How Joe Biden and the I.R.S are Performing Criminal Acts To dismantle our borders and destroy our country.David Horowitz and John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/how-joe-biden-and-irs-are-performing

In an earlier article about Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to fix the 2020 presidential election, we observed that the root cause of America’s current problems, beginning with broken borders and off-the charts urban violence – is lawlessness.[1] We also observed that this lawlessness originates in the White House, and includes the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Executive Branch generally.

Discussions of the border problem often touch on the criminal element that violates our unenforced border laws beginning with drug dealers, sex traffickers, and migrant smugglers. But the crime problem is vastly understated in these references which give the impression that it is largely confined to the countries they have left, and has no impact on the country they have invaded. In July 2018, the Government Accountability Office issued a report containing “Criminal Alien Statistics,”[2] which serves to correct this false impression.  Among its conclusions, the report states that one in five federal prisoners in the United States is a criminal alien. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The G.A.O. report covered the period between 2011 and 2016. During that time frame, approximately 2 million foreigners crossed the border into the United States illegally – which is just about the number of unvetted foreigners whom border officials predict will cross the border illegally this year alone. In that same time frame there were more than 730,000 criminal aliens in U.S. prisons, federal and state, and local jails. Criminals are not usually arrested the first time they commit a crime, and are often released with minimal time served when they are. So while there were 730,000 criminal aliens in U.S. prisons, they accounted for 4.9 million arrests and 7.5 million offenses – which would translate into a 10 times greater number of victims than offenders. 

The Unraveling of Education in America The bad news from the education industrial complex just keeps on coming. Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/unraveling-education-america-larry-sand/

It’s no secret that education in America has been in bad shape for some time, and now, low student proficiency has been exacerbated by the hysterical response to the Covid outbreak. Most recently, the results of a Harvard University study, which investigated the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening gaps in achievement by race and school poverty, have been released.

Using testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and D.C., the researchers found that “shifts to remote or hybrid instruction during 2020-21 had profound consequences for student achievement. In districts that went remote, achievement growth was lower for all subgroups, but especially for students attending high-poverty schools. In areas that remained in-person, “there were still modest losses in achievement, but there was no widening of gaps between high and low-poverty schools in math (and less widening in reading).”

Another study, by curriculum and assessment provider Amplify, examined test data for some 400,000 elementary school students across 37 states and found a spike in students not reading at grade level, with literacy losses “disproportionately concentrated in the early elementary grades (K-2).” The report also found that minority children suffered disproportionate learning loss. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “During the last normal school year, only 34% of black and 29% of Hispanic second graders needed intensive intervention to help catch up. This school year 47% of black and 39% of Hispanic second graders have fallen this far behind on literacy, compared to 26% of white peers.”

And distressingly, a longitudinal study from the Annie E. Casey Foundation finds that kids “who don’t read proficiently by third grade are four times more likely to leave school without a diploma than proficient readers,” and “for the worst readers, those [who] couldn’t master even the basic skills by third grade, the rate is nearly six times greater.”

The FBI is on the November Ballot The incoming Congress could stop the FBI’s warrantless spying on more than three million Americans. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/05/fbi-november-ballot-lloyd-billingsley/

As the midterm election approaches, the Annual Statistical Transparency Report Regarding the Intelligence Community’s Use of National Security Surveillance Authorities shows why the Federal Bureau of Investigation is also on the ballot.

One of the few to give this document the attention it deserves was historian Matthew Guariglia, a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and affiliated scholar at the University of California’s Hastings School of Law.

The report “provides statistics and contextual information concerning how the Intelligence Community uses the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act  and certain other national security authorities to accomplish its mission.” The Act authorizes the U.S. government to engage in mass surveillance of foreign targets.

As Guariglia discovered, FISA is “still being abused by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to spy on Americans without a warrant.” This abuse takes place under Section 702, an amendment to FISA.

Between December 2020 and November 2021, Guariglia notes, the FBI potentially queried the data of more than three million Americans without a warrant. Collection of the data, from telecom and internet providers, renders conversations described as “incidental,” but they aren’t. Each intelligence agency’s rules on “targeting” and “minimization,” Guariglia shows, allow access to access to the communications of Americans caught in  the “702 dragnet.”

Chiefly Illiterate in San Francisco Schools The district pulls ‘chief’ from its CFO’s title as a progressive gesture to Native Americans

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chiefly-illiterate-in-san-francisco-schools-chief-native-american-11653599414?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The San Francisco school district is a slow learner, apparently. In February voters ousted three school-board members in landslide elections. One complaint was that the board was more interested in progressive gestures, such as scrubbing Abraham Lincoln’s name off school buildings, than in reopening classrooms amid the pandemic.

Now the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the school district is planning to phase out the word “chief” in its job titles, “given that Native American members of our community have expressed concerns.” Currently the district has executives with the customary roles of chief financial officer, chief of staff, and so on.

Here’s what is particularly amusing in this attempt at progressive sensitivity: While the English language has lots of words that can be traced to the native peoples of the Americas, including “chipmunk,” “barbecue” and “hurricane,” they don’t include “chief.” That word comes from Old French, and originally Latin, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations back to 1297.

“Farewell great Chiefe,” says a character in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” That’s dated to the early 1600s. Somehow we doubt he was thinking about the Sioux. A biblical translation from William Tyndale in 1526 speaks of “the power of Belzebub, the chefe of the devyls.” The earliest examples are hard to parse unless you’re fluent in Beowulfese, but here’s one we grasp from 1483, a decade before Columbus sailed to the west: “She was made abbesse and chyef of al the monasterye.”

Militarizing The Baby Formula Crisis Is Infantile Iain Murray and Michelle Minton

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/05/27/militarizing-the-baby-formula-crisis-is

A military cargo plane lands filled with vitally needed baby formula to be greeted by a top government official. A relief flight to a developing world country? A ray of hope for a war-ravaged Ukraine? A blockade broken? No, America in the year 2022.

Simultaneously, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to force American companies to produce more baby formula. Our response to a problem caused by domestic regulation and protectionism has been to militarize it.

I’m sorry, Mr. President, but this solution is infantile.

America is unique in having this problem because its regulatory state caused it. The proximate cause of the shortage was the February recall of products made at America’s largest manufacturer of baby formula, Abbott Labs’ facility in Michigan. The Food and Drug Administration was concerned about outbreaks of death and illness among infants fed with the formula but was slow to inspect the facility. Abbott has indeed announced that it will reopen the facility, as the FDA found no evidence of contamination. As 40% of America’s supply comes from that facility, the shortfall hit supplies hard.

Ordinarily, however, the market would respond to such a shock by two means – raising prices to signal a shortage and importing substitutes from abroad. However, regulation precludes those two responses. Much of the American market depends on price agreements with the country’s welfare agencies, which are there to stop poor mothers from having to face difficult choices for their pocketbooks. Higher prices could lead to mothers choosing to limit formula use, with nutritional detriments to the baby.

The White House’s Specious Gender Manifesto The White House is claiming that the debate about childhood gender medicine is settled—even as numerous international experts are coming forward to say it‘s not. Bernard Lane

https://quillette.com/2022/05/13/joe-bidens-faulty-gender-diktat/
“How will history judge gender-affirming care if professional groupthink has in fact served to improperly justify the medicalisation of vulnerable minors with no good evidence to confidently predict the effect on their welfare? ”

On March 31st, Joe Biden’s White House issued a lengthy “fact sheet” claiming that science has spoken in favour of medicalised gender change for young people. What used to be called “sex-reassignment” is now the more seductive “gender-affirming care” —from puberty-blocker drugs to interrupt natural development, on to lifelong synthetic hormones, even surgery. And now we have the leader of the free world boldly “confirming the positive impact of gender-affirming care on youth mental health” for children and teens who identify as transgender or non-binary.

“Confirming” is the new asserting, and the Biden-Harris administration is also “confirming that providing gender-affirming care is neither child maltreatment nor malpractice.” It’s a small step from confirming to enforcing, and so the federal Justice Department has written to state attorneys-general warning them that if they deny minors the benefits of gender-affirming medical science, they will fall afoul of constitutional and statutory guarantees of equality, not to mention funding rules tied to grants from Washington. The first state under federal fire is Alabama, where a new law would impose up to 10 years’ prison time on clinicians taking anyone under 19 on a medicalised gender journey. The White House is even taking the fight offshore, pledging to uphold trans health rights with its foreign policy and overseas aid programs.

Biden’s blizzard of initiatives was unleashed on Transgender Day of Visibility. Timing matters in politics, and Biden’s may be a little off. Americans are starting to get their first glimpse of gender medicine as an intensely contested field; it’s nowhere near settled science. For several years, big left-leaning media outlets have told a simple story in which the medicalised gender-affirming approach is lifesaving, at least for those kids who say they can’t live without it. It follows, we’re told, that any restriction is a suicidally dangerous denial of health care, there being supposedly no alternative to hormonal and sometimes surgical interventions.

Please Don’t Go To College Higher education has become simpler and less effective as we have fetishized a modern misunderstanding of equality. By William M. Briggs

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/25/please-dont-go-to-college/

“If learning were profaned by being made available to all and sundry,” Cardinal Richelieu predicted in 1625, “it would be found that there were more people capable of creating doubts than of resolving them, and many would show themselves more apt in opposing truth than in defending it.”

Passing by, only for a moment, the shocking elitism, so appalling to our modern ears, how did the Red Eminence fare?

The answer is obvious, as is the answer to the growing madness which surrounds us: Less, not more, education. And more elitism.

You’ve heard the slogan: “We want our college to look like America.” They say it about college, about Congress, the bureaucracy, the bar, the professoriate, almost anything. The reply should be: “No, we don’t.” I don’t want my pilot looking “like America.” America looks like the furtive guy at the end of the bar who should have been arrested years ago. Or America looks like that nice old lady we just helped load groceries into her trunk. Pilots look nothing like that. I want my pilot looking like he has the skills, and the intelligence, to fly the marvel of engineering that is a jet aircraft. I also do not want those aeronautical engineers to look like America. I’m keen on them understanding differential equations, and what stress does to aluminum welds.

The exceptions to that “almost anything” were, until recently, things like combat soldiering and professional sports. Alas, even in those sanctuaries of reality, the cry of looking like America has taken hold. Because of a false understanding of equality.

If Only We Were More Reasonable: Christopher Akehurst

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2022/05/if-only-we-were-more-reasonable/

With the best will in the world there are times when one wonders about the sanity of many people. This is one of them.

We have just handed over control of our country, in dangerous and uncharted times, to a fractious horde of mathematical illiterates with no idea how to run an economy, lockdown-loving fascists scheming to control our lives by any means possible and now with all the apparatus in place, mad Greens with apocalyptic visions of planetary doom, obscurantist “teachers” who have turned the wide horizons of education into a crucible of noxious mendacity and sexual fantasists wanting to manipulate the self-understanding of children, all lumped in with an assortment of monomaniacs squeaking out their solipsistic obsessions in, to borrow a phrase from Browning, fifty different sharps and flats.

Then there’s the avalanche of hysterical panic that followed the suggestion that abortion in America might – might – become more restricted. We’ll be hearing much more of it any day now, shriller and louder – inarticulate rage, pure and simple. Where’s the rationality, the reasoned arguments amid the churning torrent of abuse and invective?

Florida IG Rejects Conspiracist Rebekah Jones’s ‘Unsubstantiated’ Covid Cover-up Claims By Caroline Downey

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/florida-ig-rejects-conspiracist-rebekah-joness-unsubstantiated-covid-cover-up-claims/

A former dashboard manager at the Florida Department of Health made “unsubstantiated” claims that Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration fired her because she refused to obey her superiors’ instructions to fudge the state’s Covid-19 data, a new investigation has found.

The extensive report from the Health Department’s Office of Inspector General found “insufficient evidence” that Rebekah Jones was ordered to falsify, alter, or misrepresent Covid positivity rates on the state COVID-19 Data and Surveillance dashboard that she helped build.

In December 2020, Jones alleged that former Florida deputy secretary of health Dr. Shamarial Roberson, a reputable chronic-disease epidemiologist, pressured her to “delete cases and deaths” to sugarcoat the state’s handling of the Covid crisis. Jones later backtracked, arguing instead on her now-suspended Twitter account that Roberson “asked me to go into the raw data and manually alter figures.”

The report addressed Jones’s accusations that Roberson, as well as two other state health officials, directed her to restrict access to underlying data that supported what was presented on the dashboard, finding them “exonerated.” The three confirmed that they told Jones to temporarily remove the “data hub” before reactivating it after it was reviewed for accuracy, which the report determined “does not appear to violate law, rule, or policy since the ‘data hub’ was not required to be made available,” and since it was quickly restored unchanged. Another reason the officials took down the section was to prevent private individual health information prohibited from public disclosure from being released.

Meet The Billionaires’ Club Pumping Critical Race Theory Into Your Child’s Classroom By: Luke Rosiak

https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/26/meet-the-billionaires-club-pumping-critical-race-theory-into-your-childs-classroom/

These groups have been sowing seeds of critical race theory in educational bureaucracies since long before you even heard the term.

A decade ago, when an Obama-era initiative called “Common Core” convinced 41 states to give up control of their education standards, it was infamously the result of a massive influence campaign by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, with America’s K-12 landscape being turned upside down by “equity” initiatives that divide children by ethnicity and devalue rigorous academics, the culprit is much the same: Gates and other philanthropic foundations.

That’s a takeaway from the two years I spent poring through educational and financial records for my new book, “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education.” These philanthropic foundations are perhaps the most powerful and least understood force in American politics — and a key node in moving critical race theory from academic papers to society. Pick any radical racial initiative in your child’s school, and it is likely to tie back to the Ford, Kellogg, Gates, Annie E. Casey, MacArthur, or Surdna foundations.