as quickly as possible. As part of a broader deliberative process, this review will help prepare for future events by establishing a process for quickly assembling subject matter experts for evaluation of other potentially threatening organisms.
The outcome: This group slapped the table on what the narrative was going to be — not what the science indicated. They hid their conflicts of interest from the NSTC and the president; most still continue to fight tooth and nail to suppress that information. This esteemed group of virologists expended more effort and publications in advancing their cover-up than leading the charge against the exploding pandemic, until at least the summer of 2020.
The 2/1 attendees included:
The world’s largest public (Fauci) and private (Farrar) grant money distributors, who organized the call; Farrar is also an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Seemingly no GOF opponents.
Nearly all of the major scientists with conflicts of interest related to the WIV who later published zoonosis materials.
Francis Ross but no other HHS, DHS, or other executive branch officials.
Ron Fouchier, famous for his Spanish Flu concoction.
The 2/3 meeting that decided to censor included:
The policy head of the NASEM academies that controlled fellowship conferral and published “Science.”
Heads of most of the most prestigious virology labs on the planet.
The president’s science adviser/OSTP head.
The HHS science adviser/PPP authority.
A mandate to control the narrative.
Therefore, the signal was sent to all scientists that pursuing the lab origins angle meant career death (no academy membership), no funding (via Fauci or Ross or Farrar), no publication in the big four journals during the historic pandemic (NEJM, Science, The Lancet, and Nature — by virtue of their publishing of the tone-setting pieces), no executive patronage for things like generic drugs, etc.
The disparity between peer-reviewed articles and everything else is stark:
If sorted chronologically, the impact from February to May 2020 is even clearer.
It’s disgusting, and the extension of that censorship to all Americans just ices the cake.
Edifice Wrecks
I’ve pondered the contents of the emails that were redacted before release, but I can’t imagine what could possibly be redacted that is worth protecting. The West didn’t make COVID-19, even if it taught the Chinese how to do major aspects of it. But, these people did decide to lie from the start, then continued to do so after it exploded from 40 deaths to 4 million. It means that they refuse to call a spade a spade even now, and the prospect of China getting off scot-free as a direct result is horrifying. The protection of Fauci is a midterm election decision only, and that means the goal is to drag this out until the electoral damage can be mitigated. Anything that clarifies this to the public negates being worthy of redaction.
The recent congressional appearances by Fauci, however, have shown that he is willing to drag this fight out forever in defense of his legacy, and many politicians are sympathetic to his plight. Thus, it’s clear that better questions are needed to build the proper level of awareness among the public to the full implications of Fauci’s concerted effort to prevent that same public discourse he claimed to support in 2012. Below are the questions I would lead with, were I appearing at his future hearings.
10 questions for Fauci
1) Where did the buck stop?In 2014, who served as the final approval authority for Baric’s pending research, which ultimately allowed it to be grandfathered under the impending GOF ban? Why did the experiment not get forwarded to Chris Hassell’s committee for review?
Why did no one notice that the experiment included the use of humanized mice to increase human pathogenicity, which David Relman had asked Ralph Baric about directly in November 2014, when Baric denied any current research interest in that area?
Coincidentally, it was also the research that Zheng-Li Shi was in North Carolina working with Baric on, then immediately returned to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and continued in 2016.
2) Holding Dr. Fauci to his word — In 2012, Dr. Fauci called for an open, public debate on the GOF issue, saying that scientists should justify their research to the broader public any time the risks of such research carried a non-negligible probability of an accident that could affect them. Why then, in 2017, did the NIH rescind the GOF pause — without first engaging the public or its constitutionally elected president/representatives?
3) Secrecy — What did Peter Daszak tell Erik Stemmy and Alan Embry “off the record” on Jan. 8, 2020? When did they pass on the contents of that discussion to Dr. Fauci?
4) Redactions — When did you first learn of the existence of the furin cleavage site within the genome of SARS-CoV-2? What were the insert and backbone referred to by Marion Koopmans? Was the insert the FCS? Why were emails with the topic heading “humanized mice” redacted?
Let me “recombine” these queries into a single thematic question: Why did the world’s leading virologists/microbiologists and top American/U.K. officials refrain from releasing their knowledge of the existence of the FCS when they first learned of it? The FCS is so good at increasing pathogenicity that it’s the specific insertion typically added by labs worldwide for such experiments. In fact, much has been made of the omission of that specific segment of the genome in the WIV’s landmark paper introducing the likely connection between SARS-CoV-2 and its purported predecessor RaTG13.
What possible justification could there have been to ignore the FCS, other than limit discussion during the early phase of their censorship? And what effect might that have had on our doctors’ ability to characterize the virus?
5) Silence — Why did Victor Dzau and the other two academy presidents of NASEM ultimately remove the forceful pro-zoonotic statements inserted by Daszak et al. from the final version of their public letter to the OSTP? What reservations justified that decision, and why did they not speak out when censorship prevented the doubts of others from being published?
6) Selective Inclusion — Why was Robert Kadlec, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response, not included in any correspondence with Jeremy Farrar or your gathered audience of world-renowned virologists? His deputy is the chair of the PPP oversight panel and he is an expert on C-WMD and biological weapons. The existence of any doubt in the possibility of a zoonotic source (doubts which you harbored) should’ve made his inclusion mandatory.
Instead, you shaped the information provided to those outside the scientific community.
7) Why were you and Francis Collins the only U.S. officials involved in the Feb. 1, 2020, conference call?
8) Subversion — Did you, Collins, or Droegemeier alert Matt Pottinger, Robert Redfield, President Donald Trump, or any member of the National Security Council to the substance of the Feb. 1, 2020, conference call, or the decision-making over the next three days that led to an unannounced censorship of non-natural origin hypothesis for the origin of SARS-CoV-2? Why not?
9) Diverging Narratives — Jeremy Farrar’s experts decided on natural origins of COVID-19 on March 17, 2020? So, Fauci and the presidential science adviser lied to us and President Trump in the OSTP letter on Feb. 7, 2020? And in “Proximal,” on Feb. 16, 2020, written by your future dream team? What was the basis of the Feb. 4, 2020, decision to reject a lab-leak origin and produce “Proximal Origin” — if no additional evidence was added to the Feb. 16 version prior to its March 17, 2020, online appearance in Nature?
Both Fauci and Farrar explained the general makeup and purpose of a “group of experts”:
By this point on Feb. 13, 2020, 10 days had passed since the “Proximals” and Fauci had held a second conclave, this time with the OSTP director, that was followed directly by a flurry of peer-reviewed letter, articles, and “collaboration” (collusion) to smother the scientific community with pro-zoonotic propaganda.
10) Prove It — Which evidence, specifically, led to the Proximals’ reversal from Feb. 1, 2020, to Feb. 4, 2020? The arguments made in the following weeks were pathetically unsubstantiated. If stronger evidence exists, why wouldn’t it have been shown?
The answer, of course, is that the driving force behind the shift had nothing to do with the quality or quantity of the supporting evidence.
Paved by good intentions
The only proper action for Dr. Fauci to take at this point is to resign immediately and apologize for prioritizing the suppression of embarrassing and extensive conflicts of interest, double standards, and political decisions masked as sound policy. Ideally, such a statement would include a call for the retraction of “Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” one of the most-read (and potentially most impactful) pieces of scientific propaganda published in at least a generation. Each of its five authors intentionally framed the COVID origin debate around “evidence” and “facts” that they couldn’t prove and a finality of their conclusions that the known facts couldn’t justify.
These actions are independent of the ultimate answer to the origin question, because the failures of leadership I’ve described are ethically and morally indefensible, regardless of China’s guilt or innocence in the sparking of the pandemic. Any remaining shreds of credibility left in the public’s perception of scientists must be salvaged by new leaders who are willing to do what needs to be done to clean the Augean Stables.
Sufficient evidence already exists for Congress to do the right thing moving forward. Given the enormity of the failures — and of the efforts to hide, censor, and destroy the credibility of anyone who spoke out against lockdowns, vaccines, masks, generic drugs, mRNA efficacy versus risks, and the curtailment of numerous constitutional/human rights in the last 18 months — it will take historic leadership to honestly converse with a righteously indignant citizenry (in the U.S. and everywhere else). We must accept that our current representatives have proven manifestly unqualified to assume such leadership — in the last six months, censorship has been expanding, not receding.
The COVID-19 pandemic has manifestly proven that there is no lie so “noble” that it overrides the rights and wisdom of a free and informed public. That doesn’t mean that the public will inherently do better.
It’s just acknowledging the inescapable conclusion — that we can’t possibly do worse.
*****
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article details current historical research into COVID-19’s origins as part of the D.R.A.S.T.I.C. team of scientists, journalists, and researchers.
All references for this and other articles are compiled under my research project The Arc of Inquiry Bends Towards Enlightenment. The files include my statistical analysis of the impact of censorship on the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
More than 100,000 pages of FOIA documents referred to here have been condensed into 173 pages of the most relevant selections in my appendix Prometheus Shrugged. It was here, last February, that the role of Dr. Fauci in ongoing academic censorship of COVID’s origin was first exposed. A chronological narrative of the events described throughout my research will included in a forthcoming volume of D.R.A.S.T.I.C.’s set of published collections of evidence.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
When I first became a Christian, I looked forward to a quiet life, basking in the love and beauty of having met my Lord and Savior.
Since I spent most of my adult life deeply engrossed in political battles over one issue or another, and serving my country in ways that were quite dangerous, the prospect of serenity was quite appealing. It was not more than three months that went by before the Lord gave me the vision for my ministry so others could experience the redemptive power of Christ.
At first, I wanted to ignore the call and pretend I didn’t hear it correctly. Starting a ministry and being public with my Christian faith meant I could be attacked or even physically harmed by Muslims seeking to impose the penalty of apostasy. It meant I was going back into battle. However, the Lord was relentless.
The inspirations came to me like a flood nearly every day, and then I heard the words, “Hedieh, you are battle-tested, combat-ready.” It made me laugh out loud because it was so true. My whole life and career were preparing me for this new mission to spread the Gospel at a time when being a follower of Christ is increasingly under attack.
I have lived and worked in places where I escaped the outbreak of civil war, was shot at in the marketplace, and nearly lost my toes from frostbite because the heating in our compound turned off. The Lord took all the inner fortitude and discipline of my past and combined it with the courage and strength that comes from being in relationship with Him.
He was using it all so I can serve the Kingdom. Whether it is writing columns and doing radio interviews, or witnessing to my hairstylist and speaking out at a School Board meeting, my faith in Christ is at the forefront of all that I do. I often remember the Scripture, “Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops,” (Mathew 10:27).
Some would say my enthusiasm stems from being a relatively new Christian, but I beg to differ. I had the good fortune of listening to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at church last week, and he made it so clear why all Americans should think of our faith in this way.
Mr. Pompeo talked about being an openly devout Christian during his time as Secretary of State, and how it informed all he did. Though being asked ‘how does being a Christian impact your life?’ often had a negative connotation, that was irrelevant to him. He responds with conviction and recounts his words that are clearly meant to inspire us:
“[Our faith] impacts everything you do; it informs every action that you take. It impacts how you think about the world, how you interact with people, and every day in your work life. Our founders believed deeply this was right and that the capacity to exercise our religion freely was important, and it mattered. …My oath was to the nation, I raised my right hand and swore that I would support defend the American Constitution, but I knew that if I did that with the Lord in my heart, I’d be more successful at delivering on that very outcome.”
Whether it was President Sisi in Egypt or Chairman Kim of North Korea, world leaders respected him for it, and there is nothing un-American or unbiblical about it. In his seminal speech in Cairo, he began the remarks saying, “I’m Mike Pompeo, and I’m an evangelical Christian.” His speechwriters tried to remove it, but he insisted on keeping it in. He knew it was essential not because he wanted to talk about Christianity in a Muslim nation, but he wanted them to understand that the believers of Christ wanted good things for people everywhere and that it’s our responsibility to be faithful, no matter where we are. There is not one line that gets him more questions or comments about even to this day. Leaders of every faith, Christians, Jews, and Muslims worldwide, say they appreciated his honesty. They appreciated that he kept faith in the public square. They admired the discipline with which he practiced his faith. They appreciated his courage to talk about his values so they could better understand how our nations could work alongside each other to deliver better lives for people across the world.
Though some US officials criticized his openness, it never deterred him. Unfortunately, many government representatives wrongly interpret that the First Amendment prohibits talking about faith, but it does not. The freedom of religion is meant to protect the rights of people of all faiths to practice their religion without encroachment from the government. In my experience, it is a lack of religious conviction in our government officials that has led to disastrous policy decisions.
I will never forget being in a closed-door meeting at the White House during the Obama Administration, where a small group of us was invited to address the President on “countering violent extremism.” After nearly an hour of our passionate pleas and recommendations for stricter policies towards state sponsors of terrorism and other stringent measures, the President says he didn’t “get religion” and would not let people drag him into a war over it. Quite frankly, this sentiment explains why he did virtually nothing about the explosion of violence in the Middle East during his tenure. Suppose many of our senior US diplomats cannot appreciate the impact religion has on the way people live their lives and determine their priorities. How then can we properly represent our country as a nation founded on Judeo-Christian values?
Secretary Pompeo went on to say, “There’s no separation between faith and country because God governs in the affairs of men. Our success depends on virtuous people. Wherever that is— volunteering in the parking lot at church or serving in government. Our faith should form our character and inform our opinions.”
Being a Christian should be part of whatever we do. It’s not proselytizing; it is a belief that whatever religion someone believes in, they should be allowed to practice it freely. Hopefully, they will find the power of Christ revealed to them. If our faith is not public and visible, how can we call others to faith in Christ? It is not just about being a good person.
How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? (Romans 10:14)
I am eternally grateful for receiving salvation after practicing Islam freely in the US for decades. I also cherish the freedom to share my new faith with others. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, forit is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes,” (Romans 1:16).
Hedieh Mirahmadi was a devout Muslim for two decades working in the field of national security before she experienced the redemptive power of Jesus Christ and has a new passion for sharing the Gospel. She dedicates herself full-time to Resurrect Ministry, an online resource that harnesses the power of the Internet to make salvation through Christ available to people of all nations, and her daily podcast LivingFearlessDevotional.com.
Black Lives Matter-Antifa mobs caused over one billion dollars in damages in cities across America since May 2020. In Minneapolis alone, Black Lives Matter mobs damaged or destroyed over 1,500 businesses or buildings. Over 700 police officers were injured in the BLM riots — and that was just in the month of June 2020! Black Lives Matter was linked to conservatively 91% of the riots that resulted in the most expensive property damage in US insurance history. These Democrat riots resulted in a massive surge of homicides in cities across the US.
In comparison, the Jan. 6 “riot” caused up to a million dollars in damages from Trump supporters, antifa, FBI informants and police. That is around 1/1,000th of the damages of the George Floyd Democrat riots. Four Trump supporters were killed that day — one was shot in the neck by police in cold blood.
On Wednesday The National Police Association spokeswoman Betsy Brantner Smith told FOX News the Pelosi commission is a “dog and pony show” and called for an investigation of the hundreds of George Floyd riots that caused mayhem and destruction across America.
The National Police Association on Wednesday slammed Congress’ investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as a politically motivated “dog and pony show” that has no intention of uncovering the truth of what really happened that day.
In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, association spokeswoman Betsy Brantner Smith, a retired police sergeant who describes herself as a conservative, said Congress should hear from the thousands of police officers who were injured during the George Floydriots last year.
“People need to see that police officers go through horrible things, and Jan. 6 was a horrible thing for some of those officers,” she said. “But, quite frankly, I find this whole Jan. 6 Commission, frankly, a dog and pony show. It doesn’t tell the whole story.”
“Myself, like millions of Americans, sat there watching the testimony thinking, ‘Wait, where are the police officers who appeared – appeared – to let some of the protesters in?” she asked. “Where is the police officer who shot Ashli Babbitt? In fact, why aren’t we talking about Ashli Babbitt? I mean there’s so much more here.”
Jim Hoft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.
Members of Congress received a bulletin from Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger, which declared that face masks must be worn “at all times” on the House side of the Capitol complex. The new mask mandate states that everyone must wear face masks starting Thursday, even those who are fully vaccinated. The letter states that Capitol staff and visitors can be arrested for not wearing a mask. The bulletin noted the decision for mandatory masks was based on the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that recommends Americans wear masks indoors, even if they are fully vaccinated.
“The Office of Attending Physician (OAP) advised that Congress follow the CDC’s guidance to require mask wearing in interior spaces to help reduce the risk of COVID-19 infection,” the Capitol Police bulletin said. “Therefore, effective immediately, to promote the good health and well-being of our employees, all USCP personnel must wear a mask at all times when in interior spaces throughout the Capitol Grounds.”
“In addition, masks are required for all individuals on site, and social distancing guidelines are to be followed,” the letter to lawmakers stated.
Manger informed Congress members that the “Capitol Division shall enforce this mask policy on all staff and visitors” in the House side of the Capitol building.
“If a visitor or staff member fails to wear a mask after a request is made to do so, the visitor or staff shall be denied entry to the House Office Buildings or House-side of the U.S. Capitol,” the bulletin said. “Any person who fails to either comply or leave the premises after being asked to do so would be subject to an arrest for Unlawful Entry.”
The new Capitol rules declared, “If a staffer, who is accompanying a Member, refuses to wear a mask, that refusal should be noted and reported to a supervisor who will, in turn, refer the matter to the House Sergeant at Arms.”
The memo noted that the mask mandate applies to Congress members, but “officers should not arrest any Member for failure to wear a mask or to comply with the mask mandate.” Instead, any lawmaker who “fails to comply with a request to wear a mask should be reported to the House Sergeant at Arms’ office.”
Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) posted a copy of the memo with the caption: “In today’s edition of Pelosi’s abuse of power, Capitol Police have been directed to arrest staff and visitors to comply with her mask mandate for vaccinated individuals. For Members, they advise not arresting but ‘reporting Members to SAA for their failure to comply.'”
Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.): “I have no words. Actually, I do this is an extreme power grab.”
Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.): “To be clear: Pelosi is directing police to ARREST vaccinated people who aren’t wearing masks. This isn’t about science—it’s about power and control.”
Rep Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.): “This is insanity. Threatening arrest for not wearing a mask is unlawful and tyrannical!”
Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.): “Here are the facts, @SpeakerPelosi: 85% of House Members are vaccinated. 70% of the Congressional workforce is vaccinated. Transmission rate on the Hill is .5%. Senate has no mask mandate. Pelosi’s political theater is only aimed at distracting from her radical agenda.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.): “You’ve lost your mind, @SpeakerPelosi. This isn’t your House, it’s the PEOPLE’S HOUSE.”
Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-N.M.): “By order of Nancy Pelosi, Democrats in Congress are using the hardworking men and women of the Capitol Police to enforce their dangerous and politicized mask mandates. Arresting staffers who believe in science is absurd.”
Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah): “Speaker Pelosi’s draconian behavior isn’t even based on credible science. This isn’t about our well-being. This is about politics and power.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.): “This is so out of control. Pelosi is massively drunk on power, obsessed with control, and hypocritical and partisan beyond belief. This isn’t just some mask mandate either. The enforcement measures are absurd. *There are now just 27 COVID-19 patients in ALL DC hospitals.”
Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.): “Meanwhile, Pelosi is silent on the COVID-positive Texas Democrats who came to D.C. and infected others.”
Rep. Jerry Carl (R-Ala.): “This is a ridiculous abuse of power by Nancy Pelosi. It’s the People’s House, NOT Pelosi’s House!”
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.): “In Biden-Pelosi’s America the maskless are arrested while the looters, shoplifters, and border crossers go free.”
Oversight Committee Republicans: “Vaccinated, law abiding Americans: arrest them. Unvaccinated, illegal border crosses bringing COVID into America’s interior: here’s a plane ticket.”
There were Republican representatives who flagrantly said they would not comply with the mask mandate in the Capitol Building.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has been an outspoken critic of mask and vaccine mandates, dared Capitol Police to arrest his “entire staff.”
“This is INSANE. Might as well come into my office and arrest my entire staff. We are not wearing masks,” Massie tweeted. “I support the Capitol Hill Police, but the Chief of Police made a mistake here. The physician and the chief of police don’t have this authority.”
A defiant Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) also challenged Pelosi by proclaiming, “Nancy Pelosi has lost her damn mind, arresting staff and visitors for not wearing masks? This is the People’s House, not her House. Let me make it easy for you, Speaker Pelosi, my office, and my visitors won’t comply — have an issue with that? Come see me.”
Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.) simply said, “Nope. #IWillNotComply.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) posted a video on Twitter with the caption: “Madam Speaker, your insane power grab is showing. Today I’m not wearing a mask outside of the chamber b/c I follow science — not Pelosi. Come and get me.”
Madam Speaker, your insane power grab is showing. Today I’m not wearing a mask outside of the chamber b/c I follow science — not Pelosi. Come and get me. pic.twitter.com/7vDNn4Tzke
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com., and WhatDidYouSay.org.
Source: AP Photo/Marta Lavandier
If I weren’t already staunchly pro-vaccination, the vaccine zealots would turn me against the COVID shot. The proof that they’re practicing religion and not science is their refusal to acknowledge the great heaping hunks of immunity a person gets from natural infection.
Obviously, you don’t want to contract COVID just to get all that boffo immunity, but lots of people have already been infected, so why can’t we count them the same as vaccinated?
The current research — and that’s all we have for the vaccines, too — indicates that natural immunity is not as good as vaccine immunity — it’s better! Study after study keeps finding that the previously infected have stronger, broader and longer-lasting immunity than people who’ve received the vaccine.
When the vaccinated, with their pipsqueak immunity, stop browbeating the already-infected, I’ll believe this is something other than a cult.
Why is the only proof of virtue — I mean, “Trusting the Science(TM) — a vaccination card and not a positive COVID test? Why don’t sports teams, concert halls and foreign countries accept proof of prior infection the same way they accept proof of vaccination?
Nope. Your prior infection is no good here! We are accepting ONLY vaccination cards.
Whatever that impulse is based on, it’s not “science.”
Despite earlier reports showing that antibodies declined rapidly after infection, in May of this year, scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri, released a study showing that “robust” antibodies were still present at least 11 months after infection. (France accepts proof of prior infection not older than six months. If they trust the science, they’ll soon be accepting prior infection for a year.)
Then in June, the Cleveland Clinic produced a gigantic, perfectly controlled study finding that people who’d already had COVID received no benefit from vaccination.
The clinic had tested its 52,238 employees throughout 2020. At one point or another, 2,579 tested positive. By mid-December, 46% of the recovered COVID patients had taken the vaccine, but more than half (54%) had not.
Five months later, none of the previously infected had been re-infected — including the 1,359 who did not take the vaccine. (Among clinic employees who were vaccinated, but not previously infected, 15 got COVID.)
The authors concluded: “Our study … provid[es] direct evidence that vaccination does not add protection to those who were previously infected.”
Great news, right?
NO! This was terrible news for the vaccination Karens! Their position is: Everyone must get the vaccine. Even if you live alone on a mountaintop and eat leaves and beetles to survive, even if you’re a burbling infant, even if you’ve had COVID, YOU MUST GET THE VACCINATION!
In short order, the Cleveland Clinic was bullied into submission. The authors of the report issued what sounded like a retraction, but, on closer examination, was just a lot of airy nonsense.
E.g.: “This is still a new virus and more research is needed. …”
Duh. Same for the studies showing how fantastic the COVID vaccines are.
“It is important to keep in mind that this study was conducted in a population that was younger and healthier than the general population. …”
This study SUCKS. It only applies to the entire working-age population of the U.S.!
“In addition, we do not know how long the immune system will protect itself against re-infection after COVID-19. …”
Ditto for the vaccine.
“It is safe to receive the COVID-19 vaccine even if you have previously tested positive …”
Presumably, it’s also “safe” to use Gwyneth Paltrow’s healing crystals if you have previously tested positive. The question is: Do you need to?
” … and we recommend all those who are eligible receive it.”
Perhaps, someday, there will be a study establishing that the previously infected should get the vaccine, but your study didn’t, Cleveland Clinic. Everyone knows you’re only telling the previously infected to get vaccinated so the loons will leave you alone.
Just this week, a study out of the Emory University Vaccine Center, led by “world renowned immunologist” (as he is known) Rafi Ahmed, found “durable and broad immune memory after SARS-CoV-2 infection.” And get this: The researchers also found that a natural COVID infection protects against a range of other coronaviruses, too.
What’s so impressive about these studies is that they are going against the woke mob. After a year of seeing scientists and scientific journals irredeemably corrupted, any study that won’t be cited in Teen Vogue carries extra credibility. Worse, the results support Sen. Rand Paul! Nobody’s going to lie about that.
This isn’t just a matter of policy not catching up to the science. The vaccine Karens positively disdain the previously infected. Instead of being treated like the superhumans that they are, recovered COVID patients are scorned, treated like smokers or AIDS victims. (No, sorry — the latter were revered as “angels.”) We’re simultaneously told that COVID is WILDLY contagious and … it’s your own damn fault for not wearing a mask, socially distancing or getting a vaccine.
The dismissal of people who’ve developed their own antibodies springs from the same totalitarian mindset of gun control activists: You cannot protect yourself! Your body cannot protect you! Only the government can protect you. Or, as Mussolini said: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
This abject refusal to acknowledge the existence of natural immunity proves that the vaccine Karens don’t care about the health of their fellow human beings. They just want to boss us around.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Demonstrators hold signs outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the court is due to issue its first major abortion ruling since 2007 in Washington, U.S. June 27, 2016. | Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
A new report reveals that Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, the subject of litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court, is in line with most European laws on abortion.
The Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, published a study concluding that “Mississippi’s 15-week Gestational Limit on Abortion is Mainstream Compared to European Abortion Laws.”
Conducted by the Charlotte Lozier Institute associate scholar Angelina Nguyen, the report comes as Supreme Court justices are poised to hear a case involving the law.
After lower courts have ruled in favor of the abortion clinic seeking to invalidate the law, the state of Mississippi, which supports the bill, has asked the Supreme Court to review those decisions. The justices are expected to hear oral arguments in the case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in its upcoming term, scheduled to begin in October, and will make a decision next year.
The report analyzed the abortion laws of 50 European countries, finding that “the majority of European countries that allow elective abortion limit it to 12 weeks.” Specifically, while 42 European countries permit elective abortions, 39 of those nations only allow the procedure to take place when the child is at 15 weeks gestation or less. A majority of European countries actually have stricter restrictions on abortion than Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban. Croatia, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia and Turkey only permit elective abortions within the first 10 weeks of a pregnancy.
Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Moldova, Northern Ireland, North Macedonia, Norway, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Ukraine restrict the procedure to the first 12 weeks.
Austria and Italy only permit elective abortions in the first three months of a pregnancy, while Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania and Spain have 14-week limits on the procedure.
Only three European countries allow elective abortions to take place more than 15 weeks into a pregnancy: Iceland, the Netherlands and Sweden. The Netherlands has the most permissive abortion law of the three countries, allowing elective abortions to take place as late as 24 weeks into a pregnancy. Iceland and Sweden limit elective abortions at 22 weeks and 18 weeks gestation, respectively.
In contrast to elective abortion, or “abortion without restriction as to reason,”eight European countries require women seeking an abortion to have a specific reason for doing so: Andorra, Finland, Lichtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Poland, San Marino, and Great Britain. Restrictions in these countries range from “most protective of life (to save the life of the mother or completely prohibited) to most permissive of abortion (socioeconomic grounds) with various reasons in between (e.g., physical health, mental health).”
As noted in the report, the “United States Supreme Court precedent allows for elective abortions through all nine months of pregnancy, and only permits states to enact limitations on abortion on demand after viability, a legal definition which has not kept pace with science and is usually marked around 24 weeks.”
In 2017, a Washington Post fact check, citing a previous study from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, confirmed that the United States was one of only seven countries in the world to allow late-term abortions. The others are Canada, China, the Netherlands, North Korea, Singapore and Vietnam.
Nguyen and Charlotte Lozier Institute President Chuck Donovan elaborated on the results of the study and abortion laws in the U.S. in a USA Today op-ed where they said: “We reached this inglorious status by judicial decree, joining only Canada in the dubious distinction of completely sidelining the consent and consensus of the governed.”
“We reached this inglorious status by judicial decree, joining only Canada in the dubious distinction of completely sidelining the consent and consensus of the governed.”
As Donovan and Nguyen indicated in their op-ed, the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade and subsequent Supreme Court decisions have determined that women have a right to obtain an abortion throughout the first two trimesters of pregnancy, thereby limiting the ability of states to restrict the procedure. Pro-life activists see the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as an opportunity to reverse the longstanding abortion precedent in the U.S.
When the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the state of Mississippi’s challenge to a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision ruling the state’s 15-week abortion ban unconstitutional, Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser praised the development as “a landmark opportunity for the Supreme Court to recognize the right of states to protect unborn children from the horrors of painful late-term abortions.”
Dannenfelser added, “It is time for the Supreme Court to catch up to scientific reality and the resulting consensus of the American people as expressed in elections and policy.”
In addition to pro-life advocates, the attorney general of Mississippi and other pro-life politicians have explicitly called for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. In a brief submitted to the Supreme Court last week, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch argued that Roe and the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey that upheld Roe’s central finding were “egregiously wrong.” She described the case for overturning the precedent of those two decisions as “overwhelming.”
“Roe and Casey are profoundly unprincipled decisions that have damaged the democratic process, poisoned our national discourse, plagued the law, and harmed the perception of this Court. Retaining those precedents harms this Court’s legitimacy. This Court can thus offer the Nation an overwhelming case for overruling Roe and Casey,” she added.
Fitch also pointed to scientific advancements as another justification for reversing Roe and Casey, specifically highlighting that “advances in ‘neonatal and medical science’ … now show that an unborn child has ‘taken on the human form in all relevant respects’ by 12 weeks’ gestation.”
“And while the Roe Court thought there was no ‘consensus’ among those ‘trained in … medicine’ as to whether ‘life … is persistent throughout pregnancy’ … the Court has since acknowledged that ‘by common understanding and scientific terminology, a fetus is a living organism while within the womb’ before and after viability … Yet Casey and Roe still impede a state from acting on this information by prohibiting pre-viability abortions.”
Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, filed a separate brief with the Supreme Court, maintaining that “Roe and Casey should be overruled, and the question of abortion legislation should be returned to the states.” If the Supreme Court sides with the state of Mississippi in Dobbs, abortion would not automatically become illegal in all 50 states.
Instead, states like Mississippi would have the ability to limit abortions to the first 15-weeks, while states like New York could continue to enforce permissive abortion laws like the Reproductive Health Act, which allows women to obtain abortions up to the moment of birth.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is now saying that “new data” shows breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals can spread as much virus as an unvaccinated person.
The CDC has now changed course yet again and is now calling for fully vaccinated Americans to wear masks indoors in places with “substantial or high” transmission — including “universal masking” in schools.
“In rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with a delta variant after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others,”Walensky said during a press briefing on Tuesday. “This new science is worrisome, and unfortunately warrants an update to our recommendation.”
Despite giving these new recommendations, the CDC director continued to demand that people go get vaccinated.
“Getting vaccinated continues to prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death, even with delta. It also helps reduce the spread of the virus in our community. Vaccinated individuals continue to represent a very small amount of transmission occurring around the country,”Walensky said.
The CDC had issued guidance earlier this month that suggested vaccinated students and staff were fine to go to school without masks.
“CDC recommends localities encourage universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors to schools, regardless of vaccination status,” the CDC wrote in a summary of the new guidance. “Children should return to full-time in-person learning in the fall with proper prevention strategies are in place.”
Walensky claimed that the news that vaccinated people will still have to wear masks “weighs heavily” on her.
“This weighs heavily on me. I know at 18 months through this pandemic, not only are people tired, they’re frustrated,” Walensky said. “And I know, in the context of all that, it is not a welcomed piece of news that masking is going to be a part of peoples lives who have already been vaccinated.”
She claimed that vaccinated people will have to wear masks again due to people who opted not to take the jab — continuing to pit the nation against each other.
“This moment, and most importantly, the associated illness, suffering and death could have been avoided with higher vaccination coverage in this country,” Walensky said.
Walensky added that if more people don’t get vaccinated, the virus could mutate to “potentially evade our vaccines.”
Cassandra Fairbanks is a former leftist who came out in support of Donald Trump in 2016. She has been published in the International Business Times, RT, Sputnik, The Independent and countless other publications.
Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated– $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.
Fox News reporter Peter Doocy on Tuesday grilled Press Secretary Jen Psaki over the new mask regulations for vaccinated people.
Officials told Reuters the CDC will recommend fully vaccinated Americans wear masks indoors.
“If vaccines work, which this signs says that they do, then why do people who have the vaccine now need to wear masks?” Peter Doocy asked.
“Because the public health leaders in our administration have made the determination based on data, that that is a way to make sure they are protected, their loved ones are protected and that’s an extra step given the transmissibility of the virus,”Psaki said.
In other words, the vaccine doesn’t work and a cloth mask is more effective. Science!
Fox News WH correspondent Peter Doocy asks why those who are vaccinated are now being advised to wear masks.
WH Press Sec. Jen Psaki responds: "That's an extra step given the transmissibility of the virus." pic.twitter.com/WYAO4Xtqk4
Cristina began writing for The Gateway Pundit in 2016 and she is currently the Associate Editor.
This is more proof that it’s never been about a virus. It’s only been about CONTROL. The Demo-RATS are embarrassed by the Texas dems who fled the state to avoid a vote, and sex of them turned up sick with COVID-19. They then made others sick. If in fact they believe their own propaganda about the vaccine, then why didn’t THE TEXAN DEMOCRATS GET VACCINATED? Then, WHY DIDN’T THE WHITEHOUSE PERSONNEL THAT GOT SICK NOT GET VACCINATED?
Therefore their new mandates. It is the most obvious “cover-your-ass” act of any politician ever.
Get your children vaccinated for COVID. That’s the official position of experts at Johns Hopkins University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — at least for children 12 and over. But there are growing doubts as to whether all children need the COVID vaccines, including uncertainty from Johns Hopkins faculty member Marty Makary.
In an Op-Ed last week for The Wall Street Journal, Makary wrote that he and a research team reviewed about 48,000 cases of children under 18 reported to have COVID between April and August of last year.
“Our report found a mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia,” he added.
Got that? Among that sample, no individuals under 18 without pre-existing conditions died of COVID.
Not one.
Zero.
None.
Overall, the CDC has reported that 335 children with a COVID diagnosis have died.
“Yet the CDC, which has 21,000 employees, hasn’t researched each death to find out whether Covid caused it or if it involved a pre-existing medical condition,” wrote Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health and Carey Business School.
“I’ve written hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies,” he said, “and I can think of no journal editor who would accept the claim that 335 deaths resulted from a virus without data to indicate if the virus was incidental or causal, and without an analysis of relevant risk factors such as obesity.”
Makary is not the only one who has raised questions about whether it’s really necessary to vaccinate children. Amid debate, the U.K., unlike the U.S. and Canada, has delayed vaccinating most children, according to the venerable British medical journal The BMJ.
On Friday, the journal published an article that indicated a government agency had recommended vaccinating 12- to 15-year-old children who had medical conditions (at-risk 16- and 17-year-olds already were eligible) or who were living with someone with immune system problems. In a point-counterpoint debate published in an edition of The BMJ earlier this month, three professors argued against vaccinating children, saying the risks outweigh the benefits and citing limited supplies of vaccines.
They referenced a U.S. CDC slide presentation that outlined the risk of myocarditis, mainly for young males, following vaccination. In boys aged 12 to 17, there were 56 to 69 cases of myocarditis per 1 million vaccine doses over a 120-day period, the CDC presentation said.
“… the risk of myocarditis, mainly for young males, following vaccination. In boys aged 12 to 17, there were 56 to 69 cases of myocarditis per 1 million vaccine doses over a 120-day period, the CDC presentation said. “
These instances may be rare. But they’re something that should go into parents’ decision-making process.
And that’s the key — parents ought to be the ones deciding whether or not their children will get vaccinated, not the government or any other parties that want to get involved. It’s up to the parents to evaluate the risks and benefits, and then decide what they want to do.
And the truth of the matter, as Makary’s research appears to show, is that for most children — not all, of course — COVID poses a much less serious risk.
It isn’t that COVID is something to take lightly (it’s not) or that children can’t get sick or die from it (they can, especially if they have pre-existing conditions). But politicians and others must be wary of pushing parents to just shut up and get their children vaccinated — the science simply isn’t on their side.
Mike Landry, PhD, is a retired business professor. He has been a journalist, broadcaster and church pastor. He writes from Northwest Arkansas on current events and business history.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit has ruled that a Christian web designer must create websites that conflict with her religious views. In a 2-1 decision released Monday, the circuit panel ruled against Lorie Smith and her web design company, 303 Creative, stating that they must provide services for same-sex marriages if they offer said services for traditional weddings.
Smith filed a pre-enforcement legal challenge in 2016 to the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, arguing that the law would compel her to provide services that go against her religious beliefs and is unconstitutional.
At issue was a plan to start building websites for weddings, but with the desire to not provide those services for same-sex weddings due to religious objections to the unions. In 2017, a district court ruled that Smith couldn’t challenge the law and upheld that decision in a subsequent ruling.
Circuit Judge Mary Beck Briscoe, a Clinton appointee, authored the majority opinion. The appeals court acknowledged that 303 Creative could face prosecution under CADA if they refused to build websites celebrating same-sex weddings while offering such services for opposite-sex weddings.
Nevertheless, Briscoe concluded in part that “CADA is a neutral law of general applicability, and that it is not unconstitutionally vague or overbroad.”
“Colorado has a compelling interest in protecting both the dignity interests of members of marginalized groups and their material interests in accessing the commercial marketplace,” wrote Briscoe.
“When regulating commercial entities, like Appellants, public accommodations laws help ensure a free and open economy. Thus, although the commercial nature of Appellants’ business does not diminish their speech interest, it does provide Colorado with a state interest absent when regulating noncommercial activity.”
Regarding the intentions of 303 Creative to put a statement on its website explaining its refusal to create websites for same-sex weddings, the majority opinion concluded that “Colorado may prohibit speech that promotes unlawful activity, including unlawful discrimination.”
Lawyers for Smith say that the state has placed a “gag” rule that prohibits designers and artists from expressing religious views in the online marketplace about marriage that indicate someone is “unwelcome, objectionable, unacceptable, or undesirable.”
“Having concluded that the First Amendment does not protect Appellants’ proposed denial of services, we also conclude that the First Amendment does not protect the Proposed Statement,” continued the majority opinion.
“Parts of the Proposed Statement might not violate the Accommodation Clause, such as those parts expressing Appellants’ commitment to their clients or Ms. Smith’s religious convictions. Yet, the Proposed Statement also expresses an intent to deny service based on sexual orientation — an activity that the Accommodation Clause forbids and that the First Amendment does not protect.”
Tenth Circuit Chief Judge Timothy M. Tymkovich, a George W. Bush appointee, authored a dissenting opinion. He argued that “the Constitution protects Ms. Smith from the government telling her what to say or do.”
“But the majority takes the remarkable — and novel — stance that the government may force Ms. Smith to produce messages that violate her conscience,” wrote Tymkovich.
“In doing so, the majority concludes not only that Colorado has a compelling interest in forcing Ms. Smith to speak a government-approved message against her religious beliefs, but also that its public-accommodation law is the least restrictive means of accomplishing this goal. No case has ever gone so far.”
Tymkovich contends that while “Colorado is rightfully interested in protecting certain classes of persons from arbitrary and discriminatory treatment,” the state should not “turn the tables on Ms. Smith and single out her speech and religious beliefs for discriminatory treatment under the aegis of anti-discrimination laws.”
“CADA forces Ms. Smith to violate her faith on pain of sanction both by prohibiting religious-based business practices and by penalizing her if she does speak out on these matters in ways Colorado finds ‘unwelcome’ or ‘undesirable,’” he continued.
Attorney John Bursch of the nonprofit legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, representing Smith, denounced the panel decision and declared plans to appeal the ruling.
“The government should never force creative professionals to promote a message or cause with which they disagree. That is quintessential free speech and artistic freedom,” Bursch said in a statement.
“Lorie is happy to design websites for all people; she simply objects to being forced to pour her heart, imagination, and talents into messages that violate her conscience.”
Critics of 303 Creative’s efforts include Americans United for Separation of Church & State. The progressive advocacy group joined several other groups in filing amicus briefs in 2020.
“The sweeping exemption for religiously motivated discrimination that 303 seeks so that it may deny equal service to same-sex couples would necessarily also permit businesses to deny service to people of the ‘wrong’ religion (or race, or sex, or any other characteristic protected by the Act),”the Americans United brief argues.
“A ruling in 303’s favor would therefore undermine, not strengthen, religious freedom by impairing the ability of the people of Colorado to live as equal members of the community regardless of faith or belief.”
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Colorado’s treatment of a Christian baker punished for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding in defiance of the state’s discrimination laws. However, the Supreme Court this month refused to hear the case of a Washington florist who was punished for refusing to provide floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding.
In the new woke NFL, the Deshaun Watson story is quite incredible.
Despite more than 20 civil allegations of sexual misconduct hanging over the Houston quarterback, Watson reported to training camp, business as usual, and the Texans are weighing options to trade him to another team. Watson is drawing a paycheck, and demand for his future services remains strong. That’s incredible.
According to a story on ESPN.com and Watson’s attorney Rusty Hardin, 10 women have filed criminal complaints against Watson with Houston police. The lawsuits and criminal complaints should have Watson on the commissioner’s exempt list, a tool Roger Goodell uses to sideline players charged with or under investigation for violating the league’s personal conduct code. The exempt list is a paid leave of absence until the player settles his legal matters.
The fact that Watson isn’t on the list is baffling at first glance but understandable upon further review. The left-wing website Deadspin published a column Monday asking, “Why isn’t Deshaun Watson on the commissioner’s exempt list?” Funny that Deadspin would ask this question when the site is part of the reason Watson isn’t sidelined.
Roger Goodell, the NFL, and the Houston Texans are playing racial politics. They fear attack from the identity politics police on the left. They’re afraid to discipline a high-profile black quarterback. Deshaun Watson can’t be treated like Pittsburgh’s white quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
Eleven years ago, Goodell suspended Big Ben for six games because he faced a relatively small number — in comparison to Watson — of sexual misconduct allegations. Prosecutors declined to bring charges against Roethlisberger after a 20-year-old college student accused him of sexual assault. That did not stop Goodell from punishing Roethlisberger and requiring him to undergo a comprehensive behavioral evaluation. Big Ben faced discipline long before the #MeToo movement and long before Trump Derangement Syndrome politicized every aspect of American life.
My point is, given the tenor of the country now, Watson should be facing a harsher scrutiny and punishment than Roethlisberger did a decade ago. Watson is not because the league fears a racial backlash. Black privilege is the only explanation for the league’s hands-off approach to Watson. It’s the only explanation for Watson not being totally radioactive and untradeable.
I’m not arguing Watson’s guilt or innocence. Some of — or even all of — his accusers might be motivated by money. Maybe he had a series of innocent sexual misunderstandings with personal masseuses he contacted via Instagram. I’ve heard that requesting a rub-and-tug from an amateur does lead to misunderstandings.
Whether miscommunication or criminal assault, 22 allegations in this climate should lead to Watson sitting in a corner somewhere until his legal matters conclude. A strong push from Goodell could compel Watson to financially settle with his accusers. That push doesn’t appear to be coming. Goodell has prioritized Black Lives Matter above #MeToo. Given the racial dynamics and gender of his employees, Goodell’s pragmatism makes sense.
So does Watson’s reluctance to settle with his accusers. A settlement could provoke more accusers. How many massage therapists has Watson negotiated a happy ending with? This is starting to feel as if a fast-food drive-through employee sued me for misconduct. By the time the allegations finished rolling in, I would need a Dream Team of lawyers twice as large as O.J. Simpson’s defense team.
The left constructed a safe space for Deshaun Watson. I’m not sure they’re happy about it.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claps with military officers at the Command of the Strategic Force of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) in an unknown location in North Korea in this undated photo released by North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on August 15, 2017. | KCNA/via REUTERS
An inquiry by the United Kingdom’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on North Korea has found that officials working with dictator Kim Jong Un have committed murder, torture, modern-day slavery and religious persecution, all of which amount to crimes against humanity.
There is evidence of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea officials’ involvement in “murder and killings; torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and sexual violence, sex trafficking, forced abortions and infanticide; modern-day slavery; persecution based on religion or belief; and much more,” the report released last week states.
The report of the inquiry by the informal cross-party group looked at evidence of human rights violations since 2014 when the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK released its landmark report. The 2021 report warns that “[t]here are reasons to believe that some of the atrocities reach the threshold of genocide, particularly in relation to three groups: Christians; half-Chinese children; and the ‘hostile’ group.”
The inquiry cites a 2020 report by the U.S. State Department, saying that executions have been carried out “for possession of Bibles, circulating antiregime propaganda material, and superstitious activities.” The inquiry also cites a 2020 report by Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit that researches various human rights situations worldwide.
“Some female detainees reported that they experienced or observed sexual violence, including rape in detention and interrogation facilities,” the All-Party Parliamentary Group report states. “Interviewees said that agents from the police, secret police, and the prosecutor’s office, most in charge of their personal interrogation, touched their faces and their bodies, including their breasts and hips, either through their clothes or by putting their hands inside their clothes. They said they were powerless to resist because their fate was in the hands of these men.”
The report urges the U.K. government to “assess cases of possible genocidal atrocities” and “ensure comprehensive humanitarian assistance to all those affected by atrocity crimes in the DPRK.” The All-Party Parliamentary Group calls for the U.K. government to “review the options for accountability for the crimes in the DPRK” and “make the best of their sanction regimes to target individual perpetrators.”
Mervyn Thomas, founding president of the London-based watchdog group Christian Solidarity Worldwide, called on the U.K. government “to take heed of the report’s recommendations, and continue to call on North Korea to ensure that all human rights are upheld and defended by the government.”
For years, North Korea has ranked as the worst country globally when it comes to Christian persecution on Open Doors USA’s World Watch List, which reports that tens of thousands of Christians are held in North Korean prison camps. Conservative estimates suggest that about 80,000 to 120,000 people are held in labor and political prison camps inside North Korea.
“Individuals can be sent to these prison camps for something as simple as having read the Bible, having watched a South Korean drama, listened to K-pop,” Olivia Enos, a policy analyst in Asian studies at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, said in July 2019 during the release of a documentary film exposing the challenges of North Korean Christians. “These are average, ordinary things that we as Americans take for granted.”
She said the Kim regime “sees religion as potentially threatening to its leadership.”
There are no definitive estimates on how many people have died inside North Korean political camps. But Enos said some believe the number ranges from 400,000 to many millions.
Dallas Democrats were blasted over the weekend after the group advertised a donation drive soliciting supplies for Texas House Democrats who fled the Lone Star State two weeks ago to block certain legislation from becoming law.
More than 60 Texas Democratic lawmakers — 56 state representatives and nine state senators, according to the Texas Tribune — fled to Washington, D.C., to deny the Texas House the quorum required to conduct business. By fleeing the state, they effectively blocked Republican-backed legislation from certain passage. The lawmakers plan to be in Washington through the Texas legislative special session, which is set to expire after the first week of August.
On Saturday, the group tweeted they will be conducting a donation drive on Tuesday to collect supplies — not for the needy in their community — but for Texas House Democrats who willingly left Texas.
“Our Dems in DC said they’d appreciate care packages from home,” Dallas Democrats tweeted. “Before 5pm Tues, we’re collecting Dr. Pepper, salsa, hard candy, hairspray, travel toiletries, hand sanitizers, sewing kits, first aid, and/ or $ to pay shipping. TY!”
The request for materials for “care packages” and money to ship them was met with swift mockery and immediate condemnation. Many people who took issue with the request, in fact, questioned its authenticity, noting that all of the requested items can be found in any of the dozens of drug stores in Washington.
“Sewing kits? First aid? They’re in hotels in Washington DC not the Western Front,” another person mocked.
“Thought Robert Francis (@BetoORourke) was taking care of their needs . . . ? Not to mention the Texas tax-payers paying them $221 per diem. Absurd!” Allen West, who is running for Texas governor, reacted.
“The Democrats who abandoned Texas are asking for care package donations?! They are grown adults in Washington, DC refusing to do their taxpayer funded jobs. And they are surrounded by plenty of stores where they can buy whatever they want. Pathetic,” commentator Clay Travis said.
“they could go also go purchase any of these items at a CVS conveniently located on literally any block…” another person said.
“These utter morons have been gone for literally only days and want a care package mailed from Texas for a photo op with stuff they could buy at a local CVS. Salsa and first aid?” lawyer Jenna Ellis said.
Still, others responded to the outrageous request by pointing people to better places to donate their money.
“Here’s a link to @FeedingAmerica where you can support a worthwhile charity helping Americans in need instead of throwing money at these private jet flying covid infecting morons https://feedingamerica.org,” one person said.
“You know who could use all of that? The DC Food bank,” writer Bethany Mandel said, including a link to the DC Food Bank.
“They’re in hotels in our nation’s capital. If you’re moved to help those truly in need, and want a worthy cause, consider donating to Samaritan’s Purse,” another person said, including a link to Samaritan’s Purse.
Retired Minneapolis police officer Mylan Masson warns that while the city currently is not ‘as bad’ as Chicago, it ‘certainly could be’ unless the crime surge is addressed. The Minneapolis City Council is preparing a measure that would allow voters to replace the city’s police department with a community-focused safety initiative, according to local reports.
The Minneapolis Policy and Government Oversight Committee, which is comprised of all 13 Minneapolis City Council members, approved the measure proposed by the advocacy group Yes 4 Minneapolis Committee in an 11-2 vote that will now be passed along to the general council for a vote, according to Fox 9 Minneapolis.
If the City Council votes in favor of the amendment, it would appear on the general election ballot for Minneapolis residents on Nov. 2.
“Today’s vote confirms what we’ve known all along: The people of Minneapolis are excited and ready to participate in their democracy to keep themselves and one another safe,” the Yes 4 Minneapolis Committee wrote in a Wednesday tweet, and that a handful of unelected people continue attempts to derail these efforts.
The group’s ballot measure proposal would replace the city’s police department with a public safety department including licensed police officers, but it does not outline a detailed plan for how city leaders will do so. The plan would include “public health tools”such as mental health responders, substance abuse specialists, violence interrupters and violence prevention professionals.
The proposed ballot question reads: “Shall the Charter be amended to create a Department of Public Safety that employs a comprehensive public health approach with a range of strategies and personnel, including licensed peace officers as necessary, to fulfill responsibilities for community safety, with the general nature of the amendments being briefly indicated in the explanatory note below, which is made a part of this ballot?”
The Yes 4 Minneapolis Committee delivered a petition to City Hall in April calling to replace the city’s police department with more than 20,000 signatures. It then went to the City Council. The city has been under pressure to overhaul policing after George Floyd’s fatal encounter with former Officer Derek Chauvin last year. Chauvin was convicted of murder and sentenced to 22 and a half years. A Justice Department probe into the department’s policing practices has compounded that pressure.
Councilmember Steve Fletcher told Fox 9 that he is “persuaded that this language is a version of describing the intention of the petitioner and 20,000 people who signed the petition saying they want to create a significant change and that we should put it on the ballot,” referencing the Policy and Government Oversight Committee’s vote to keep Yes 4 Minneapolis’ language in the measure.
“So I’m going to go ahead and move for approval of language as is,” he added.
Last week I shared a quote from a very important column “How Adherents See ‘Critical Race Theory’” by William A. Galston, a former Clinton administration veteran (1993-95) who is currently a fellow with the Brookings Institution (a liberal “think tank”) and a weekly columnist with the Wall Street Journal.
(Photo: The Christian Post/Katherine T. Phan)
I know Galston and have participated on various panels with him in Washington, D.C. I like Bill. He is liberal but he’s honest and a “straight-shooter” as we would say in Texas. That common sense, patriotic streak may be attributable to his having served a four-year stint in the United States Marine Corps when he was a young man.
In that July 14th column, Galston concludes with the following observation: “But, one thing is clear: Because the Declaration of Independence – the founding document of the American liberal order – is a product of Enlightenment rationalism, a doctrine that rejects the Enlightenment, tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation.”
It took the courage of a Marine to write that column in the face of a withering propaganda barrage in favor of critical race theory in the progressive media. After this week’s column, “A Deeper Look at Critical Race Theory,” it would be wise for Bill to employ a food taster at Capitol Hill receptions and D.C. dinner parties. Why? It is quite simple – he has told the truth to the progressive elites, and they often react viscerally and violently to such effrontery.
Galston “unmasks” CRT as a mortal threat to the American constitutional and judicial system and he does so in no uncertain terms.
Having dived into the original sources, Galston reports several devastating facts about CRT.
First, “Critical Race Theory denies the possibility of objectivity.”
Second, CRT makes “race the center of our focus,” which is in direct opposition to Dr. King’s focus and vision. As such, CRT harshly critiques the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s as making only “symbolic” and “token” solutions for systemic racism.
Third, Galston notes that CRT “is an explicitly left-wing movement inspired by the thinking of an Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci.”
Fourth, CRT’s founders “identified with Black Power movements much more than with those who were working for integration.”
Lastly, CRT “rejects the principle of equality of opportunity” and asserts that the real goal must be “equality of results,” measured by the “black share of income, wealth and social standing.” CRT rejects policies such as affirmative action as mere “diversions” meant “to make the mythology of equal opportunity plausible.”
Galston concludes his exposé and critique by quoting Ibram X. Kendi, the author of the best-seller, How to Be an Anti-Racist, where he asserts that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” This would condemn America to a perpetually racist future in perpetuity.
Bill Galston has committed the unpardonable progressive sin. He has told the plain, unvarnished, democracy-destroying truth about CRT. The counter-culture lynch mob will be out in force in full-throated rage.
We need more Americans and especially more progressives to display this kind of extraordinary courage and intellectual honesty.
I hope you will join me in applauding Bill Galston’s courage, and his intellectual honesty. Please also join me in praying for him in the days ahead, because the proto-fascists and black shirts masquerading as progressives will be out to destroy him.
Detective Joseph Scaramucci (upper left) is joined by panelists Ron Eritano, Tim Palmbach and Linda Nealon for a discussion during the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation’s online summit on July 21, 2021. | Screenshot: Coalition to End Sex Trafficking
A detective and a panel of guest speakers at the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation’s online summit detailed Wednesday how the popular content subscription service platform OnlyFans, frequently used for pornographic purposes, fosters abuse and sex trafficking.
Detective Joseph Scaramucci from McLennan County Sheriff’s Office in Texas, known as one of the country’s most elite human trafficking investigators, shared with viewers how OnlyFans shows evidence of sex trafficking activity. He spoke about the signs that investigators look for when working to find evidence of sex trafficking.
Scaramucci has been involved in both state and federal investigative work since 2004. He has participated in arresting over 460 sex buyers and has aided in the arrests of 149 individuals for human trafficking and related offenses, which led to the identification of 260 trafficking victims.
“Targeting trafficking is going through and looking at the photographic visual indicators, being able to show the travel, and being able to get very strong indicators, whether it be financial transactions coupled with money movement,” he detailed. “And people in certain cities at certain times, [those] advertisements just happen to be posted at and then coupling that with are they advertising for OnlyFans as well.”
“… The beauty of OnlyFans is that many of them are hiding behind that paywall. … [They] are shooting video with their victims [on OnlyFans], and they are using that video to elevate themselves because that’s what [pimps] do … which is what drives me crazy about them.”
In several instances, Scaramucci said he has taken videos from OnlyFans and screen captures faces throughout the videos to build criminal cases against many. During the pandemic, OnlyFans has seen exponential growth. Last year, it claimed to have more than 30 million registered users and more than 450,000 creators.
OnlyFans, headquartered in London, was launched in 2016 by British tech entrepreneur and investor Timothy Stokely, who has a background in the online adult world. Since the launch, OnlyFans has become a haven for online pornographic material.
“This platform is unquestionably facilitating child sex abuse material and human trafficking of adults and minors alike, … enabling sexual abuse and exploitation,” said Linda Nealon, the director of corporate and strategic initiatives for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
“It’s critical that law enforcement, policymakers, service providers, parents and caregivers understand how this platform works and the many associated risks.”
In October 2018, Ukrainian-American entrepreneur Leonid Radvinsky bought the majority stake in OnlyFans parent company, Fenix International Ltd. Radvinsky also has a history in the adult online world. He started a porn website called MyFreeCams through his holding company, Mfcxy, Inc. Radvinsky has other smaller pornography sites that he promotes.
“As you can imagine, given both these gentlemen’s backgrounds, a large percentage of the content of OnlyFans is pornographic in nature, … at least 90% to our best estimate,” said Ron Eritano, representing the Normandy Group on behalf of Awareness is Prevention. “… The interesting thing about OnlyFans is it portrays itself as a much more mainstream website and platform due to connections with a number of celebrities, from Floyd Mayweather Jr., the boxer; to Cardi B, the entertainer. But make no mistake about it, OnlyFans is predominately and heavily an adult online pornographic website.”
The OnlyFans layout, Eritano said, is much like that of Instagram and Facebook, with a homepage, options to grow subscribers or followers and a messaging feature.
When using the platform as a subscriber, users must check off a box verifying they are over 18 and submit a credit card payment. However, the only method for creators to monitor age verification is when they request payment for video content they post. They must provide a selfie photo, which shows themselves in the picture and a government identification card.
OnlyFans has partnered with at least three different organizations, which use an AI platform to work to verify whether or not users are the same person in their photo IDs, he said.
The platform allows users to have an option to be a creator, a subscriber or both. When using OnlyFans, Eritano said, there is some free content made available. However, much content requires a fee to access, typically how hardcore pornography is made available. OnlyFans differs from its predecessors in the online space because of its paywall, which can often create trouble for law enforcement and those trying to monitor what is happening on the platform. The price structure is constantly shifting because the prices per creator are changing based on demand.
Eritano said it is difficult for law enforcement to monitor the website because the paywall is expensive and not easily searchable due to very few search mechanisms. Greater responsibility is placed on the payment providers because they can police or influence OnlyFans and its interactions with its creators and the content they are posting.
One of the most common features of OnlyFans is the use of third parties in most videos and content posted. There is no age verification process in place for third parties. Age verification only takes place for the account in which the creator is sitting.
“This creates a huge loophole that continues to be utilized by many folks on OnlyFans today,” Eritano explained.
The other potentially dangerous factor about OnlyFans is its inner connectivity to other social media platforms through promotions. Those sites include Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Snapchat and Instagram.
“Not only are they promoting OnlyFans, but they have recruiters actively recruiting folks to come make their millions, citing the few examples of folks who have made a lot of money, and encouraging a lot of folks, particularly young folks who are on a lot of those websites, to come on over to OnlyFans and have a similar experience,” Eritano added.
“As you can imagine, that becomes pretty dangerous pretty quickly. Not only do they pay the recruiters on OnlyFans, the creators themselves are incentivized to add folks by getting a small payment in conjunction with anyone they add to the platform. OnlyFans continues to drive its membership based on those payment structures.”
OnlyFans receives a 20% cut of any content purchased on the site, and 80% of the money made from content purchased on the site stays with the creators.
“Early on, some of these big celebrities jumped in, like Bella Thorn. And when they jumped in, she went a little towards the racy side and showed pictures that are maybe not allowed in some of the other sites. And all of a sudden, her subscribers would follow her and pay very substantial amounts of money,” added Tim Palmbach, the director of the University of New Haven Center For Forensic Investigations of Trafficking in Persons.
“One of the problems with OnlyFans is not only is it just generally exploitative in nature, … there is layers of exploitation. … What it’s doing is grooming and finding our young, vulnerable children in the general social media, and convincing them to come on over … and then grooming them to do more and more sexually explicit, exploitive activity under a lie that they will make millions.”
Palmbach said some of the ways to stop the potential threat of OnlyFans is through banking, financing, working with law enforcement by reporting things that are witnessed and searching for potential dangers in other social media platforms.
Arkansas flag flying high beside the Arkansas state Capitol, front exterior, in Little Rock, Arkansas. | Getty Images
A federal judge has temporarily blocked an Arkansas law banning the use of experimental drugs and gender-transition surgeries on minors, which was set to take effect next week in the state. The law, called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, was adopted earlier this year in the southern state after lawmakers overrode Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s veto of the bill. Hutchinson, a Republican, said in April that the measure was “extreme” and “overbroad” and that it could not be defended on limited government grounds. The law was scheduled to be enacted on July 28.
Led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, he and Republican attorneys general of 17 states — Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas — filed an amicus brief in federal court last Tuesday in support of the Arkansas law.
Wednesday’s judicial injunction against the law comes as four trans-identifying young people, two doctors, and the American Civil Liberties Union came together to file a lawsuit against the state, arguing that the statute violates their constitutional rights. The judge said that their motions could indeed be successful at trial.
“CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS”?????????? What constitutional rights? Where did the Founding Father’s write down that it is the right of adults to have children be mutilated by agenda other driven adults?
“To pull this care midstream from these patients, or minors, would cause irreparable harm,” U.S. District Judge Jay Moody, who issued the ruling, said in a statement.
Praising the decision, Holly Dickson, the executive director of the Arkansas chapter of the ACLU, said the ruling sends a message to other states that her organization will not allow the medicalized gender transitioning of children to be taken away from youth.
Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, a Republican, intends to appeal the ruling, promising to defend the law.
“I will not sit idly by while radical groups such as the ACLU use our children as pawns for their own social agenda,” she said.
Likewise, family advocates in favor of the law said they believe the truth about the nature of these contested medical practices and procedures will eventually win out.
“We are disappointed but not surprised that a judge has placed a temporary hold on the Arkansas law that protects children from unscientific, experimental, and destructive gender transition procedures. However, we are confident that ultimately state lawmakers will remain free to protect the health and safety of children,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, in a statement emailed to The Christian Post.
“The legal challenge to this law is being mounted by a political movement that advocates for using off-label drugs and experimental procedures on minors. Yet a growing number of individuals are coming forward to share their stories of being permanently disfigured and/or sterilized from procedures such as puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries. The truth about the dangers of these life-altering procedures cannot be ignored,” he said.
The intensifying legal disputes in the United States regarding the medicalization of gender, especially as it pertains to minors, comes as European nations are moving away from the experimental practices.
Late last year, the High Court of Justice in the United Kingdom ruled in a judicial review that children younger than 16 are unlikely to be mature enough to consent to taking irreversible chemical puberty-blocking drugs given the significant risks and repercussions to their health. The ruling is presently being appealed, and a subsequent decision in March held that parents could give consent on behalf of their minor children.
Earlier this year in Sweden, the prominent Karolinska Hospital said that as of April 1, puberty blockers would no longer be given to youth younger than 16, and their statement referenced the U.K. ruling as part of their rationale.
In June of last year, health authorities in Finland revised their professional guidelines by prioritizing psychological help and support over experimental medicine, especially for young people whose gender dysphoria came about after puberty.
Participants carrying a rainbow flag attend the annual gay pride. | Reuters/Annika Af Klercker/TT News Agency
A judge has ruled against a group of churches, schools and a pro-life pregnancy center challenging a Virginia law that adds sexual orientation and gender identity to state antidiscrimination law. Judge James E. Plowman Jr. issued a ruling from the bench last week in favor of the Virginia Values Act, which was passed by the Democrat-controlled state government in 2020.
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring released a statement last Friday expressing support for the ruling, which will be entered as an order within the next few weeks.
“Our landmark civil rights protections will remain in place, and Virginia will remain a place that is open and welcoming to all, no matter what you look like, where you come from, how you worship, or who you love,” stated Herring.
“I was proud to support passage of the Virginia Values Act and am so proud of our work to successfully defend the law twice against legal attack.”
In late September of last year, Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit on behalf of two churches, three private schools, and a pregnancy care center against the Virginia Values Act. In the suit, Calvary Road Baptist Church of Fairfax County and its school, Community Fellowship Church of Staunton and its school, Community Christian Academy of Charlottesville, and Care Net of Loudon County claimed that the new law forced them to compromise various hiring and employment practices based on their sincere religious beliefs.
“[The Act] puts the Ministries in an impossible position: they must either abandon the religious convictions they were founded upon, or be ready to face investigations, an onerous administrative process, fines up to $100,000 for each violation, unlimited compensatory and punitive damages and attorney-fee awards, and court orders forcing them to engage in actions that would violate their consciences,” stated the suit, in part.
“Even merely posting their religious beliefs on their own websites could subject the Ministries to prosecution and exorbitant fines. These penalties could easily exceed a million dollars, ruin the Ministries financially, and make continuing their Christian missions impossible.”
In March, U.S. District Court Judge Claude M. Hilton rejected a separate challenge to the Virginia Values Act, another lawsuit filed by the ADF, this time on behalf of Robert Updegrove of Bob Updegrove Photography. In his decision, Hilton argued that the Updegrove lacked the standing to sue since the Act “has never been enforced against” him “or any other person.”
“In the almost nine months since the statute became effective, no complaint has been filed under the statute,”wrote Hilton in late March.
“No case or controversy exists when a person expresses a desire to change his previously compliant conduct to violate a new statute that no person, government or otherwise, has ever sought to enforce.”
Rather than proving the need to sow more panic, fear, and control over people, the story from India — the source of the “Delta” variant — continues to refute every current premise of COVID fascism.
The prevailing narrative from Fauci, Walensky, and company is that Delta is more serious than anything before, and even though vaccines are even less effective against it, its spread proves the need to vaccinate even more people. Unless we do that, we must return to the very effective lockdowns and masks. In reality, India’s experience proves the opposite true; namely:
Delta is largely an attenuated version, with a much lower fatality rate, that for most people is akin to a cold.
Masks failed to stop the spread there.
The country has come close to the herd immunity threshold with just 3% vaccinated.
Most people are now getting cold-like symptoms from Delta, but to the extent countries hit by Delta suffered some deaths and serious illness, they could have been avoided not with vaccines and masks, but with early and preventive treatment like ivermectin.
In other words, our government is learning all the wrong lessons from India, and now Israel and the U.K. Let’s unpack what we know occurred in India and now in some of the other countries experiencing a surge in cases of the Indian “Delta” variant.
The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) recently conducted a fourth nationwide serological test and found that 67.6% of those over 6 years old in June and July had antibodies, including 85% of health care workers. This is a sharp increase from the 24.1% level detected during the December-January study. What we can conclude definitively is that strict mask-wearing (especially among health care workers) failed to stop the spread one bit. Yet now they have achieved herd immunity and burned out the virus with just 3% vaccination (now up to 6%) with roughly one-sixth the death rate of the U.S. and the U.K. and less than one-half that of Israel.
Immediately, naysayers will suggest that somehow India is vastly undercounting the deaths because it is a shabby third-world country. However, if we are to suggest that, it would mean that so much of the data from so many other countries we use for studies must be ignored. Also, it’s true that India is poor in some areas, but it is highly developed and has a very strong bureaucracy and administrative state throughout. There might be undercounting, but the notion that it can account for that wide a gap between India and the U.S./U.K. was always unlikely.
However, now that the Delta has spread to other countries like Israel and the U.K., we need not speculate who is right about India’s death rate. The fact that Israel and the U.K. have so many Delta cases yet so few deaths relative to the winter spread of the original strain demonstrates that Delta is likely much weaker and India’s numbers are probably close to accurate. Remember, most of India’s spread, unlike in the West, occurred with Delta, long after the ancestral strain that hit the West was gone. If it really was the bloodbath some are suggesting (a tenfold undercount of deaths, in their estimation), why is the data from the U.K. showing just the opposite?
The latest data from the U.K. show that the case fatality rate for the Delta is just 0.2%, much less than the others. And we need not speculate with generalized studies. The raw data shows that since May 1, there have been approximately 1,300 deaths in the U.K. out of roughly 1.1 million confirmed cases. But those are confirmed cases. The likely infection fatality rate is much lower because now more than ever, people are avoiding testing, and the U.K. media has been reporting for weeks that the symptoms of the Delta for most people appear more like a cold.
The Guardian reports that based on data from the app-based Zoe COVID symptom study, the symptoms being reported are mainly headaches and runny nose. “People might think they’ve just got some sort of seasonal cold, and they still go out to parties … we think this is fueling a lot of the problem,” said Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London, who is leading the work on the reporting app.
The U.K. media are trying to panic people about spreading a cold, but in fact, they are reporting good news! This virus has attenuated for most people to the point that they can’t even distinguish it from a cold, much less a flu. Thus, the fact that India achieved most of its immunity throughout the spread of the Delta variant actually lends a lot of credence to the fatality rate of one-sixth of that of the U.S. and the U.K., which experienced most of its deaths from the ancestral strain.
If you look at any chart from Scotland, which is now mainly over the curve, there is a complete decoupling of deaths from cases.
The same thing is being observed in Israel, which is slightly behind the curve. The country has had just 20 deaths so far in July, but again, 15 of them were of vaccinated individuals.
However, to the extent that there are cases, and the relatively rare serious cases, the vaccines have proven to be a bust in preventing them. The Western countries are relying on an exponentially higher vaccination rate than India with a much lower seroprevalence rate from infection. It’s simply not working. According to Israel’s Ministry of Health, the Pfizer vaccine efficacy against infection dropped 42% since the start of the inoculation drive in Israel, and efficacy against severe illness has dropped 60% among those vaccinated early on. Ditto for the United Kingdom.
In fact, in Israel, the case rates track almost perfectly with the percentage of those vaccinated stratified by age range.
Thus, the experience from India and the Delta variant teaches us the exact opposite of what the panic-mongers are pushing. Natural immunity, not vaccination, is king. Which explains the dichotomy between India and countries like Gibraltar. In Gibraltar, nearly every adult in the tiny country has been vaccinated, yet it has the third-highest per capita rate of infection in the world.
The same trend appears to be playing out in Cyprus:
In general, there is zero correlation between vaccination rates and better outcomes, and in fact, many Latin American countries with the highest vaccination rates have recently had high infection rates, and many eastern European countries with lower vaccination rates had many fewer cases than their vaccine-obsessed western European counterparts. Here in the U.S., San Francisco, which had a low infection rate until recently, has seen an explosion in cases, despite a 70% vaccination rate.
At the same time, as I chronicled last month in great detail, even within India, the states that used ivermectin to treat COVID experienced a much sharper and quicker drop in cases in May. Imagine if the Western world used ivermectin and many other treatment options pre-emptively and prescribed them at every testing station. That is how you flatten a curve.
The lesson is clear: The only way out of this is for most people to get it, and the best way to do that safely is to make sure early treatments with drugs like ivermectin are made available and to be used even preventively for vulnerable populations. If this is really about saving lives, rather than doubling down on all of the things that have failed and distorting data and history to comport with pseudo-science, they would try the one thing they have shunned until now – actually treating the virus before people have trouble breathing.CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is correct when she says, “Nearly every death, especially among adults, due to Covid-19 is at this point entirely preventable.” But the data and learned experience show that it’s not because of a lack of vaccines, but a lack of treatment.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com., and WhatDidYouSay.org..
Source: AP Photo/Ron Harris
As we discussed last week, “critical race theory” is a subtle philosophical construct where the answer to everything is: THAT’S RACIST! Teachers hawking this glop are being defended by their journalist allies, who sneer that CRT critics are too stupid to understand the nuances of the theory. The Aristotelian ideal of this sneer was Elle Reeve‘s “special report” for CNN — pre-taped to eliminate any danger of Elle being contradicted by someone smarter, such as a 10-year-old.
CNN’s Brianna Keilar introduced the segment by asking her: “Do these vocal opponents of critical race theory actually understand fully what it is?”
(That’s what’s known as a “rhetorical question,” kids!)
Elle: “No.” [Bored] “And why should they? It’s an academic theory taught mostly at the grad student level. But what they think it means is teaching white kids that all white people are bad and racist. And so, of course they’re afraid of that.”
They’re afraid!!! Wait — remind me: Who’s banning books, again? Who’s flipping out about “microaggressions”? Who’s demanding that Big Tech censor people? Who’s demanding “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” from speech they don’t like?
Parents aren’t “afraid”; they’re incensed. They’re paying the salaries of people who spend all day telling their kids that America is racist. (Elle didn’t give that explanation. Perhaps it frightens her.)
The “vocal opponents” of CRT who “don’t actually understand fully what it is” seem to be mostly billionaire investment bankers — at least judging by the articles in the Daily Mail. Elle’s conclusion: A “theory” that consists of going around shouting “RACISM!” is too complex for those guys to understand.
The format of Elle’s pre-taped report consisted of her interviewing opponents of CRT … then nailing them with her brilliant comebacks! Except even with CNN doing the editing, the CRT opponents sounded perfectly reasonable, while Elle’s comebacks kept revealing her yawning stupidity.
Early in Elle’s report, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is shown saying, “Critical race theory says America’s fundamentally racist.” What a dope!
About 60 seconds later, Elle deferentially asks a hijab-wearing high school teacher to explain CRT. The teacher exclaims: “Race and racism is literally the building blocks of this country!” (Were I the editor of Elle’s piece, I think I would have cut that part of her answer.)
Next, Elle talks to a parent fighting CRT, who says: “Don’t force on our kids a particular worldview. Taking a wide brush and painting this country as structurally racist, it’s insane … it’s a lie.”
To this, Elle patronizingly informs the parent that America’s racism “isn’t distant history.” Her evidence of contemporary racism? “In the ’90s, the crime bill gave much more severe sentencing to crack cocaine versus powder cocaine simply because black people were perceived as doing crack cocaine and white people weren’t …”
HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS? The reason crack penalties were so severe is because the Congressional Black Caucus demanded it.(And as long as I’m correcting Elle’s false facts, the crack penalties were passed in 1986 and 1988, not “in the 1990s.”)
Black churches, black leaders and black members of Congress were enraged by what the crack epidemic was doing to their neighborhoods. A 1986 New York Times article reported on “all-night vigils” held by the leaders of 60 black churches, who called the crack epidemic “a new form of genocide.” Urban League President John Jacob railed against communities “held hostage by crack dealers,” saying “drugs kill more blacks than the (Ku Klux) Klan ever did.” Running for president in 1988, Jesse Jackson spoke of the scourge of crack cocaine and told a cheering crowd, “When I become president, the drug pusher is in trouble.”
White supremacists — right, Elle?
This has been patiently explained roughly 1 million times. But why bother knowing stuff when smug arrogance is good enough for CNN?
Elle’s next big “gotcha” was even more embarrassing, if that is possible. She rolled out the old chestnut about blacks being considered “three-fifths” of a human being in our Constitution. Yes, she really did that.
Here’s her exchange with a college Republican:
COLLEGE REPUBLICAN: To paint the country as an inherently racist country from its founding I think is dangerous.
REEVE: The three-fifths compromise is written into the Constitution in which slaves are counted as three-fifths of a person.
SCORE!
How can you be in journalism and have no idea what the three-fifths clause means? No research is involved, Elle! Just read it.
The three-fifths clause means exactly the opposite of what Elle thinks it means. This was not a general statement on the slaves’ humanity: It was about congressional apportionment. The slave states wanted to count slaves as full “persons” in order to increase the number of their representatives in Congress.
If you adored slavery, you’d want the Constitution to count each slave as a full person — as 20 people! The slaves still couldn’t vote, but their slave masters would get more votes in Congress. It’s the same idea behind California’s demand that illegal aliens be counted when determining that state’s congressional apportionment.
I can’t even believe there’s anyone in America who needed that explained again. (Next time, I’ll just say: Get a home-schooler to explain it to you, Elle.)
It must have been embarrassing for everyone at CNN to watch this bimbo misstating well-known facts in a network “special report” that was supposed to show what cretins CRT critics are.
So how did the CNN hosts react? They were gobsmacked by the genius of Elle’s report!
JOHN BERMAN: That was so great.
KEILAR: Right?
BERMAN: I mean, that was just so great, and just the way the questions are asked. Just by asking simple questions you revealed so much. I mean, that was just fantastic.
ELLE: Thank you.
My idea of hell is being condescended to by an idiot, forever and ever, with no respite. In other words, watching CNN.
Female inmates in the California prison system say they’re now “prey for men” as correctional facilities prepare for an uptick in rapes and pregnancies following a policy change that allows men who identify as female to be transferred to women’s-only prisons.
At medical clinics inside the Central California Women’s Facility, newly available resources suggest that women housed there should anticipate a heightened risk of being raped. As all sex inside the prison system is deemed non-consensual by default, the influx of men in women’s-only facilities only increases that risk, according to the radical feminist group Women’s Liberation Front.
Posters displayed in these medical clinics advertise a variety of options for “pregnant people” who might become pregnant while in prison. The methods available to female inmates to prevent pregnancies are condoms and the emergency contraception Plan B. Yet these measures were only deemed necessary after the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation started allowing men, who claim a gender identity other than their biological sex, to be housed with women earlier this year, Women’s Liberation Front’s sources reported.
“Trusted sources inside California Institute of Women tell us that one reason for the backlog in transferring men who have requested transfer is the prison is making the men take a course in how to deal with their fears about living with women. In April, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation implemented a new mandatory 16-hour class as a prerequisite for any inmates wishing to transfer,” the group added reported.
In light of the passage of SB 132 going into effect in January, approximately 300 requests were filed from male prisoners seeking to transfer to the women’s prison. Thus far, around 20 have been processed and no request has been denied.
At a recent captains’ meeting at the Central California Women’s Facility, a woman reportedly read a statement in which she implored prison staff for help, and said correctional officers were disregarded their fears about having to share close quarters with a serial rapist.
“How do we feel safe in our community? When we reach out for help we get nothing. … There has been an assault on a woman and we still are silenced. We have had our hope taken away once again. Does anyone care that we are being forced to house with 6’2, 250-pound men with penises that are here for brutally raping women? We have been warned by the officials in this prison, more are coming with worse charges. Where is the safety concern for us? If we say we are in fear, we are the ones locked up,” the woman protested.
Writing in the Santa Monica Observer earlier this month, Amber Jackson, who is incarcerated, asserted in an op-ed that what supporters of the bill allowing men to be housed with women under the banner of “gender identity” thought would never happen did happen almost immediately after the policy was implemented.
“The one man I saw up close looked unhealthy and possibly diseased. I have little doubt these transwomen are positive for communicable diseases. Very little. This is a disgusting time to be in prison,”she said.
An update to Jackson’s July 10 op-ed claims that three out of the four trans-identifying men that she wrote about are HIV-positive, according to a CIW officer. The department’s push to distribute condoms to the prison population for the purposes of avoiding liability was too late.
“The condoms were not yet available when the sex began even though CDCR knew these three transwomen had HIV, and it was possible to spread through sexual intercourse. Most of the population does not know this as it is protected by Federal HIPPA [sic] legislation,” the update read.
In 2015, access to condoms became law in the Golden State. It was the second state in the nation, after Vermont, to allow all state prisoners to have access to condoms even though sex between prisoners is unlawful.
Jackson wrote Tuesday, again in the Santa Monica Observer, that female inmates have become “prey for men.”
“What kind of human being would intentionally cause harm by placing a number [of] HIV-infected, anatomically male prisoners among the female prisoners?” she asked, adding that the general public is not aware that this is happening.
She continued: “Nobody is making this known. Nobody cares about us. We are in danger here. Make no mistake. Prison rape is nothing new. However, until now, there were never live males with full male anatomy sharing showers with us in a group shower room. We have male officers who have to announce their presence when they even walk down the hall! In case we’re undressed! Yet, now men can share our showers.”
“Call yourself a ‘woman’ all you want. But when you have man, with a penis, that works as it was designed to do, that’s a problem in a women’s prison group shower room. That’s a problem.”
A woman walks past the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse, which hears cases from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, stands in Lower Manhattan, January 18, 2019 in New York City. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which supports the federal court system, is set to run out of funds on January 25, due to the partial government shutdown. Without this funding, federal courts will continue functioning, but with smaller staffs and only mission-critical operations. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The leader of a Christian nonprofit organization in California is celebrating after a federal appeals court has agreed to review a previous court decision ruling that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects social media platforms such as Vimeo from liability in censorship cases.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New York City, has agreed to rehear the case of Pastor James Domen v. Vimeo en banc. The lawsuit comes after the streaming service Vimeo suspended the account of Jim Domen, a pastor who leads the California-based nonprofit organization Church United, for posting videos highlighting the stories of five individuals who left the LGBT community to pursue their Christian faith.
Pastor Jim Domen, who leads the nonprofit organization Church United, is suing Vimeo for terminating his account after he posted videos of people detailing how they were able to overcome their same-sex attraction. | Jim Domen
Vimeo alleges that the videos violated its terms of service, which ban content promoting the practice referred to by critics as “conversion therapy.” Domen, who is himself a former homosexual, reacted to the development in an interview with The Christian Post. “I’m grateful that the Second Appellate Court en banc has been granted,” he said.
“Church United has a network of over 2,000 California pastors, and we’re growing nationally.” We have representatives in other states across the nation … and … Church United … helps senior pastors engage in government, [and] engage in culture at the local, state and federal level,” said Domen, elaborating on the mission of his organization.
The announcement that the entire Second Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the case comes four months after a three-judge panel on the appellate court sided with Vimeo, ruling that the pastor cannot sue the streaming service for terminating his account. Domen alleged that he was “canceled because of my faith,” as well as his status as a former homosexual.
“They completely deleted our account,” he added. “It was so targeted. It was so evident that it was a direct assault on my faith … not only … my story, but all these other former LGBTQ people.”
Domen recalled how he received an email at 5 a.m. on Black Friday 2018 informing him: “’you have 24 hours to remove all of your videos because we’re going to completely delete your account.’”
He told CP that the videos were deleted the first week of December that year, which he noted is “one of the holiest months of the year for Christians, obviously celebrating the birth of Christ.”
“When they deleted our account, it plummeted our organization financially,” Domen explained. “That’s how we share our impact stories, our pastors sharing their stories of how Church United has helped them engage in government … stop evil [and] stand up against injustice.”
“It took months before we could even find another place” to post the videos. He maintained that he has also faced censorship by other prominent social media platforms, including Google, YouTube and Facebook.
Domen rejected the argument that Vimeo, as a private company, has the right to do whatever it wants, including banning certain users if it so chooses. He stressed that private companies “can’t discriminate against someone’s sexual orientation” and say, “I’m not going to hire you because you’re LGBTQ or you’re black or you’re Muslim. That’s exactly what they did to me,” he added.
Likening his battle with Vimeo to a “David and Goliath” scenario, Domen vowed to “take this to the Supreme Court of the United States of America,” if necessary. At the same time, he expressed relief that the Second Court of Appeals agreed to hear the case en banc after a three-judge panel ruled in favor of Vimeo.
“Historically, they’ve been known to deny that and the fact that a court said ‘we want to hear your case’ shows not only how biased … the last four liberal justices have ruled, but what’s scary is how can someone, even as a judge, be as … intellectually astute and yet rule against blatant discrimination against someone’s faith and religion and against someone’s sexual orientation.”
Domen attributed the adverse treatment he’s faced to the fact that he has “a different narrative” and “they oppose that.” Describing himself as a person who “stands and does what’s right,” he proclaimed that “people shouldn’t be canceled, discriminated against or treated subhuman because they have a different worldview or a different experience than what others might perceive or believe.”
The entire case against Vimeo revolves around whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act insulates social media companies, who portray themselves as platforms instead of publishers, from the legal liability that traditional publishers like newspapers and radio stations often find themselves subject to. So far, the judicial branch has decided that social media companies are protected from such lawsuits.
As explained in a legal memorandum filed by Domen’s legal team, Section 230 asserts that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of — any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
The memo asserted that previous court interpretations of the Communications Decency Act, which the lawsuit is seeking to overturn, “give immunity to Big Tech whenever such a company commits unconscionable discrimination in their online filtering decisions against protected classes of individuals.”
In Domen’s case, the “filtering decisions” resulted in him losing his Vimeo account as a result of five videos he uploaded to the site.
One of the videos of concern featured testimony from Domen, who detailed how he dealt with same-sex attraction dating all the way back to junior high school. Despite his efforts to resist the temptations, he ultimately pursued the homosexual lifestyle.
“It will ruin your life. It’s devastating. It will destroy your life,” he warned.
Domen credits God for helping him avoid contracting HIV and Hepatitis C despite the fact that his partner at the time had both. In his interview with CP, Domen said his former partner died in 2006.
In 2002, three years after embracing the homosexual lifestyle, Domen began an “incredible journey of healing and restoration through the power of Jesus Christ, through the power of professional counseling and logical thought, and understanding what same-sex attraction is.”
Today, Domen is married to a woman and together they have a “4-year-old daughter, a 1-year-old son and a baby on the way.” He characterized the homosexual lifestyle as “death, destruction and disaster,” contrasting it with the “life, beauty, tranquility and peacefulness” that defines heterosexual relationships.
Another video tells the story of Luis Ruiz, a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub terrorist attack. The shooting took place in June 2016 at an Orlando entertainment venue frequented by the LGBT community. Ruiz recalled how he thought he was “going to die” but ultimately survived, remarking that “God showed His grace on my life.”
Ruiz also expressed confidence that his mother’s prayers played a role in his survival. He left the homosexual lifestyle after testing positive for HIV. He recounted how after calling out to God, his “desires became less and less” to the point where same-sex attraction was “no longer an issue” in his life. The video concluded with footage of a speech given by Ruiz where he characterized God as “the only man in my life that would die for me.”
The third video that Vimeo sees as problematic is a 44-second promotion for the Freedom March in Los Angeles that took place in 2018. The event featured speeches from former members of the LGBT community, including Domen and Ruiz.
In the fourth video, Andrew Comiskey, the founder of Desert Stream Ministries, explained that although he received encouragement from his father and his alma mater of UCLA to embrace his same-sex attraction, he quickly realized, “I didn’t like the person that I was becoming.” After engaging in reflection, Comiskey began attending a new church at UCLA. He stressed that he did not see the end goal of leaving the homosexual lifestyle as heterosexual marriage but rather “being able to walk conscientiously with our God.”
Comiskey ultimately married a woman and the two began ministering to people in West Hollywood who experienced same-sex attraction. This effort grew into a larger ministry called Living Waters, which Comiskey and his wife have run for four decades.
In contrast to the other videos, the fifth video is a 14-minute package profiling Evan Low, an openly gay member of the California State Assembly who spearheaded the effort to ban conversion therapy in the state. Low withdrew the bill at the last minute as part of an effort to find common ground with members of the religious community. The video includes clips of Domen and others speaking in favor of conversion therapy, as well as critics deriding the practice as harmful.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he would pull every Republican member from the House Select Committee to look into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi rejected the recommendations of Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, two sources familiar told the Daily Caller.
Pelosi released a Wednesday statement two days after McCarthy selected a group of five Republicans to serve on the House Select Committee. McCarthy’s Republican picks include Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, North Dakota Rep. Kelly Armstrong and Texas Rep. Troy Nehls.
“Monday evening, the Minority Leader recommended 5 Members to serve on the Select Committee. I have spoken with him this morning about the objections raised about Representatives Jim Banks and Jim Jordan and the impact their appointments may have on the integrity of the investigation. I also informed him that I was prepared to appoint Representatives Rodney Davis, Kelly Armstrong and Troy Nehls, and requested that he recommend two other Members,”Pelosi said in the statement.
“With respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject the recommendations of Representatives Banks and Jordan to the Select Committee. The unprecedented nature of January 6th demands this unprecedented decision,” Pelosi added.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks at a press conference on the INVEST in America Act on June 30, 2021 in Washington, DC. The act directs federal funding into repairing roads and bridges and improving transit systems around the country. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Pelosi announced in late June that she would be establishing the select committee. The House then approved a resolution to form the committee weeks after Senate Republicans killed a bipartisan commission in late May. The House Select Committee announced it will hold its first hearing July 27. The resolution authorized Pelosi to select eight members to serve on the committee and McCarthy to select five. The resolution ended up passing in the House 222 to 190, with two Republicans joining all Democrats in voting in favor. Those two Republicans were Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney.
Pelosi picked her panelists. One of them is Cheney.
Pelosi also selected Democratic Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, California Rep. Adam Schiff, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, California Rep. Pete Aguilar, Virginia Rep. Elaine Luria and Florida Rep. Stephanie Murphy.
McCarthy announced his opposition to a Jan. 6 commission in May. McCarthy has said he would like the commission to investigate violence committed by Black Lives Matter and Antifa throughout the summer of 2020, as well as the Capitol riot.
“Putting Adam Schiff and Raskin on it looks more like an impeachment committee than one that wants to get to the bottom of the questions that are still out there,” McCarthy said in an interview with Fox News.
Pastor Ché Ahn speaks at Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, 2019. | Facebook/Harvest Rock Church
A California pastor who has challenged his state government over worship restrictions and church closures in response to COVID-19 believes such restrictions are rooted in Marxist ideology.
In an interview with The Epoch Times published Saturday, Pastor Che Ahn of Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, asserted that “When the pandemic happened, I think a lot of what I would call left-wing governors, you can call Democrat or liberals, but I feel they’re more left-wing, I think they seized the opportunity to really control society and one of the areas that I think they really like to control is the church because historically, the church has been the most outspoken against government control in this country.”
While many proponents of limiting the number of people who can attend in-person church services point to public health concerns as the justification for their actions, Ahn attributes the restrictions to a more sinister motive: “Marxism is a religion. Humanism is a religion. It is putting the human at the top instead of God, and so, [socialism] will do everything possible to get people to reject worshiping the true God.”
“That’s why we’re having such a battle in our nation against the values of our Founding Fathers who are mostly Christians and you know they had biblical values, Judeo-Christian values. So that’s why I feel there is an assault going on,” he asserted.
Over the past year, Ahn has found himself among several pastors clashing with the government over coronavirus worship restrictions. California implemented particularly strict restrictions on worship services during the coronavirus pandemic. The state faced criticism for not imposing similar restrictions on secular businesses, which led to some pastors to designate their churches as “strip clubs” so they could remain open during the pandemic.
In addition to limiting the number of people who could gather for in-person worship services, the state prevented people from conducting at-home Bible studies, which prompted Ahn to file a lawsuit against the state. Pastor Ahn took his challenge against the ban on all forms of in-person worship to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and later to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered the district court to rehear the case in light of its ruling in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo that struck down coronavirus worship restrictions in New York state.
In April, more than a year after the coronavirus pandemic first began to spread in the U.S., California lifted its mandatory restrictions on religious services, changing the language on capacity limits regarding worship services from “mandatory” to “highly recommended.” In response to this move, Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel, who represented Harvest Rock in its legal proceedings, expressed relief that California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom “finally dropped his draconian restrictions on churches.”
In May, the state of California was ordered to pay Harvest Rock Church $1.35 million in attorneys’ fees and legal costs that the church incurred as a result of its litigation against the state. Last month, a federal judge ordered the state to pay $1.6 million in attorneys’ fees to South Bay United Pentecostal Church and an additional $550,000 to a Catholic priest who also sued the state over its worship restrictions.
At the same time, the same federal judge issued an injunction preventing Newsom and other state officials from “issuing or enforcing regulations” against churches and places of worship in response to the pandemic. Although Ahn was threatened with fines and jail time for holding in-person worship services in violation of public health orders, he maintained that he made the right decision by defying the state’s restrictions in his interview with The Epoch Times.
“Thank God that we chose to be open, defying [Newsom’s] orders because we feel strongly that the Constitution is the Supreme Law of the Land, and no one’s above the Constitution, even our president or governor, and the Constitution protects our right, not only for free speech but for us to assemble, to worship, and they will not interfere with a free exercise thereof, ” he said.
Ahn is not the only person warning about the advance of Marxism in the U.S. In a recent interview with The Christian Post, Kevin McGary, the co-founder of Every Black Life Matters, said “Marxism is really what we’re fighting on all fronts at the moment,” specifically noting its prominence in American education.
Even as churches in California no longer face the strict worship restrictions they were subject to at the beginning of the pandemic, Newsom could still face political consequences for the restrictions he imposed during the height of the pandemic. His private dinner at an upscale French restaurant, which took place as coronavirus restrictions prevented Californians from eating out, resulted in allegations of hypocrisy and accelerated the effort to recall him.
The recall campaign gathered enough signatures to force a recall election, which is scheduled to take place Sept. 14. California voters will be asked if they want to remove Newsom from office. If a majority vote to oust him, the votes for replacement candidates will be tallied. In such a scenario, the replacement candidate that receives the most votes would become governor.
The most recent poll of the recall election, conducted by Democratic pollster Change Research in June, found that 54% of California voters oppose the recall election compared to 40% who support it. However, a June poll from Republican pollster Moore Information Group found a plurality of likely voters (49%) support the recall effort and 46% oppose it. The most recent nonpartisan poll, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California in May, found that 57% of Californians oppose the recall while 40% would vote in favor of it.
The left-wing obsession with placing itself on the right side of the fraudulent history that corporate media plans to write reached a historic zenith yesterday. At least Sports Illustrated thinks so. The formerly iconic sports magazine trumpeted its 2021 Swimsuit Issue with bold proclamations about its history-making trifecta of cover models.about:blank
Tennis star Naomi Osaka is the first Haitian and Japanese cover model.
Megan Thee Stallion is the first rapper and uncastrated male horse cover model.
And Leyna Bloom, well, she’s the GOAT of GOATs. Bloom is the first transgender cover model.
But that’s not all. Osaka, Thee Stallion, and Bloom are the first trio of black people to grace the cover of SI’s Swimsuit Issue.
Yesterday, blue-check Twitter and legacy media partied like it was 2099 and the Great Reset was celebrating its 70th birthday.
Cosmopolitan magazine tweeted with glee. “Megan Thee Stallion makes history as the first rapper ever to pose for ‘Sports Illustrated Swimsuit’ cover.”
Page Six tweeted about Bloom and Osaka. Entertainment Weekly, People Magazine, the Today Show all threw Twitter confetti high in the air. This is progress. This is history. This is a transformational moment in American culture. This is Neil Armstrong taking one giant leap for mankind.
This swimsuit edition reminds me of other great moments in black history. My parents remember exactly where they were in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. My grandparents fondly remember when Jesse Owens took four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. Has anyone forgotten that day in 1974 when Hank Aaron smashed home run number 715 and surpassed Babe Ruth?
Who will forget this moment when desperate editors of a failing magazine resorted to a publicity stunt exploiting racial tension and gender dysphoria?
“This moment heals a lot of pain in the world,” Leyna Bloom tweeted. “We deserve this moment; we have waited millions of years to show up as survivors and be seen as full humans filled with wonder.”
I get Bloom’s joy. Gender dysphoria is a serious issue. I’m not going to begrudge Bloom and other transgenders their sense of normalcy. My problem is with packaging of gender dysphoria with the black race. Sports Illustrated made intentional, calculated choices. The company injected race into the Swimsuit equation. These choices are subjective. No one earns the Swimsuit cover. It’s given. It’s not an accomplishment. It’s affirmative action.
There was a time when magazines such as Sports Illustrated gained attention celebrating the actual history-making accomplishments of all athletes. Now, legacy print publications and corporate media outlets troll the public for relevance and cast their virtue signals as historic moments.
Why wouldn’t they? They plan to write the history your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read. In the world that corporate media are plotting, immoral, pornographic rappers will be portrayed as thought leaders and public intellectuals. Biological men with the balls to surgically transition to women will be described as heroes and every bit as courageous as the soldiers who stormed Normandy.
In the aftermath of the Great Reset, the Christian values that led this country down the path to freedom and greatness will be characterized as evil. My problem is that the puppet masters are using race and racism as the Trojan horses to socially engineer America into a new reality. No one made history with the SI covers. The Swimsuit Issue is the further rewriting of history. It’s another companion to the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Let’s call it the 36-24-36 Project, written by the Alphabet Mafia.
Demonstrators protest for transgender rights with a rally, march through the Loop and a candlelight vigil to remember transgender friends lost to murder and suicide on March 3, 2017 in Chicago, Illinois. | Getty Images/Scott Olson
More than a dozen state attorneys general have come to the defense of an Arkansas law banning the use of puberty blockers on children with gender dysphoria amid a legal challenge, arguing that states have an obligation to “protect kids.”
Led by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, the Republican attorneys general of Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas filed an amicus brief in federal court last Tuesday. They asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas to reject the ACLU’s motion to block Arkansas’ Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act. The law, the first of its kind to be passed in the nation, prohibits physicians from providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and elective cosmetic gender surgeries to children under 18.
Additionally, the measure prohibits state tax dollars from funding such practices and allows insurance companies to deny coverage for sex reassignment surgeries. The legislation was passed by the Republican-led state legislature in March. But Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson vetoed the measure when it reached his desk. The legislature overrode the veto, enabling the SAFE Act to become law.
Shortly after, the progressive legal nonprofit ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of four Arkansas families seeking to invalidate the law. The complaint argues that the law “denies adolescents medically necessary treatment and prevents parents from obtaining medically necessary care for their children.” Although the ALCU claims that the law prohibits “doctors from treating their patients in accordance with the well-established standards of care,” the attorney’s general’s friend-of-the-court brief argues that the lawsuit is “misleading” and ignores “risks such experimental treatments pose.”
“They ignore the fact that children cannot fully understand the long-term risks associated with the procedures,” the brief argues.
“They threaten that Arkansas’s law will result in increased suicides even though the research does not support such a claim. And they assert that the State’s protection of its children is ‘animus’ against transgender youth, even though, among other problems with the statement, most of these children will not identify as transgender as adults since their dysphoria will have resolved naturally so long as they can be protected from Plaintiffs’ preferred experiments.”
The brief was filed over a month after the ACLU first asked the court to rule in favor of Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and the other defendants seeking to uphold the SAFE Act. The attorneys general argue that states have been forced to step in to protect children because children with gender dysphoria are being given “puberty blockers, then cross-sex hormones, then surgical interventions such as ‘chest reconstruction surgery’ … to ‘masculinize’ … a girl’s chest …”
The plaintiffs argue that not taking such measures “can result in debilitating anxiety and depression, self-harm, and suicide,” the brief explains.
“States have been forced to step in to protect kids from experimental treatments,” the brief argues. “Because “the medical establishment has abandoned the field to the political zeitgeist, which labels dissenting opinions as ‘animus’ (or worse) and closes its ears to the tragic and growing chorus of detransitioners who feel betrayed by the adults who should have been caring for them.”
The “peculiar vulnerability of children,” specifically their “inability to make critical decisions in an informed, mature manner,” is listed as a justification for state action.
The attorneys general warned that cross-sex hormones and other medical interventions to address gender dysphoria could lead to “irreversible, lifelong consequences.” They include “complications such as infertility, loss of sexual function, increased risk of heart attacks and strokes, bone-density problems, risk of altered brain development, social risks from delayed puberty, and mental health concerns.”
The document cited the decision by the Astrid Lindgren Children’s Hospital at Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden “to change course and prohibit the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in minors except in clinical trial settings.”
A statement from the hospital contends that “these treatments are potentially fraught with extensive and irreversible adverse consequences such as cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, infertility, increased cancer risk, and thrombosis.”
The attorneys general maintained that “the evidence that does exist shows that most cases of gender dysphoria resolve naturally by adulthood.”
“At the end of the day, it was the responsibility of the Arkansas legislature to determine the best way to protect children suffering from gender dysphoria and other forms of gender-related psychological distress. The medical uncertainty in the field does not relieve that responsibility, but only heightens it,” the brief reads.
“Based on the evidence, the legislature determined that the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions are still experimental in nature and that the risks of such procedures outweigh their benefits. That determination does not discriminate against children suffering from gender dysphoria, but seeks to protect them.”
The Biden administration believes that Arkansas law is unconstitutional.
In a court filing in support of the ACLU’s lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Justice asserted that “federal law bars the State of Arkansas from singling out transgender minors for specifically and discriminatorily denying their access to medically necessary care based solely on their sex assigned at birth.”
Such action, the Justice Department argues, would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The consequences of allowing minors to undergo medicalized gender transitioning have received heightened attention in recent weeks. The CBS news magazine program “60 Minutes” profiled detransitioners who underwent some form of gender transitioning as minors only to regret their decision later in life. A mainstream media outlet giving a platform to detransitioners outraged transgender activists, who accused the program of doing “harm” to the transgender community by reporting on the transgender debate from that particular angle.
Journalist Lesley Stahl defended the production.
“Their point is that they were not getting proper healthcare,” Stahl said in a follow-up segment. “That was their point and that’s the point we wanted to emphasize: that these were young people that were not getting proper healthcare advice.”
LGBT activists also slammed the American Bookseller Association for promoting the book Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, which highlights the rapid acceleration in the number of girls seeking to undergo gender transition surgery in addition to the long-term consequences associated with such procedures.
In response to the outcry, the ABA apologized for promoting a book that “goes against ABA’s ends policies, values and everything we believe and support,” describing their previous action as “inexcusable.”
An “America First” rally that had been scheduled for Saturday in Anaheim, California, was canceled, and city officials were jubilant over the news.
A Twitter post from the city announced the cancellation, noting that the city was a prime mover in ensuring that the event featuring Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia would not take place.
“The city of Anaheim shared public safety concerns with the operator, and those concerns were shared by the operator,” the statement said.
Then came a hint at the real reason.
“As a city we respect free speech but also have a duty to call out speech that does not reflect the city or our values,” the statement said.Advertisement – story continues below
When the city was called out for picking and choosing which brands of free speech were permitted, the city insisted safety concerns it did not elaborate upon were the real reason.
“Please help us share accurate information. We uphold free speech every day in Anaheim. As a city, we enjoy the same right of free speech and can note when something doesn’t align with our values. To be clear: public safety concerns are why this is not still on,” the city said in a statement.
Many on Twitter noted that this decision smacked of censorship.
Saturday’s canceled rally was to be held at the Anaheim Event Center, a privately owned facility, according to KNBC-TV.Advertisement – story continues below
The event had been scheduled at venues in two other southern California cities — Laguna Hills and Riverside — but each backed out, KNBC reported.
“I recognize this was a divisive issue in our community, and I am glad it has been resolved,” Riverside Mayor Patricia Lock Dawson said, adding that she commended a venue that canceled the event.
The Laguna Hills venue, the Pacific Hills Banquet & Event Center, is also privately owned.
However, the Riverside Convention Center, which also canceled the rally, is owned by the city. That means the cancellation could face a serious legal challenge, KNBC reported.
Greene and Gaetz did hold a protest event outside Riverside City Hall on Saturday.
“They may try to shut down our venues, but we will take this fight to them in the courts, in the halls of Congress and, if necessary, in the streets,” Gaetz said, according to KCAL-TV.
Donald Trump won the last election and he’s gonna win the next one!
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
Nikole Hannah-Jones argued in 2019 that Cuba’s socialist government affords residents a utopian form of racial equality unmatched anywhere in the Western Hemisphere
Nikole Hannah-Jones /Marcus Ingram/Getty Images
Last week, spontaneous uprisings erupted across Cuba as residents of the island nation bravely stood up to protest the pains inflicted upon them by the country’s oppressive communist regime. That news likely came as a shock to journalist and “1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, who argued in 2019 that the country’s socialist government affords residents a utopian form of racial equality unmatched anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
During an interview with progressive journalist Ezra Klein for Klein’s podcast “Vox Conversations,” Hannah-Jones touted Cuba as the “most equal“ country in the Western Hemisphere, “largely due to socialism.”
“Are there candidates right now or even just places that you think have a viable and sufficiently ambitious integration agenda, and if so, what is it?” Klein asked, prompting the discussion.
“If you want to see the most equal, multiracial democ … it’s not a democracy — the most equal, multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba,” Hannah-Jones responded, despite admitting she’s not an “expert” on race relations internationally.
“Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere,” she continued. “I mean the Caribbean — most of the Caribbean it’s hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small. They’re countries run by black folks. But in places that are truly at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality, and that’s largely due to socialism, which I’m sure no one wants to hear.”
Hannah-Jones’ controversial comments can be heard at the 1:12:20 mark of the podcast.
The National Pulse, which first unearthed the remarks, noted that the journalist also penned an op-ed in 2008 praising Cuba as a gold standard example for other countries to follow. In the op-ed, Hannah-Jones commended the communist country for its high literacy rate, low HIV infection rate, and for bringing about the “end of codified racism.“
“It manifests in what Cuba has accomplished, through socialism and despite poverty, that the United States hasn’t,” she stated.
After news broke about Hannah-Jones’ past comments, conservative critics pounced.
“Please go to Cuba and stay in Cuba — Nicole [sic] Hannah-Jones,”tweeted American Conservative Union senior fellow Mercedes Schlapp. “The anti-American factions in our own country fail to understand the horrors of Communism.”
Another commenter quipped, “Yes, all the Cuban people are suppressed ‘equally’!!!” adding, “Send Nikole to Cuba!”
“Note to Nikole: Cuba has ‘equality’ because everyone is equally desperately poor,” another said.
A Florida man who breached the Senate floor on Jan. 6 while carrying a Trump flag was the first Capitol rioter sentenced with a felony offense.
Prosecutors are seeking a minimum 18-month sentence for Paul Allard Hodgkins. In a July 14 court filing, they alleged that he, “like each rioter, contributed to the collective threat to democracy” as they forced lawmakers, reporters, staff and Vice President Mike Pence into hiding as they convened to certify President Joe Biden’s victory.
He was sentenced to eight months in prison.
Video footage described in the report shows Hodgkins, 38, sporting a Trump T-shirt and flag on the Senate floor. At one point he took a selfie with the self-described shaman, who is also awaiting trial for participating in the riot.
Rioters enter the Senate Chamber on January 6. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Lawyers for Hodgkins had argued that the court of public opinion was enough punishment to avoid a prison sentence.
“Whatever punishment this court may provide will pale in comparison to the scarlet letter Mr. Hodgkins will wear for the rest of his life,” his lawyer, Patrick N. Leduc, wrote in a filing on July 12.
That filing likens Hodgkins’ actions to those of Anna Lloyd Morgan, a 49-year-old from Indiana who was the first of hundreds to be sentenced. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in June and was given three years of probation.
Hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol as Congress sought to certify President Joe Biden’s victory. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Though Hodgkins was never accused of assaulting anyone or damaging property, prosecutors noted that when he boarded a bus from Tampa, Florida, to D.C. he had rope, protective goggles and latex gloves, and said that demonstrated that he was prepared for violence.
Prosecutors also said, however, that Hodgkins deserved leniency for immediately coming forward and pleading guilty to his obstruction charge, which carries a maximum sentence of two decades. But they noted that “time and time again, rather than turn around and retreat, he pressed forward.”
“When a mob is prepared to attack the Capitol to prevent elected officials from both parties from performing their constitutional and statutory duty, democracy is in trouble,” Federal District Judge Randolph Moss said Monday. “The damage that they caused that day is way beyond the delays that day. It is a damage that will persist in this country for decades.”
Leduc argued in his filing that Hodgkins was “a man who for just one hour on one day lost his bearings” and “made a fateful decision to follow the crowd.” It also noted former President Abraham Lincoln’s attempt to reconcile immediately after the Civil War.
“The court has a chance to emulate Lincoln,” Leduc wrote.
Wendolynn Perez, 23, second from left, a DACA recipient who is now a permanent resident and is originally from Peru, chants with other supporters of immigration reform, Tuesday, Aug. 15, 2017, at the White House in Washington. The protesters want to preserve the Obama administration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. The Trump administration has said it still has not decided the program’s fate.(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
A federal judge on Friday ruled the Deferred Actions for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is illegal and blocked new enrollments.
Recall, Barack Obama granted illegal aliens protection in 2012 when he established the DACA program. According to reports, more than 800,000 illegal aliens are currently protected under Obama’s illegal DACA program.
Judge Hanen ordered the DHS to stop approving new DACA applications. A coalition of states, with Texas leading the way, filed a lawsuit arguing DACA is unconstitutional.
Students listen to a teacher in a classroom. | Unsplash/NeONBRAND
As the debate about critical race theory continues to engulf the political discourse in the United States, grassroots organizations and activists rely on a variety of methods to combat “woke” ideology’s influence on American education and counter what they characterize as a “destructive message.”
Over the past year, parents have become increasingly aware of content that their children have been exposed to in public, private and religious schools, as the coronavirus pandemic led to the widespread adoption of online learning. The implementation of critical theory and elements of what they call “woke” ideology in the curriculum of American schools has caused some parents and conservative activists particular concern. It’s also led to several conservative politicians voicing their outrage with the promotion of the academic framework, and some states to pass policies banning its teaching in schools.
American schools’ embrace of critical theory, controversial sex education, gender ideology, sexually explicit teaching material and other “woke” curriculums has led many parents and concerned citizens to launch advocacy groups committed to raising awareness about the situation in American education and providing parents with the tools to combat it. It has also led to the launch of political action committees seeking to elect school board candidates who oppose critical race theory.
One group is Parents Defending Education, which describes itself as a “national grassroots organization working to reclaim our schools from activists promoting harmful agendas.”
“By the time students are 18 years old and they get to college … they have never received a proper civics education, they hate America, they don’t understand the First Amendment,” Nicole Neily, the mother of two who founded Parents Defending Education this past March, told The Christian Post.
“So, if the first time you hear … free speech or First Amendment is this is why [white nationalist] Richard Spencer can come to campus, then yeah, you’re going to hate it.”
Previously having run an organization called Speech First that “defends students’ rights on campus primarily through litigation,” Neily said that she was inspired to launch Parents Defending Education after seeing news articles about how some schools were providing benefits to minority groups and discriminating against white students in the name of diversity.
Parents Defending Education has compiled an “IndoctriNation” map of schools teaching students controversial curriculum based on tips from parents that also includes a directory of parent groups set up to combat “woke” ideology within public schools. She clarified that the map does not include “hearsay.”
“Everything is backed up with a screenshot, a URL … a Freedom of Information Act request,” Neily stated. “We asked the schools for comment. We asked the schools to verify that the information is correct. … We are only putting up information that we stand behind.”
“We have on our map about 100 parent groups across the country that have been created mostly within the past year, specifically to address political indoctrination in schools — not math, not reopening, not school choice, specifically political indoctrination,” Neily explained.
Among the concerns that Neily has with “woke” curriculums is the promotion of critical race theory.
“I honestly don’t think [critical race theory] should be banned,” Neily told CP. “When I did my master’s degree, I had to read Karl Marx.”
“Where I have a problem is when … [critical race theory] is taught to students … as the only way,” she said. “How some of these things are implemented, I think … it encourages discrimination.”
What is critical race theory?
Encyclopedia Britannica defines critical race theory as “an intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour.”
According to the reference source, “critical race theorists hold that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.”
Proponents of critical race theory, such as those at the New York-based Leadership Academy, argue that the steadfast opposition to the ideology arises from “fear and misunderstanding.” The organization trains educators on how to dismantle “systemic inequities in schools.”
“Critical race theory, at its core, is about acknowledging the existence and impact of race and racism in our communities and society,” wrote the Leadership Academy’s Mary Rice-Boothe and Jill Grossman. “It is about valuing multiple points of view and life experiences, which are essential for helping students learn to think critically about and participate in our global and diverse world.”
The scholars alleged that critical race theory is “central to culturally responsive leadership, which research and our experience supporting thousands of leaders across the country has shown is critical for disrupting inequities in our schools.”
Additionally, they stated that “equity and culturally responsive policies and teaching practices are about making sure students of every race, ethnicity, language, and other characteristics of their identity, feel valued and respected and have what they need to achieve academic, social, and emotional success.” Rice-Boothe and Grossman summarized critical race theory as “simply about humanity.”
The most prominent example of curriculum embracing critical race theory is The 1619 Project, a partnership between The New York Times and the Pulitzer Center that portrays the arrival of enslaved Africans on American soil in 1619 as “the beginning of the system of slavery on which the country was built.”
Launched in 2019, the curriculum framework places the institution of slavery at the center of the national narrative around the country’s founding instead of 1776 and the American Revolution.
Christopher Rufo, a writer, filmmaker and researcher who has studied the issue extensively, defines critical race theory as “an academic discipline that holds that the United States is a nation founded on white supremacy and oppression and that these forces are still at the root of our society.”
Rufo, an outspoken opponent of critical race theory, added that “critical race theorists believe that American institutions, such as the Constitution and legal system, preach freedom and equality, but are mere ‘camouflages’ for racial discrimination.”
According to Rufo, adherents to critical race theory believe that “racism is a constant, universal condition” that “simply becomes more subtle, sophisticated, and insidious over the course of history.” He characterized the discipline as a reformulation of “the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and black.”
“…….the old Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed, replacing the class categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and black.”
James Lindsay, who hosts the “New Discourses” podcast, elaborated on critical race theory in a video for the nonprofit media organization Prager University. An opponent of critical race theory, he quoted from two of its proponents, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, in an attempt to portray the philosophy as un-American: “Critical Race Theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
NEA embraces CRT as the public remains lukewarm
Earlier this month, Rufo reported that “the nation’s largest teachers’ union has approved a plan to promote critical race theory in all 50 states and 14,000 local school districts.” He shared screenshots showing that the National Education Association approved New Business Item 39 at its annual meeting and representative assembly two weeks ago.
New Business Item 39 calls on the NEA to make it clear that “we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project.” The measure advocates for the publication of an “already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, racism, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”
The item also indicated an intention for the union to double down on its support for an “accurate and honest teaching of social studies topics … including critical race theory.” It also signaled an intent to “join with Black Lives Matter at School” to create a “national day of action to teach lessons about structural racism and oppression” and “conduct a virtual listening tour that will educate members on the tools and resources needed to defend honesty in education including but not limited to tools like CRT.”
While critical race theory has achieved a lot of support in academia, it remains very unpopular with the American public as a whole. A poll released last month found that 38% of Americans had a very or somewhat favorable opinion of the ideology. In comparison, 58% had a very or somewhat unfavorable view of critical race theory. Majorities of Democrats, liberals, African Americans and Americans between the ages of 30 and 44 viewed critical race theory favorably, while majorities of all other groups hold the opposite views.
The teaching of critical race theory at American schools is part of a broader trend of educational institutions embracing what critics refer to as “toxic new curriculums.” Parents across the country have spoken out in opposition to these curriculums, with parent opposition in Loudoun County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., receiving much media attention.
At a school board meeting earlier this year, concerned parents read aloud texts that the county’s children were exposed to in freshman honors English classes that included portrayals of domestic violence and graphic descriptions of sex acts. A video of the parents reading excerpts from the books, published by the grassroots organization Fight for Schools, has received more than 150,000 views [Warning: video contains graphic and sexually explicit language].
‘It is in everyone’s backyard’
Neily told CP that in addition to spotlighting groups of concerned parents and schools exposing children to material widely seen as problematic, she sees the mission of Parents Defending Education as seeking to “empower, expose and engage.”
The activist hopes to “empower” American parents by “[telling] people what their rights are” if their children attend a public school, specifically mentioning the First Amendment, Title VII and Title IX. She illustrated that while students have rights at public schools, “they generally do not have the same rights at private schools.”
Neily hopes to get parents engaged in their children’s education and equip them with the tools needed to share their concerns, such as “How do you write a letter to the editor?”“What are questions to ask your school board?” “How do you get involved in a school board race?” “How do you … file a Freedom of Information Act request?” “How do you file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education?”
Expanding on her organization’s goal to “expose,” Neily stressed that she’s “very much a believer in the saying that ‘sunshine is the best disinfectant.’”
She illustrated the need to make American parents aware of what their children are learning at school.
“A lot of this has been happening. People have no idea it’s in their backyard,” she explained. “Many people believe that this problem is like primarily a California and a New York problem. It is not. It is in red states. It is in blue states. It is in private schools. It is in parochial schools. It is in everyone’s backyard.”
Neily said that during the pandemic, American parents “saw what their children were learning on a regular basis because classrooms were then in their living rooms.” She called that the “silver lining” of the coronavirus pandemic.
She recalled how finding out what their children were learning motivated parents to reach out to her and ask, “How do we get the schools to listen to us?” and “What can we do?”
The activist said an action taken by the public school system in Wellesley, Massachusetts, earlier this year is the worst example of “woke” ideology.
Following the shooting at Atlanta-area spas that left several Asian masseuses dead, the school district held a “healing space for Asians and people of color”during school hours, with the invitation for the event specifically highlighting that “white students [were] not allowed.”
Characterizing the event as “modern-day segregation,” Neily’s organization filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights with the U.S. Department of Education, citing the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled school segregation unconstitutional.
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. | AFP via Getty Images/Andrew Caballero
‘We’re fighting Marxism’
Parents Defending Education is not the only group dedicated, at least in part, to opposing critical race theory.
Kevin McGary, the co-founder of Every Black Life Matters, is a staunch critic of critical race theory. | Kevin McGary
Kevin McGary, the father of two children, co-founded Every Black Life Matters approximately nine months ago. The group is a response to the “race hatred” and “violence” that resulted from the video of African American George Floyd’s “atrocious” and “heinous” death in police custody.
His organization aims to counter the Black Lives Matter movement, which he referred to as “radical revolutionary Marxists” in an interview with The Christian Post.
“We are founded based on fundamentals that say the nuclear family is important, that protecting black life from conception to the grave is important, that helping encourage black life from early childhood development in education is important,” he asserted. “We believe that having an active father as a part of children’s life is important.”
Acknowledging that “we’re sort of leveraging the momentum of Black Lives Matter,” McGary held up his organization as “the exact opposite of BLM” and the “antithesis” to the left-wing advocacy group.
Every Black Life Matters includes a “template library of … letters that are already pre-written for school boards, city council, other … people that are running for political office or are holding political office.” McGary told CP that all concerned parents have to do is “put their names on it and send it to those people.”
While much of the focus in the effort to push back against critical theory has focused on public schools, the ideology has infiltrated religious schools as well.
As The Christian Post previously reported, Loyola Academy, a Catholic school based in a suburb of Chicago, faced backlash from several parents after employing “diversity consultants” and conducting Zoom meetings where teachers included their gender pronouns.
Noelle Mering, a fellow with the Washington-based think tank Ethics & Public Policy Center, wrote an op-ed arguing that critical theory is incompatible with the teachings of the Catholic Church. She discussed parents’ concerns about Loyola.
“Students were racially segregated for school assignments on privilege,” she wrote. “A working-class student was bewildered to learn that because of his skin color, he is an oppressor to his peers, some of whom live in multi-million dollar homes.”
The Grace Church School, a private Episcopal school in Manhattan, came under fire from both teachers and parents for integrating a “repressive ideology” into its curriculum.
Paul Rossi, a former teacher at the school, wrote an op-ed accusing the Grace Church School of pressuring students to “identify primarily with their race before their individual identities are fully formed” and assigning “the morally compromised status of ‘oppressor’” to one group of students “based on their immutable characteristics” as “dependency, resentment, and moral superiority are cultivated in students considered ‘oppressed.’”
McGary attributed the presence of critical theory and “woke” ideology in religious schools to the fact that “they are using critical race theory within our seminaries.”
“And so, we have woke theologians now that are coming out and spreading a false Gospel,” he said.
Echoing Rufo’s analysis, McGary sees the implementation of critical theory and “woke” ideology in both public and religious schools as part of a larger effort to advance Marxist ideology in the U.S.
“Marxism is really what we’re fighting against on all fronts at the moment,” he said. “It’s not necessarily these individual elements — CRT, liberation theology … social justice. Fundamentally, at their core, they’re all based in … Marxism. And so, we’re fighting Marxism.”
“What we need to help people understand is that Marxism has led to more human atrocities, more human deaths, more economic damage and collapse than any other system in world history,” he continued.
“… part of a larger effort to advance Marxist ideology in the U.S.“
Lambasting Marxism for causing over 100 million deaths and “all economic collapse,” McGary emphasized that “there is no actual great, perfect track record with Marxism.”
While he admitted that “capitalism is not perfect either,” he praised the economic system as “better than Marxism” by “any viable metric.”
McGary maintained that schools “should teach the good and bad of history.”
“If indeed we do have … Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, a lot of other founders and/or presidents who were slave owners … that’s fine,” he said.
“We should know the good and bad of … our patriots and heroes and our founders.”
He criticized the move to “expunge history and say that these guys were strictly bad guys,” pointing to some curriculum, “saying that George Washington was a plantation owner … and a slave owner.” He feels “they focus on that and really exclude the fact that he was an American Revolutionary War hero, that he was the first president.”
McGary opined that rather than teaching “accurate history,” critical race theory proponents instead seek to present a “revisionist history.”
‘A more patriotic curriculum’
In May, Ryan Girdusky, a conservative writer and political commentator, founded the 1776 Project PAC, a political action committee supporting school board candidates who explicitly oppose critical race theory.
Speaking to The Christian Post, he emphasized the importance of school boards. He stressed his organization’s mission to “get school board people in there who can actually start reversing it” by changing the superintendents and textbooks as well as pushing “for a more patriotic curriculum.”
He wants school boards to “start negotiating and countering these principals and these teachers who are pushing this policy.”
“There are many institutions working on creating an alternative curriculum in history,” Girdusky said, including Hillsdale College.
“There’s many institutions on the right that are looking to … get involved … with the program of changing curriculum. So hopefully, we can have a meeting of the minds and find the best options that we can put in front of school board members and say, ‘Can you consider this?’”
Girdusky clarified that his organization was not recruiting candidates but rather “supporting candidates who are opposed to critical race theory and the 1619 Project.” He elaborated on the role of school boards, which he characterized as “the only check really for the public school systems that voters have.”
“They can hire superintendents, negotiate with the schools. They can try to hold teachers and principals more accountable within the school system,” he added. “They can pick out which textbooks are … acceptable, and they purchase textbooks in many cases. They can pick out which outside reading material is acceptable.”
Girdusky acknowledged that “conservatives have been trying [for decades] to get children out of the public school into either private school … or charter schools.” However, he maintained that it is still essential to focus on fixing the public schools because “a majority of children will always go to public schools.”
Girdusky, who comes from “a very large family” with “a lot of younger cousins,” was motivated to start the 1776 Project PAC after discovering that as “many of [his cousins] were in school at home … on Google classroom” as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
“Teachers were incorporating things inside their classrooms that were pretty horrendous and pretty shocking,” the activist claimed. For example, “children as young as 8, 9 years old were being taught things … about racial profiling from police. And one of the teachers basically … said that … police are all racist.”
“What’s happening at the schools and inside classrooms that I find horrendously shocking is … teachers telling … children that there’s implicit bias against them if they’re non-white or that white students have … implicit bias against … non-white people, and that the institutions that really … created this country and … keep our civilization are … inherently created to work against them.”
Consequences for society as a whole
Neily told CP that she worries that “we are encouraging people to hate each other, to doubt each other, to make judgments about each other based on immutable characteristics.”
She slammed critical race theory’s “destructive message.” Girdusky agreed, calling critical theory a “cancer that society is pushing.”
“It’s telling non-white children that they are handicapped in the society that they are raised in on purpose to hurt them. And it says that everyone from our Founding Fathers to entrepreneurs to … the heads of major companies today to their local government and their police force is implicitly working to … keep them down,” he explained. “It’s telling white children, some of which … are extremely young and have no understanding of race or the history of race in our country … that they are racist, that they are born racist … and that’s a terrible lesson to learn.”
Girdusky contends that this ideology will have “detrimental” consequences for the health of American society:
“In a nation that is … multiracial now and increasingly more diverse, it breeds [an] immense amount of social distrust.”
McGary said that the widespread promotion of critical race theory extends far beyond the classroom.
“The net impact is people are viewing … each other with a certain amount of distrust. African Americans have adopted critical race theory to such a degree that a lot of them are viewing white people with complete disdain just because they’re white, and … they’re viewing Asians with disdain,” he stated.
“There’s been a lot of Asian hate, but there hasn’t been a whole lot of coverage as to what is the predominant … ethnicity of the person carrying out those hate crimes and that’s because it’s an inconvenient truth that … blacks are viewing Asians as white-passing and they’ve internalized racist white supremacy. And so, they’re going after Asians with the same vigor that they have towards whites.”
McGary stated that the American public as a whole is “over-sensitized to race.”
“Every conversation, every civic discussion … 10, 12 years ago, we didn’t go around labeling people based on their skin color, whether you’re an oppressed, oppressor, whether you’re privileged or … supremacist … or racist or whatever. Twelve years ago, that didn’t exist.”
He warned that in “every real and every domain,” people are making “snap assessments about people based on the color of their skin and not the content of character.”
McGary connected the adoption of critical theory and “woke” ideology to the rising crime rates across the country. He predicted that “we’re going to see a lot more racial hatred and a lot more crimes based on race as opposed to any other factor.” He believes the “if people don’t get a handle on this stuff, we could actually see a certain amount of mass civil unrest in certain cities between races.”
“we’re going to see a lot more racial hatred and a lot more crimes based on race as opposed to any other factor.” He believes the “if people don’t get a handle on this stuff, we could actually see a certain amount of mass civil unrest in certain cities between races.”
All three agreed that critical theory runs contrary to the teachings of the late civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. Girdusky is concerned that “too many people confuse critical race theory with Martin Luther King Jr.’s conception of having a colorblind America and equality when, in fact, it is using race as the cornerstone of every inequality and inequity in society.”
“What happened to Martin Luther King? What happened to the … content of our character and not the color of our skin?” Neily asked.
McGary lamented that the country is “moving away from … the encouragement and admonition that Dr. Martin Luther King gave us.”
“We’re sort of moving away from that. We’re moving towards strictly analyzing people based upon the color of their skin,” McGary said.
Victories in the battle against CRT
Neily told CP that in the short time since Parents Defending Education was established, there had been “victories that have happened in different places.” She pointed to the town of Southlake, Texas, outside Dallas, where “they just cleared house with their school board” in an “anti-CRT wave that was swept in.”
She also praised the school district in the Chicago suburb of New Trier, Illinois, for adopting a K-12 version of the “Chicago statement” from the University of Chicago expressing support for “free speech and free expression.”
Another example of success against critical race theory is Palm Beach County, Florida. As The Palm Beach Post reported, following backlash from parents, the school board voted to retract a portion of an “equity statement” highlighting its commitment to “dismantling structures rooted in white advantage.”
It’s not just groups like Parents Defending Education, the 1776 Project PAC and Every Black Life Matters working to combat critical race theory and “woke” ideology in education. Several states have already banned the teaching of critical race theory or “divisive concepts” in their public schools, and others are in the process of doing so.
According to Education Week, 26 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to restrict the teaching of critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism, while 11 states have enacted those bans as of July 15.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s charge that the National Security Agency illegally spied on him and leaked his emails is enraging prominent liberals. Carlson sought “to sow distrust [of the NSA], which is so anti-American,” declared MSNBC analyst Andrew Weissman, formerly the chief prosecutor for Special Counsel Robert Mueller. CNN senior correspondent Oliver Darcy ridiculed Carlson for effectively claiming that “I’m not a crazy person overstating a case!”
When did the NSA become as pure as Snow White? Do pundits presume that there is a 24-hour statute of limitation for recalling any previously-disclosed NSA crimes and abuses?
The Carlson controversy cannot be understood outside the context of perennial NSA abuses. The NSA possesses a “repository capable of taking in 20 billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes,” the New York Times reported. The NSA is able to snare and stockpile many orders of magnitude times more information than did East Germany’s Stasi secret police, one of the most odious agencies of the post-war era.
The FBI, for its part, is permitted to rummage through the seized data under strict restrictions. In 2018, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court slammed the FBI for abusing that database with warrantless searches that violated Americans’ rights. After the FBI promised to repent, the FISA court to permitted FBI agents to continue rummaging in NSA troves. In April, the FISA court revealed that the FBI surveillance crime wave continues.
The FBI conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for “domestic terrorism,” “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets — including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity.
In 2019, the FBI unjustifiably searched the database for information on 16,000 people “even though only seven of them had connections to an investigation,” the New York Times reported. FISA court Chief Judge James Boasberg lamented “apparent widespread violations” of the legal restrictions for FBI searches but shrugged them off and permitted the scouring of Americans’ personal data to continue.
On June 30, Americans learned that one of NSA’s most intrusive surveillance engines is still being widely abused. In 2013, Edward Snowden revealed that the XKeyscore program was being used to commandeer the email and Internet data of any American who was caught “searching the web for suspicious stuff.” XKeyscore enables NSA analysts to wiretap anyone simply by entering the target’s email address into the database. Six months after Snowden’s disclosures began, federal judge Richard Leon issued a ruling denouncing the NSA surveillance regime as almost Orwellian: “I cannot imagine a more indiscriminate and arbitrary invasion than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval.”
Travis LeBlanc, a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, released his declassified dissent to that civil liberties watchdog board recent report on XKeyscore. Hundreds of illegal or prohibited searches were apparently committed using XKeyscore in 2019. LeBlanc complained that the oversight board failed to ask “how many U.S. persons have been impacted by XKeyscore, how much data the program collects and analyzes, how widely information analyzed through XKeyscore is shared.”
However, the oversight board did not even “request specific information” about violations of U.S. law by NSA.
Americans have probably not seen even the tip of the iceberg of NSA abuses. NSA apparently never even bothered doing a formal analysis of the legality or constitutionality of XKeyscore until 2016, after the oversight board specifically requested such information. LeBlanc told the Washington Post: “What concerns me most is that we have a very powerful surveillance program that eight years or so after exposure, still has no judicial oversight, and what I consider to be inadequate legal analysis and serious compliance infractions.”
Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, the most dogged congressional watchdog of federal spying, declared that “Americans still know far too little about the government’s surveillance activities… and how it threatens their privacy.” Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is muzzled from disclosing the NSA’s confidential dirt.
NSA is like an accused murderer who continually proclaims his innocence up until the moment a video surfaces of him pulling the trigger. After Carlson stated that his emails were being intercepted, the NSA issued a statement declaring that “Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency… With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.”
However, 90% of the people whose emails and other data were dragged into NSA surveillance dragnets were not NSA’s actual targets, according to a 2014 Washington Post analysis based on data that Snowden provided. Shortly before Snowden’s disclosures began, National Intelligence Director James Clapper lied to Congress when he denied that the NSA collects “any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans.” He was never charged for that crime, thereby encouraging falsehoods by every subsequent top federal intelligence official.
On July 7, Axios reported that “Carlson was talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin shortly” before he accused the NSA of spying on him. U.S. government officials became aware of Carlson’s effort to interview Putin. Axios noted the possibility that “one of the people Carlson was talking to as an intermediary to help him get the Putin interview was under [NSA] surveillance as a foreign agent.”
But NSA would still be prohibited from disclosing emails from an American citizen after “unmasking” his identity. As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted, “It is one of the gravest crimes in the U.S. code for the NSA to leak the contents of communications that it intercepts between a foreign official and an American citizen.”
In an interview scheduled for release on Monday (previewed by the Daily Mail), Carlson explained that he went public with his NSA charge “defensively… I don’t have subpoena power. I can’t arrest anybody. I can’t make them answer questions.” An investigative producer for Carlson’s show did file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the NSA, seeking “any call records, texts, or emails the NSA has obtained from journalist Tucker Carlson’s cell phone or email,” among other information.
Unfortunately, FOIA has long since become a sham. The Obama White House drove nails into the FOIA coffin by inventing the doctrine of “White House equities,” permitting political appointees to delay embarrassing disclosures for years (instead of the 20 business days the law requires). Obama’s Justice Department formally proposed to permit federal agencies to falsely claim that FOIA-requested documents did not exist. Such travesties did not deter the media from repeating Obama’s boast of having “the most transparent administration in history.”
NSA’s power and prerogatives have been buttressed by the vast increase in federal secrecy in recent decades. Since the 1990s, the number of documents classified annually by the feds increased more than tenfold. Federal agencies are now creating trillions of pages of new secrets each year, and each page is backed by a federal fist waiting to crush anyone who makes an unauthorized disclosure. Congress and the media have been complicit in tolerating the Iron Curtain that shrouds far too many federal abuses.
But Carlson has nothing to fear because the NSA is constrained by checks and balances elsewhere in the government, right? Fat chance. Any pretense that Deep State surveillance agencies were on a legal leash should have been destroyed by RussiaGate.
In December 2019, the Justice Department Inspector General reported that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA court to authorize surveilling a 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign official, Carter Page. Former FBI assistant general counsel Kevin Clinesmith admitted to falsifying key evidence to secure the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.
As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, Clinesmith “changed an email confirming Page had been a CIA source to one that said the exact opposite, explicitly adding the words ‘not a source’ before he forwarded it.” A federal prosecutor declared that the “resulting harm is immeasurable” from Clinesmith’s action. But at the sentencing hearing, Judge Boasberg gushed with sympathy: “Mr. Clinesmith has lost his job in government service—what has given his life much of its meaning.” Scorning the federal prosecutor’s recommendation for jail time, Boasberg gave Clinesmith a wrist slap—400 hours of community service and 12 months of probation.
The FISA court has gone from pretending that federal surveillance violations don’t occur to pretending that such crimes don’t matter. Practically the only remaining task is for the FISA court to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy.
Tucker Carlson may or may not be in NSA cross-hairs at the moment, but there are plenty of other Americans who should be sweating. Capitol Police acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told Congress that the Jan. 6 riots were “a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists.” Does federal law enforcement believe that any Trump supporter within a mile radius of the U.S. Capitol that day was a terrorist?
President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives David Chipman favors banning more than ten million AR-15 rifles owned by American citizens. The Biden administration is claiming a right to know whether every American has been vaccinated for Covid and will be sending its agents door-to-door to harangue people who are unjabbed. Considering the Biden administration’s histrionic rhetoric on “domestic terrorism,” guns, and COVID-19, it would take only a few tweaks in NSA searches to pull up vast troves of new offenders who could be targeted.
Glenn Greenwald recently observed that “the Democratic Party and journalism, in general, has aligned with the CIA, the NSA and the FBI, and has aligned and merged with the security state.” But there was a time when Democrats were eloquent defenders against federal intrusions.
Democrat House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana explained in 1971 that “Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of action for men in public life can be compromised quite as effectively by the fear of surveillance as by the fact of surveillance.”
Democratic Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina observed that same year, “When people fear surveillance, whether it exists or not, when they grow afraid to speak their minds and hearts freely to their Government or to anyone else, then we shall cease to be a free society.” A few decades earlier, Justice Robert Jackson, who had been Attorney General for FDR and the chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials, declared, “Search and seizure rights… belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms. Among deprivations of rights, none is so effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart.”
Americans cannot acquiesce to illegal government surveillance without forfeiting their right to the tattered remnants of their privacy. The feds need to come clean on any surveillance and leaks that may have targeted Tucker Carlson or otherwise violated his rights. The Carlson case is a wake-up call to Congress and concerned citizens to stop any new war on dissent.
The chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus celebrated her arrest Thursday after leading an incursion of protesters into the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio said that breaking the law was an important way to illustrate her belief that voting reforms passed by state legislatures will disenfranchise black voters.
“I stand in solidarity with Black women and allies across the country in defense of our constitutional right to vote. We have come too far and fought too hard to see everything systematically dismantled and restricted by those who wish to silence us,”Beatty said in a statement on her website.
“Be assured that this is just the beginning. This is Our Power, Our Message,”the congresswoman in the statement.
“You can arrest me. You can’t stop me. You can’t silence me,” Beatty said on Twitter.
NBC News reported that the protesters who joined Beatty in the incursion demanded passage of the so-called For the People Act, a Democrat bill that would largely put elections under the thumb of the federal government instead of the states.
Capitol Police said the demonstrators were arrested after refusing to disperse.
“This afternoon, nine people were arrested for demonstrating in a prohibited area on Capitol Grounds,” the department said in a statement on Thursday.
“At approximately 3:30pm, the United States Capitol Police responded to the Atrium in the Hart Senate Office Building for reports of illegal demonstration activity. After officers arrived on the scene, they warned the demonstrators three times to stop. Those who refused were arrested for D.C. Code §22-1307. Two males and seven females were transported to USCP Headquarters for processing,” Capitol Police said.
Unlike the coverage of the Jan. 6 incursion of the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, there was no hue-and-cry in the media about Beatty and the other protesters staging an “insurrection” or “threatening our democracy.”
Police arrested nine people including Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, in a prohibited area on Capitol Grounds during a pro-voting rights demonstration pic.twitter.com/kWZjpJrwYz
Many Republicans have said the fight over election reform legislation is an attempt by Democrats to use their current congressional majority as a means to cement leftist rule in America.
“Democrats want to rig every election going forward to make it nearly impossible for a conservative to win again,”Fox News host Laura Ingraham said Wednesday.
“They’re now effectively arguing that the very voting rules that delivered two two-term victories for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are essentially just like Jim Crow 2.0,” she said.
“So this leaves them really with only one option in their mind, which is to promote racial fear-mongering in pretty much everything around them. We already know what they’re doing in our schools, to our workplaces, the military, even to now our system of voting,” Ingraham said.
Fox News host Sean Hannity said the left’s fuss over voting rights is part of a strategy to sway the 2022 elections.
“So what does this really all about? We all know there’s nothing racist about integrity in elections. Democrats are obviously worried. Chances are they now believe they probably will lose in 2022 and maybe even 2024,” he said Thursday on “Hannity.”
“Mark my words, if Democrats suffer huge losses in 2022, they will blame racist right-wing voter suppression. … The truth isn’t important to the Democratic Party or the media mob, for that matter. Power is all that matters,” Hannity said.
Jack Davis is a freelance writer who joined The Western Journal in July 2015 and chronicled the campaign that saw President Donald Trump elected. Since then, he has written extensively for The Western Journal on the Trump administration as well as foreign policy and military issues.
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Crowds gathered outside the Luther Jackson Middle School in Virginia, where concerned parents were rallying against critical race theory being taught to students in Fairfax County Public Schools. During Thursday’s “Stop CRT Rally,” a PTA and NAACP official spewed rhetoric against the parents, including proclaiming, “Let them die!”
“LET THEM DIE!”
An event flyer for the “Stop CRT Rally” stated: “It’s not about race or equity, it’s about a Communist Radical Takeover of America!” At the rally, there were counter protests, including a diatribe delivered by federal employee Michelle Leete, who is also the vice president of training at the Virginia Parent-Teacher Association, vice president of communications for the Fairfax County PTA, and first vice president of the Fairfax County NAACP.
Leete lambasted anti-critical race theory parents, even going so far as to say, “Let them die!”
So let’s meet and remain steadfast, steadfast, in speaking truth, tearing down double standards, and refuting double talk. Let’s not allow any double downing on lies. Let’s prepare our children for a world they deserve. Let’s deny this off-key band of people that are anti-education, anti-teacher, anti-equity, anti-history, anti-racial reckoning, anti-opportunities, anti-help people, anti-diversity, anti-platform, anti-science, anti-change agent, anti-social justice, anti-health care, anti-worker, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-children, anti-health care, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-admissions policy change, anti-inclusion, anti-live-and-let-live people. Let them die. Don’t let these uncomfortable people, don’t let these uncomfortable people deter us from our bold march forward.
Asra Nomani, an education activist and vice president for strategy and investigations for the watchdog group Parents Defending Education, shared footage from the rally and counter protest on Twitter.
“I listened, stunned, as Michelle Leete, an executive of the NAACP and the PTA, put a target on the backs of parents just because they have a different point of view,” said Nomani, whose son recently graduated from Fairfax County Public Schools.
“What we heard tonight was hate speech, pure and simple. It was shocking that anyone would cheer and applaud a call to violence,” Nomani told the Daily Wire, “Ironically, her hateful, intolerant words are a perfect illustration of the divisive ideology of critical race theory in action. In the name of tolerance, it preaches intolerance and is a betrayal of all values of humanity and decency.”
Harry Jackson, who has three children in the Fairfax public school system and is president-elect of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Parent Teacher Student Association, told the Daily Wire, “I was in shock looking at the crowd, watching Ms. Leete pander to white liberals with her hateful rhetoric … Her call to violence against every kind of parent, including parents who oppose changes to admissions policies at schools like TJ, also reveal that she has a serious conflict of interest.”
In May, Nomani delivered a stirring speech where she slammed the Fairfax County Public Schools board for pushing “anti-racism” propaganda.
“And then by the fall, every single one of you voted to remove the merit-based race-blind admissions test to TJ. And we pled with you, as Asians, as an immigrant (I came at the age of 4, I knew no English), and you didn’t listen to us,” Nomani scolded the school board.
Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology, ranked the top math school in the country, instituted a “merit lottery,” where race became a factor in admissions and academic qualifications were a lesser determinant.
The Daily Mail reported that admissions data for the class of 2025 at the prestigious school shows that black students rose from 1% in 2021 to 7%, Hispanics grew from 3% to 11%, white students increased from 18% to 22%, but Asian students dropped from 73% to 54% because of the new standards.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen acknowledged “rapid inflation” will persist for several more months after she repeatedly downplayed the risk of consumer price increases. Americans can expect consumer prices to continue their rapid rise until returning to normal in the “medium term,” Yellen said Thursday in an interview with CNBC. But Yellen, along with top Federal Reserve officials, predicted inflation wouldn’t be a concern.
“We will have several more months of rapid inflation,” Yellen told CNBC. “So I’m not saying that this is a one-month phenomenon.”
“But I think over the medium term, we’ll see inflation decline back toward normal levels,” she said. “But, of course, we have to keep a careful eye on it.”
Yet in February, Yellen downplayed the risks of inflation, saying the Treasury Department had the tools to deal with the risk “if it materializes.” She also pushed back on former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’ warning that President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package would trigger massive, once-in-a-generation inflation.
Yellen added that the Biden administration was more worried about jobs than rising prices.
President Joe Biden speaks as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen listens during a White House meeting on April 9. (Amr Alfiky/Pool/Getty Images)
One month later, the Treasury secretary downplayed inflation again when asked if the $1,400 stimulus checks included in the relief package could boost prices, according to the Associated Press. She again pushed the legislation, saying it was key for a full economic recovery.
“I really don’t think that is going to happen,” she said in the March 8 interview, the AP reported. “We had a 3.5% unemployment rate before the pandemic and there was no sign of inflation increasing.”
Then, one week later, Yellen doubled down, arguing again that there wouldn’t be significant inflation.
“Is there a risk of inflation? I think there’s a small risk and I think it’s manageable,” Yellen told ABC News.
“I don’t think it’s a significant risk,” she continued. “And if it materializes, we’ll certainly monitor for it but we have tools to address it.”
However, consumer prices have surged faster than they have in decades, according to government data. Economists also expect inflation to rise higher and for longer than previously expected.
In addition, several major U.S. corporations have recently announced price increases while the highest number of small businesses have reported price hikes since 1981.
These Leftist can’t even lie convincingly anymore, and it obviously doesn’t bother them. When they lie it’s their native language.
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Commentary: A child receives a shot in the stock image above. (Melinda Nagy / Shutterstock)
Written
on July 15, 2021