EDUCATION Comments turned off

Biden Ed Sec Says Low Civics Scores Show Students Need Critical Race Theory “It may be best to have students learning from home” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-ed-sec-says-low-civics-scores-show-students-need-critical-race-theory/

You have to give the promo lefties credit for staying on message. No cult member has ever been as determined to ignore everything factual, moral or legal in pursuit of the agenda. They start fires and then show up to pour more gasoline on them while warning that cuts to the arson department will undermine our best defense against fires.

After lefties, doing the bidding of teachers’ unions, closed the schools, the educational system ceased to function leading to catastrophic drops in test scores. None of the lockdowners has been willing to claim their share of the credit and Biden’s Secretary of Education manages to suggest that poor civics scores is proof that we need to teach kids more critical race theory.

Knowledge of civics among the nation’s eighth-graders fell for the first time since the federal government began testing children under the current framework in 1998, according to new results that come amid a broader concern about pandemic-era learning loss.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, known as the Nation’s Report Card, also show a 5-point decline in average scores in history.

Biden’s Secretary of Education, who kept trying to close schools, has some thoughts on the matter.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement, noting the abysmal math and reading NAEP scores released last fall.

“It tells us that now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes,” the secretary said.

We spent insane amounts of money on a school system that did not function because the primary beneficiary of all that ed spend, bureaucrats, teachers’ unions and assorted administrators, decided to close the schools. If we want to increase spending on schools, let’s claw some of that money back from their salaries and budgets.

And no matter how much we spend, it’s not going to get any better because education isn’t a money game. It’s a parent game. All the stats clearly show it. If the parents don’t care, then a student has to be really dedicated to overcome that hurdle. And how many kids are?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trans Massacre Manifesto Still a Mystery The Nashville shooting, and the callous official response, portend a year of living dangerously. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/murder-manifesto-still-a-mystery/

“The investigation has advanced to the point that writings from the Covenant shooter are now being reviewed for public release and that process is underway and will take a little time.”

That was a spokesman for the Metro Nashville Police Department speaking to the New York Post last Thursday. That day marked one month since Audrey Hale, a woman who thought she was a man, murdered Evelyn Dieckhaus, 9, Mike Hill, 61, William Kinney, 9, Katherine Koonce, 60, Cynthia Peak, 61, and Hallie Scruggs, 9, at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee.

Nashville police “could not give a firm date when the writings would be released.” Shortly after the murders, Nashville city councilman Robert Swope told reporters “the manifesto is going to be released. It’s just a matter of when.” In the meantime, the FBI is reportedly “processing” the material.

“It’s really not even a manifesto,” according to Nashville city council member Courtney Johnson.  “It’s diaries of a mentally ill person.” The councilwoman, a real-estate agent, did not explain how she was qualified to diagnose Audrey Hale, who carefully planned the attack for months.  “What I was told is, her manifesto was a blueprint on total destruction, and it was so, so detailed at the level of what she had planned.”

According to Johnston, “that document in the wrong person’s hands would be astronomically dangerous.” So it was the “document” that was dangerous, and Johnston didn’t understand “these claims that law enforcement is hiding something.” That should be a simple matter.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The Wages Of Woke Are Death

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/04/the-wages-of-woke-are-death/

Going woke means more than, as the saying says, going broke. It also means the ultimate loss of life. The grip of wokeness on our society will eventually kill Americans.

Let’s begin with health care. Medical school students, whose learning should be focused on the healing arts, are being taught social justice ideology. Apparently white supremacy, oppression and structural racism must be addressed by America’s doctors-to-be, as well as the sin of being white.

Diversity, equity and inclusion studies are being required at some schools, which of course crowds out time used in the past to acquire the knowledge and develop the skills needed to be a good doctor. Politics have no place in medical schools, but there they are.

At the same time, some schools, as many as 40, are dropping standardized testing for diversity’s sake, reports the Daily Caller. The Medical College Admission Test, which “determines an individual’s ability to problem solve, think critically, and understand concepts about medical study,” does not serve the purposes of the social justice mafia. Now there are other legitimate academic avenues to medical school outside the MCAT. But as we’ve seen in other institutions of higher learning, standards designed to demonstrate and ensure competence are being killed off.

Given these facts, it’s a certainty that many of this country’s doctors of tomorrow and beyond will not have the competence needed to keep patients alive and well. Americans will die or suffer unnecessarily because wokeness demanded that the medical community marginalize them.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Jordanian MP Lauded as “Hero” for Smuggling Weapons into Israel by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19616/jordan-mp-smuggling-weapons

Why would a member of the Jordanian parliament who hates Israel with a passion and supports a terror group whose charter calls for the elimination of Israel try to smuggle weapons? To kill Jews.

That is precisely why Al-Adwan is seen by many Jordanians and Palestinians as a “hero” and a “brave man.”

It is not difficult to imagine the public outcry had an Israeli MP been caught trying to smuggle weapons into Jordan or any other country.

Sadly, the campaign of solidarity with the Jordanian parliament member who was caught while trying to smuggle a large cache of weapons into Israel signals the hatred that Jordanians and Palestinians feel towards Israel and Jews.

This hate is the direct result of decades of indoctrination and brainwashing of Jordanians and Palestinians. Israel does not harbor any bad feelings towards Jordan. The opposite is true. Israel has always been supportive of the Jordanian monarchy and the stability of the Hashemite regime was and still is an important cornerstone of Israel’s security.

As for the international community and the mainstream media in the West, they could learn from the failed smuggling attempt that Israel’s security concerns are not unjustified and not exaggerated. This week, over 100 rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel, a country roughly the size of Victoria Island. What would the UK do if one rocket – let alone 100 – were fired into England? Or Germany, if rockets were fired at Munich? Or France, if rockets were fired at Nice or Cannes or St. Tropez?

Israel daily faces attempts by Hamas and other terror groups to carry out terrorist attacks to kill Jews. The next time people complain about “tough Israeli security measures,” please remind them of that?

Imad Al-Adwan, a member of Jordan’s parliament, is being praised as a “hero” by many Jordanians and Palestinians after he was reportedly caught trying to smuggle weapons into Israel.

On April 22, Israeli authorities arrested Al-Adwan, 35, when he tried to cross from Jordan into Israel through the Allenby Bridge border crossing. A video posted on social media showed the contents of three bags containing 100 kilograms of gold, 12 automatic rifles and 270 semi-automatic pistols discovered in his possession.

ELECTIONS, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Trump 2024 Dilemma: What Would Ben-Gurion Do? He saw the need to help the British fight the Nazis while opposing the British occupation of Palestine.By Ruth R. Wisse

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-dilemma-what-would-ben-gurion-do-israel-british-white-paper-re-election-52ed5dcc?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“It is now more urgent than ever to recover and restore the best of America, but also more difficult because the former president fails to embody the greatness of America that he seeks to restore. Sober Americans will therefore defend the Trump record without supporting his candidacy, and deny him re-election while defeating those who did not allow him to govern.”

“We can’t win with Trump and we can’t win without him,” a friend said, echoing many other sober Americans. But I suggested that recent Jewish history shows a way out of the bind Republicans face in regaining the White House without its former incumbent.

In 1939, as World War II began, the Jewish community of Palestine faced simultaneous and competing challenges from Europe and at home.

Adolf Hitler intended to wipe out the Jews of Europe. Jews in the Land of Israel urgently needed to provide refuge for the millions being refused entry everywhere else. They faced resistance in Palestine, where the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was determined to prevent the fleeing Jews from entering their homeland. He incited the local Arab population to violence, warning the British overseers of potential pan-Arab resistance against the British throughout the Middle East.

Britain had been entrusted with the mandate for Palestine after defeating the Ottomans in World War I. Though the mandate was intended to include the establishment of a Jewish national home, three-fourths of the territory was given to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and British authorities undertook neutral supervision over the rest. The more the Arabs rioted in the 1920s and ’30s, the more the British gave way to their demands and prevented Jews from arming in self-defense. This culminated in the British White Paper of 1939, which severely restricted Jewish immigration and prevented Jews’ rescue from certain death.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

New York’s Migrant Crisis Is About to Get Worse Covid-era restrictions on entry expire May 11. Mayor Adams says Washington ‘has turned its back.’ By Carine Hajjar

Posted By on May 4th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-yorks-border-crisis-is-about-to-get-worse-immigration-title-42-sanctuary-city-work-permit-9fdd3167?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

If you want proof that there’s a crisis at the southern border, enter New York City’s subway system and listen for the calls of “chocolate, chicle, y agua.” On my daily commute, I see many Central and South American women pacing across platforms peddling chocolate, gum and water. Many hold young children, some even breastfeeding.

Lucia, a young mother from Ecuador, has her sleeping 3-year-old son, Danny, swaddled against her back. In Spanish she tells me they crossed the border into El Paso, Texas, and were put on a flight to New York in November. Now she lives in a cramped room in Queens with her cousin and two sons—the other, 5, is in school as we speak. Her husband and two other children, 9 and 10, are still in Ecuador. What’s her plan in New York? “Like everyone who comes here—work. And to give my children a better future.”

But lawful work is hard to find. Lucia doesn’t have a permit. “I don’t know where to go,” she says. “I don’t know the city well.” If she did know where to go, she’d encounter bewildering applications and long delays.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Politicized Intelligence Community: Danger to a Democracy by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19611/politicized-intelligence-community

Teixeira, if convicted, is facing a lengthy prison sentence. Morrell, meanwhile, remains an esteemed national security figure who has members of the press defending his actions, even though they had an impact on the last election. Beyond Morrell, none of the other signatories of the letter has suffered any negative consequences for choosing to use the stature they gained by virtue of being high ranking, cleared individuals to politicize national security.

While one cannot condone the alleged activities of Mr. Teixeira, one can understand his confusion at being a part of an Intelligence Community where the leadership has allowed itself to become a partisan appendage of the Democratic Party and, instead of suffering consequences, is rewarded.

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe called the letter “election interference,” said it had damaged national security by unjustly framing another country, Russia, and stated that Secretary of State Antony Blinken should either resign or be impeached.

Why then are we surprised when a 21-year-old leaks classified information? The big shots are not afraid to trade on their reputations or access to highly classified information, and they are not held accountable for their actions. Even though he should have known better, maybe Teixeira thought he would not be held accountable either?

The deception and political activities of these intelligence professionals — and their complicit media enablers — need to be exposed and reported. Every single one of these 51 individuals who signed the Hunter Biden laptop letter should lose their security clearance if they still have one.

Those serving in government or on appointed federal boards or commissions should be removed from those positions immediately. Lastly, Congress needs to hold hearings into the culture of the Intelligence Community that lets these types of individuals serve without fear of accountability. It then needs to expose and rip out the rot that has infected the Intelligence Community and get it out of domestic politics and refocused on foreign threats to our great nation.

Recently Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Massachusetts Air National Guardsman, was arrested by the FBI and charged with unlawfully retaining and transmitting national defense information classified at the highest level. As reported in numerous media outlets, the documents in question relate to the war in the Ukraine and other sensitive topics, including surveillance on allies and adversaries alike. Teixeira reportedly copied, photographed, and leaked hundreds of pages of highly classified U.S. government secrets to gain admiration and influence among a group of teen-aged boys he befriended on Discord, a popular online platform favored by gamers.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Steven Malanga Public Education’s Days of Reckoning Steep enrollment declines, sparked by long pandemic closures, have eroded school budgets, forcing many systems to shrink.

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/public-educations-days-of-reckoning

Public school districts across the United States closed for unprecedented periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enrollments plunged, as students either headed to private schools or stayed home for schooling. Other children simply disappeared from schools and remain unaccounted for even today by school officials. Now, because of this exodus, school districts nationwide are grappling with another kind of closing: empty classrooms and underused school buildings are prompting waves of school shutdowns, as education officials look to downsize their operations in response to smaller student populations and disappearing Covid bailout funds. In many communities, the process is messy, with parents, teachers, and teachers’ unions objecting. But failing to act will only worsen budget deficits at a time of economic uncertainty.

According to an international study, American schools closed for an average of 70 weeks during the pandemic—far longer than schools shut down in most European countries, though the length of closures varied by state. Schools in Texas and Florida, for example, were closed for just a fraction of the time that schools in California and New York were shuttered. In all, public schools lost some 1.2 million students in the first two years of the pandemic. Some migrated to private institutions, where enrollments grew by 4 percent, while homeschool numbers rose by 30 percent.

Among states sustaining the biggest losses are California, which saw public school enrollment shrink by some 245,000 in two pandemic years, and New York, where enrollments fell 80,000 in the same period. In these states and elsewhere, Covid accelerated a trend already underway. School enrollment had peaked in many states in the mid-2010s and begun slipping shortly after, a result of fewer births, outmigration, and modest growth in homeschooling and alternative schools. New York State, for instance, has lost about 6 percent of its students, or 120,000 children, since 2016. California’s enrollment has dropped by 382,000 students since the 2014 school year.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

During Fiery Hearing, GOP Senators Blast Democrats’ ‘Unseemly Efforts’ to Delegitimize Supreme Court By Debra Heine

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/02/during-fiery-hearing-gop-senators-blast-democrats-unseemly-efforts-to-delegitimize-supreme-court/

During a contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Republicans shot down their Democrat colleagues’ efforts to intimidate and delegitimize the Supreme Court.

The Democrat-led “Supreme Court Ethics Reform” hearing was held amid a partisan media campaign accusing conservative justices of ethics violations and conflicts of interest.

Corporate media hit pieces in recent weeks have focused on Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, accusing them ethics violations, while ignoring the allegedly larger ethics violations of liberal justices, the Wall Street Journal editorial Board argued on Monday.

WSJ writers have “examined and debunked” multiple MSM reports accusing Thomas and Gorsuch of various ethics violations in recent weeks, and have concluded that the attacks have been part of a larger effort to subject the Court to more political control.

The first sign that this is all politics is the context for the hearing. Note that it’s been triggered by easily debunked reports about the conservative Justices, especially claims that Justice Thomas didn’t properly disclose certain financial transactions.

But Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t get the same attention when she revised her financial disclosures in 2022. Her oversights were far more extensive than Justice Thomas’s. There was also no outcry in 2020 when Justice Sonia Sotomayor amended her financial disclosures after the group Fix the Court found that she hadn’t disclosed reimbursement for trips to universities.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The War on Boys and Girls Fractured American families and disturbed children. What – and who – is behind it? by Larry Sand

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-war-on-boys-and-girls/

Over the years, a cause for teen angst, suicide, etc., has reportedly been the media. But there is no definitive evidence to corroborate that. In fact, every recent generation has traditionally pointed to the media or some other cultural factor as damaging to youth. In the 1920s, it was the Charleston, and in the 1940s, the bogeyman was radio crime dramas. Then in the 1950s, it was shoot-em-up westerns on TV and the advent of rock ‘n roll. But at the end of the day, most kids grew up normally.

These days cell phones and social media are supposedly culpable, but scientists still don’t know to what extent they are responsible for the rising mental health issues among teenagers and whether it is the primary cause. Alexey Makarin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, opines, “It seems to be the case — like it’s a big factor, but that’s still up for debate.”

What do we know?

A report from the CDC in February found that teen girls are experiencing “record high levels of violence, sadness, and suicide risk.” The data show that 57% of U.S. teen girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless in 2021—double that of boys, representing a nearly 60% increase and the highest level reported over the past decade.” About 30% had seriously attempted suicide. These numbers are dramatically higher than they were ten years ago.

Boys are suffering too. One of the main culprits for young males’ problems is the ongoing stress on so-called toxic masculinity, where feminists and the left take normal male behavior, exaggerate it, and then vilify it.

Toxic masculinity is a counterproductive term, to say the least. Boys are unlikely to react well to the idea that there is something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcised, especially as most of them identify quite strongly with their masculinity. Almost half of men said their sex was “extremely important” to their identity.