Biden takes his Welcome Back Carter cosplay to the next level, fighting the plague of wokeness, and more disasterous Kyle Rittenhouse prosecutor missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
A group of Houthi rebels reportedly stormed the U.S. compound on Wednesday seeking “large quantities of equipment and materials,” according to regional reports translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. The raid comes just five days after the Houthis kidnapped Yemeni nationals who work for the U.S. embassy. “The alleged raid comes after the Houthis kidnapped three Yemeni nationals affiliated with the U.S. Embassy from one of the employee’s private residences in Sana’a on November 5,” according to MEMRI. At least 22 other Yemenis were kidnapped by the Houthis in recent weeks, “most of whom worked on the security staff guarding the embassy grounds,” according to MEMRI.
The State Department confirmed to the Free Beacon that the Yemeni staffers are being detained without explanation and that the Iran-backed militants stole property after breaching the American facility in Sana’a, which housed U.S. embassy staff prior to the suspension of operations there in 2015.
For a long time now, people have been watching the spectacle of Democrats grinding away at the sausage and fighting for their piece of the pie (to make a metaphoric meal). And it has not been a pretty picture.
The question raised by Tuesday’s debacle for Democrats is: Now that President Biden’s high poll ratings and good will are squandered, how do they turn the mishegoss into a winning message?
There’s some truth in what James Carville told Judy Woodruff: “What went wrong is this stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools.”
There’s also some truth in what Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Virginia Democrat in a tough re-election battle, told The Times’s Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns about the president: “Nobody elected him to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos.”
Biden has pursued his two bills with Captain Ahab-like zeal; he pines to be F.D.R. and eclipse Barack Obama, who pushed him aside for Hillary.
It’s Dowd and the Times, so I can’t say read the whole thing. But even Dowd can smell a dead fish rotting…
Kurt Schlicter: “Americans Are Waking Up To The Democrat’s Race Hustle.”
he smart, moral transcriptionists of our glorious ruling class have discovered what they contend is a terrible crime of wickedness – those rural monsters out there whose skin tone is pale voted for Republicans in astounding numbers. Blatant “whiteness” they call it, a malady that people who aren’t white can suffer from too. Just ask Winsome Sears. And so can the other minority voters who ditched the Democrat plantation in record numbers. But they also contend that voting for Democrats because of your race is great. If consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, these people are totally hobgoblin-free.
As a normal person, you will observe that this all makes no sense. That’s incorrect, because it makes perfect sense when you understand that all this race hustling is a garbage scam to secure the liberal establishment’s power. It’s morally illiterate, but the moral angle is part of the scam. See, voting for a Democrat or a Republican, to most folks, is just a thing. It’s morally neutral. Now, many vote for a party by habit. Others vote by the individual or by policies. Keeping the former group and coercing the second are the goals of racializing elections in order to cast casting your vote as a moral imperative.
Republican, bad.
Democrat, good.
Dig through the dross of “privilege” and “whiteness” and you get to the crux of the scam. They use race to turn what should be a choice based on rational self-interest into one based on (alleged) virtue. Suddenly, a vote for the Dem is not something Dems need to earn through competence and quality. It is something they are simply entitled to because they are on the side of righteousness. And this is super convenient because the Democrats just suck. They are terrible. Not even a year in and President * has managed to screw up everything his dusty claws have touched.
There were two main reasons that Virginia swung: government overreach from a party that claims to be advocating for middle class freedom, and willful ignorance (i.e. government under-reach) about the state of the economy, and inflation, in our country.
There’s no doubt that a tone of government overreach has grown to a fever pitch since President Biden took office. Whether it is forcing children to wear masks at school, counter-intuitive vaccine mandates which have resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs, or the idea of indoctrinating children too small to even read or write properly with elements of critical race theory, my guess would be that Virginians have simply had enough government in their lives for the time being. And another guess is that the swing state is likely a barometer for a large portion of the rest of the country.
Nearly everything that the Biden administration has done since he has taken office has likely appeared to centrist voters to be counterintuitive: he turned our country’s exit from Afghanistan into a humanitarian and economic travesty, he has pushed a Soviet-style propaganda campaign for vaccination mandates and most recently introduced the bizarre idea of paying $450,000 to the families of illegal immigrants separated at our border.
“It is bizarre,” a family member who voted for Biden said to me this weekend, while discussing Biden’s proposed $450,000 payments.
And therein lies a key axiom: there comes a point where even the most fervent Democrats realize that they have to side with common sense, even if it means disagreeing with the candidate they voted for. I am guessing that this is the principle that helped drive so many anti-Donald Trump voters in Virginia back to the sensibility of conservative government.
A metallurgist in Washington state pleaded guilty to fraud Monday after she spent decades faking the results of strength tests on steel that was being used to make U.S. Navy submarines.
Elaine Marie Thomas, 67, of Auburn, Washington, was the director of metallurgy at a foundry in Tacoma that supplied steel castings used by Navy contractors Electric Boat and Newport News Shipbuilding to make submarine hulls.
From 1985 through 2017, Thomas falsified the results of strength and toughness tests for at least 240 productions of steel — about half the steel the foundry produced for the Navy, according to her plea agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Tacoma. The tests were intended to show that the steel would not fail in a collision or in certain “wartime scenarios,” the Justice Department said.
Snip.
“Ms. Thomas never intended to compromise the integrity of any material and is gratified that the government’s testing does not suggest that the structural integrity of any submarine was in fact compromised,” Carpenter wrote. “This offense is unique in that it was neither motivated by greed nor any desire for personal enrichment. She regrets that she failed to follow her moral compass – admitting to false statements is hardly how she envisioned living out her retirement years.”
So, she just harmed national security and endangered the lives of American servicemen because she was lazy as fuck. Oh, that makes it all better…
Today was the fifth day of the trial by which ADA Thomas Binger’s is seeking to have Kyle Rittenhouse convicted and sentenced to life in prison for having shot three men (two fatally) the night of August 25, 2020 in Kenosha WI, when the city was suffering a tsunami of rioting, looting, and arson following the lawful shooting of a knife-wielding Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers.
And it would be hard to fully express what a catastrophe this day was for Prosecutor Binger.
The prosecution’s demise came into the courtroom in the form of its star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, famously struck in the right bicep as he closed on the fallen 17-year-old with a Glock pistol in his hand.
Grosskreutz is the only survivor from among the three men who were struck by Kyle’s desperately fired rounds, and the only one of Kyle’s attackers available to testify for the State in this prosecution (the fourth primary attacker, “jump kick man,” had the unbelievably good fortune to be missed twice by the 17-year-old, and has since disappeared off the face of the Earth).
Grosskreutz is fortunate that modern American courtrooms don’t do trial by combat, because otherwise he’d have been carried out of the courtroom mortality wounded by his own testimony.
Kasparian said she thought Rittenhouse first chased after Joseph Rosenbaum, sparking the incident that ended with the teen fatally shooting Rosenbaum. However, it was Rosenbaum who chased after Rittenhouse. Moreover, a gun was fired from a third party just seconds before Rittenhouse fatally shot Rosenbaum.
“I was wrong about that, okay, so I want to correct the record,” Kasparian said on her news show. “Look, these details matter, because if you’re going to make an argument that you acted in self-defense, there needs to be some proof that there was an imminent threat.”
Some Rittenhouse trial tweets:
PROSECUTOR: "You decided you needed to run because of the fire?
Text I got from a friend re: The Rittenhouse Judge
“So we’re in essence at a place now where news is so filtered you have to find some random dude in Ohio who posts the entire clip on YouTube sans any commentary, any editing, any title cards, etc to really know what happened.” pic.twitter.com/f92L7lSraZ
These Antifa dumbfucks were literally chasing a guy who was carrying a rifle. Then they threw him to throw ground and tried to shoot him. What did they think was going to happen? pic.twitter.com/4EMJRDM9lN
Why are so many Democrats advocating for Kyle Rittenhouse to be found guilty of murder and locked up the rest of his life? Regardless of the evidence. Why?
I don’t think the progressive out there really understand how much the rioting was a turn off to moderates or just left of center types, and left leaning news media coverage was attempting to gaslight us while we watched it all on tv and social media for ourselves
After you learn you have been duped by the left-leaning press on the Kyle Rittenhouse story, do an Internet search on "Fine People Hoax," first on DuckDuckGo and then on Google. Compare.
Make sure to wear a hat because your head is about to explode.
Based on the absolute ass-kicking delivered to the Democrats last Tuesday in my home state of Virginia, you’d think they’d get the message that maybe its time to move on from their goals of disarming American citizens. Based on the reaction so far,though the Democrats are in deep denial or simply unwilling to waver on their commitment to denying Americans their Second Amendment rights, and disparaging those who exercise them.
Witness the reaction to Republican Winsome Sears winning election as Lt. Governor in Virginia. Sears is the first Black woman to win statewide election in Virginia, but Democrats by and large have preferred to focus on the campaign ad with her proudly holding an AR-15. In fact, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che declared that the picture was actually good news for Democrats, because “nothing will get Republicans to support gun control faster than this picture.”
Che should come hang out with me in central Virginia sometime. I guarantee that conservative white folks are far more comfortable with Winsome Sears (or himself) owning an AR-15 than his white liberal neighbors in New York City. The “tolerant Left” is never more bigoted than when it comes to conservatives of color, which is evident when it comes to the Left’s collective disdain over Sears’ embrace of the Second Amendment.
Combine the “everyone who disagrees with me is racist” argument with a “and hell yes we’re coming for your guns” and it’s no wonder that Democrats couldn’t even muster 20% of the vote in more than a dozen rural Virginia counties. Heck, my own county, which went for Barack Obama twice before flipping to Trump in 2016, saw Democrats get less than 40% of the vote, which is a big deal. And I know firsthand how important gun control was for many of these voters, who knew that Terry McAuliffe was going to try to ram through his gun and magazine ban if elected. These folks have as much disdain for most Republicans as they do Democrats, but there was no way they were going to sit out this election.
While there are some Democrats sounding the alarm bell, none of them are highlighting the need for the party to ghost the gun control lobby.
Spoiler: Democrats aren’t going to change course because they are radically, institutionally hostile to civilian gun ownership.
“Black Lives Matter Is the Real Domestic Terrorist Threat.” They’re currently threatening to burn new York City some more. “Democrats at the highest levels have been giving BLM cover since the group was founded. They either excuse BLM’s violence as some part of a protracted mea culpa, or they deny that the violence is happening at all.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The current MIT administration has caved repeatedly to the demands of “wokeness,” treating its students unfairly, compromising the quality of its staff, and damaging the institution and academic freedom at large.
We object to MIT’s politically correct measures, including the firing of its Catholic chaplain. In the early days of the George Floyd protests, before the details of Floyd’s death were clear, Father Daniel Moloney sent a letter outlining his thoughts on the event to the university’s Catholic community. It was a sincere examination of conscience from a person whose job it was to examine conscience, yet it prompted his immediate dismissal. MIT’s leadership apparently took umbrage at his statement of these simple facts: that George Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” (based on his multiple criminal convictions) and that “most people in the country have framed [Floyd’s death] as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that.”
Moloney did not present these statements as justification for Floyd’s death; to the contrary, his letter begins, “George Floyd was killed by a police officer, and shouldn’t have been.” But MIT found the letter intolerable and fired the chaplain. (We are not Catholic, by the way, but believe fairness transcends religion.)
We also deplore MIT’s new mandatory diversity training. In the autumn of 2020, MIT sent an email to new and current students informing them that they would be unable to register for spring classes if they failed to undergo wokeness instruction. In the email, MIT outlined two required trainings: one on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” and the other entitled “Sexual Assault Prevention Ongoing: Healthy Relationships.” Portions of the training materials are available here. The compulsory videos contain deftly worded but fatuous questions implying that straight white males are at the “intersection” of all oppressive behaviors. Everyone else is an oppressed victim, with extra points for being a member of multiple minority groups. Thus, the concept of “intersectionality” is a kind of conspiracy theory of victimization.
The war against Critical Race Theory Texas classrooms takes a scalp.
The Black principal of a majority-white Texas high school who has been embroiled in a controversy over critical race theory was forced to resign after months of accusations that he indoctrinated students.
The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board of trustees voted Monday to part ways with the principal, James Whitfield, who was suspended this year at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Fort Worth area.
The school board had voted in September not to renew Whitfield’s contract, NBC Dallas-Forth Worth reported.
Whitfield is the principles who accused residents of “systemic racism” and demanded students “commit to being an anti-racist.” (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
Enes Kanter refuses to sweep Chinese oppression under the rug:
The genocidal Chinese government and the insecure tyrant behind it all XI JINPING must not be allowed to host the upcoming Winter Olympics.
Toshiba is also breaking itself into three parts, infrastructure, semiconductors and devices. Toshiba used to be one of the top semicodnuctor companies in the world in the 1980s, but I thought they had spun off semi operations as Kioxia in 2018.
Democrats take a good, hard, sober look at their policies to determine why voters abandoned them in drove. Ha, just kidding! It’s all racism all the way down:
In response to Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win in yesterday’s Virginia gubernatorial race — as well as Republican wins all the way down the ballot — left-wing pundits and celebrities immediately began to assert that the Democratic losses were the result of voters’ white-supremacist sympathies.
Yeah, that’s the reason voters turned out in droves to elect a black Republican Lt. Governor: white supremacy.
Even Politico writers got in on the action, asserting in this morning’s newsletter that Youngkin’s strategy included “racial appeals to working-class white voters.” During elections results coverage last night, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace asserted that “critical race theory, which isn’t real, turned the suburbs 15 points to the Trump-insurrection endorsed Republican.”
Also on MSNBC last night, host Joy Reid spent much of the evening insisting that the education issue, an enormous part of Youngkin’s successful appeal to Virginia parents, was a dog whistle for racism. Plenty of progressives, including Reid herself, began pushing this line well before Election Day.
And that worked out so well for them.
Already, progressives are pointing to exit polls showing an enormous swing to the GOP among white working-class women, who voted for Joe Biden last fall but supported Youngkin this time around — the nasty implication being that these women were motivated to vote by Republicans’ supposedly racist agenda. Totally ignored, or even outright dismissed, are the many nonwhite voters who backed the GOP.
McAuliffe himself obliquely indulged in this fantasy in his statement conceding the election.
On several counts, progressives have begun to coalesce around a narrative that doesn’t hang together — one that displays a shocking unwillingness to grapple with the problems facing their party. For one thing, it makes little sense to assert both that critical race theory doesn’t exist and that parents who oppose it are doing so because they don’t want their children to learn about race or slavery.
If progressives admit that CRT exists at all, they pretend that it’s merely an effort to teach school children about the complicated history of race in our country. In fact, a quick investigation reveals that the proposed curricula contain, in most cases, highly inaccurate history aimed at indoctrinating kids into racially divisive identity politics.
Parents have legitimate concerns about such curricula, including understandable resistance to misrepresenting history, stoking guilt and division among children, and perhaps even encouraging race-based bullying. Dismissing these parents as white supremacists for having these concerns is unlikely to succeed either in persuading them to think differently about the curriculum in question or to vote for Democrats the next time around.
Finally, the “white supremacist” theory for Democratic losses intentionally ignores that two of the top Republican candidates voted into office were Winsome Sears, a female Jamaican immigrant elected lieutenant governor, and Jason Miyares, a Cuban American who was elected attorney general. It’s hard to imagine why Virginians voting en masse for the GOP out of thinly veiled racial animus would throw in their lot with this ticket.
Logic has never been the Democratic Party’s strong suit.
While former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s loss to Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin was cemented very late on election night, in practice the day that he forfeited the gubernatorial race was September 28. That was when, during a debate with Youngkin, McAuliffe, a Democrat, made the statement that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
That was his response to questions about school curriculum and the fury that had taken hold at many local school board meetings, where irate parents assailed education leaders for allegedly supporting what has been termed “critical race theory” by right-wing activists who oppose it. CRT is a divisive concept, in part because progressives and conservative disagree sharply about what it even is. Many members of the liberal media don’t even believe it exists, and have accused the GOP of fabricating the issue. As Youngkin’s victory became apparent, MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace lamented that critical race theory, “which isn’t even real,” had swung the suburbs 15 points in Republicans’ favor.
Well, they can’t really racialize it because a number of Black parents and immigrant parents have stood with their White brothers and sisters to reject critical race theory, which is very harmful to Black and minority children. It’s a violation of our civil rights laws. It’s un-American because it involves shaming and bullying children and it runs counter to our Constitution. And so, they can say what they want with their Marxist agenda and their false narratives but the American people spoke in my home state of Virginia and I could not be more proud of them.
McAuliffe’s loss is a victory for all Americans. Why? Because it was a resounding rejection of efforts to divide us by race, the stripping of parental rights, and arrogant, deaf leaders. This benefits us all.
Democratic political strategist James Carville blamed his party’s recent losses and weak performance in state elections on “stupid wokeness” on Wednesday.
“PBS NewsHour” host Judy Woodruff asked Carville what went wrong for the Democratic Party in the Virginia gubernatorial race in which Republican Glenn Youngkin beat former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
“What went wrong is just stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that,” Carville said.
“It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” he added. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”
Will Democrats heed his warning and abandon their suicidal drive for social justice, forced transgenderism and critical race theory?
Other news I missed: The Alexandria Ocasio Cortez-backed socialist running as a Democrat for mayor of Buffalo lost, despite being the only candidate on the ballot.
The incumbent Democratic mayor of Buffalo, running as a write-in candidate, declared victory Tuesday night as he held a nearly 20-point lead over his Democratic Party opponent.
India Walton, a socialist backed by many high-profile progressives, refused to concede to Mayor Byron Brown in the highly publicized contest until her campaign sees “all the votes,” her spokesman Jesse Myerson told The Post via text.
Brown, 63, who lost to Walton in the June Democratic primary, claimed what would be a stunning victory in a speech to supporters from his campaign headquarters shortly after 11 p.m.
“Today’s election, it’s not just a referendum on the future of the city of Buffalo, it was a referendum on the future of our democracy,” Brown said.
Both Walton and Brown are black, so I’m sure the reason he won was racism…
Republicans won four contested City Council races in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island and had a shot at taking a fifth in a potential upset.
Republican Inna Vernikov thumped her Democratic opponent Steve Saperstein for an open seat in southern Brooklyn’s 48th Council District by nearly 30 points.
With 87 percent of the vote in, Vernikov, a 37-year-old lawyer and Ukraine native, garnered 10,768 votes, or 65 percent of the vote, to 5,870 votes, or 35 percent, for Saperstein.
She will succeed ex-Councilman Chaim Deutsch, who forfeited his seat earlier this year when he was convicted of tax fraud.
The district includes many Russian-speaking and Jewish immigrants in the communities of Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, Sheepshead Bay and Homecrest.
Vernikov ran as an unabashed supporter of former President Donald Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. endorsed her in a robocall to voters. She also opposed coronavirus vaccine mandates.
“I’m very excited. This election victory shows that the people are fed up with the progressive policies that have destroyed our city and district,” Vernikov told The Post last night.
Snip.
Vickie Paladino led former Democratic Councilman Tony Avella with 99 percent of the votes in. Paladino had the support of 12,143 votes, or 50 percent, to 10,490, or 43 percent, for Avella. John-Alexander Sakelos, running on the Conservative and Save Our City lines, received 1,729 votes or 7 percent.
Snip.
In another shocker, Democratic Councilman Justin Brannan, who is running to become the next council speaker, is fighting for political survival.
With 95 percent of the vote in, Brannan was locked in a dead heat with Republican Brian Fox in the 43rd District that takes in communities including Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights.
Other Republicans holding onto GOP seats: David Carr (not the former Texans quarterback) and Joann Ariola, who beat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-backed Felica Singh.
Another shocking loss for the hard left in deep-blue Seattle: “Republican Ann Davison is leading police- and jail-abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy in the race for city attorney.” Also, in the Mayor’s race, “Bruce Harrell, a former City Council president who urged adding police, including unarmed officers, rather than cutting funding, held a commanding lead of nearly 30 percentage points over current Council President Lorena González as additional ballots were counted Wednesday.” To be fair, Davison is a pretty nominal Republican.
Though it looks like Murphy will hold on to the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, “Republican Edward Durr, Truck Driver Who Spent $153 on Campaign, Defeats New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney.”
The second-largest school bond in the state faced a narrow defeat Tuesday night as Leander ISD voters rejected the $727.2 million proposition. The proposal would’ve financed the construction of new buildings, including five new schools, and the renovation of two existing schools to expand capacity.
The final margin was one percentage point, amounting to 215 votes difference in the school district with over 40,000 students. Leander ISD said the bond, along with two others on the ballot Tuesday, was necessary for the population growth the district expects to come.
Those other two finished with slim margins, as well. Proposition B, a $33 million bond to finance technology upgrades including laptops for students and faculty, passed by 805 votes, and Proposition C, a performing arts center upgrade, failed by 765 votes.
That was a pretty consequential off-year election.
Not only did Glenn Youngkin win, but Republicans swept statewide offices in Virginia, with Winsome Sears winning Lieutenant Governor and Jason Miyares winning Attorney General. (And for those that worry that Youngkin wasn’t quite beyond the margin of fraud, Terry McAuliffe conceded.)
Turns out that Critical Race Theory and radical transgenderism are deeply unpopular among actual voters. Who knew?
Here in Virginia, the sun is shining a little brighter, the birds are chirping sweetly, the leaves are turning vibrant colors, and Republicans just stomped the bejeebers out of Democrats up and down the ballot. A “bloodbath,” as University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato told Rachel Maddow last night. “A five-alarm fire,” as Van Jones declared on CNN.
Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race by about 70,000 votes over Terry McAuliffe, Winsome Sears won the lieutenant-governor’s race by about 56,000 votes, and Jason Miyares won the state attorney-general’s race by about 34,000 votes. Democratic incumbent AG Mark Herring was the guy who called upon governor Ralph Northam to resign, despite his own past wearing of blackface. The night was so bad that McAuliffe’s surrogates canceled on Chuck Todd and wouldn’t come out and eat their humble pie.
Republicans picked up six seats to win control of the House of Delegates — the oldest continuous legislative body in the Western Hemisphere — with 51 seats to the Democrats’ 49 seats. This is one of the indicators that even though Terry McAuliffe was a deeply flawed candidate, the problem for Democrats was not just him. (With McAuliffe’s defeat, the last gasp of the Clinton political legacy ends.) This should dispel the defeatist “Virginia is a blue state now” talk among Republicans.
Snip.
Once schools did come back, some parents didn’t like what they saw in their children’s curricula and also how schools handled some big issues. What did it mean if teachers were instructed to “embrace critical race theory,” “engage in race-conscious teaching and learning,” “teach code-switching in positive, nonjudgmental ways,” and “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems”? What kinds of materials are appropriate for sex education, and what kinds of materials are age-appropriate for school libraries? Do schools quickly and accurately report sexual assault and violence, or are they trying to sweep it under the rug?
And when parents objected, the National Association of School Boards labeled them “domestic terrorists” and demanded “the resources of the U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, and its National Threat Assessment Center” to investigate them.
As Robby Soave summarized, “The public school system abused families’ trust during the pandemic, and the reckoning has just begun.”
Nebraska senator Ben Sasse contended that the teachers’ unions delivered the governor’s mansion to Youngkin.
“The Virginia GOP’s MVP has to go to Randi Weingarten, the leader of a radical teachers’ union that ignored actual teaching, politicized everything, shut down schools, and literally tried to tell parents to shut up. Congrats, Randi, you really turned out the vote,” Sasse declared in a released statement. “Congrats to Glenn Youngkin as well, on a sane, well-run campaign — and may all American politicians finally reject drunken, anti-parent rage from radicals like Randi Weingarten.”
Some Twitter reactions to Virginia:
Maybe "your kids belong to us and also fuck you" was not the greatest education slogan for Democrats to run on
I’m very surprised to learn that classifying parents as domestic terrorists for not wanting their children to learn racist and pornographic material in school is not a winning election strategy.
If screaming about racism tanks your previously-favored campaign in a few short weeks, maybe the lesson you draw from your loss shouldn't be "we didn't scream hard enough about racism."
Youngkin would have lost by ten points if he’d remained in the mode of a cookie cutter Republican. Instead he embraced the culture war, started talking about issues people actually care about, and everything changed.
If Sears were a Democrat, the leftwing media would never tire of telling us how historic her election was. Since she’s a Republican, the MSM tried to make her all but invisible. What was the media’s reaction to Republican ticket with a black Lt. Governor and a Hispanic attorney general winning? It was because of racism:
To the surprise of absolutely no one who’s been paying attention to the execrable members of the mainstream media, their response to this momentous occasion was to say that the Republicans won because of racism.
They’re not only evil, but they’re also lazy too.
As we have discussed on many occasions, the Democrats and their media mouthpieces are truly broken people. They were barely tethered to reality when Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016. His victory ripped them from any moorings that they had. Now incapable of rational thought, all they can do is reflexively belch “Racism!” whenever bested by a Republican. They’ve got nothing else, which is why that’s all they’ve got in response to the Virginia results despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
They’re still lying about Critical Race Theory, which is just going to keep making them dig deeper holes for themselves. There were stories about anti-CRT conservatives taking over school boards, like this one in Texas. Of course, NBC News spun that as the victors being anti-diversity. The biggest of the lies about CRT is that it’s “anti-racist,” which it is not. It’s racist, it’s commie, and it’s all about fomenting division.
It wasn’t just CRT that was on the ballot in Virginia last night, it was also a referendum on what the drooling idiot usurper in the Oval Office has done to the country since January. The media won’t dwell on that though, they’re still tasked with carrying all of the water for President LOL Eightyonemillion.
I’ve been writing and saying for months that the egregious overreach by the Democrats would be their undoing. This is the first electoral manifestation of that.
If Virginia was a wakeup call for race and transgenderism-obsessed Democrats, then what are we to make of New Jersey? There Republican Jack Ciattarelli holds a razor-thin lead over Democratic incumbent Philip Murphy in the governor’s race. If that holds up, it would be a seismic event akin to Chris Christie’s victory there in 2009. That provided a foretaste of the red tsunami that would give Republicans control of the House and Senate in 2010, even if Republican enthusiasm for Christie himself waned considerably over the years. (Update: Murphy is now ahead.)
Bad news on for Austin residents: Proposition A, the proposal for adequately funding the police, went down to defeat. It wasn’t a small defeat, either. A whopping 102,791 against to only 46,433 for. And we’re left to figure out an electorate that voted to reinstate the homeless camping ban but didn’t want to refund police in the face of record murders. Maybe I should do a roundtable discussion on the topic.
I’m hearing the same about Cypress-Fairbanks, with three incumbents going down to defeat. Holly Hansen at The Texan is on that beat, and I’ll update this post when her piece is up. Update: Here it is:
Following a year of heated controversy in the state’s third-largest school district, challengers have unseated three long-time incumbents for positions on the school board.
The winners in the Cypress-Fairbanks ISD (CFISD) election — Natalie Blasingame, Scott Henry, and Lucas Scanlon — were all endorsed by the Harris County Republican Party (HCRP), the Conservative Coalition of Harris County (CCHC), and business political networking organization BIZPAC.
These are two stories that have merged into a bigger story. Parents in Loudoun County, Virginia (a D.C. suburb that includes most of Dulles airport) started fighting against the school board’s imposition of Critical Race Theory, a debate that became so hot and heated (especially after it was revealed that the board had suppressed news about the rape of a students by a boy wearing a skirt in the girl’s bathroom) that it became the main issue in the Virginia Governor’s race between Clinton crony retread Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Glenn Youngkin.
So here’s a roundup of the issue before voters go to the polls Tuesday:
The anti-Trump, pedo-protecting Lincoln Project was forced to issue an emergency press release Friday afternoon after Democratic operatives they paid to impersonate tiki-torch wielding Trump supporters were doxxed, after they stood in front of Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s campaign bus.
The hoax was spread by several notables, including Terry McAuliffe’s spokeswoman, Christina Freundlich.
It was also spread by MSM journos [see the Glenn Greenwald thread below].
And then… the internet figured out who the operatives were;
One of them is the financial director for the Virginia Young Democrats… and since being outed as such, has made his Twitter private.
With the race tightening, Democrats have been doubling down on their infernal strategy of labeling Youngkin as a racist.
Retweeting a race-baiting anti-Youngkin ad from the “Republican” Lincoln Project, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) opined that the only reason Youngkin doesn’t say openly racist things about black people is because it would be politically damaging, so he “codes it with ‘Critical Race Theory.’”
“There’s a word @GlennYoungkin would really like to say to talk about black people, but he knows he can’t, so he codes it with ‘Critical Race Theory.’ Don’t take my word, trust the honorable Republicans who made this ad and know how this ugly strategy works,” wrote [Democratic Rep. Eric] Swalwell on Twitter, quote tweeting the Lincoln Project’s latest ad.
The news media are the ones spreading fake news and inflaming racial tensions for partisan reasons:
The people who most vocally claim to be worried about disinformation and Fake News — to the point that they want to censor the internet in its name — are, by far, the most aggressive and prolific disseminators of disinformation and Fake News. Always. Dems & corporate outlets.
White Democrats sitting with their white families in their white neighborhoods now believe they own racism and race discourse, to be deployed for their amusement and fun, or with any slight belief that it will advance their interests. They're the owners👇https://t.co/kGNaSD3VZJ
Speaking of white Dem scumbags who think they own racism discourse, the Lincoln Project – led by Rick Wilson, last seen frolicking on a boat with a cooler covered by the Confederate Flag – admits to staging the fake white nationalist rally in Virginia:https://t.co/P5yH4D1wB4
I can't think of any clearer expression of the rot of US liberalism and Dem Party politics than the white scumbags of the Lincoln Project — MSNBC stars — engineering a fake racist rally while Dem operatives & MSNBC analysts used it to accuse Youngkin of racism. Utterly sick. pic.twitter.com/sqk7QTvoL7
And I'd ask rhetorically whether the Lincoln Project admitting to having perpetrated this racist fraud — while MSNBC analysts spread it all over the internet — means MSNBC will stop having them on, but if fleecing donors & covering up for child predators didn't, this won't.
On June 22, Scott Smith was arrested at a Loudoun County, Virginia, school board meeting, a meeting that was ultimately deemed an “unlawful assembly” after many attendees vocally opposed a policy on transgender students.
What people did not know is that weeks prior on May 28, Smith says, a boy allegedly wearing a skirt entered a girls’ bathroom at nearby Stone Bridge High School, where he sexually assaulted Smith’s ninth-grade daughter.
Juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that a boy was charged with two counts of forcible sodomy – one count of anal sodomy and one count of forcible fellatio – related to an incident that day at that school.
Students in the district staged a walkout in protest. The students were from “Broad Run High School, where the attacker was relocated and is still technically enrolled.”
A law firm that employed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is being paid handsomely to fight victims of alleged sexual abuse in schools, on behalf of a school system that the girls say failed to protect them.
In one case the Hunton Andrews Kurth law firm, where McAuliffe served as a senior adviser from 2019 until recently, is battling a young woman who says that she was repeatedly raped on her Fairfax County middle school campus as a 12-year old and that she was slashed with a knife, burned with a lighter, anally penetrated, and gang raped.
The law firm and McAuliffe’s campaign did not return request for comment, but McAuliffe reported income apparently linked to the firm in 2021, after announcing his run for governor of Virginia on December 8, 2020. Later advertisements from the firm for McAuliffe fundraisers refer to him as a “former colleague.”
The girl in the middle school case said she was afraid of having her real name attached because one of her alleged tormentors had threatened to kill her if she came forward. The law firm is seeking to have the lawsuit thrown out because it was filed under a pseudonym, even though there is no dispute that the school system knows who she is. A judge rejected Hunton’s argument, but it filed an appeal on behalf of its client, the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS).
In a separate case, a girl alleged that after FCPS administrators were told of an unwanted sexual incident on a band trip, a school security officer told her there was no point in seeking criminal charges, and the school gave an award to her alleged abuser. Hunton told the court that the school system lost documentation showing its investigation of the allegations – which occurred in part because it was not using a sexual harassment allegation database that it had promised to use pursuant to a federal settlement in the other girl’s case. In both cases, a women’s rights group filed “amicus” briefs to express opposition to Hunton’s arguments.
Joining McAuliffe’s former law firm and FCPS in the latter case was the National School Boards Association, which filed its own amicus brief. The trio is banking on an aggressive interpretation of Title IX, a law that provides protections in sexual assault cases, that would be more favorable to school administrators and less favorable to victims. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals smacked down their logic, but Hunton has signaled its intent to take the case to the Supreme Court. A win there would mean the same interpretation would apply to schools across the country.
Wait, a Bill Clinton crony involved in attempts to silence and discredit rape victims? Try to contain your shock.
“Brenda Sheridan, chair of the Loudoun County Public Schools board, criticized parents protesting the use of critical race theory in schools, claiming “[t]here is no rational debate [on the issue]…Critical race theory has been manipulated to replace what is really equity initiatives and teaching students about their biases and our teachers about their biases.” “Equity” is the tell that they are trying to impose critical race theory. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Chris Rufo has proof that Critical race Theory is being taught in Virginia schools, in the form of official documents. (Hat tip: Twitchy.)
Woman who survived China’s Cultural revolution denounces Critical Race Theory:
Loudon County School board meeting: Virginia teacher and mom who survived Maoist China's Cultural Revolution purge warns against the dangers of Critical Race Theory 'indoctrination camps' teaching 'neo-racism in schools'. pic.twitter.com/i4Eya10RGa
The Loudoun County Sheriff says he’s not going to be the school board’s enforcer:
The Loudoun County Superintendent asked the Sheriff's office for undercover agents to track parents at school board meetings, but the Sheriff refused, saying there wasn't "any justification" for such repressive measures. https://t.co/w1x8y93tqYpic.twitter.com/wnj6mKxh6g
The school boards want the full power of the federal government to silence critics and to stop people from saying things school board members do not want to hear.
What they don’t want to hear is that Critical Race Theory is racist anti-white indoctrination. They don’t want to hear that cloth masks don’t stop any virus. And school boards really don’t want to hear that a boy in a skirt raped a girl in a bathroom.
Boy do they not want to hear about that last one.
In its letter, the association cited 20 incidents. There are 14,000 school boards in America. That’s a pretty paltry amount, and the cases cited were dubious.
In the letter, the organization said, “In Virginia, an individual was arrested, another man was ticketed for trespassing, and a third person was hurt during a school board meeting discussion distinguishing current curricula from critical race theory and regarding equity issues.”
That was a reference to the Loudoun County School Board meeting on June 22, in which Scott Smith, 48, tried to confront the board about the rape of his daughter in the restrooms by a boy in a skirt.
The board had closed off discussion after retired state Senator Dick Black spoke. He tweeted, “The LCPS shut down the public input after the audience erupted in applause at the end of my speech. Hundreds of parents continued to rally for hours to send the message that these CRT policies are racist. Parents and teachers, stand up for your children now.”
Smith then tried to speak. The board had deputies arrest him. That led to a scrum. He was charged with trespassing — at a public meeting in a public building. He still faces a trial.
The board then shut down the meeting and continued the meeting the next day in private. I am not sure how Virginia’s open meetings law works, but if it allows this, then the law needs to be changed.
The backlash surprised me. Democrat Terry McAuliffe fueled it. He is seeking his old job as governor back.
In a debate, he said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
That appeased his teacher union supporters and the snob set.
But it also set in motion a process that had state school board associations withdrawing from the national board, which now has withdrawn its letter. There is no way in hell that 14,000 school boards are going to go along with branding parents domestic terrorists.
The New York Post reported, “The National School Boards Association board of directors Friday repudiated a letter its two top officials sent to President Biden, which precipitated Attorney General Merrick Garland’s order that the FBI to investigate complaints of threats to school officials from parents.
“In a message to NSBA members, the board said that ‘we regret and apologize for the letter,’ which was sent Sept. 29 and co-signed by association CEO Chip Slaven and President Viola Garcia.”
Retired Republican Congressman Peter King of New York believes Democrats stepped on a rake this time.
King wrote, “A sleeping giant has been awakened. Parents and taxpayers are taking traditional school board issues and controversies into the political arena. As parents continue to mobilize, they can be expected to bring other child-related issues — such as school violence, open borders, and the inability to buy Christmas toys — into next year’s midterm congressional campaigns. This cannot be good news for Democrats, who will have to play defense on all these issues while being compelled to explain why the Biden administration has sicced the FBI on parents who publicly protest school policies.
“Intended or not, this grassroots school board movement is a real-world response to the expanded influence of progressives and socialists on government and education. The awakened giant is fighting back!”
I hope that rake hits Democrats right where it hurts.
Also: “The January 6 protest at the Capitol was not an insurrection. A boy in a skirt is not a girl. And Scott Smith is not a domestic terrorist.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Who will win in Virginia? Any pollster worth their crosstabs should tell you they don’t know. It’s too close. All of the latest polls are tied or within the margin of error. It shouldn’t be that way, which is why Youngkin has the edge. He shouldn’t be this close.
For a GOP candidate with the former president’s endorsement — and McAuliffe’s constant reminder of it — we’re likely missing some of the Trump effect in our polling. This is the non-response bias that keeps me up at night as a pollster — the notion that those who answer our questions, particularly in contentious races, are somehow different than those who don’t.
It would not surprise me if Youngkin is ahead at this point, and that he wins in November.
Three reasons:
Core message
Youngkin has focused most of his campaign on education, which is an extremely savvy move for a first-time candidate. While most elections don’t turn on education, this time it might. Parents have been upset with the closing of schools and limitation of activities. Some parents are furious over masks and critical race theory.
Youngkin has said that he will leave masking decisions up to parents, not school systems. Moreover, he is for parents making decisions on virtually all educational issues, an empowering message. McAuliffe, instead, stands with institutions and unions. While McAuliffe is right on masking, standing against parents is a very bad message, which he’s handled very badly.
Handling opposition research
Youngkin has been masterful at countering opposition research hits, which have been the core of McAuliffe’s campaign. Shot: Youngkin plays footsie with 2020 truthers. Chaser: McAuliffe did it twice. Shot: Youngkin wants Texas-style abortion rules in Virginia. Chaser: Youngkin said in a debate he would shorten the period when a women can get an abolition to where a fetus feels pain, which is about two to four weeks less than it is now. Shot: Youngkin is against masks. Chaser: Youngkin wants parents to decide, not school boards.
In each of these cases, Youngkin mitigates the damage of the attack, and — in some cases — returns fire more powerfully. While Youngkin is a newbie to politics, he’s campaigning like a pro.
Voter enthusiasm
Finally, first-time candidate Youngkin has far stronger voter enthusiasm than the lifetime political hack and retread governor McAuliffe. The commonwealth allows governors to return for another run after four years, but it’s generally a bad political look for the party.
Democrats have been in power here for several years, and it’s resulted in a fair amount of corruption and far-too-left of center policies for this purple state. Trump twice masked it as a blue state, but it’s really not. Virginia is two states, north and south, and the counties that go blue and red roughly split. Being the change candidate in this environment fuels enthusiasm.
There’s literally nothing new and exciting about McAuliffe. Democrats are fighting with each other just up the road in Washington, deadlocked on policy, and Virginia’s candidate is unusually tied to the party. A sign of a lack of enthusiasm for Democrats: McAuliffe admitted on a recent call that Biden is unpopular here.
There are other signs — or lack of them. Drive around Loudoun County, the most up-for-grabs one in the commonwealth, and you will have to search for a McAuliffe yard sign. Yes, yard signs are overrated as a persuasive political tactic, but they reflect voter enthusiasm. This is not upstate or downstate. This is right in the middle, and McAuliffe is invisible, while Youngkin is everywhere. If you are a low-information voter, you could be excused for thinking that there is only one name on the ballot. McAuliffe has run a negative campaign, while Youngkin has a set of policies that are coherent and different.
One reason McAuliffe might do better: voting fraud:
Earlier this month, Fairfax County, Virginia — a locale that broke 70-30 for President Joe Biden and Democrat Sen. Mark Warner in 2020 — previewed the attacks on election integrity likely planned for the midterm cycle of 2022 and beyond. There, election officials in the deep-blue county approved absentee and mail-in ballot applications lacking the statutorily mandated last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, then promptly mailed these unauthenticated individuals ballots for next Tuesday’s election.
While last week the Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP), a public policy organization dedicated to election integrity, filed suit against the county registrar and the three members of the Fairfax County Electoral Board responsible for flouting state election law, a hearing on the case is not scheduled until Friday. By then, the election will be only days away and a court is unlikely to order ballots returned by the deadline discarded.
We saw this precise scenario come to pass throughout the United States in 2020, with state officials ignoring the election code dictates established by the legislative branch. But the lawlessness happened too late for lawsuits to wind through the court system in time for the decision to matter.
Greetings, and welcome to a Saturday LinkSwarm! To get this out, even a day late, I’ve tossed all the Virginia Governor’s race/Louden County news into a separate post, hopefully on tap for tomorrow.
One of President Biden’s first acts on immigration is to suspend investigations, arrests, and deportations of most criminal aliens for the next 100 days. In a memo titled “Review of and Interim Revision to Civil Immigration Enforcement and Removal Policies and Procedures”, sent on Wednesday to all immigration agency heads, Acting DHS Secretary David Pekoske announced the deportation freeze and new enforcement priorities that go into effect now. The memo imposes restrictions on immigration enforcement actions that are even tighter than those adopted (with disastrous results) by the Obama administration, and make the country a sanctuary not only for criminal aliens, but all who are here in defiance of our laws.
According to the memo, virtually all removals will stop for 100 days. In addition, only the following categories of illegal aliens will be subject to removal as of February 1, 2020:
National security threats — those who have been involved in or are suspected of involvement in terrorism, or who are otherwise deemed a threat;
Recent illegal border crossers — those who have arrived illegally after November 1, 2020; and
Aggravated felons — those who are currently incarcerated for an aggravated felony conviction and who are determined to be a threat to public safety.
If you’re any other kind of illegal alien felon, Democrats evidently want you here, victimizing Americans.
In practice, this means that ICE must release criminal aliens and others in custody who are not covered in these definitions. This will include aliens convicted of domestic violence, sex offenses, drunk driving, theft causing loss of less than $10,000, vehicular homicide, an infinite number of misdemeanor crimes, and much more. It means that when USCIS refuses green cards or other benefits because the applications were fraudulent, that unqualified applicant will be able to stay anyway. It means that in the next 100 days, if a local police officer arrests a previously deported gang member, even one with a serious criminal history, for a new crime that is not an aggravated felony, ICE will not be able to take action to remove that gang member again.
“Joe Biden to Ban Cash Bail for Violent Criminals — in the Interest of ‘Equity.'” There’s no end to the number of other people’s dead bodies social justice warriors are willing to step over on their way to utopia…
San Francisco prosecutors quit, and District Attorney Chesa Boudin faces a second recall effort over failure to prosecute crimes.
Walgreens closed 22 stores in San Francisco where thefts under $950 are effectively decriminalized.
A couple of readers asked “Why just San Francisco?” if it was California Proposition 47 that put the $950 limit on nonviolent misdemeanors.
The answer is total lack of enforcement in San Francisco.
Please note San Francisco DA faces second recall effort as residents ‘fed up’ with progressive ‘zero consequence’ policies.
A second recall effort launched against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin demonstrates how residents are “fed up” with his progressive policies, as his push to reduce jail funding and refusal to prosecute repeat offenders ensures the streets remain marred with open-air drug dealing and violent crime now stretching into the suburbs, a leader of the prominent local police union tells Fox News.
Last week, the first Republican-backed recall effort fell just 1,714 signatures short of the 51,325 required to trigger a special election to bring the question of ousting Boudin before voters. Now a second recall effort is being organized, which Boudin brushed off Monday night as proof that his so-called successes in reducing incarceration has “angered the billionaire class.”
But it’s his progressive approach that’s actually hurting average San Franciscans, San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya tells Fox News, as Boudin’s “swiftest revolving door in criminal justice” sends the message to offenders that there are no consequences for their actions.
Snip.
Prosecutors Brooke Jenkins and Don Du Bain told KNTV they have stepped down from their posts in San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office due to his lack of commitment to prosecuting crimes.
“Chesa has a radical approach that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend,” Jenkins said in the interview. “Being an African American and Latino woman, I would wholeheartedly agree that the criminal justice system needs a lot of work, but when you are a district attorney, your job is to have balance.”
Du Bain added that he believed Boudin “disregards the laws that he doesn’t like, and he disregards the court decisions that he doesn’t like to impose his own version of what he believes is just – and that’s not the job of the district attorney.”
The Chinese private equity fund in which John Kerry holds a $1 million stake is not only invested in a tech company blacklisted for human rights abuses but is also a major shareholder in a solar panel company linked to labor abuses of the Uyghurs.
Last December, that private equity fund, Hillhouse China Value Fund L.P., purchased a 6 percent stake in LONGi Green Energy, a Chinese solar panel manufacturer, making it the company’s second largest shareholder.
LONGi has come under fire from human rights groups and U.S. lawmakers for sourcing many of its raw materials from companies suspected of using forced labor in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where the government has cracked down on the Uyghur population and other ethnic minorities.
Hillhouse is also a major funder of a tech company tied to the Chinese government’s surveillance of the Uyghurs, as first reported by the Washington Free Beacon last week. News of that investment led Republican senators to call on Biden to fire Kerry over ethics concerns. Further insight into Hillhouse’s holdings is likely to increase scrutiny of Kerry’s finances and raise questions about whether he is using his role as climate envoy to block regulations on Chinese solar panel imports. While Kerry has acknowledged that many solar panels are produced with forced labor in Xinjiang, he has also indicated resistance to additional financial restrictions or penalties on these goods.
So Kerry is working the China grift and the green grift at the same time. No wonder he couldn’t resist…
Speaking of which: China produces more CO2 than the U.S., India, Russia and Japan combined. “China’s emissions are so vast that its biggest companies, few of which are household names, create more pollution than entire nations. China Baowu, the world’s top steelmaker, put more CO2 into the atmosphere last year than Pakistan.”
Manchin and Sinema continue to terrorize democrats by daring to doing what their constituents want rather than doing the Holy Will Of The Party.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) are the gruesome twosome. They may have different reasons behind their opposition to the $3.5 trillion spending package, dubbed human infrastructure, that Democrats want to pass via the reconciliation process, but the results are the same. The far-left can’t get everything they want—which has infuriated them to no end. They don’t like the price tag. They don’t like the ethos behind it. They don’t like the tax structures. The tax on billionaires is out due to Manchin’s opposition. Sinema isn’t moving on hiking corporate taxes. Now, paid family leave has been nixed and most of the climate change provisions are gone too. Manchin and Sinema are the angels of death for the far-Left. It’s not hard to figure out why. These two will do what they think is best for the constituents of their respective states. Period. This has been known about Manchin for years, and he’s not afraid to lose re-election. If that’s the case, he will happily take his houseboat and go home. Sinema is the same with regards to Arizona. She’s there to serve them. Not Chuck Schumer, not the liberal media, not the hordes of illegal alien activists who harass her in the bathroom. And polling shows that voters in West Virginia and Arizona aren’t too keen on the $3.5 trillion bill
If you haven’t been following the situation on Capitol Hill — and it’s in so much flux that it’s almost impossible to stay completely up to date — I’ll give you a brief rundown before we get to that odor.
“Build Back Better” is Biden’s slogan for a massive expansion of welfare, spending, regulation, the likes of which we haven’t seen since LBJ’s Not-So-Great Society. Massive change on slender majorities is not a good idea, either politically or for the nation’s social fabric, but Dems gotta Dem.
BBB comes in two parts.
The first is a $1.2 trillion-with-a-T “infrastructure” bill that doesn’t contain much actual infrastructure spending, but is nonetheless supported by enough Republicans to almost guarantee its passage. (We’ll get back to the “almost” momentarily, so stick a pin in that.)
The second is another, even larger bill so absurd that its contents fall under comic sci-fi writer Douglas Adams’ “bistromathics.” There have been several versions of this bill, ranging in price from the current “compromise” bill costing $1.8 trillion (so they say) to the original Bernie Sanders (CPUSA-Vermont Oblast) version weighing in at $3.5 trillion (but actually $5 trillion).
No one knows what any version would actually cost. My friend and colleague Stephen Kruiser heard from a Senate aide on Thursday that the current bill is 2,500 pages, has no table of contents, and we probably won’t know what’s in it even if it does pass.
This brings us to a defining concept of bistromathics, recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. So if Democrats claim the bill costs precisely $1,790,238,032,455, then you can be sure it costs some figure exactly not that (but higher).
But they can’t get any version passed, because the hard left keeps demanding more and more radical proposals Democratic leadership can’t deliver.
Authorities in Denver have ordered the arrest of Steve Bachar, a longtime Clinton operative and “socially responsible” investor who has been charged with felony theft and securities fraud. The former co-chair of the Clinton Global Initiative is also under investigation for unrelated allegations that he mishandled millions of dollars allocated for personal protective equipment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bachar is accused of stealing as much as $1 million and lying to an investor “in connection with the offer, sale or purchase of a security,” according to the criminal complaint filed by the Denver district attorney’s office. The crimes are alleged to have occurred between October 2017 and August 2018. The former Clinton operative told the Denver Post the criminal charges were “outrageous, unfounded, and false,” and he looks forward to letting “the facts come to light.”
Bachar, who served as White House advance lead and in the Treasury Department under former president Bill Clinton before joining the Clinton Global Initiative, also served on the national finance committee for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016 and as an adviser to former governor John Hickenlooper (D., Colo.). His private sector career as a corporate attorney and cofounder of Empowerment Capital Management was focused on “socially responsible investing.”
This is not the first time the socially responsible investor has been accused of serious wrongdoing. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bachar allegedly pocketed nearly $2 million from health care companies that believed they were purchasing life-saving personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns.
According to a lawsuit filed by a Denver-based health care company, Bachar agreed to sell them 4,200 cases of N95 masks for $2.4 million in April 2020 but never delivered the masks and did not return their initial payment of $604,000. Over the summer, Bachar was ordered to pay nearly $4.5 million to the companies he allegedly defrauded but has yet to comply with the civil judgments against him.
Speaking of corrupt Democratic crime families, former New York Governor has been charged charged with sex cri-cri-cri-crime.
With the obligatory Eurythmics video
(I actually own their 1984 soundtrack, but “Sexcrime” isn’t nearly as good as “Doubleplusgood.”)
While the administration begs overseas adversaries to ramp up oil production with jobs and development to the benefit of foreign citizens, Americans remain handicapped by Democrats’ zealous animosity towards fossil fuel extraction on domestic land.
Underneath the tundra surface of Alaska’s North Slope sits an estimated 4.3 t0 11.8 billion barrels of untouched recoverable oil located within the flat wetland boundary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Then-President Donald Trump opened ANWR’s 1.6 million acres of the 19.6 million-acre refuge for drilling in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with leases approved since then now in jeopardy under the new administration.
Biden has been yanking permits and demanding new environmental assessments in an effort to cancel projects altogether. Last week, the Interior Department tossed out the analysis completed under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), long held as the gold standard of assessing environmental impacts, and ordered a new supplemental review for leases in the Arctic refuge two months after they were suspended.
Racine County Sheriff’s Department investigators have presented evidence that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) committed felony election fraud by telling nursing home staffers to violate state law and fill out ballots on behalf of nursing home residents who were unable to themselves.
During a news conference Thursday, Racine County Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said WEC commissioners and staff who prohibited legally-required special voting deputies from entering nursing homes during the COVID-19 pandemic and instead told nursing home staff members to assist residents in voting committed a Class I felony, which is punishable by a maximum sentence of three years, six months in prison and $10,000 in fines.
I missed this for my Texas Critical Race Theory fight roundup: “Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School is Brewing Division.” “Over the last year, teachers and staff at a North Texas school have been going against the district and teaching racist propaganda, creating division among students, parents, and staff. Under the supervision of teachers, students are leading the charge in this growing division Keller ISD’s Timber Creek High School has been experiencing since the previous school year.”
Portugal’s six-year experiment with leftwing “anti-austerity” government will end this week in a political crisis leading to early elections unless António Costa, the socialist prime minister, can strike a last-minute budget deal with the radical left.
The anti-capitalist Left Bloc (BE) and old-guard Communist party (PCP) have vowed to withhold crucial support in a budget vote on Wednesday unless the minority Socialist party (PS) government makes further concessions in a bill already seen as the most leftwing in recent history.
“They are asking the impossible and I can’t see the PS giving way,” said Francisco Seixas da Costa, a political commentator and former secretary of state for European affairs. “The pact has exhausted its possibilities and the BE and PCP can see no further advantage in co-operating with the government.”
Costa has offered a €40 increase in the national minimum wage to €705 a month and a €700m increase in investment in the national health service, alongside higher old-age pensions and public sector wages. The BE and PCP are pushing for bigger increases in these areas as well as labour reforms that the government fears would clash with EU rules.
After offering hope to struggling centre-left parties across Europe and inspiring neighbouring Spain’s mainstream socialists to follow a similar path, Portugal’s broad left pact is foundering over the smaller parties’ dissatisfaction with their peripheral role, and the limits of EU policy.
If the budget is defeated, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s centre-right president, has said he will immediately dissolve parliament and call a general election two years ahead of schedule. Costa, meanwhile, has stated he would remain in office at the head of a caretaker government until the ballot was held, probably in January.
This has been all over everywhere this week, but it still angries up my blood: Fauci Funded ‘Cruel’ Puppy Experiments Where Sand Flies ‘Eat Them Alive’; Vocal Cords Severed.”
No less than four versions of “Let’s Go Brandon” are in the iTunes top 10.
Iran has announced that the country’s energy infrastructure was hit by a massive cyberattack on Tuesday, which left state subsidized gas stations across the country out of commission, resulting in very long lines of cars observed waiting to fill up in many towns and cities.
The timing is interesting given it happened near the two year anniversary mark of deadly nationwide protests following serious gas shortages and price hikes in the fall of 2019. The ‘activist’ nature of the hack is further revealed in that Iranian media is reporting that a message showed up in national computer systems that were hacked that addressed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with the words, “where is the gas?”
By nearly every measure Americans are more generous with their money and time than anyone — including Europeans.
Indeed, American charitable giving exceeds the entire GDP of most European countries.
According to the Almanac of American Philanthropy, Americans donate around seven times as much as continental Europeans to charitable causes per capita. Per person, even after adjusting for differences in household income, Americans donate twice as much of their income as the Dutch, three times as much as the French, five times as much as Germans, and ten times that of Italians.
I have a big bucket of Social Justice Warrior links I’ve been meaning to herd into a roundup for a ridiculously long time now. Within that bucket, there’s a smaller (still large) bucket of links on fighting Critical Race Theory in education. Finally, I’ve whittled it down to just links relevant to just fighting critical race theory in Texas. Yes, it’s here, and yes, it needs to be fought tooth and nail.
The Cultural Competence Action Plan (CCAP) and parental rights are front and center as Carroll Independent School District (CISD) residents go to the polls again for a special election to fill a vacancy left by the resignation of Dave Almand from the school board in July.
The election will be held on November 2 with early voting beginning on October 18.
Two candidates have filed to fill the position: Stephanie Williams and Andrew Yeager.
Williams is a member of Dignity for all Texas Students (DATS) that is committed to passing the controversial CCAP in CISD as a diversity and inclusion plan that will “provide a safe environment where students can take risks, make mistakes, and grow from experience.” She has spoken at school board meetings in favor of CCAP, saying, “Critical race theory is not in CCAP.” She has also declared that “CRT is not taught in CISD and will not be taught in our district.”
However, Southlake Families, a political action committee that has endorsed Yeager, opposes CCAP because they believe it creates more problems than it claims to solve. They say its sections relating to microaggressions are especially problematic, where students are “permanently penaliz[ed]…for unintentional verbal or nonverbal actions.” The group also opposes critical race theory and its outgrowth from being promoted in CISD.
Critical race theory has its roots in Marxist philosophy and examines society with race and racial hierarchy as the primary concern for societal ills. It then seeks to deconstruct cultural institutions it defines as racist.
Although the theory itself may not be taught in local school districts, its critics say it lays the foundation for divisive identity politics that group people as either victims or oppressors. Language that grows out of CRT can often be found in curricula and training materials related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, like CCAP, or social and emotional learning concepts.
Yeager says on his website that “I will also work to ensure our primary focus is on education, not indoctrination. Students should be taught ‘how to think,’ not ‘what to think.’”
The tide is turning in the fight against Critical Race Theory (CRT). Following the exposure in 2020 of CRT training in agencies throughout American government, the Trump Administration issued a ban on CRT at the federal level. President Biden overturned that ban on his first day in office, but the war has gone on—and it’s turning in the direction of reason, common sense, and the American tradition of equality before the law. State legislatures from Texas to Florida have put forward bans on critical race theory. Meanwhile, local activists and parents have taken the fight to their local school boards.
On May 1, two school board candidates in Southlake, Texas converted these media, administrative, and legislative advances into a political win. In a high turnout election marked by intense media coverage, the two anti-CRT candidates for the Carroll ISD School Board won in a landslide—by a 40-point margin. The Southlake victory provides a blueprint for conservatives elsewhere to emulate as they fight to win elections against CRT in school boards across America.
Carroll ISD’s Five-Year Plan
In the fall of 2018, a video of several teenagers singing along to a rap song went viral; the song’s lyrics included a racial slur. The video was filmed at a private post-Homecoming party in Southlake, a largely conservative suburb of Fort Worth and Dallas. The teens were students at Carroll ISD, the prestigious public high school that consistently ranks among the top school districts in Texas. Progressive activists wasted no time in seizing the opportunity to implement (CRT) in Carroll ISD.
The district formulated a “Cultural Competence Action Plan” (CCAP), which set forth ambitious goals, first of which would entail hiring a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) officer to oversee implementation of the Plan. Students and their teachers would be pressed to discover their racial bias and confess their white privilege. Anonymous tip lines would be set up to report alleged “microaggressions” and to impose punishment. “Focus groups” of radicalized students would be organized to report directly to the DEI administration. External auditors would be hired to reshape every District policy, organization, and curriculum in the name of advancing racial equity.
The CCAP adopted all of the quasi-Marxist aims and methods characteristic of CRT. It was even described by its own proponents, unironically, as a “Five Year Plan.”
In some school districts, faculty would have toed the line, parents would have bowed to the wisdom of Progress and Equity, and students would have let it all pass them by. But this is Texas—and Carroll ISD’s mascot is the Dragons.
Beginning in 2020, Southlake conservative families formed a political action committee; they filed a barrage of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests; they showed up in record numbers to speak at school board meetings; they educated the community about the evils of CRT; and they recruited winning school board candidates. Hannah Smith and Cameron “Cam” Bryan campaigned for almost 4 months, meeting with community members in 70 meet-and-greets all over Southlake and shared their positive vision for the future of Carroll ISD. Their campaign volunteers went block by block and door by door across Southlake to tell voters the truth about CCAP.
On May 1, Smith and Bryan won with supermajorities of the vote (69 percent and 68 percent, respectively). Local voter turnout for a municipal election broke records, with over 10,000 votes were cast, up more than 150 percent from the previous high.
More than twice as many Republicans voted in the 2021 Carroll ISD election than had voted in any previous May election. In fact, more GOP voters turned out to vote than had turned out in the last two Republican primary elections for President and U.S. Senate!
But massive turnout among independent voters was key to the victory over CRT. In Texas, political affiliation is determined by participation in party primaries, not by party registration, and almost all of the voters who participate in the May elections for school board are also regular primary voters. In Carroll ISD, independents normally make up about 17 percent of the May electorate—an average of less than 500 votes. But this May, independent turnout surged to over 3,500 raw votes and the independent share of the electorate doubled to 35 percent.
There are four lessons to learn from the Southlake victory:
Use Freedom of Information Act requests to get the real story
Recruit qualified candidates who reflect the community’s values
Start early to build a real grassroots base
Run a professional political campaign
Another school district where parents are fighting Critical race Theory: Cypress Fairbanks.
Controversy over a trustee’s social media posts and allegations of critical race theory (CRT) elements in school curricula have drawn multiple challengers for three incumbents on the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District (CFISD) Board of Trustees this year.
Parents in the state’s third-largest public school district have been asking questions about curriculum since the board adopted a “Resolution Condemning Racism” in September of 2020.
Written by trustees John Ogletree, Julie Hinaman, and Gilber Sarabia, the resolution states that the district will “lead through policy and practice to eliminate racism, systemic racism, discrimination, injustice, and inequality in any and all its forms,” and commits to hiring a third party to conduct an “equity audit” in order to develop equity policies.
According to documents obtained by The Texan, CFISD has contracted with Millennium Learning Concepts (MLC) for an estimated $75,000 to conduct an equity analysis and to “provide recommendations on how to alleviate the policies and practices that are contributing to inequitable experiences and outcomes for students.”
President and owner of MLC, Roger Cleveland, is a professor of education who frequently presents to schools and districts on implicit bias and using equity to ensure that “equality is the outcome.”
Since then, parents have voiced opposition to plans to show a video on “implicit bias,” a Black Lives Matter protest video shown to third graders, and materials from controversial professor Tyrone Howard used in teacher training materials. Trustees have vehemently denied that the district uses any curriculum under the CRT label, but parents say ideas derived from CRT are presented to students under the guise of anti-bullying and anti-racism materials.
Critical Race Theory has roots in Marxist philosophy and examines society with race and racial hierarchy as the primary concern for societal ills. Drawing on Marxist philosopher of education Paolo Freire’s theories asserting that teaching is never neutral but always political, materials containing elements of CRT seek to use education to deconstruct institutions and culture deemed racist.
Ogletree has also come under community scrutiny for a slew of social media posts that invoke racial conflict. In one case Ogletree posted a Washington Post opinion piece comparing police officers to the Ku Klux Klan. In other instances, he shared a racially tinged comment about GOP congressional candidate Wesley Hunt who is black, and a comment reading, “This country was built on bad theology with white men holding Bibles.”
Critical Race Theory has been embedded in Austin ISD for almost half a decade under the guise of “ethnic studies.” “Administrators said teachers will cover everything from critical race theory, immigration versus colonization versus slavery to sexual orientation.” In other words: Hard left indoctrination.
There’s a battle over Critical Race Theory brewing in Eanes ISD in Travis County. “The Eanes DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, all CRT buzzwords] consultant, Mark Gooden, has said that he wants to develop people into racial activists. He has stated that he wants to help people “develop their racial awareness with a hope of transferring that into action that they will then use to transform the organization.'”
As a high school debate coach, I’ve watched critical race theory crush the souls of students for years. When it began to creep into the honored and honorable academic pursuit of policy (CX) debate, it lowered standards, created division and sundered relationships.
Let me explain how. Policy debate pits two two-person teams against each other. The Affirmative team (Aff) presents a plan that falls within this year’s topic; the Negative team (Neg) argues against that plan. This requires immense research and study; if the year’s topic is, say, the oceans, teams must be prepared to argue against plans ranging from the Law of the Seas Treaty to plastics to overfishing.
But some years ago, a new tactic emerged. Why argue that the Aff plan is terrible, when you can simply argue that the United States is terrible? Or worse, that the Aff team is terrible?
This kind of argument is called a kritik—debate jargon for employing critical theory (including, and especially, critical race theory) to undermine not the plan you’re supposed to be refuting, but the very legitimacy of liberal society, Western history and even debate itself.
Writing in an article called “The Corrosion of High School Debate—And How It Mirrors American Politics,” one former debater recalled how “Some debaters even began refusing to debate the resolutions altogether, formulating elaborate theoretical and critical arguments that were, at best, tenuously linked to the topic they had been given.”
The language of critical race theory is new to most Americans, but debaters have been parsing these words and phrases for years. “Equity” is in; fairness is out. Black bodies, colonialism, “words are violence,” ontological death—these concepts are tossed around in classrooms and tournaments throughout Texas.
Here’s what I saw first-hand. One of my teams, two Senior girls, went into a round as the Affirmative team. I don’t recall the topic that year (a decade ago), but I do remember them emerging from the round in tears. They lost—and were told they lost—because the Negative team argued they should lose. As two white, privileged students from a private school, Neg claimed, the Affirmative team embodied everything wrong with America.
I thought there had to be some mistake. But when I saw the ballot a couple of hours later, it was true. The judge wrote that in the interest of social justice, he handed the win to the Negative team—even though Neg offered not a single argument against the Aff plan.
In another round, one of my teams was a little confused when a member of the opposing team got up and left just as the round started. The judge didn’t object, so my guys went on as usual—making their speeches, organizing their thoughts and crafting their arguments. In the penultimate speech (Second Negative Rebuttal), the absent Neg team member returned, holding a can full of coins. He argued that Neg should win because instead of wasting time in the round, he was out collecting money for a climate change charity—real-world action should trump ineffectual speech, he said (mind you, at a speech tournament). Neg won that round.
What does one kritik-dependent team do when it comes up against another kritik-dependent team? I’ve watched those rounds devolved into a morass of intersectionality. “You may be female, but I’m Hispanic.” You may be Hispanic, but I have a learning disability.” “Your school spends more per-student than mine.”
How can debaters respond to critical race theory and similar arguments? They can’t; CRT is non-falsifiable, and to take any position against it is to display “white fragility”—an argument I’ve seen used against non-white students.
Biden is bumbling, borders are crumbling, bankers are plotting, and Art is out. Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!
Stephen Green finds out the real reason behind the supply chain SNAFUs: California Democrats changing the rules because they weren’t getting enough kickbacks and graft from an efficiently functioning transportation system.
The immediate problem, the one in Los Angeles, has been caused by the state’s vindictively regulatory state government.
We’ll get to the trucker shortage in just a moment, but California also faces a shortage of trucks for them to drive.
Twitter user Jerry Oakley reminds us that “Carriers domiciled in California with trucks older than 2011 model, or using engines manufactured before 2010, will need to meet the Board’s new Truck and Bus Regulation beginning in 2020.” Otherwise, “Their vehicles will be blocked from registration with the state’s DMV,” according to California law.
Snip.
As a result, trucks aren’t being purchased to replace the ones being regulated out of business.
But even if there were plenty of trucks in California, there wouldn’t be enough truckers to drive them — and it isn’t because the truckers are too old.
“Traditionally the ports have been served by Owner Operators,” Oakley says, who are non-union. But under AB-5, “California has now banned Owner Operators.”
Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can’t accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.
In fact, those work rules helped create the crisis conditions.
The exact language of AB-5 was copied and pasted into Presidentish Joe Biden’s $5 trillion (Or: Five Million Million Dollar) “Build Back Better” bill currently stalled in the Senate.
It’s one thing for Californians to screw themselves over, but AB-5 is hurting the entire country’s economy — and Washington Democrats want to take AB-5 nationwide.
Social Justice doesn’t want to win, it wants to destroy you:
If you’re unaware, [David] Shor was canceled for accurately summarizing the contents of an academic paper. Shor made a point that he felt was important for the messaging of the Democrats. At the time the country was exploding in riots aligned with BlackLivesMatter and driven by anger over the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor. Shor linked to a paper that argued that riots have bad political consequences for Democrats. This would not seem to be particularly inflammatory; people indiscriminately burning and smashing shit has little obvious utility for the marginalized or anyone else. But Shor lost his job for tweeting that paper and agreeing with its thesis. Similarly, the Intercept’s Lee Fang was absolutely mobbed for the crime of recording an interview with a young Black man who was critical of the riots and the protest movement from which they sprang. He almost lost his job, as well.
(Here’s a fun tip for you all: if you have the power to get someone fired or otherwise ruin their life you are not a powerless, marginalized Other.)
Not that they had rebutted a particularly coherent pro-riot argument. There was little in the way of defense of riots in 2020 at all, really. Many attempted to invoke Martin Luther King in that regard, which is hilarious and bizarre concerning a man who among many other critiques of riots said that they “are not revolutionary but reactionary because they invite defeat; they offer an emotional catharsis, but they must be followed by a sense of futility,” and that close to the end of his life. (In their defense, almost no one who invokes MLK has actually read him.) But what Shor and Fang were guilty of was not of breaking with some intellectual mandate within liberalism but with speaking out of turn, with criticizing the wrong people. The difference between Shor and Fang’s criticism of the pro-riot side and the behavior of those who rose against them is that Shor and Fang never tried to destroy anyone, didn’t tweet at anyone’s boss in an attempt to get them fired, didn’t have the inclination or the power to punish those who dared to disagree with them. But those who targeted them were operating in a bizarre liberal discursive culture where, if you dress up what you’re doing in vague language about oppression, you can operate however you’d like without rebuke and attempt to ruin the life of whoever you please.
Snip.
The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them. Are most of these institutions false friends? Of course. But that, too, is not much of a defense.
This tendency to be promiscuous in enthralling elites and powerful institutions should be a clue to the fact that, despite its radical self-branding, the contemporary social justice movement fundamentally serves to empower the status quo. Effective left politics are about convincing various people who are unalike that they have a shared self-interest, that society can do best for them when we do best for others, too. That’s how you build a mass movement, by appealing to people’s sense of self-interest and showing them how they can help their neighbors while they help themselves. But because the social justice movement’s first dictate is to establish a hierarchy of suffering, and to tell those that are purported to suffer less that their problems aren’t problems, no such mass movement is coming. The social justice movement is not just incidentally antagonistic to organizing everyone and recognizing all kinds of people as worthy of our compassion and support. That antagonism is existential. When you ask many people within the movement, “what could we do to convert the white working class to our values?,” they will simply tell you that they don’t want to convert them, that they are not worthy of being a part of their movement. They would rather have targets than converts, to lose as an exclusive moral caste than win as a grubby populist coalition.
Core to understanding this moment is to realize that the vast majority of people who enforce these politics don’t actually believe in them. They don’t, that is, think that social justice politics as currently composed are healthy or just or likely to result in tangible positive change. There’s a core of true-believers who do, and there’s a group of those who profit directly from the hegemony of social justice politics in elite spaces. (The former two groups have some overlap, but it’s not a perfect circle.) There’s conservative critics, who are both the most natural targets of social justice ire and yet those the social justice movement seem least interested in targeting. There’s an island of misfit toys of left and leftish critics of social justice politics like me. And then there’s the great big mass of people who are just scared.
Do global elites have incentives for pushing “Green Energy”/”Climate Change” nonsense? $150 trillion of them.
Now, in case someone is still confused, none of these institutions, and not a single of the erudite officials running them, give a rat’s ass about the climate, about climate change risks, or about the fate of future generations of Americans (and certainly not about the rising water level sweeping away their massive waterfront mansions): if they did, total US debt and underfunded liabilities wouldn’t be just shy of $160 trillion.
So what is going on, and why is it that virtually every topic these days has to do with climate change, “net zero”, green energy and ESG?
The reason – as one would correctly suspect – is money. Some $150 trillion of it.
Snip.
How much would this green utopia cost, because if the “net zero”, “ESG”, “green” narrative is pushed so hard 24/7, you know it will cost a lot.
Turns out it does. A lot, lot.
Responding rhetorically to the key question, “how much will it cost?”, BofA cuts to the case and writes $150 trillion over 30 years – some $5 trillion in annual investments – amounting to twice current global GDP!
At this point the report gets good because since it has to be taken seriously, it has to also be at least superficially objective. And here, the details behind the numbers, do we finally learn why the net zero lobby is so intent on pushing this green utopia – simple answer: because it provides an endless stream of taxpayer and debt-funded “investments” which in turn need a just as constant degree of debt monetization by central banks.
Consider this: the covid pandemic has so far led to roughly $30 trillion in fiscal and monetary stimulus across the developed world. And yet, not even two years later, the effect of this $30 trillion is wearing off, yet despite the Biden’s admin to keep the Covid Crisis at bay, threatening to lock down society at a moment’s notice with the help of the complicit press, the population has made it clear that it will no longer comply with what is clear tyranny of the minority.
And so, the establishment needs a new perpetual source (and use) of funding, a crisis of sorts, but one wrapped in a virtuous, noble facade. This is where the crusade against climate change comes in.
Imagine a central banker, destroying your bank account through hyperinflation…forever.
Controlling (barely) all three branches of government, you wouldn’t expect Democrats to show this much panic.
he results in 2020 came as a shock to Democrats for several reasons. First, Joe Biden’s official margin of victory, while slightly larger than Obama’s in 2012 at 51.26% to 46.8%, was half the size that polls, such as Nate Silver’s 538, had showed, at 51.8% to 43.4%. But even more concerning for Democrats, the locations of the polling error tended to be not in places where Democrats were strong, but rather either in swing areas where they hoped for gains, or areas where Obama had done well in 2008 and 2012, but Trump had won in 2016. In effect, Democrats won areas they felt were moving in their direction such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin by far less than they expected, and lost states they thought were close such as Iowa, Ohio, and Florida by much larger margins.
The implications of this in the Presidential race were obscured by the fact that the numbers showed Biden won. But they were keenly felt in the Senate races, where Democrats lost races in Iowa and North Carolina where they believed they were favored, and their candidates did worse than Biden even where he won, such as in Michigan and Maine. The result at the time was to leave the Senate at 50 Republicans and 48 Democrats, a situation transformed by the victory of Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock against a dysfunctional Georgia GOP in January 2021. Nonetheless, it was ominous and it set the tone for Democratic behavior in 2021.
In light of these results, we can understand that the reason Democrats are now obsessing the filibuster is not because they have a mere 50 seats in the Senate. When Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut calls out Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for blocking legislation that 48 Democrats support, he is doing so not because he believes they are likely to be 50 or 52 Senators for it in the future but because he is pretty sure 50 is as good as it is going to get. In 2008, Democrats won 60 Senate seats, and while with hindsight we can see this was a high-water mark, at the time Democrats dreamed bigger. After all, Mitch McConnell had only won 53%-47% in 2008. There were also open seats in states Obama had won in 2008 such as New Hampshire, North Carolina and Florida coming up in 2010, and there was a path to a Democratic supermajority.
That is not the case after 2020. In 2020, only Susan Collins won reelection in a state won by the Presidential candidate of the opposing party. Democratic challengers, including strong ones such as Montana’s two-term governor, Steve Bullock lost, and lost badly (by 10% in Bullock’s case). This was also not just a 2020 phenomenon. Despite a good year for Democrats overall in 2018, Democratic incumbent Senators lost in Florida, Indiana, and Missouri that year.
Biden’s underperformance scared Democrats because it indicated a ceiling, rather than a floor for their strength.
In 2022, Democrats will be defending Senate seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire, all states that went to Biden, but within margins whereby strong GOP challengers, which exist in all those states, could win. More problematically, the list of Democratic targets includes only Pennsylvania and Wisconsin among states Biden won, and North Carolina and Florida among states Trump won by less than landslide margins. Matching Biden exactly would get the Democrats a gain of two seats; but even in 2020 most Democratic candidates ran behind Biden, and Biden is himself deeply unpopular today.
The situation in the House is, if anything, worse for the Democrats. Democrats lost 12 House seats in 2020. The impact of redistricting is overblown – Republicans will gain a marginal advantage from the lines, but census results show the areas growing most quickly lean Democrat – yet nonetheless, the Democrat position is so weak that any deterioration in Biden’s position will be fatal to their 2022 hopes.
In effect, the 2021 Democratic majorities are on a “death watch,” and Democrats’ confused attempts to deal with that realization is determining their current erratic behavior.
The split in the party is not so much between the moderates and the progressives. It is between progressives and moderates who desire political futures and those who know they have none. Pelosi is able to generally pass left-wing legislation in the House despite her narrow majority because many of her moderates know they are doomed no matter what, and are willing to cast their votes for the progressive agenda. In turn, AOC and the Squad feel free to sabotage any compromises because their own seats are safe and they believe they have time to fight another day, even if it is ten years from now. By contrast, both Sinema and Manchin seem to resent the efforts of other Democrat officials to pressure them to commit political suicide or behave as if they personally are doomed, just because it is true of some of their colleagues. In particular, rhetoric out of the Democrat caucus that Manchin is “probably in his last term anyway” or that Sinema “won’t win reelection” seems predicated on the idea that both should act as if they are finished and behave accordingly.
But think about the deeper implications of that statement: All moderate Democrats (with the possible exceptions of Manchin and Sinema) are aching to do The Will of the Party and push the most radical, leftmost agenda possible if only it weren’t for the pesky problems of winning elections. Even moderate Democrats are leftwing radicals.
Biden: The war against terror is over! Supreme Court: Then why are you still doing all these things that are only legal if a war’s still on? Biden Administration: Yeah, when we said the war against terror was over, we didn’t mean it was over over…
You know Merrick Garland’s social justice warrior problem? It gets worse:
We learned, too, that Merrick Garland’s son-in-law, through his company, Panorama Education, sells CRT materials to public schools. And yesterday, it turned out that Panorama is also spreading material calling Trump and his supporters “white supremacists”
Alexander “Xan” Tanner, a very White man, is married to Merrick Garland’s daughter. Tanner co-founded Panorama Education, which purports to provide a data platform that delves into students’ psychosocial issues in order to help schools intervene in problems and improve the school climate. In a word, it’s creepy…
The educational workshop released by Panorama Education, co-founded by Alexander “Xan” Tanner, the group’s president, revolves around “systemic racism” and includes an article as a resource that states the Ku Klux Klan and attendees of Trump’s rallies are both “examples of white supremacy.”
Garland should be forced to resign.
“More Hunter Biden Questions: Art Gallery Repping Him Gets Big Federal COVID Loan.” Try to contain your shock.
A husband and wife were arrested for trying to sell U.S. submarine secrets. “Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebe, 42, and wife, Diana, 49, were charged Saturday with selling secret information to an unidentified foreign country.” Bonus! “The woman arrested with her Navy nuclear engineer husband for allegedly selling secret information about nuclear submarines to an undercover FBI agent appears to be vocally in support of Black Lives Matter and ‘resistance’ movements on her social media.” There’s a lot of shocked face in this LinkSwarm…
Investigators determined Trenae Myesha Rainey, 28, a facility employee, did not contact residents as set by procedure and instead filled out the applications and forged the resident’s signature to each application….
Investigators determined Nancy Juanita Williams, 55, planned to control absentee ballots for legally incapacitated persons under her care by fraudulently submitting 26 absentee ballot applications to nine identified city and township clerks.
Morgan Freeman still isn’t having any of your defund the police lunacy. “I am not in the least bit for defunding the police.”
Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate and Clinton toady Terry McAuliffe lies again.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe incorrectly stated on Thursday night that there were 1,142 children in Virginia’s intensive care unit beds, a gross overestimation of the virus’s current impact in the state.
“We in Virginia today, 1,142 children are in ICU beds,” McAuliffe stated during a roundtable discussion with local reporters. The statistic is a massive overestimation. Virginia Department of Health statistics show that there are a total of 443 people of all ages currently in ICU beds, a fraction of the figure McAuliffe put forth for children.
The state database shows the number of Virginians in ICU beds infected with COVID-19 has never come close to 1,142 since the first hospitalizations in March 2020—the peak of individuals hospitalized in the ICU with COVID-19 was on Jan. 13, when there were 587 cases. State records show that just 1,094 individuals younger than 19 years old have been hospitalized with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Children, who rarely get seriously ill from the virus, have never made up a significant chunk of hospitalized individuals.
McAuliffe also said during the roundtable Virginia had “8,000 cases on Monday,” another exaggerated statistic. On Monday, Oct. 4, Virginia saw 1,220 “confirmed” cases and 864 “probable” cases, according to the Virginia Department of Health.
The state has never seen 8,000 confirmed cases in a day. According to the department, Virginia’s 7-day moving case average peaked at 5,904 on Jan. 8, 2021—a number thousands short of McAuliffe’s case assessment.
“Longtime politician Mark Ridley-Thomas and the former dean of the School of Social Work at a university in Southern California were indicted today on federal corruption charges that allege a bribery scheme in which a Ridley-Thomas relative received substantial benefits from the university in exchange for Ridley-Thomas supporting county contracts and lucrative contract amendments with the university while he served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.” This is the fed indictment notice, so it doesn’t mention that he’s a lifetime Democrat, in addition to being an LA City Councileman and former state rep.
Art Acevedo out in Miami. Sounds like a mixture of BS and real Acevedo stupidity. And it’s generally not a good idea to compare Miami Cubans to commies…
“Buy an electric vehicle,” they said. “They’re just as good and you’ll be saving the earth,” they said. Well surprise! “UK Readying New Law Mandating Home EV Chargers Be Shut Down During Peak Hours.” Also: “Beginning May 30, 2022, all chargers that are installed must be ‘smart’ chargers connected to the internet, allowing their functions to be limited between 8am to 11am and 4pm to 10pm.” Big brother in his squad car’s coming near…
Communist China demands that Christian pastor denounce himself for daring to preach the gospel in violation of state doctrine. Oh wait, did I say Communist China? I meant “Canada.”
Texas House passes Save Girls Sports act to keep them from having to compete against men.
UK: “Sir David Amess: Conservative MP stabbed to death. Police said a 25-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of murder after the attack at a church in Leigh-on-Sea.” Police seem awful tight-lipped on details about the murderer…
When the federal government banned sliced bread, supposedly due to helping the war effort in World War II. But nobody would admit who ordered it, or what scarce wartime commodities it was supposed to save, and the ban was lifted after two months. Sound familiar? Well, except for that whole “admitting the mistake and quickly reversing course” part…
Soldiers told us there have been cartel gunfights in Ciudad Miguel Aleman, the Mexican city across from Roma, TX, frequently in recent days and weeks. The soldiers heard gunfire and explosions two days ago and showed us this video of smoke billowing after the gunfight. pic.twitter.com/yow1pPvJS8
Indeed, Biden’s poll numbers are so low that even CNN has noticed. “Just 32% of independents approved of how Biden is handling his job while 60% disapprove in a new Quinnipiac University national poll… In 2010, the Republicans picked up 63 seat, with being up 19 points among independents.”
Short-term debt limit extension bill passes. Tastes like chicken…
The reconciliation bill is deeply hostile to marriage. Well, it’s no surprise, since happily married couples with children are increasingly an obstacle to Democratic Party control…
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland recently instructed the FBI to begin investigating parents who confront school board administrators over Critical Race Theory indoctrination material. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to initiate investigations of any parent attending a local school board meeting who might be viewed as confrontational, intimidating or harassing.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s daughter is Rebecca Garland. In 2018 Rebecca Garland married Xan Tanner. Mr. Xan Tanner is the current co-founder of a controversial education service company called Panorama Education. Panorama Education is the ‘social learning’ resource material provider to school districts and teachers that teach Critical Race Theory.
So far, all we have is his press conference and other such made-for-media huff-puffing. No such rule even claiming to be legally binding has been issued yet.
That’s why nearly two dozen Republican attorneys general who have publicly voiced their opposition to the clearly unconstitutional and illegal mandate haven’t yet filed suit against it, the Office of the Indiana Attorney General confirmed for me. There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan.
According to several sources, so far it appears no such mandate has been sent to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs yet for approval. The White House, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Department of Labor haven’t released any official guidance for the alleged mandate. There is no executive order. There’s nothing but press statements.
Let the lawsuits against private companies firing people for refusing the vaccine for which no mandate exists begin!
Scientists from Wuhan and the US were planning to create new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic codes of other viruses, proposals show.
Documents of a grant application submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), leaked last month, reveal that the international team of scientists planned to mix genetic data of closely related strains and grow completely new viruses.
A genetics expert working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail, said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match has never been found in nature.
Here’s a novel thought: How about you not do that?
Did I mention that Wuhan scientists also wanted to genetically engineer coronaviruses that were more infectious to humans and release aerosols containing “novel chimeric spike proteins” among cave bats in Yunnan, China? And they also applied DARPA grant! Who the hell was asleep at the grant proposal switch while Chinese biological warfare scientists were going full Frankenstein?
Masks are not mandatory now in classrooms in: UK, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium (12 & under), Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria (up to 5th grade), most of South America, etc. Masking children in the U.S. isn't science.
Facebook’s fake “Whistleblower” Frances Haugen was part of the election meddling team that suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story. Also: “She’s receiving ‘strategic communication guidance’ from former Obama aide Bill Burton’s public relations firm Bryson Gillette, which is run by Democratic operatives. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was a senior adviser there until September 2020.” Basically she’s a pawn to let Facebook suppress even more conservative stories.
WOW! This is the moment Acting Senior Sergeant Krystle Mitchell QUITS Victoria Police.
"I can't remedy in my soul anymore how the organisation I love is being used [to enforce health tyranny]… and the damage it's causing to the community."
“Tesla is moving its headquarters from Palo Alto, California, to Austin, Texas, CEO Elon Musk announced at the company’s shareholder meeting on Thursday.” Given how crappy California’s business climate has become, this was pretty much a forgone conclusion. Come on down, Elon.
Amazon is looking at leaving Seattle. “After years of deteriorating relations with their home city of Seattle and its ultra-progressive city council, Amazon’s CEO [Andy Jassy] made it known that the online giant may look for greener pastures. Citing the city’s hostility toward their presence, Jassy suggested that the suburbs are looking better and better for a new home to its 50,000-employee home base.”
Speaking of Seattle, over 400 police officers may be facing termination over refusal to get vaccinated. Good thing Seattle is a peaceful utopia where there are never any antifa riots…
The China/India border is getting frisky again. “Sources mentioned that patrol parties of both the countries came face-to-face in Arunachal Pradesh, which led to some jostling before they disengaged. The incident took place last week near Yangtse in the Tawang sector.” Arunachal Pradesh is basically the complete opposite end of northern India from where most of last year’s clashes occurred.
Did China lose coal shipments waiting for docks to open up to India? Source is a little “rah-rah India,” so grains of salt are probably in order.
Are you using the wrong plunger? This plumber seems to think that this one is the new hotness for clearing toilets.
John Kerry’s commie connection. “Kerry’s latest filing with the Office of Government Ethics shows Teresa Kerry benefits from an investment of at least $1 million in a hedge fund specializing in private partnerships with Chinese government-controlled funds.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Indictment of Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman for allegedly lying to the FBI has a lot of people grumbling about how long it took prosecutor John Durham to finally come up with an indictment of someone with regard to the Russia collusion hoax. And even then, while Sussman was an important lawyer at an important Democrat operative law firm, his indictment has a “that’s it?” feel to it.
But, the 27-page Indictment is a wealth of information, and hopefully a roadmap to wider and more substantial prosecutions (you can’t take my hope away!). What the indictment demonstrates is that the Russia collusion claim leveled against Donald Trump and the Trump campaign was a fabrication of Hillary Clinton operatives who peddled the fraud to the media and FBI, allowing Clinton to use the media reports in the campaign against Trump.
Much like the fabricated Steele Dossier, also paid for and arranged by Clinton operatives, Hillary Clinton and Clintonworld perpetrated a massive fraud on the American public which not only manipulated the election process but also froze the Trump presidency and nearly paralyzed the nation politically for years.
We have had some pretty terrible politicians in our lifetime, and it’s always dangerous to say “the worst” — but the Russia collusion hoax fabricated by Hillary Clinton operatives proves beyond little doubt that Hillary Clinton is the most systemically manipulative politician of our lifetime.
Forget the MSM spin: Here’s what the Maricopa County audit really found:
None of the various systems related to elections had numbers that would balance and agree with each other. In some cases, these differences were significant.
There appears to be many ballots cast from individuals who had moved prior to the election.
Files were missing from the Election Management System (EMS) Server.
Ballot images on the EMS were corrupt or missing.
Logs appeared to be intentionally rolled over, and all the data in the database related to the 2020 General Election had been fully cleared.
On the ballot side, batches were not always clearly delineated, duplicated ballots were missing the required serial numbers, originals were duplicated more than once, and the Auditors were never provided Chain‐of‐ Custody documentation for the ballots for the time‐period prior to the ballot’s movement into the Auditors’ care. This all increased the complexity and difficulty in properly auditing the results; and added ambiguity into the final conclusions.
That’s the thing about a Missing White Woman story — the damsel-in-distress angle only works, in terms of TV news ratings, if the missing woman is young and attractive, preferably blonde. Males can and do go missing, but those disappearances never dominate national news. It’s always a woman, and a young, attractive woman — if she’s old, fat or ugly, nobody cares if she goes missing. But the nubile blonde? Oh, yeah, that’s nationwide headline stuff, because she’s Prime Rape Bait, and sex is the secret ingredient in the Missing White Woman story.
Beyond the cynical calculations of ratings-hungry TV news producers, however, what’s really wrong with Missing White Woman Syndrome is not the kind of “social justice” concerns Joy Reid is talking about. No, what’s wrong is that it feeds the public’s distorted ideas about crime.
How many people are murdered in America annually? Nearly 14,000 in 2019, according to the FBI, and about 78% of the victims were male. In terms of statistical risk, then, males were nearly four times more likely to be murdered than women, but how many of those murdered men become national news? Not many. And how many murder victims are white? About 5,800 in 2019 — 42% of the total — whereas blacks were 54% of the total murders. There were 1,759 white women murdered in 2019 — 12.6% of the total, according to the FBI — compared to 6,446 black males, 46.3% of the total. So the death of Gabby Petito was anomalous, a comparative rarity in the overall crime situation in America.
A blonde, blue-eyed “social media influencer” is not typical of murder victims, who are disproportionately male and black. During the month of August, when Gabby and her boyfriend were on their excursion across the West, 87 people were killed and 424 were wounded in Chicago. Did any of those Chicago victims make national news? Well, about 83% of the victims in Chicago were black, and none were blonde, blue-eyed 22-year-old “social media influencers.” Not newsworthy, you see?
The selectivity of the news media in deciding which murders deserve national attention is a sort of bias that most people never notice. Why does the death of one black in police custody become a cause célèbre, while the vast majority of murdered black men — about 125 a week, on average — never get any national media attention? Because the death of George Floyd fit a specific political narrative. And why does the disappearance of a blonde girl with an Instagram account get hourly updates on the cable-news networks? Because it’s a convenient distraction from the disastrous failure of Joe Biden’s presidency.
In fact, there were at least 46 reports of swollen balls (and another 76 of testicular pain) in the VAERS database of adverse reactions.
People who wanted Biden to win to see a “return to normal” are being gravely disappointed:
In traditional Washington fashion, Biden has ignored that message voters sent and delivered the opposite. In less than seven months, we have found that Biden is far from that empathetic persona he has crafted over the years, and we have not returned to anything near normal.
And Biden lies. Not tiny little lies, but ones that affect events that are deeply tragic. Last week, he told leaders in the Jewish community that he visited the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were slaughtered during a service in 2018.
Synagogue officials said he was never there.
One can only guess he said this as an attempt to continue the manufactured empathy he allegedly possesses. Forgetfulness is not an excuse anyone should accept.
Nor is it normal.
In fact, the only thing the Biden presidency has done most effectively is prove that we are not on the path to normality under his administration.
From the uneven overall economy to soaring inflation to the humiliating debacle in Afghanistan, and from Biden’s insistence to spend our money like a drunken sailor to the crisis at the Mexican border that he has blatantly ignored and to how he has politicized the pandemic: None of this is normal, none of this promotes stability, none of this is what an exhausted electorate bargained for.
Over the past 18 months our overall sales have increased as follows:
590% increase in revenue
604% increase in transactions
271% increase in site traffic
77% increase in conversion rate
This data is from February 23, 2020 – August 23, 2021, when compared to the previous 18 months (August 24, 2018 – February 22, 2020).
Leading the way: Texas, with a 736% increase.
9mm was the most popular ammunition just about everywhere, followed by .223 and 5.56 NATO.
“Maspeth High School [NYC] created fake classes, awarded bogus credits, and fixed grades to push students to graduate — ‘even if the diploma was not worth the paper on which it was printed,’ an explosive investigative report charges. Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir demanded that teachers pass students no matter how little they learned, says the 32-page report by the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools, Anastasia Coleman.”
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s gambit to have funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system stripped backfires, with the funding passing 420-9. Now there’s principled case to be made against the U.S. funding Iron Dome, as part of a broader initiative to eliminate all foreign aid because it’s not an enumerated responsibility of the federal government, because we’re already running huge budget deficits, and because Israel is a prosperous, modern country that shouldn’t need our charity. But we all know that not why The Squad presented this bill.
I think the Squad’s biggest problem with the Iron Dome is that it keeps people from killing Jews.
Word is that pick isn’t popular with the rank and file:
@austin_police officers voted 90% to 10% for an outside candidate over a career insider for chief, yet Cronk/Council gave the insider the nod. Tell me again who is protecting the status quo? #atxcouncil has forfeited the right to say APD officers are the ones resisting change. pic.twitter.com/RwnBOHptmv
In the UK: “Our eco-obsessed government is sleepwalking into an energy crisis….we could be facing a hard winter of higher energy bills and even blackouts.”
50-64 years: 106,674 (.27% of total cases) 65-74 years: 144,020 (.36% of total cases) 75-84 years: 173,655 (.43% of total cases) 85+ years: 185,188 (.46% of total cases)
50-64 years: 106,674 (.27% of total cases) 65-74 years: 144,020 (.36% of total cases) 75-84 years: 173,655 (.43% of total cases) 85+ years: 185,188 (.46% of total cases)
Islamic terrorist dirtnapped in Indonesia. “The military earlier said the militants killed late Saturday were Ali Kalora, leader of the East Indonesia Mujahideen network that has claimed several killings of police officers and minority Christians, and another suspected extremist, Jaka Ramadan, also known as Ikrima.” (Hat tip: Rantburg.)
Our current moment is often described as a “racial reckoning.” In reality, what this often means is that a narrative about Black victimization has gone mainstream. We hear endlessly about systemic racism, white supremacy, the black/white income gap, and police brutality. So powerful an ideology has this narrative become that those of us who pose a credible counter-narrative—black anti-woke writers, for example—frequently find our words being misconstrued in an effort to stanch their impact.
This doesn’t happen to everyone who opposes the Critical Social Justice narrative of black victimization. White dissenters are simply called “racist” while many black dissenters are considered tragic victims of internalized racism. But things get ugly when woke Critical Social Justice proponents encounter a certain kind of black person who does not align with their preferred victim narrative and instead emphasizes his or her own individuality or self-regard. Such people present a threat to the woke narrative, since that narrative insists that all black people are victims of white supremacy, meaning anyone who insists on their individuality and their own power proves the falsity of that victim narrative; if the woke narrative were true, such people should not be able to exist.
Which means that when we claim to exist, antiracist woke warriors need to erase us, using a logical fallacy I call “erase and replace.” Erase and replace is a combination of the strawman and ad hominem logical fallacies. The move involves taking the argument someone is making and substituting it for one that fits more neatly into the woke victim narrative by specifically targeting the character of the challenger—since it is, in part, their character that is the greatest challenge.
“Chris Cuomo accused of sexually harassing former boss at 2005 party.” “A former ABC executive producer has accused Chris Cuomo of sexually harassing her at a 2005 work party after he grabbed her butt in front of her husband and co-workers.” If she was his boss, does that technically count as sexual harassment? In New York, I believe such an offense would fall under the statute for “forcible touching,” which is a class A misdemeanor. Do you think that this is coming out now because, with his brother out of office, Fredo is no longer of any particular political use to CNN?
ACLU alters Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s words to eliminate #Wrongthink.
Enjoy this Babylon Bee takeoff on the “Talking Tina” doll episode of The Twilight Zone:
I wonder at what point references to classic Twilight Zone episodes falls out of common cultural memory. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror seem to have longer staying power that, say, period sitcoms. Teenagers today might have caught Twilight Zone episodes on MeTV or one of those endless series of free streaming services, whereas I doubt most have ever seen an episode of Hazel or The Real McCoys.
