RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/whos-afraid-of-moms-for-liberty

In a breakout session in a windowless conference room at last weekend’s Moms for Liberty “Joyful Warrior Summit” in Philadelphia, Christian Ziegler, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party and father of three school-aged daughters, is stiffening spines. Dozens of attendees, mostly women, are nodding and taking notes as Ziegler explains how to work with local news media. 

“Your product is parental rights. Your product is protecting children and eliminating indoctrination and the sexualization of children. You’re the grassroots. You’re on the ground. You’re the moms, the grandparents, the families that are impacted. The stories you tell help set a narrative,” Ziegler coaches them.

One story above us, the ballroom floor of the downtown Marriott is groaning under the weight of crowded press risers, where camera crews have set up for the parade of Republican presidential hopefuls coming here to curry favor with the more than 600 Moms for Liberty members attending—and a few thousand more watching the livestream. 

Ron DeSantis held forth this morning. Nikki Haley is scheduled to speak at lunch. Donald Trump will close things out later this afternoon. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson are on tap for tomorrow. 

It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated. 

If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system. 

They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it. 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/12/joe-bidens-ministry-of-truth/

Under President Joe Biden, the US government has undertaken ‘the most massive attack against free speech in United States history’. That was the extraordinary conclusion reached by a federal judge last week. The case of Missouri v Biden has exposed the incredible lengths to which the Biden White House and other federal agencies have gone to bully social-media platforms into removing political views they dislike.

On America’s Independence Day, the Fourth of July, US district judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction, stipulating that the federal government must cease from communicating with social-media companies for the purpose of ‘urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing’ them to remove or suppress ‘content containing protected free speech’. Essentially, government agencies are now prevented from getting the likes of Facebook, Twitter and other tech giants to censor content on their behalf.

Judge Doughty didn’t mince his words. He said the evidence presented in Missouri v Biden depicted an ‘almost dystopian scenario’. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the US government ‘seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth”’, he wrote. As the ruling notes, the US government worked with the Silicon Valley titans to suppress reports of the lab-leak theory of Covid’s origin, and to gag those who questioned the efficacy of masks, lockdowns and Covid vaccines.

What’s more, this assault on free expression extended far beyond Covid. Doughty’s 155-page ruling describes how the government squashed social-media coverage of many other inconvenient issues. In fact, the groundwork for what the plaintiffs called a ‘systemic and systematic campaign’ of censorship was actually laid by government officials in 2017, four years before Biden took office. Even when Donald Trump was president, officials suppressed stories that might have hurt his Democratic opponents, including the Hunter Biden laptop story and claims about election integrity in 2020, particularly around the security of postal voting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-student-debt-forgiveness-supreme-court-income-based-repayment-plan-11f1c5fa?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Biden is determined to make student loans for college a new entitlement even after the Supreme Court struck down his $430 billion cancellation. The Education Department on Friday wrote off another $39 billion in debt. And this is only a down-payment on the President’s bigger plan to sweeten Obama-era repayment plans. Call it debt cancellation on the installment plan.

Obama-era repayment plans cap borrower monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income and let borrowers discharge unpaid debt after 10 to 25 years. Yet the Education Department said Friday that borrowers will receive credit for payments even during months when they weren’t making them. This adds up to $39 billion in new loan forgiveness.

The Administration also boasted that it has approved $116.6 billion in loan forgiveness to date, including $45 billion through “improvements” to public-service loan plans. That’s $68,828 of writeoffs on average for each qualifying government and nonprofit worker. Now the Administration plans to “improve” repayment plans for all borrowers.

The Education Department plans to slash payments to 5% of discretionary income, which would be redefined to exclude more earnings. Borrowers earning less than $32,800 wouldn’t pay a cent. Even years in which they don’t make payments, as during the pandemic, would be counted toward their required payments.

The Administration estimates that a typical graduate of a four-year public university would save nearly $2,000 a year, or about $40,000 over 20 years. That’s several thousand dollars more than the already generous Obama writeoffs, and loan balances wouldn’t grow from unpaid interest as they do now.

A grad earning $50,000 with $50,000 in debt would have to pay only $860 a year compared to some $6,200 under a standard payment plan. Borrowers would have an incentive to take out more debt, and colleges would raise tuition. The Biden plan includes no reforms that would mitigate this debt ratchet.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/donald-trump-and-the-standard-of-evidence/

The headline on the New York Times story of ex-President Trump’s indictment is a wonderfully unintentional guide to the topsy-turveydom of American life in the Biden era: “US Justice System Put on Trial as Trump Denounces the Rule of Law”. To start with, the front-page piece is not a simple factual report—“Trump Indicted on Thirty-Seven Counts”, say—but “news analysis” which signalled Schumpeter’s definition of Marxism (“preaching in the garb of analysis”) even before Wokedom tightened its grip on US journalism.

It’s worse now, of course, and relentless too. An accompanying report inside warns in another headline that “Trump Backers Unleash Wave of Violent Threats, Worrying Some Analysts”. The worries of analysts don’t usually make it into headlines, and we don’t learn about the reactions of “other” analysts. Presumably, if quoted in the NYT, those complacent fellows would argue that the threats—one of which is the simple word “Retribution”—were religious and military metaphors used by all parties at times but, when employed by Republicans, more worrying than the actual if “largely peaceful” riots of the Left.

To revert to the front-page headline, though, Trump did not in fact “denounce the rule of law” unless every indicted man who proclaims his innocence is held to be denouncing it. He said that law enforcement had been “hijacked” by the Democrats, including elected Democratic prosecutors, to take out the most formidable opponent they face in next year’s presidential election, namely himself.

In a few paragraphs I’ll deal with the thirty-seven charges levelled against the former President by the Special Prosecutor looking into, inter alia, his retention of classified national security documents in insecure conditions in his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. These are serious charges and pose a real threat, namely a long prison sentence. But his claim that the Democrats had hijacked law enforcement to take him out of the 2024 election is largely true.

Largely? Well, Trump is probably not the most formidable challenger Biden could face next year. He may be the strongest candidate in the GOP primaries, but his negatives are so high with the full electorate that he would probably lose to the President where a challenger like Florida’s governor, Ron de Santis, would enter the race as the favourite.