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Ruth King

EDUCATION Comments turned off

This Florida Mom Who Spoke Out Against CRT In Schools Warns Parents To Be Vigilant About Curriculum By Paulina Enck

By on June 17th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/16/this-florida-mom-who-spoke-out-against-crt-in-schools-warns-parents-to-be-vigilant-about-curriculum/

Quisha King is not going to sit by and allow her children, or anyone else’s, to be indoctrinated into the racist lies of critical race theory without putting up a fight. The Floridian mother of two went viral from a speech she made at a school board meeting, in which she spoke in favor of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s proposal to ban critical race theory from public schools in Florida, which the state Board of Education passed unanimously last week.

Many states are not so lucky, however, with the racist ideology being enacted in schools across the country, in both blatant and subtle ways, from prep schools in New York and New Jersey to government primary schools in the Midwest.

I spoke with King about her activism to prevent these racist lies from pervading schools. That viral speech is far from the start of her fight, as she noted: “I’ve been learning about CRT for over a year now, and I’ve been seeing a lot of the policies that are being pushed onto our children from the school board. I have been speaking at local school board meetings as well about CRT and them putting our children down, essentially. Putting them in these ‘oppressor,’ ‘oppressed’ categories. When I saw that a vote was coming up, I thought it was important that I make my voice known.”

“I know a lot of parents feel the same way I do, but some are just, quite frankly, a little intimidated or scared to speak up about it,” she added.

As a mother of two black children, King is particularly concerned about how critical race theory will harm black kids, who are being told they are less capable and will accomplish less than their white peers, due solely to their skin color.

“That is destructive for any young mind to believe that they can never rise up to the level of their own dreams, goals, and the things that they want to accomplish,” King said. “I think that’s a terrible way to start kids off into life, by telling them they are oppressed, especially today. Black Americans are the most successful black people in the entire world, so why in the world would we tell black children or any child that they are oppressed? If you tell a child they can’t do something, eventually, they won’t even try.”

One of King’s children attends public school while the other attends private school, thanks to school choice.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

At NATO And G7, Biden Advances An ‘America Last’ Foreign Policy By John Daniel Davidson

By on June 17th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/16/at-nato-and-g7-biden-advances-an-america-last-foreign-policy/ 

President Biden’s first foreign trip wasn’t just an embarrassing disaster, it heralds the return of the disastrous foreign policy of the Obama-Biden era.

The most important takeaway from the recent G7 and NATO summits in Europe isn’t President Biden’s many embarrassing and unsettling mental lapses, long pauses, and rambling non sequiturs, but the clear message coming out of these meetings: the United States is returning to an Obama-Biden era “America Last” foreign policy that puts the interests of multilateral institutions and international partnerships above the interests of the American people.

That policy shift was perhaps best encapsulated in a quip from President Emmanuel Macron of France, who said of Biden, “It is great to have a U.S. president who’s part of the club and very willing to cooperate.” And of course it’s true. At the close of the G7 Summit, Biden boasted that America is “back at the table,” and described the summit as “extraordinarily collaborative.”

So what did this extraordinarily collaborative club manage to accomplish? One of the G7’s most pressing tasks heading into the summit was what, if anything, it would do about an aggressive and intransigent China. What the group settled on was doing almost nothing.

With each passing week it becomes more obvious that COVID-19 almost certainly originated in a lab in Wuhan, China. We can’t say for sure because the Chinese Communist Party has been blocking efforts to discover the origins of the virus ever since the outbreak began. But at this point, with zero evidence that the virus emerged naturally, the answer seems obvious enough.

Yet all the G7 could manage was a tepid call for a new World Health Organization-backed study on COVID’s origins, as if another investigation by the compromised WHO will yield something more. The G7 also cooked up a plan to dump $40 trillion into infrastructure (a bill likely to be footed largely by American taxpayers) for the developing world to compete with China’s Belt and Road initiative.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

You’re Not Woke, So You Can’t Play By George Leef

By on June 17th, 2021

A college player on the women’s volleyball team has been kicked off because she didn’t agree with the leftist ideology being force-fed to the team.

The absurdity of American higher education is on display at the University of Oklahoma. As we read in this Campus Reform story, a player on the women’s volleyball team has been kicked off because she didn’t agree with the leftist ideology being force-fed to the team.

So even athletics are now controlled by people who demand conformity to the foolish tenets of diversity and social justice. No matter if you’re a good player — if you think wrong thoughts, you are not wanted.

The player, Kylee McLaughlin, is suing the university for a minimum of $75,000, plus legal fees. Let’s hope this gets to the jury and the jurors decide to let the defendants know what they think about this astounding intolerance. Perhaps some administrator at OU will remember the Oberlin case and settle fast.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

-Putin Must Watch a Lot of Cable News By David Harsanyi

By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/putin-must-watch-a-lot-of-cable-news/

After his meeting with Joe Biden in Geneva, Vladimir Putin held a presser where he adeptly aped some of our partisan hyperbole to deflect attention from his own authoritarianism.

“People are shot and killed every day [in the U.S.],” Putin told reporters when asked about his crackdown on domestic political opposition. “You don’t have a chance to open your mouth and you’re shot dead.” Shooting a person for any reason other than genuine self-defense, despite what gun-controllers might have us think, isn’t sanctioned by the state or supported by any organization in America. Though people are also murdered every day in Russia, which has a substantively higher homicide rate than the United States.

Putin had also preposterously suggested that Ashli Babbitt, shot when she joined a mob that stormed the Capitol, was a victim of “assassination” by the police — which, I suppose, is also a tacit admission that he was behind the attack on the now-imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny and numerous journalists.

“America just recently had very severe events, well-known events, after the killing of an African American,” Putin explained. “And the entire movement developed known as Black Lives Matter. I’m not going to comment on that but here’s what I do want to say. What we saw was disorder, destruction, violations of the law, etc.” Russia has been using racial tensions in the United States to deflect attention from its widespread, sometimes genocidal, actions since the 1930s. Riots do break out from time to time in the United States. Riots, though, rarely break out in police states. Not long ago, Russian police arrested 3,000 people and shut down thousands more for peacefully attending “unauthorized” events.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Republicans press education secretary on China’s foothold in US universities During the Trump administration, the Education Department opened investigations into schools including Harvard and Yale By Evie Fordham

By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-education-china-us-universities-miguel-cardona-banks-foxx

Reps. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., pressed Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for answers about his department’s plans to investigate China’s financial foothold in the U.S. university system.

“The American public deserves to know that their money is not being compromised by Communist China and other adversarial nations,” the Republicans wrote in the letter sent on Wednesday. “The FBI warned colleges a decade ago about how hostile actors use campuses for spying, propaganda hubs, and faculty recruitment. Unfortunately, too many institutions failed to take this warning seriously.”

“The previous administration modernized the reporting process and found over $6.5 billion in unreported gifts and contracts and opened 19 university investigations. However, the Department has closed only four of those investigations to date. Moreover, you have not started or provided status updates on any other investigations into foreign gifts or contracts,” the letter continued.

The lawmakers demanded information including the number of staff analyzing the Higher Education Act’s foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements, the total amount of reported foreign gifts and contracts in the Jan. 31 reporting period, and whether the Department has opened any related university investigations. Banks and Foxx asked Cardona and his staff to respond to them within two weeks.

In this Jan. 28, 2020 file photo, Connecticut State Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona speaks with Berlin High School students while on a tour of the school. (Devin Leith-Yessian/Berlin Citizen/Record-Journal via AP) (AP)

“The lack of progress we have seen on this issue since your confirmation as Secretary is alarming, and we are concerned the Department is not treating threats from China and other adversarial nations seriously,” Banks and Foxx wrote to Cardona.

The investigations hinge on Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires schools to report foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000. During the Trump administration, the Education Department opened investigations into schools including Harvard and Yale over unreported foreign funds from countries including China.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America   Advocating double standards for people on top and everyone else is a bad idea By Charles Murray

By on June 17th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/identity-crisis-politics-race-wreck-america-charles-murray/

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

Treating our fellow human beings as individuals instead of treating them as members of groups is unnatural. Our brains evolved to think of people as members of groups; to trust and care for people who are like us and to be suspicious of people who are unlike us. Those traits had great survival value for human beings throughout millions of years of evolution. People who were trusting of outsiders were less likely to pass on their genes than people who were suspicious of them. People who were loyal to their tribe were more likely to pass on their genes than people who stood apart.

The invention of agriculture and the consequent rise of complex societies exposed another aspect of human nature that had enjoyed less scope for expression in hunter-gatherer bands: acquisitiveness, whether of money, status or power. Whatever its evolutionary roots may be, the empirical consistency of human acquisitiveness over the eons is impressive. The open-ended desire for more money, status or power has been natural; to voluntarily limit one’s wealth, status or power has been unnatural.

The combination of acquisitiveness and loyalty to the interests of one’s own group (be it defined by ethnicity or class) shaped human governments for the subsequent 10,000 years. The natural form of government was hierarchical, run by a dominant group that arranged affairs to its benefit and oppressed outsiders to a lesser or greater degree, usually greater. The rare attempts to try any other form of government were unstable and short-lived. The American founders’ idealism lay in their belief that an alternative was possible. Their genius was to design a system with multiple safeguards against the forces that had made previous attempts self-destruct.

America proved that a durable alternative to the natural form of government was possible — a constitutional republic combined with carefully circumscribed democracy. The idea behind that alternative eventually spread around the world, but neither the United States nor any other country that has made it work has ever been out of danger. If we decide that our system for tending the garden needs to be replaced, and if the replacement should prove to be even slightly less devoted to keeping nature at bay, the garden will be reclaimed by jungle within a few decades.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s Failed Hezbollah Ban by Soeren Kern

By on June 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17468/germany-failed-hezbollah-ban

In retrospect, Germany’s much-vaunted Hezbollah ban appears to have been little more than a publicity stunt aimed at silencing critics of the German government’s pro-Iran foreign policy.

Hezbollah has effectively evaded the ban by transferring many of its activities to charities and cultural centers controlled by Iran.

Iran’s main base of operation in Germany is the Hamburg-based Shiite Imam Ali Mosque and the associated Islamic Centre of Hamburg (Islamisches Zentrum Hamburg, IZH).

“Like all pro-Iranian institutions, IZH is based on the model of the Islamic state of Allah and the ideas of the 1979 revolution with the aim of expanding and Islamizing the entire world. Western values, liberal ideas or the free democratic basic order are in contradiction to this. Due to the history and the animosity between Iran and Israel, the teachings of IZH have a strong anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli attitude.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Hamburg branch.

“Although it contains ‘democratic’ elements, this doctrine does not serve to establish the rule of the people, i.e., democracy, but rather to establish the rule of Allah, whose ‘guardians’ are Shiite Islamic scholars. Therefore, Hezbollah spreads an extremist Islamist ideology and represents a threat to the constitutional order.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, North Rhine-Westphalia branch.

“For Hezbollah, Germany represents a space for logistical and financial support services. Although its supporters in Germany are well networked internally, they are not very visible to the outside world because they are careful not to be openly connected with Hezbollah.” — Annual Report for 2020, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Rhineland Palatinate branch.

“One gets the impression that no one has really tried to completely shed light on and smash the structures of Hezbollah in Germany.” — German MP Benjamin Strasser.

The Hezbollah ban was in fact a compromise measure between German lawmakers who wanted to take a harder line against Iran and those who did not. As a result, the ban fell far short of a complete prohibition on Hezbollah and was apparently aimed at providing the German government with political cover that allowed Germany to claim that it had banned the group even if it had not.

One year after Germany banned Hezbollah from operating on its soil, the Iran-backed, Lebanon-based Shiite terrorist group’s presence in Germany is stronger than ever.

In the twelve months since the ban entered into effect, Hezbollah’s propaganda and fundraising activities in Germany have continued apace; the number of its followers in the country has increased; and the Hamburg mosque which serves as Iran’s main base of operations in Germany has gained in influence.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden’s ‘Sanctions Hygiene’ Will Rearm Hamas Terrorists  The deal will not only boost Iran’s military capabilities but also help Hamas terrorists to rearm. By Fred Fleitz

By on June 16th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/15/bidens-sanctions-hygiene-will-rearm-hamas-terrorists/

Negotiations in Vienna are moving the Biden Administration closer to rejoining the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal with Iran (the JCPOA), and convincing Iran to reverse steps it took to back out of the agreement in response to President Trump’s 2018 withdrawal. 

The Biden Administration last week gave Iran a major concession when it quietly dropped sanctions against three former Iranian officials and two companies that traded Iranian petrochemicals. Biden officials deny this, however, and say they lifted the sanctions in the name of what the State Department calls “good sanctions hygiene”—a bizarre new euphemism for appeasing Iran. 

Biden officials are certain also to deny the dangerous consequences of the much larger sanctions relief it plans to grant the terrorist regime. The goal is to revive the nuclear deal, supposedly to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons systems. In fact, the deal will not only boost Iran’s military capabilities but also help Hamas terrorists to rearm and stage another deadly round of missile attacks on Israel. 

We saw this happen in 2015 and 2016 after the Obama-Biden nuclear deal lifted over $150 billion in U.S. and E.U. sanctions against Iran. Tehran used that money to send an estimated $100 million to its terrorist proxies in Gaza—Hamas and Islamic Jihad—and $1 billion to its terrorist proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran also sent its own troops and Hezbollah fighters into Syria, backed its Shiite militias in Iraq, and increased its military budget in 2016 by 90 percent.  

President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the fatally flawed JCPOA, and his “maximum pressure” strategy of placing tough U.S. sanctions on Iran devastated the Iranian economy and made it hard to fund pro-Iran militant groups and political allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. This led to protests against the regime in Iran as well as in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon in 2020. It also caused Iran’s terrorist proxies sometimes to go without paychecks. 

Most Iranian officials claim the approximately 2,000 Trump sanctions cost their economy at least $150 billion. One Iranian official contends the Trump action caused the regime $1 trillion in economic damage.  

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

No Leaders Attended the G7 Summit The meeting last week in the U.K. is just a reminder of what happens whenever we allow actors to take the place of leaders. By Daniel Gelernter

By on June 16th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/15/no-leaders-attended-the-g7-summit/

When I was a child, I made the mistake, as many children do, of thinking that the actors I saw in movies were in some way responsible for their lines. As the playwright Moss Hart heard from a lady sitting behind him: “Actors say the cleverest things!”

But it didn’t take me long to notice that while an actor can make good material great, he cannot make bad material good. If you give him stupid and implausible things to say, he will look stupid and implausible. He may or may not be aware of how he looks; that’s not his job: His job is to act the way someone tells him to act, and to say what someone tells him to say.

And that brings us to the picture of the G7 leaders on the beach in Cornwall. Nobody who watches the film of these people arriving, coming down the boardwalk carefully spaced, hygienically elbow-bumping in lieu of shaking hands, and finally taking up positions for their photo op—nobody would believe these people are world leaders. Because they aren’t. They aren’t running the western world. They are run by the people who really are running the western world—people whose names we don’t know. The people on the beach in Cornwall are there simply in recognition of the working man’s need to see an elected head of state. They are actors.

A Rasmussen poll in March found that just 47 percent of Americans believe Biden is actually doing the job of president. At least as many people believe the job is being done by some other person or persons behind the scenes. And that 47 percent who believe Biden is doing the job must think it’s an awfully easy one, since you don’t have to remember where you are or with whom you are speaking. Even as an actor, Biden’s powers are failing.

It is hardly more plausible that Boris Johnson, a man who looks and talks like a buttered scone, is actually determining policy in Britain. Remember his great pandemic speech: “I must give the British people a very simple instruction: You must stay at home. . . . If you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the power to enforce them . . .” That would have stuck in the throat of any real leader of any real democracy. Churchill would be vomiting in his grave. But Boris Johnson’s eyes were burning with earnestness as he relayed the instructions given to him by the civil service bureaucracy and whatever other hidden powers are running his mouth.

Justin Trudeau meanwhile seemed genuinely hurt when nobody liked his little Bhangra dance routine back in Delhi in 2018. It’s not entirely his fault: He was in Indian costume, and he slipped into the role. He forgot for a moment that his full time job was pretending to be a prime minister.

You could replace Biden with any Hollywood actor—George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep—and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference in how the country is being run or what policies are pursued. You could replace Biden with a paper cup. That might destroy the illusion (though not by much). Biden is a figurehead, rather more embarrassing than the Queen of England, and rather less powerful.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academia’s Obsession with Racism By Abraham H. Miller

By on June 16th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/academias_obsession_with_racism_.html

For the 2020-2021 admissions cycle, the English department at the University of Chicago only admitted graduate students committed to working in Black Studies. At the other end of the city, at Evanston’s Northwestern University, white students took  to social media not only to confess their racism but also to pledge to do better.

Throughout America, faculty at colleges and universities are being required to enroll in modules (courses) on race relations, written with an eye toward critical race theory and the epistemology of Black Lives Matter.

These modules have various names, but among the most common is an oxymoron titled “inclusive excellence,” as if everyone can be excellent by being included. The object, of course, is for colleges and universities to enroll greater numbers of those who already receive preferential treatment based on ascribed characteristics.

Meanwhile, sacrosanct suppositions that represent critical race theory are increasingly becoming the norm on the college campus. Among these are: All whites are racists; systemic racism is the cause of a vast black underclass, and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow explains every pathology to be seen in the black community.

Seldom, if ever, has a single factor explained such a complicated set of social forces.

To raise the question of free will and individual responsibility is a manifestation of racism or white privilege. Nothing shuts down a conversation faster than “check your privilege” or “your white fragility is showing.”

Millionaire black celebrities are pointing out the privilege gap to many white Americans who live from paycheck to paycheck. The absurdity is only lost on those white people who are mired in their own guilt.

When challenged, the inanity is justified in that privilege is not what you’ve accomplished, experienced, or how many homes you own, but what you won’t experience, like being abused by the police or not being able to find a band-aid the color of your skin.

Of course, white people also get killed by rogue cops, and no one has the skin color of a band-aid.

But what really undermines this nonsense preached from the gospel of political correctness is that the fundamental divisions in post-industrial society is not based on race, but on distinctions that come from the division of labor or class.

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