EDUCATION Comments turned off

Tony school in DC forces five-year-olds to parade around chanting ‘Black Lives Matter’ for the cameras By Monica Showalter

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/tony_school_in_dc_forces_5_yearolds_to_parade_around_chanting_black_lives_matter_for_the_cameras.html

What is it about radical leftists and getting their hands on people’s kids?

Libs of Tik Tok (hat tip: Daily Wire and We Love Trump) found this one, posted on the ritzy Lowell School’s site, showing very small schoolchildren, all around age 5, marching in their masks, with signs chanting “Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter…”  I suppose we’re supposed to say, “Aw, aren’t they cute,” but the normal response is, Who is forcing them to do that against their will?

I remember singing “ring around the rosie” at that particular age.

What’s more, as a five-year-old in the ’60s, I remember seeing Black Panther and Symbionese Liberation Army violence, riots, and gun-waving parade-arounds, Charles Manson and his leftist fangirls, and hippies spitting at troops in airports, on the television set as a kid.  I recall viewing those things as vile, hateful, threatening, something never to get involved with.  More to the point, it would have been unthinkable to force any five-year-old at that time to go around chanting for those causes as they are for today’s similar ones.  It simply would not have been done.

But here we are today, with near-toddlers being forced to march and parade around for the cameras chanting for an organization that is characterized by its cause and effects — violence, burning cities, dead police officers, police defunding, zero response to 9/11 calls, and big death spikes in the black community based on unchecked violent crime, corporate kowtowing to the crocodile, and humongous piles of money engulfed in colossal corruption.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dem Mask Hypocrisy on Full Display By Isaac Schorr

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dem-mask-hypocrisy-on-full-display/

Last week ended with perennial Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a Democrat, posting pictures of herself maskless in a classroom full of masked children and teachers. When the public reacted negatively to the images, Abrams defended herself by explaining that she had only appeared maskless in photos on the condition that everyone else around her did don face-coverings. Much better, then.

Abrams is far from alone, though. The pandemic has seen countless examples of politicians convinced that while it’s imperative that the little people — be they younger or less famous and wealthy — wear masks as their patriotic duty, the VIPs should remain exempt from such strictures.

Just a few days after Abrams’s gaffe, Representative Elissa Slotkin posted a picture of what appeared to be a townhall event in her district. Slotkin is in the foreground wearing an enormous smile. The other attendees appear in the background, wearing masks.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why the Spotify – Rogan fight will define Free Speech

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/08/why-the-joe-rogan-spotify-fight-will-define-free-speech-for-us-all/

Remind us again what it was that Joe Rogan said that got the left so apoplectic. Did he spew hate speech? Call for an insurrection? Say mean things about a protected minority?

No? The left wanted him canceled because he supposedly aired misinformation about COVID? Are you kidding? If this is the new standard for censorship, you can kiss free speech goodbye.

After all, anything can be labeled “misinformation.”

Would you dare to say climate change hysteria is unfounded? Or government-provided daycare is a bad idea? Or Joe Biden’s massive welfare expansion is a bad idea? Election fraud is real? Dogs are better pets than cats? Misinformation! Misinformation!! Misinformation!!! Misinformation!!!!

What information did Rogan spread about COVID that has so alarmed the left? That masks are ineffective? That all we needed was a 15-day lockdown to “slow the spread”? That there was no way the virus resulted from Chinese lab experiments? That schools had to be shut down? That this was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”?

Oh, wait, those were all uttered by people like Anthony Fauci.

No, the left claims that Rogan, by not being sufficiently panicked about COVID and not toeing the line on the vaccination mandates, is guilty of second-degree murder, with Spotify being an accessory. As Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan put it, “People are dying because of COVID misinformation that Spotify packages as glib podcast fodder.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Campaign of the Century’ Review: Revisiting Kennedy vs. Nixon A revisionist tract debunks the ‘conventional mythology’ surrounding the 1960 presidential election.By Robert W. Merry

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campaign-of-the-century-review-revisiting-kennedy-vs-nixon-11644271787

When Richard Nixon ran against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1950, his House colleague John Kennedy slipped him a $1,000 campaign contribution from the family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, who liked Nixon’s anticommunist fervor. Nine years later, when the two men emerged as likely presidential nominees for their respective parties, Kennedy asked Nixon to keep the matter secret so he could avoid a political firestorm from fellow Democrats. The Californian agreed; later, when columnist Drew Pearson got wind of the story, Nixon press secretary Herb Klein denied the report. Nixon acquiesced in the public lie to honor his private commitment to the man emerging as his most threatening political rival.

This intriguing anecdote, recounted in historian Irwin F. Gellman’s “Campaign of the Century,” encapsulates the author’s central thesis—that Richard Nixon got a raw deal from campaign reporters and later historians who portrayed him as a menacing political scoundrel, when in fact he deserved greater recognition for his “high road” politics. “Those who insist on seeing Nixon only as a dark and devious character,” Mr. Gellman writes, “overlook the fact that he ran by far the more honorable, and honest, campaign.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Facebook, other tech giants censor inconvenient facts about climate change By Bjorn Lomborg

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/02/07/facebook-other-tech-giants-censor-facts-about-climate-change/

The online world has become a free-speech battleground. Tech platforms have sided with illiberal regimes to censor posts while flagging “misinformation” in free countries. We all share a legitimate interest in avoiding outright falsehoods, but much censorship today — whether at dictators’ behest or in the name of eradicating “misinformation” — ultimately is about restricting discourse to a narrow corridor of the politically acceptable. That makes it harder to identify smart policies.

This is especially troubling for important issues like climate change. Global warming is real and man-made. However, social-media giants — Facebook in particular — are going far beyond censoring people for denying its existence.

Facebook monitors what people say about climate change in 100 countries and uses third-party fact-checkers to identify misinformation for flagging or removal.

Here’s something Facebook’s censors deemed unacceptable: I wrote a comment using the latest peer-reviewed research from the medical journal Lancet on deaths caused by heat and cold. The paper is the first to show that globally, every year, half a million people die because temperatures are too hot, while 4.5 million people die because it is too cold. In other words, nine times more people die from the cold than the heat.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Famed Alzheimer’s Researcher John Hardy Is a Knight … but Not in Shining Armor By Eric Felten

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/08/famed_alzheimers_researcher_john_hardy_is_a_knight__but_not_in_shining_armor_813737.html

The celebrated Alzheimer’s Disease researcher John Hardy was among the British doctors and medical researchers honored by Queen Elizabeth II with knighthoods at the dawn of the new year. It was just the latest on a long list of prestigious awards Hardy has collected, including the Potamkin Prize for his work identifying genetic aspects of Alzheimer’s disease, the MetLife Prize, the Thudichum medal, the Robert A. Pritzker Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize.

In 2018, Hardy added the Brain Prize to his list of accolades. Awarded by the Danish Lundbeck Foundation, it is regularly referred to as the “Nobel of neuroscience.” Winners are assumed to be on the short list for the Nobels themselves.

Missing among all the flattering kudos and attendant news coverage has been any mention of the geneticist’s leading role in a conspiracy that held Alzheimer’s research hostage to fraudulently acquired gene patents. The sordid affair mired efforts to find a cure in tangled, resource-sapping litigation. The last of the courthouse wrangling that began in 2003 wouldn’t be resolved for more than a decade – a resolution that came with a ringing rebuke from the bench expressing the judge’s outrage at the scheme, the schemers, and the damage they caused.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Parents Prevail Over K-12 ‘Bias Incidents’ Wellesley Public Schools amends woke policies after families sue.

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/parents-prevail-over-k-12-bias-incidents-wellesley-public-schools-massachusetts-11644272316?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Score one more victory for the parental revolt against woke K-12 education. As part of a legal settlement on Monday, Wellesley Public Schools in Massachusetts agreed to amend practices that parents said excluded some students from events because of their race.

Last year the nonprofit Parents Defending Education sued in federal court on behalf of three Massachusetts families over Wellesley policies and practices that they said violated the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment and civil-rights law. The settlement looks like a solid win for the parents.

Wellesley’s “affinity groups” had held events aimed at specific races. School officials claimed no students or staff were excluded, but the families argued that isn’t what their children were told. The complaint quoted an email where a middle-school teacher said a specific “healing space” was “for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.”

Under the settlement, Wellesley agreed not to “exclude students from affinity-based group sessions or any other school-sponsored activities on the basis of race.” The district won’t identify events “as intended only for certain racial groups.” It “will provide notice” of affinity-based group sessions “to all grade-eligible students, regardless of their race.” Announcements will feature a disclaimer saying that “this event is open to all students regardless of race, color, sex, gender identity, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s administration wants to make life easier for minority crack addicts By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/bidens_administration_wants_to_make_life_easier_for_minority_crack_addicts.html

In times past, the American government stood with productive people and pushed back against the forces of corruption and decay. In Biden’s America, though, the opposite is true. Big cities are becoming concierge services for hard-drug addicts and Biden’s administration is joining in, with a multi-million plan to provide crackpipes for addicts. And here’s the kicker: In the name of equity, the administration will make a special effort to bring these instruments of destruction to Blacks and members of the LGBTQ+ crowd.

There’s a growing trend on the left to facilitate drug addiction. Just recently, under ex-Mayor de Blasio’s aegis, New York opened legal shooting galleries—or, as they’re politely called, “Overdose Prevention Centers.” On the very first day, five people overdosed in the Harlem site—although they were brought back to life.

The theory is that, if the drug addicts have a nice, safe place to shoot up, fewer will die. This is the same belief system that sees parents offer their kids pot and alcohol at home so that they’re not on the mean streets doing drugs. Either way, with a green light from those who would ordinarily try to protect them from vice, the kids end up seriously addicted and heading downhill fast. (Just ask Robert Downey Jr., who ended up in federal prison after his dad got him started on drugs; or ask Mackenzie Phillips, whose father did the same for her.)

EDUCATION Comments turned off

University of Minnesota Alums Protest Scholarship in George Floyd’s Honor “He was not a hero, but a drug addict and criminal.” Sara Dogan

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/tuesday-university-minnesota-alums-protest-sara-dogan/

To mark the one-year anniversary of his death, the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota announced that they are endowing a new scholarship to honor George Perry Floyd Jr.—the drug addict and criminal who became famous through his death at the hands of police officer Derek Chauvin.

“This is an important step for our community,” said Carlson School Dean Sri Zaheer, who added that the scholarship “will enhance the diversity of the student body and has a preference for black and African-American students as well as those who have financial need or are victims of police violence, for as long as they are underrepresented at the Carlson school.”

Dean Zaheer noted that at George Floyd’s memorial service, “Universities nationwide were called upon to create scholarships in his honor to help create a more just and equitable world,” and called Carlson’s scholarship a “clear message” of their intentions to promote racial justice. But does George Floyd—repeat criminal, drug addict, and unwitting martyr for a movement—deserve the immense honor of a scholarship in his name?

Bruce Hendry, a prominent alumnus of the University of Minnesota, is one of many who object to the honor their alma mater has bestowed on Floyd. Hendry has devoted significant time and resources to the betterment of the University, both serving on the Carlson Board of Overseers for 10 years and joining the university’s “Century Club” which consists of those who gave more than $100,000 to the University more than twenty-five years ago. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

No Shot at a Fair Trial for January 6 Defendants in the Swamp Biden’s Justice Department relies on the Beltway trifecta—partisan federal judges, news outlets, and prospective jurors—to codify its punitive prosecution and criminalize political dissent. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on February 8th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/07/no-shot-at-a-fair-trial-for-january-6-defendants-in-the-swamp/

The first set of trials for the hundreds of protesters charged in the Justice Department’s sweeping criminal investigation into January 6 begins later this month. Since the Capitol building is considered the scene of the crime, every trial will be held in the District of Columbia—which means the jury pool will be composed solely of residents living in the nation’s capital.

To say this is a problem for Trump supporters facing even minor charges is a huge understatement.

January 6 defendants already have suffered the wrath of D.C.-based federal judges who’ve imposed unusually harsh prison sentences for low level misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies while routinely berating defendants from the bench.

For example, before sentencing a man who pleaded guilty to “parading” in the Capitol to serve 14 days in prison, D.C. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, declared that January 6 protesters were “told lies, told falsehoods, told our election was stolen when it clearly was not.” The defendant, Mehta claimed, “was a pawn in a game directed and played by people who should know better.”

Now the fate of hundreds of January 6 defendants is in the hands of biased judges like Mehta and a city populated with government workers who voted nearly 94 percent for Joe Biden in 2020, prompting some defense attorneys to try to move trials out of Washington. In July, a defense lawyer in one high-profile case filed a change of venue motion before Judge Mehta that explained why January 6 defendants could not get a fair trial in such a heavily Democratic, politically obsessed  city. “The level of antipathy towards Trump and his supporters in the District is off the charts and makes it impossible to find an impartial jury,” David W. Fischer, the attorney representing Thomas Caldwell, charged in the multi-defendant Oath Keepers prosecution.

Politicians and the media continue falsely to portray January 6 defendants as racists, Fischer continued, an accusation certain to enrage potential jurors in a city evenly split between blacks and left-wing whites. “President Biden, in a speech ironically advertised as intended to heal America’s racial divide, referred to January 6th Trump protesters as ‘thugs, insurrectionists, political extremists, and white supremacists.’ At his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Merrick Garland pledged to ‘supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on 6 January.’”