I am not an anti-vaxer but I will listen to contrary opinion. However, I cannot abide columns that compare government mandates, however excessive, to Holocaust metaphor. The Holocaust deliberately singled out one of every three Jews in the world for extermination. To compare vaccine passports or mandated masks and vaccinations to that epic horror is egregious and insulting to the memory of the victims. rsk
https://www.city-journal.org/bank-of-america-racial-reeducation-program?wallit_nosession=1
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Sign up for his newsletter here.
Bank of America Corporation has implemented a racial reeducation program that claims the United States is a system of “white supremacy” and encourages employees to become “woke at work,” instructing white employees in particular to “decolonize [their] mind[s]” and “cede power to people of color.”
Earlier this year, Bank of America’s North Carolina and Charlotte market president Charles Bowman announced a new “equity” initiative called United in Action, in partnership with the United Way of Central Carolinas. According to documents I have obtained from a whistleblower, BOA executives launched the initiative by encouraging employees to participate in their “Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge,” a race-training program funded in part by the bank and built on the principles of critical race theory, including intersectionality, white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.
On the program’s first day, Bank of America teaches employees that the United States is a “racialized society” that “use[s] race to establish and justify systems of power, privilege, disenfranchisement, and oppression,” which “give[s] privileges to white people resulting in disadvantages to people of color.” According to the training program, all whites—“regardless of one’s socioeconomic class background or other disadvantages”—are “living a life with white skin privileges.” Even children are implicated in the system of white supremacy: according to the program materials, white toddlers “develop racial biases by ages three to five” and “should be actively taught to recognize and reject the ‘smog’ of white privilege.”
Over the next three days, Bank of America teaches employees about intersectionality, unconscious bias, microaggressions, and systemic racism. “Racism in America idolizes White physical features and White values as supreme over those of others,” the program asserts. As a result of being part of the “dominant culture,” whites are more likely to “have more limited imagination,” “experience fear, anxiety, guilt, or shame,” “contribute to racial tension, hatred, and violence in our homes, communities, and world,” and, subsequently, “react in broken ways as a result.” People of color, on the other hand, cannot be racist, because “racism is used to justify the position of the dominant group . . . and to uphold white supremacy and superiority.” Therefore, the discussion guide claims, “reverse racism and discrimination are not possible.”
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/19/a-life-destroyed-for-parading-at-the-capitol/
After Robert Reeder was arrested in February and charged with four misdemeanors for his involvement in the Capitol protest on January 6, he lost his job as a truck driver for FedEx. “As a result of his arrest in this matter, he has been placed on administrative leave/has been terminated,” Reeder’s attorney wrote in court filing. “He has not been able to secure steady employment since being charged in this matter.”
Reeder, like many Americans who attended Donald Trump’s speech then walked to Capitol Hill, went alone. He is a registered Democrat but supported some of Trump’s policies. The Maryland resident decided to travel to Washington on the morning of January 6, a “spur of the moment” decision, according to his attorney.
After suffering the effects of tear gas and sting balls launched by police officers outside the building—a reality the news media still refuses to cover—Reeder went inside the building to look for water to rinse his eyes. From all accounts, he was allowed into the building. While inside, Reeder marveled at the beauty of the Capitol and urged others “do not destroy anything.” He asked police how he could get out of the building as the situation between law enforcement and protesters escalated.
Reeder took selfies and videos of his experience. “I’m leaving now . . . I got tear gassed at least four times inside the Capitol . . . I saw the lady they say got shot, I walked right past her in a pool of blood,” he said in one video. “And it’s just . . . completely crazy in there.” After he entered a second time—police were not allowing protesters to exit the grounds so Reeder was looking for a way out through the building—he said in another post that he was “gassed several times . . . and shot with pepper balls.”
Although Reeder has no criminal record and prosecutors admit he did not commit any violent crime on January 6, Biden’s Justice Department wants Reeder to go to jail for two months. He pleaded guilty to one count of “parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol Building,” a common low-level charge levied against hundreds of Americans who entered the Capitol building on January 6. Prosecutors want to make an example of Reeder despite the fact he essentially turned himself in to law enforcement and quickly negotiated a plea arrangement.
Guilty of Sharing Memes
But as is the case in all January 6 prosecutions, the government is showing no mercy; Reeder, not charged with anything close to “rioting” or mob activity, nonetheless is branded a criminal by Joe Biden’s Justice Department. “[I]t is important to convey to future rioters and would-be mob participants—especially those who intend to improperly influence the democratic process—that their actions will have consequences,” assistant U.S. attorney Joshua Rothstein wrote in the government’s sentencing memo. “Picketing, demonstrating, or parading at the Capitol as part of the riot on January 6 is not like picketing at the Capitol some other day, without other rioters present.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17669/biden-obama-jihadists
Biden is following in Obama’s ill-fated footsteps. In fact, Biden’s foreign policy is so unoriginal that you could almost describe the “Biden Doctrine” — as more and more left-wing pundits are calling it — as “Obama on steroids.”
The Biden administration must… Refuse with absolute consistency to work with radical Islamist groups. Exceptions to this rule must be limited to cases of absolute and immediate necessity. Never trust and always verify, verify, and verify.
Send powerful messages of support to Taiwan, Ukraine, Israel and our allies in Asia such as Japan and Australia especially. These are the partners most at risk because of Biden’s failure in Afghanistan, and his inadequate responses to China and Russia, our other greatest adversaries.
Make it clear, now that the U.S. is at a much greater risk than just a few weeks ago, that any attack against the U.S. will be met with the harshest response.
“Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” An unforgettable line from the classic movie Patton. George C. Scott, in the title role as the legendary General George Patton, is surveying the battlefield from his command post. He senses that his U.S. forces will rout the Germans, led by the brilliant Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, in this pivotal World War II tank battle in Tunisia. Why would the Americans be blessed with victory? In large part because Patton, himself a military genius, took the time to thoroughly study Rommel’s book on battlefield tactics and strategy during the previous war, World War I. Patton believed in the value of knowing his history, learning from his adversaries and avoiding the mistakes of his predecessors.
I truly wish President Joe Biden were interested in learning from history. Tragically, however, the pattern is becoming more pronounced every day: instead of learning from the mistakes of the Obama administration, many of them, by the way, his own mistakes as Obama’s vice president, Biden is following in Obama’s ill-fated footsteps. In fact, Biden’s foreign policy is so unoriginal that you could almost describe the “Biden Doctrine” — as more and more left-wing pundits are calling it — as “Obama on steroids.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17659/afghanistan-disaster-biden
The fear now is that, as Western intelligence agencies are no longer able to monitor the activities of Islamist extremists both in Afghanistan and in neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Iran, the West will find itself increasingly vulnerable to high profile terror attacks as a direct consequence of Mr Biden’s disastrous withdrawal plan.
An important first step for the security of the United States would be immediately to shut its southern border.
The alarming implications, in terms of Western security, of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan are clearly an issue the Biden administration failed to take into consideration when deciding to abandon Afghanistan to its fate. It is an oversight that adds to the scale of the disaster that Mr Biden has just inflicted on the security of the Western alliance.
The ability of U.S. security officials to monitor and disrupt the activities of Islamist terror groups will be severely diminished as a consequence of the Biden administration’s catastrophic decision to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan.
One of the most notable achievements of the US-led coalition’s presence in Afghanistan during the past two decades has been its relentless campaign to destroy the terrorist infrastructure of Islamist terror groups such as Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organisation.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/19/after-afghan-debacle-stop-the-nation-building-crusades-once-and-for-all/
Joe Biden’s haphazard, poorly executed troop withdrawal from the morass of Afghanistan has irrevocably sullied America’s reputation. Even those of us who have long supported drawing down the decades-old American military footprint from this strategically unimportant Third-World backwater have been horrified at the indefensible manner in which this extraction was done. Kabul is, unquestionably, now the younger generations’ Saigon moment.
From pushing back the withdrawal time frame Biden inherited from former President Donald Trump to coincide with the peak Taliban fighting season, to the obtuse overnight surprise evacuation of Bagram Air Base, to the impetuous and uncoordinated pulling out of ancillary air support that the Afghan military relied upon, to the images of Afghans falling to their deaths off hastily departing U.S. military planes, to the wholesale stranding of more than 10,000 American citizens on the ground with little exit strategy for them other than reliance upon the magnanimity of an internationally recognized jihadist outfit, this withdrawal was botched in every possible way. In a sane and just world, the U.S. House would already be drafting articles of impeachment.
But it’s also worth stepping back from the immediate Biden-orchestrated debacle in the Afghan “graveyard of empires” to focus on the broader lessons we can glean from this unceremonious end to America’s longest-ever war.
The U.S.-led war in Afghanistan—the earliest and initially highest-profile theater of the sprawling President Bush-era “war on terror”—commenced in October 2001, less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The invasion was supported overwhelmingly in the aftermath of the then-ruling Taliban’s harboring of al-Qaeda and refusal to extradite 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, signed into law on September 18, passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House. The AUMF granted Bush (and subsequent presidents) the authority to deploy “necessary and appropriate force” against those who “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/19/money-power-and-revenge-the-truth-about-critical-race-theory/
Nearly six decades ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. fought for a better world, imploring us to judge others by “the content of their character.” He offered a vision of an America that united people across racial, political, and economic lines — a vision that we can all believe in.
The proponents of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) offer no such vision. They only propose a world of endless grievances and revenge, petty cons, and abusing their power to ruin lives.
Where Dr. King saw a world of equals, CRT envisions only victims and vengeance. Where Dr. King called upon Americans to see the content of each others’ character, CRT calls for acts of theater and human sacrifices to cancel culture. Where Dr. King offered equality before the law — the only true, objective equality — CRT proposes only “equity,” the subjective decisions of petty tyrants over who gets what, when, and how.
CRT is an enrichment scheme perpetrated by self-proclaimed “victims.” It is a sham that makes money for CRT’s rabid proponents, granting them power over the lives of others and exercising revenge for a seemingly endless stream of slights — real or imagined. CRT doesn’t solve problems; it shreds the social fabric of a nation by perpetuating an “us” versus “them” mentality.
While the proponents of CRT insist their platform only serves to expose America’s racist past, nothing about it offers a way to shape a better future. The evidence of CRT’s do-goodery is strikingly scarce. It lays the blame at the feet of all white Americans, no matter their thoughts or actions. If “whiteness” is inherently oppressive and evil, then America is a morally bankrupt entity that deserves nothing but reproach — then America is evil and so are all patriotic Americans, white or otherwise.
At the heart of CRT is the concept of “equity” (not “equality,” which is an important distinction). The proponents of CRT believe in equality of outcome, with all Americans ending up at the same place, rather than the meritocracy implied by equality of opportunity.
Which brings us to the fundamental question: What does CRT’s better world look like? I can see Dr. King’s vision of a world in which we are all equal before the law, treat one another as we wish to be treated, and succeed or fail based on our own merits. But CRT’s world of equity is indescribable at best and insidious at worst. What makes that world better for everyone?
In effect, CRT only exists to empower a select few in acting out their perceived sense of grievance through racist vengeance against those whom they determine are — always undeservedly, of course — better-positioned in life. CRT seeks to control the allocation of money — other people’s money — with its proponents grifting their way to success through seven-figure consulting contracts. It is a revenge-based form of propaganda embodied by the woman wishing death on parents who don’t buy into it. CRT’s proponents are in the business of punishing children who don’t bow down to them.
https://issuesinsights.com/2021/08/20/where-the-sun-dont-shine-climate-alarmists-thinking/
We’re building,” reads the headline of an op-ed written by Sen. Bernie Sanders for the British Guardian, “Congress’ strongest-ever climate bill.” Why? “Because the planet is in peril.” If so, it’s not because of human greenhouse gas production, says one group of researchers.
But scientific findings are no deterrent to predatory politicians. Backed by nothing more than a bloated certitude, the Vermont socialist declares “the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage” if “the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions.”
Man-made carbon dioxide emissions – the political left’s go-to whipping boy. Human CO2 emissions, in the febrile minds of Sanders and other members of the climate doomsday cult, is responsible for a nearly uncountable number of ills: hotter temperatures, more potent storms, wildfires, melting ice caps and glaciers, armed conflict, migration, poverty, famine, drought, floods, species extinction, weeds, pests … and a host of conditions and events so absurd no half-rational person would ever think of them.
Virulent though it might be, Trump Derangement Syndrome is hardly the mental health menace that Carbon Obsession Disorder has been for decades
Occasionally alarmists will point out that methane is a greenhouse gas. Yet their fixation has long been on CO2. But let’s be clear: Other factors impact climate and temperature, and few can match the power of the sun (which Democrats should be confident in, since they worship at the altar of the solar panel). According to the researchers who recently published a peer-reviewed paper in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, whose value we’ve assessed, “is grounded in narrow and incomplete data about the sun’s total solar irradiance.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-islamic-world-christianity-afghanistan-war-taliban-american-founding-11629402268?mod=opinion_lead_pos9
Historians, soldiers and politicians will debate for decades the particulars of what went wrong during America’s intervention in Afghanistan. But a simple truth has been apparent for years: We Westerners failed not for lack of effort, but because military and economic power alone cannot change the Islamic world in a lasting way.
The U.S.-led coalition arrived in South Asia 20 years ago seeking justice after 9/11. Soon we turned into apostles of universal civilization, the idea that human beings everywhere would make the same basic decisions we made in building political community. We set out to establish a liberal democratic state, not realizing that politics lies downstream of culture, and culture downstream of religion. It never occurred to us that America was what it was because of Christianity, and Afghanistan was what it was because of Islam.
The political scientist Samuel Huntington was right: Islamic societies belong to a distinctive civilization that resists the imposition of foreign values through power. We may believe that argument or not, but trillions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives, and two decades of warfare have not proved otherwise.
Still, many remain blind to the obvious. Facing seemingly unrelated chaos in places like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Yemen, Libya and Nigeria, our diplomats and strategists devise one-off responses that ignore the common ideologies and actors that link them. Finding piles of broken china around the room, they diligently glue the pieces back together, not seeing the elephant nearby whose feet are covered in ceramic dust.
This blindness is driven by a noble desire to see humans as equal, interchangeable beings for whom faith and culture are accidents of birth. But these accidents are non-negotiable truths for hundreds of millions of people who would rather die than concede them. Failure to comprehend this is a symptom of spiritual emptiness: Alienated from America’s Christian origins, millions cannot fathom how faith could play a vital role in binding humans together.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/odious-campaign-sexualize-children-public-schools-richard-l-cravatts/
The current debate about critical race theory (CRT) being promoted in public schools by diversocrats and educators intent on indoctrinating students with one particular view of race revealed one important thing: that teachers, and the powerful unions which represent them, feel it is their right and obligation to inculcate students with a questionable, toxic view which accuses all white students of being complicit in systemic racism and assumes all black students are victims of that oppression and bigotry.
Educators have pretended that the effort to promote CRT is purportedly to make children more tolerant and less race aware, although it is obvious to CRT’s many critics that it does precisely the opposite by making children focus on their skin color and making assumptions about themselves and others based on theirs. More importantly, public schools have decided that they, and they alone, can decide to teach children a radical and discredited view of racism and that this area of teaching should have a prominent place in public school education.
But educators have not limited themselves to indoctrinating students about controversial theories about race and bigotry. Long before CRT had shown up on anyone’s radar, public schools had been widening the focus and content of what was commonly referred to as “sex education,” but which now has blossomed from a single course one might encounter in high school about hygiene and reproduction to reading materials, curricula, lesson plans, activities, and even the incorporation of aspects of sexuality into courses such as history where mention of such topics was normally absent.
The 13-million-member National Education Association, just as it has with CRT, has been vocal in promoting a wide and radical curriculum about sexuality, something it feels, as it does with race, that it has a right and obligation to do. A 2016-2017 NEA resolution, for example, “B-53 Sex Education,” announced that the organization, “. . . believes that the developing child’s sexuality is continually and inevitably influenced by daily contacts, including experiences in the school environment . . . [and] that the public school must assume an increasingly important role in providing the instruction.”
Ignoring the reality that many of the students being taught by its members are elementary and middle school-aged children with little or no prior knowledge about sexuality, the resolution continued that it would assiduously defend every student’s right to knowledge about sexuality, asserting that “The Association also believes that to facilitate the realization of human potential, it is the right of every individual to live in an environment of freely available information and knowledge about sexuality . . . .”
And such instruction, of course, would not be a mere perusal of the “birds and bees” of yesterday’s public education. No, in the infinite moral wisdom of the NEA, “Such programs should include information on … diversity of culture and diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity . . . sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and HPV, incest, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and homophobia . . . age-appropriate, medically accurate information including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) issues. This should include but not be limited to information on sexuality, sexual orientation, and gender expression.”
