“They won’t allow me to SPEAK?” — President Donald J. Trump
In light of the latest legal twist, wherein Special Counsel Jack Smith’s maneuvers have sparked a heated debate on the tightrope walk between privacy rights and the expansive reach of investigative tactics, I keep asking myself the question: Do we, as U.S. citizens, have any privacy rights or not?
The issuance of search warrants, laying out a sweeping data collection strategy, has disturbed the delicate balance between privacy rights and the extent of investigative measures and raised legitimate concerns about poking around in the private lives of individuals, especially those in the public eye.
This investigation has become controversial, supposedly centered on the timeline and circumstances surrounding former President Donald Trump’s actions leading up to the Capitol riot. These probes reek of political motives, seemingly aimed at tarnishing or undermining Trump. The once-thin line between lawful scrutiny and political agendas has not just blurred; it’s become the defining feature of this unfolding drama.
The imposition of a gag order, apparently designed to rein in the president’s exercise of First Amendment rights, shears through the surface between legal constraints and preserving the principles of free speech and pushes us to ponder the broader implications of handcuffing any public figure’s ability to criticize the government.
Smith’s arrogant move into demanding data from Trump and his followers raises many eyebrows. How else do we grasp the exceptional nature of this demand, which is essentially an illicit surveillance operation? Shouldn’t Smith be duty-bound to protect against such clear violations of the Constitution?
Such requests are disproportionate, especially when the charges against Trump lack a solid foundation. Striking the right balance between investigative reach and protecting civil liberties emerges as a crucial aspect of this ongoing narrative.
Then, adding a layer of complexity is the green light given to the gag order by a judge with an apparent partisan background. The concerns about potential political bias within the legal system intensify the debate over the fairness and impartiality of the investigation. This episode underscores the urgent need for a legal process that’s robust and transparent, free from perceived affiliations.
Smith’s filing asserts that the “narrowly tailored” order aims to prevent witness harassment. The proposed directive seeks to muzzle Trump from making statements about prospective witnesses’ identity, testimony, or credibility, along with any disparaging, inflammatory, or intimidating remarks about parties, witnesses, attorneys, court personnel, or potential jurors.
Trump’s response to the gag order accuses Smith’s team of misconduct, “they won’t allow me to SPEAK?”
The gag order is one of several contentious issues in the ongoing case led by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
The narrative takes a surprising twist, with Twitter initially resisting the search warrants and eventually complying, culminating in a fine for perceived non-compliance. This development delves into the complexities of private corporations navigating the intersection of user data protection and legal obligations, raising broader questions about the role of tech companies in safeguarding individual privacy rights.
Stepping back to examine the broader context of the investigation, particularly the events leading up to the January 6 Capitol riot, unravels a multifaceted tale. While the spotlight is on holding Trump responsible for others’ actions, recent revelations about FBI-associated individuals partaking in the riot add a layer of intricacy. This revelation underscores the nuanced challenges of pinpointing responsibility within a convoluted web of events.
The political arena takes center stage with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s role in rejecting a request to deploy the National Guard on that tumultuous day. The interplay between political decision-making and security measures invites scrutiny, underscoring the need for a comprehensive understanding of the factors contributing to the events of January 6.
As this legal and political saga plays out, don’t we find ourselves thinking about how the judicial system should find a balance between thorough investigations concerned with protecting individual rights at all costs?
As in recent history, the potential sway of political motives in legal proceedings and the intricate interplay of actors shaping a defining moment also play on our minds. The necessity for a judicious and impartial examination of events remains paramount as the narrative unfolds further.
To conclude, here is a sane piece of advice for Special Counsel John Smith: Upholding fairness and justice should be your top priority in this critical state, and not be a part of a political witch-hunt that compromises the integrity of the legal process and unfairly targets President Donald Trump.
Below is an article about an obvious desperate move to buy votes from those whose student loans have been forgiven or reduced.
The irony is most of these people who made a commitment to pay back their student loans can well afford to do so.
Biden has just created another form of identity politics pitting those of us who have paid back our student loan obligations against those who are freeloaders taking advantage of this scam; a scam which the SCOTUS ruled against yet continues.
The administration has canceled $127 billion in student debt with hopes to expand those efforts via regulation.
By Samantha Flom, 11/28/2023, Updated: 11/29/2023
The first of roughly 813,000 student loan borrowers will be notified via email on Nov. 28 that their federal loans were forgiven, the White House has announced.
The email, shared ahead of time with The Epoch Times, includes a message for borrowers from President Joe Biden congratulating them on their debt forgiveness and urging them to share their stories of “what this relief means” to them.
“For too long, the student loan program failed to live up to its commitments – and millions like you never got the relief you were owed because of errors and administrative failures,” the missive reads. “I vowed to fix that, and I’m proud that my Administration has delivered on that promise.”
More than 614,000 of the borrowers set to receive the email will have their remaining federal student loan debt entirely wiped out.
The White House first announced the mass debt cancelation—totaling more than $39 billion—in July, noting that hundreds of thousands of borrowers had been denied forgiveness they were entitled to due to “errors and administrative failures.” Those errors, according to the administration, included the failure to give borrowers proper credit for decades of payments under their income-driven repayment plans and loan servicers’ wrongful placement of certain borrowers in forbearance.
The move came on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down President Biden’s controversial student debt forgiveness plan, which the Congressional Budget Office had said could cost upwards of $400 billion.
Since then, the Biden administration has sought other ways to deliver on its promise of student loan debt relief.
One method that was settled on is through the recently launched Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan, under which monthly payments will be calculated based on a borrower’s income and family size rather than their loan balance. The plan also ensures that loan balances won’t increase due to unpaid interest—as long as monthly payments are made—and that remaining balances are forgiven after a certain number of years.
Earlier this month, the Department of Education revealed that close to 5.5 million borrowers had already enrolled in the plan.
“Under President Biden, the Department created the SAVE Plan so that young people and working families can climb the economic ladder without unaffordable student loan debt weighing them down,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.
“I’m thrilled to see that in less than three months, nearly 5.5 million Americans in every community across the country are taking advantage of the SAVE Plan’s many benefits, from lower monthly payments to protection from runaway student loan interest.”
Meanwhile, the administration has also forgiven the student loan debt of 662,000 government and nonprofit workers under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program; 491,000 borrowers with total and permanent disabilities; and nearly 1.3 million borrowers who were cheated by their schools, saw their institutions precipitously close, or were covered under related court settlements.
In all, the administration has approved $127 billion in debt cancelation for nearly 3.6 million borrowers.
In addition to those moves, the president has said he still hopes to find an alternative route to providing widespread student debt relief through negotiated rulemaking under the Higher Education Act.
The law, passed in 1965, outlines the education secretary’s powers in relation to the modification, waiver, release, or compromise of federal student loans.
Detractors of that plan, however, say that the executive branch does not possess the authority to make such sweeping changes via regulations.
During the public comment portion of the negotiating committee’s Nov. 6 meeting, Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom Director Neal McCluskey made that very argument.
“All of this is occurring through a bureaucratic process that is grossly undemocratic and a violation of constitutional separation of powers,” he contended. “It is the Legislative Branch, not the Executive, that is charged with writing laws, including the major components of federal programs.”
Mr. McCluskey also expressed disappointment that the committee’s makeup offered no representation for most Americans who have never had federal student loan debt.
“People who attend college are poised to be major economic winners,” he noted. “They should pay the cost of investing in themselves, not taxpayers. They should also bear the risk of an overly expensive or poorly scrutinized investment—that incentivizes thoughtful, efficient education.”
Holding that mass debt cancelation would only incentivize institutions to further drive up the cost of tuition, he contended that the committee’s efforts would only end up hurting those they seek to help.
Samantha Flom is a reporter for The Epoch Times covering U.S. politics and news. A graduate of Syracuse University, she has a background in journalism and nonprofit communications. Contact her at samantha.flom@epochtimes.us. [Emphasis added]
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Royal A. Brown IIIhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngRoyal A. Brown III2023-11-30 17:20:502023-12-01 04:12:34Biden Buying Votes with 813,000 Emails to Freeloaders
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit Thursday against Pfizer for allegedly misrepresenting the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine and “conspiring to censor” critics.
The lawsuit alleges Pfizer “deceived the public” by claiming its vaccine was 95% effective, as well as through suggestions it made about the vaccine’s duration of protection, protection against transmission and protectiveness against variants. Pfizer then “coerced social media platforms to silence prominent truth-tellers,” including a former FDA Commissioner Brett Giroir and journalist Alex Berenson, engaging in a “censorship campaign” to suppress content that would negatively impact sales, according to the lawsuit.
“Pfizer intentionally misrepresented the efficacy of its COVID-19 vaccine and censored persons who threatened to disseminate the truth in order to facilitate fast adoption of the product and expand its commercial opportunity,” the complaint alleges. “In light of the multi-billion dollar bet that Pfizer made on the vaccine and its need to quickly establish the product as the marketing leader, Pfizer was heavily incentivized to, and in fact did, make misrepresentations intended to confuse and mislead the public in order to achieve widespread adoption of its vaccine.”
BREAKING:🚨 I am suing Pfizer for misrepresenting Covid-19 vaccine efficacy and conspiring to censor public discourse. pic.twitter.com/63mZ1y6FNC
The complaint states that government reports show in some places “a greater percentage of the vaccinated were dying from COVID-19 than the unvaccinated” by 2021.
“We are pursuing justice for the people of Texas, many of whom were coerced by tyrannical vaccine mandates to take a defective product sold by lies,” Paxton said in a statement. “The facts are clear. Pfizer did not tell the truth about their COVID-19 vaccines.”
“Whereas the Biden Administration weaponized the pandemic to force illegal public health decrees on the public and enrich pharmaceutical companies, I will use every tool I have to protect our citizens who were misled and harmed by Pfizer’s actions,” he continued.
Pfizer did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2023-11-30 17:04:062023-12-04 14:03:27Texas AG Sues Pfizer For ‘Conspiring To Censor’ COVID-19 Vaccine Critics
In the wake of strong evidence pointing to the link between the declining mental health of young people and the rise of addictive social media sites, 41 state attorneys general have filed suit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, for manipulative business practices that they say intentionally target kids in order to ensnare them in social media addiction.
In October, 41 states and the District of Columbia filed litigation against Meta as reports of record high levels of mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, and suicide, continue to surface. Studies have shown that American teenagers have experienced a significant rise in depression over the last two decades, as the share of teens experiencing major depressive episodes steadily rose from 7.9% in 2006 to 14.4% in 2018. Since then, the persistent increase has continued unabated. In February, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that three out of five teenage girls felt depression and one in three had seriously considered suicide in 2021.
As psychologists such as Jean Twenge have observed, the rapid increase in youth mental health issues has dovetailed almost exactly with the ubiquitous rise of smartphones and social media apps. Twenge’s most recent book “Generations” details how Generation Z’s skyrocketing use of social media directly correlates with less time spent in person with friends, less sleep, and increased loneliness.
The issue has become so alarming to health officials that in May, the U.S. Surgeon General released an unprecedented advisory warning that social media use poses a “profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
As a result, public officials have decided that studies and advisories are not enough — they believe that the architects of social media themselves must claim some amount of responsibility for the crisis. On Tuesday, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to discuss the litigation he has filed against Meta.
“We’ve exposed the manipulative practices of the Meta platform that designed features in order to make kids addicted,” he contended. “And lo and behold, screen time is bad for kids. And I think one of the problems here is that Meta has hidden their head in the sand and refused to obtain data or scientific studies to measure the negative harmful impacts on kids, and deprived the public of access to that information. … [T]hey were manipulating their platform[s] to make kids more addicted, [and] they were doing it to obtain personal information to maximize their profits. And it’s putting kids at risk.”
Bailey went on to argue that Meta’s actions specifically violated his state’s consumer protection laws.
“The mental and emotional impact of the addictive features of Big Tech social media platforms, specifically Meta in this instance, have been immediately impactful on children in a harmful way, and it violates the consumer protection laws of the state of Missouri,” he asserted. “[T]he platform is depriving parents of access to information necessary upon which to make good decisions about the health and safety of their children when they’re there, fraudulently attempting to make the kids addicted to the platform that violates the law, and we’re going to hold them accountable.”
Bailey further observed that the litigation showcases a rare example of bipartisanship, in which a coalition of 41 Republican and Democrat state AGs are coming together to put pressure on Meta for allegedly harming the mental health of children.
“[C]hild safety should be a bipartisan issue,” he underscored. “I’m proud to have joined with like-minded colleagues in other states that want to put the safety of children first and hold wrongdoers in the Big Tech social media world accountable. And certainly we’ve seen a repeated pattern of behavior from Meta, not only to abuse children in this context and to deprive the public of access to information, but to violate our constitutional rights to free speech by acquiescing to government censorship demands. … [T]his is a full court press, all hands on deck approach to make sure we’re holding this monolithic monopoly accountable.”
The Missouri attorney general also highlighted specific goals that the state litigation seeks, including monetary compensation for victims. “We … think there should be some monetary compensation for the victims,” he maintained. “We’ve got to build a fund to study this problem, figure out how bad it is, the negative emotional and mental impacts on kids, and make sure that they’re treated and taken care of in the aftermath of this fraudulent behavior.”
Bailey concluded by pointing out the parallels in the social media case with the evidence that was uncovered in the 1990s of tobacco companies attempting to hide evidence of the addictive nature of their products. “I think history will look back on this moment in time and celebrate that we took a stand to protect children against this pernicious behavior very quickly.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-11-30 11:56:372023-11-30 12:00:29Meta Is ‘Manipulating Platforms to Make Kids More Addicted’: State AG
Since the George Floyd riots of 2020, law enforcement in the U.S. has taken a hit, with resignations at an all-time high, and recruitment at a dangerous low.
In New York City, over 2,500 officers have turned in their badge this year. According to NYPD pension data, this year marks the fourth highest number of police officers who have resigned in the last 10 years. “The number of cops quitting before they reach the 20 years required to receive their full pensions also skyrocketed from 509 in 2020 to 1,040 so far this year — an alarming 104% increase,” The New York Post reported.
Additionally, NYPD plans to cancel the next five Police Academy classes. Cuts such as these are projected to bring the NYPD department down to “29,000 cops by the end of fiscal year 2025 — the lowest level since the mid-90s,” the Post added. A glance at the last couple of years, however, could very well explain this crisis.
Not only does law enforcement put their lives on the line in the fight against crime, but many police officers and sheriff deputies sacrifice time with their families and loved ones as well. What most people have heard from law enforcers in the past is that helping the community makes the risks and sacrifices worth it. But the increased resignations and decreased recruitments suggest that thousands of men and women don’t believe it’s worth it anymore. And it’s no wonder, because they are demoralized at every turn.
In a matter of years, police officers have gone from heroes to the targets of utter hatred in many circles. Especially after Floyd’s death, a movement to “defund the police” went from spark to blaze. According to The New York Times’s Mariame Kaba, police are “set up” or even designed for violence. Her view of law enforcement is that the world is better without it. While I really couldn’t disagree more with Ms. Kaba’s article, she has provided a clear example of the kind of criticism thrown at police quite often these days.
According to a report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, lack of recruitment can be attributed to a number of influences, but it’s mostly due to the public image of law enforcement. They found, “Scrutiny of the police, cellphone recordings of interactions between the police and public, media coverage, and popular entertainment portrayals of police have led many young people to view police differently than their parents may have. Overall, a majority of police officers feel their jobs have gotten more difficult since high-profile use-of-force incidents have dominated the national conversation.”
In June of 2021, Officer Lindsay Rose faced chastisement as riots broke out in Asheville, North Carolina. She said she was spit on and yelled at. Even after she took several months off to recover, once she came back to the field, she was still met with backlash. After she came back she decided to quit, ending seven years of service. “I’m drowning in this politically-charged atmosphere of hate and destruction,” she said. What Rose shared reflects the experience of many in law enforcement.
In addition to the political backlash, crime is on the rise. Violent crime in Washington, D.C. has skyrocketed, thanks in part to lax local laws. Complicating the issue, the District also has about 400 less officers than three years ago. And of course, even when the city’s police do succeed at catching criminals, little to no prosecutions follow the arrests, which puts dangerous people back on the street to commit even more offenses.
While D.C. becomes a hive of crime, local officials have decided that the priority is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars — not on public safety — but on anti-police messaging. Just this week, the District blew approximately $270,000 worth of tax dollars “touching up its ‘Black Lives Matter’ street painting,” Fox News reported. In response, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said, “D.C. crime is out of control but local leaders continue to waste … tax money promoting the extremist Black Lives Matter movement in the heart of Washington, D.C. that is racist, anti-police, anti-American, and often violent.” And D.C. is just one example of the rampant crime spreading across the country.
Stores continue to get ransacked, and at least nine Targets throughout four states, four Walmarts in Chicago, five Walgreens in San Francisco, and other retailers have closed or will be closing as a result. Across the board, an MPD report revealed violent crime in total is up 40% from last year.
We are clearly in need of law enforcement, but the lack of support (or rather the abundance of opposition mixed with displaced priorities) has caused the protective ranks to dwindle.
Jacob Kersey, who is currently FRC Action’s operations coordinator, formerly served as a police officer. He shared with The Washington Stand, “Law enforcement officers head to work every day knowing the risks associated with the profession.” For Kersey, there are many reasons why someone may enter law enforcement, but often “one of the most rewarding, although challenging, aspects of the job is the opportunity to give of yourself and protect your community.”
He continued, “Rarely do officers get dispatched to a scene where those present are overflowing with gratitude that the officers are there because they often encounter citizens during the worst day of their lives — which is why support from the people you serve goes a long way in making all the sacrifice feel worth it.” He concluded that with “recent high-profile incidents leading to mass negative public image of police across the nation, veterans and recruits alike struggle with justifying the risks of donning a badge and gun.”
So the question remains: What do we do about it?
Ken Blackwell, former Cincinnati mayor and senior fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at Family Research Council, told TWS, “There is a real downside to that ‘romantic’ view of defunding the police or repurposing the police. But the pressure is on because … people are not safe in their homes, in their communities. Their kids are not safe in their schools.” For Blackwell, what we are seeing on the streets “underscores this whole embrace of lawlessness.”
It boils down to “if you turn a blind eye to bad behavior, you can’t be surprised that you get more of it,” Blackwell stated.
As for what can be done, Blackwell concluded that it’s going to take time and better leadership. Now that some cities see the consequences of their actions, changes may be in sight.
Considering the country’s police hiring woes and crime crisis authorities must deal with now, “They’ve dug themselves a hole that they’re not going to be able to climb out of quickly,” Blackwell concluded.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-11-30 11:44:172023-11-30 11:47:48U.S. Police Face Hiring Crisis: ‘I’m Drowning in This Politically-Charged Atmosphere’
The DHS Secretary Mayorkas is Intentionally Distorting the Interpretation of US Immigration Laws to Conduct Planned Border Invasion with a Recently Revealed Partisan Agenda to Push for Biden’s Amnesty Law!
Bidens ‘The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021’ Amnesty Bill Includes:
Blanket Amnesty for All Illegals Currently in the US
Increased Dreamer-DACA provisions
Increased Chain Migration
Enhanced Systems to Better Facilitate Future Illegal Immigration
No Added Border Security or Counterterrorism Funding
No Consideration for America’s Displaced ‘Unskilled’ Workers
80% of Current Illegal Population Living on 100% Government Subsidies
Mayorkas, who has faced scrutiny for allegedly misrepresenting border security to Congress, now advocates for “comprehensive immigration reform” which is nothing short of a legal, Marxist open border policy. Despite pushback from Republican lawmakers who recently opted against impeaching Mayorkas, the DHS Secretary remains steadfast in his call for a revamp of a system deemed “fundamentally broken” for over three decades.
Comparatively, President Trump led 4 years of tightly controlled borders under the SAME “broken” immigration policy that Mayorkas and the Biden Administration argue is the cause for record illegal immigration. We would argue that Mayorkas and the Biden Administration has intentionally suspended immigration law, acting more as a welcome party for illegal immigration from over 120 nations, including many that are hostile to the United States.
Southwest Border Encounters
From 2013 to 2018, 68 out of 72 Months Reported Less Than 60K Illegal Southwest Border Encounters
The Biden-Mayorkas Administration has averaged 183K Monthly:
145K in 2021 (+282% over 2020)
198K+ in 2022 (+37% over 2021)
267K in 2023 (+35% over 2022)
The Trump-Wolf Administration averaged 51K Monthly:
33K in 2018 (-7% over 2017)
81K in 2019 (+146% over 2018) *Remain in Mexico Began
38K in 2020 (-53% over 2019)
The Trump Administration understood that even monthly numbers as low as 25K in a month were too many. New York City is on the brink of bankruptcy with 10K arriving monthly since the Spring of 2022.
Biden has TRIPLED Illegal entries, with 12 million illegals crossing our southern border compared to 1,832,086 under Trump for the same period; This is the result of POLICY DECISIONS, not an organic migration pattern.
In Mayorkas’s passionate appeal, he emphasized the need for congressional action citing Biden’s Amnesty Bill and highlighting the 12 million undocumented individuals as integral contributors to the nation’s well-being—neighbors, friends, and front-line workers. President Biden, on his inaugural day, presented Congress with an immigration proposal, signaling a commitment to reshape the nation’s approach to immigration. Mayorkas failed to mention any concern for the 1.5 million American workers who were displaced by 900K+ illegal aliens earlier this year, likely at much lower wages, and the finite number of unskilled jobs at risk in this country.
Critics argue that the proposed legislation lacks any provisions for heightened border security, a concern magnified by executive actions undoing significant measures like the effective ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy. The bill’s eight-year ‘path to citizenship,’ coupled with exemptions for ‘Dreamers’ and others, raises questions about its impact on American workers, particularly the vulnerable unskilled labor force reliant on government subsidies. Moreover, skeptics express apprehensions about potential compromises to national security, including counterterrorism efforts, during a time of unprecedented illegal entries and unknown millions of ‘gotaways’, due to the lack of real border security.
Wouldn’t you run to a nation that guarantees you housing, food, necessities, education, and a pathway to citizenship, securing your government subsidies for life if you lived in a 3rd world country?
Islam and leftists are really capitalizing on the Gaza war now. Remember George Soros’ tactic of “reflexivity”. They know how organizations and peoples will react to a stimulus. So they do the stimulus with full preparedness to use the predictable response to work towards their own goals. A kind of mass-Judo tactic. Use the enemy’s inertia collectively against them.
The most obvious example would be how terrorists will use half their resources to launch an attack, and then use the other half to go after the first responders. This makes the attack for more effective both from a damage and fear inducing point of view.
The October 7th attack on Israel could be seen as a scaled up example of the same. the left and Islamic nations funded the most barbaric attack on Israel they could think of, knowing they would not achieve a strategic goal in the traditional sense, but they would achieve one in the reaction to the reaction.
They knew Israel would wage war on Gaza, which is why they took hostages. The hostages in their estimate means Israel won’t do any significant damage to Hamas because Israel values the life of its hostages. Meanwhile, Hamas can play victim to the return fire on Gaza and the left and Islamic nations can fund massive demonstrations all over the world, all appearing to be about justice in Palestine, which of course is the last thing Islamic nations or Leftist groups want. Using the word “justice” in the usual sense that is. Once you look at the word in a communist or Islamic sense, its another matter.
Remember, the overall goal is the global communist revolution. And they are using imputed and manufactured victim narratives of the Palestinians based on the Israeli response to their attacks to give them the breathing room they need to attack everything Western. Like the tree lighting ceremony in NYC.
Anyone who has ever watched a Col. Kemp video knows that Israel has done more to protect the civilians in target zones than any army in the history of the world. They would also know that Hamas, who the Palestinians voted for at something like 70%, puts civilians in harms way on purpose for the dual win of either preventing an Israeli strike on military assets, which often works, or a lot of dead women and children, which makes for great PR while Hamas leadership yuks it up in world-leading luxury.
1. Could this LARPER, this COSPLAY Commie not have found a larger cross?
A Pro-Palestinian and Hamas Supporter holding a Poster of Swastika in reference to the Israel Defense Force tonight during the Riots in Manhattan, New York. pic.twitter.com/iMQtb7OppS
2. A patriot faces off with the protestors as they grab his flag, while he asks them why they are in America if they hate it so much. Why not move to Iran or Iraq?
"You are in America right now" – A man with American flag CONFRONT Pro-Palestine protesters during 'Flood Tree Lighting for Gaza' Protest near Rockefeller Tree Lighting tonight. One protester tries to rip American flag away as someone shouts "AllahuAkbar" and "Free Palestine!" pic.twitter.com/j62uSV3msc
Crowds of Pro-Palestinian and Hamas Supporters have Attacked Police and Businesses in New York City tonight in an attempt to Disrupt and Destroy the Annual-Rockefeller Christmas Tree Lighting Event in Manhattan; several Police Officers have reportedly been Injured with Riot and… pic.twitter.com/egJwBAPeqX
⚠️ An Israeli hacker group hacked the Iranian Judiacial and Parliament:
"We broke into the computerized systems of the Iranian judiciary and parliament and were able to obtain thousands of classified documents of the decision makers on behalf of the Revolutionary Guards.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Vlad Tepes Bloghttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngVlad Tepes Blog2023-11-30 08:38:532023-11-30 08:52:05NEW YORK CITY: Videos of pro-Hamas Riot at the Christmas Tree Lighting
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: They look at Trump as a vampire and they put a stake in his heart but they’re afraid that that stake could come out any time. That he’s undying and they’re afraid of him. They are terrified of him.
But deep down inside they know that if the right ever did that to Barack Obama or Joe Biden, they could have really made something out of the fact that Barack Obama had a hot mic expose where he told the president of Russia, “You tell Vladimir that I will be flexible on missile defense.” That’s the security of the United States of America. “If he gives me space in my last election.” Putin did do that. That’s an impeachable offense if a phone call to Ukraine is. So they understand that, the right could have done that to them, and they understand now the right probably will do that to them for their own survival, and they are scared.
They’re saying that if a MAGA candidate wins, and they win the House and Senate, they’re cooked because they’re going to get special prosecutors and go after the Biden family like they’ve never gone after anybody. And they’re going to find stuff because we know Joe is crooked. And then they’re going to go after [Attorney General] Merrick Garland and [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro ] Mayorkas. And they’re not going to stop. And that’s why they’re scared.
Everybody thinks the danger passed, they got what they wanted. No, no, no, you’re never going to see anything like what they’re going to do in 2024. All of this could have been reconciled, all they had to do was say Donald Trump should not be president if that’s what they believe, and we’re not going to do any lawfare or try to change the voting laws or pack the court, we’re not going to let in two states, we’re not going to try to abolish the Senate filibuster, we’re not going to try to change the voting ID laws, we’re just going to play under the rules we have, we don’t need $419 million by Mark Zuckerberg infused, we don’t need Sam Bankman-Fried, the crook, giving us $100 million, we’re not going to go under the radar with George Soros, we’re just going to show you, the American people how we think Donald Trump should not be president and we’ll have a fair election. They can’t do that, and they don’t trust themselves.
They think anybody in his right mind would close that border right now. Anybody in his right mind would recall all of those DAs that have destroyed these major cities. Anybody in his right mind would not beg the Saudis or the Venezuelans or the Russians or the Iranians to pump oil on the eve of a midterm, or pump the strategic petroleum reserve when you have so much natural gas in the U.S. Nobody in their right mind would do that. Nobody in their right mind would ever just pull out of Afghanistan without warning just so Joe Biden can say that on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 or the original October invasion of Afghanistan, “I am the president that got us out.” Nobody would do that. And nobody would print $6 trillion when there’s pent-up demand post-Covid lockdown and there’s a supply chain disruption, and all that money without an audit or examination of who got it and why and how it was spent, but to inflate the economy and ruin it. Nobody would do that! So they know that and they know that they cant take that record to the American people.
They have a deductive mind because their ideologues, so they start with a premise that we’re for social justice and equity of result, so we’re morally superior and smarter than anybody else. And therefore we’re entitled to do things other people don’t do. So if, under the cover of Covid, and frightening people about Covid, we can change all the voting laws so that 30%, instead of voting absentee and early voting shall become 70% in most states, with very little audit of the level necessary to authenticate most ballots.
They just do all this stuff because they start with the deductive principle that, “We are better, this is the vision and thereof the following must happen.” And if things don’t fit the narrative, they go after the person, they censor. That’s how they work. And if you keep that in mind, than everybody makes sense.
What I’m saying is they go on from one lie to the next.
So everybody now knows that Donald Trump was impeached for things that Joe Biden got away with. OK. Everybody knows the laptop was authentic. Everybody knows that now. Everybody knows it would have made a big difference in that debate when Donald Trump said it was and Joe Biden said, “Oh, no, no, 51 authorities.” Everybody knows that Christopher Steele was a fraud, and especially Glenn Simpson. And that Hillary Clinton took over an old Never-Trump file and inflated it with a million bucks, got the FBI on it to hire Christopher Steele as a consultant-informant, hid her so-called legal expenses when she was fined and cited for that violation, through Perkins-Coie, Fusion GPS, and the DNC, and that file was fraudulent. It was made up! I said that the first time I saw it, everything in it was false. And yet we wasted 22 months and $40 million to know what was obvious. No apology, not only no apology but they got Pulitzer Prizes, some of these reporters.
Every time they give these monstrous lies, there’s no apology, and why should they? They’re just narratives, the’re post-modern Foucauldian, Lacan, Derrida narratives. They were useful. That’s what they look at. They were useful at the time, because when we went through the Mueller investigation, we crippled Donald Trump and therefore we were able to stop him. We had Anonymous, he was burrowed deep into the Homeland Security. He was a minor official, but we said he was one of the major operatives in the Trump administration, we lied. And then we printed his op-ed because it did what it was supposed to do, it weakened the right-wing agenda, so they think. And we got Admiral McRaven to come in and write an op-ed and said Trump should leave, the sooner the better. And then we got all of the four-star generals, McCaffrey, McCrystal, all of them, to say that Trump was Hitler, that he was Mussolini, that he was a liar, he was dangerous. We got Mark Milley to call the Chinese. We did all of this.
Yes, we do not want this to be done to us. If right now, a retired four-star general said Joe Biden is senile or dangerous of the Afghan thing is a disaster and he should be removed sooner or later, or his weaponization of the DOJ or FBI is Mussolini-like, or his hounding of individual people at school boards, or the way he conducted the Mar-a-Lago raid is Nazi-like — and I’m just quoting from what they’ve said — you know what’s going to happen to those people? You’re going to get [Attorney General] Merrick Garland to call up the Pentagon and they’re all going to be slapped with a Code 88, uniform code of military justice and court-martialed for disparaging the commander-in-chief. Trust me, they would in two seconds. And that’s not going to happen. They’re not going to say anything because they’re not equally going to apply their standards of correct behavior. And second, they’re going to say things about Donald Trump because they know the media and the Pentagon are not going to do anything to them. Now? They would destroy them if they ever criticized the commander-in-chief. They would go after them like you would not believe. And they know that.
We’re talking about, to sum up and end this, they understand deterrence. They are saying to the American people, “We are SOBs, we’re capable of everything and anything. Which side do you want to be on? Because if you’re on our side, you can do what Hunter Biden is, there are no consequences. If you want to say the voting machines are crooked like Jill Stein, go ahead, she said that in 2016. If you want to be Barbara Boxer and 32 Democrats and say you’re not going to certify the Ohio count and hold up the whole election, don’t worry, they did it in 2004. If you’re Al Gore and the attorney general says the votes have been counted and certified in Florida. Oh no, we’re going to sue and hold up the entire election for a month. And so, you can do all of that — as long as you’re on our side. But if you don’t do that, and you want to go on the other side, you’re in big trouble.”
That’s the message they’re trying to send, that’s what we’re really getting down to. Join the winning side. It’s sort of like in the Soviet Union, if you’re part of the nomenclature and you join the party, you’re exempt; if you’re not, well, you’re on your own.
People say to me: “You’re an academic and you spent your whole life, how did you deal with the 94% of all academics who are left-wing? … Why are they so left-wing? Do they have tenure? They’re exempt from worrying about losing their job? … Are they idealistic because they deal with words?”
I say, “No, they understand that if you want to get tenure and be promoted and liked, you parrot the majority. If it paid better, they’d be fascists.”
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant.”
“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran … should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.” — CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad
And where better to kick off that agenda than in New York City?
The Muslim American Society, Samidoun, designated as a terrorist group, and other pro-terror hate groups have put out flyers threatening to “Flood the Tree Lightning for Gaza”.
The “flood” reference is to Al Aqsa Flood: the Hamas name for the atrocities of Oct 7.
The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting is a great New York tradition. But those are not things that Islam will tolerate.
In May 2005, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross reported in The Weekly Standard that MAS is a U.S. front group for the Muslim Brotherhood — a claim supported by a September 19, 2004 Chicago Tribune story that stated: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.” This Tribune article was later reproduced on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language website, Ikhwanweb.
The Muslim Brotherhood is also the parent organization of Hamas.
MAS, like the Muslim Brotherhood, wishes to see the United States governed by sharia, or Islamic law. “The message that all countries should be ruled by Islamic law,” writes Gartenstein-Ross, “is echoed throughout MAS’s membership curriculum. For example, MAS requires all its adjunct members to read Fathi Yakun’s book To Be a Muslim. In that volume,
spells out his expansive agenda: ‘Until the nations of the world have functionally Islamic governments, every individual who is careless or lazy in working for Islam is sinful.’”
MAS’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood were confirmed on August 14, 2007, as The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported: “As the terror-support trial of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) continued today, FBI agent Lara Burns testified that a phonebook found at the home of Ismail Elbarrasse — un-indicted co-conspirator and former assistant to HAMAS leader Musa Abu Marzook — listed the names and numbers of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in the United States.
So we’ve got a Hamas-linked group threatening the Christmas tree lighting ceremony while New York politicians continue to tolerate this state of terror.
Finally, if there’s any doubt as what we’re dealing with, here’s a Muslim Society of America event from 2019. (That’s where the screenshot is from.)
Disturbing footage of Muslim kids saying they would sacrifice themselves and kill for the “army of Allah” surfaced from an Islamic center in Philadelphia.
The Muslim American Society (MAS) Islamic Center in Philadelphia posted the video to its Facebook page celebrating “Ummah Day” in which young children wearing Palestinian scarves sang and read poetry about killing for Allah and the mosque in Jerusalem.
“We will defend the land of divine guidance with our bodies, and we will sacrifice our souls without hesitation,” a second girl says. “We will chop off their heads, and we will liberate the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque. We will lead the army of Allah fulfilling His promise, and we will subject them to eternal torture.”
Hamas is here. Al Qaeda is here. ISIS is here. And yes, they don’t intend to allow Christmas trees or menorahs.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Jihad Watchhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngJihad Watch2023-11-30 05:11:272023-11-30 05:23:18Muslim American Society, Linked to Hamas, Flooded Rockefeller Christmas Tree Lighting
The policies of the Obama and Biden administrations have been frequently compared due to their shared history. As Vice President under Obama and now President through a stolen election, Joe Biden’s policies often seem to mirror his predecessor. This article aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of critical comparisons between the two administrations, specifically regarding border control, economic performance, Middle Eastern policy, relations with Russia, the Department of Justice, and American national pride.
Border Control
Under the Obama administration, there was no border control with an “open border” policy, which let in droves of illegal immigrants across the US-Mexico border—Ditto under the Biden administration.
The Biden administration even went several steps ahead with plans to boost refugee admissions, preserve deportation relief for unauthorized immigrants, and not enforce the “public charge” rule that denies green cards to immigrants who might use public benefits like Medicaid.
Economic Performance
Both the Obama and Biden administrations created a stagnant economy. Period.
Middle Eastern Policy with Terrorist Organizations
Under both administrations, Iran’s regime was covertly and overtly empowered. The Obama-era policy of engagement with Iran (the Iran Nuclear Deal or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) continues under the Biden administration. However, seemingly on paper, Biden recently vowed to “hold Iran accountable” for its alliance with Russia and its support of anti-Israeli militants such as Hamas, creating a mirage of a change in policy direction.
Both administrations failed in their handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with groups like Hamas getting well-funded under their watch.
Relations with Russia and Ukraine
Under both the Obama and Biden administrations, Russia has taken aggressive actions, including the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine. Both administrations failed to deter Russian aggression adequately. Biden, who was in charge of Ukraine policy under Obama, bears a heavy responsibility for Washington’s inaction and its consequences.
Department of Justice
The Obama and Biden administrations weaponized the Department of Justice (DOJ). They were also guilty of various DOJ actions, such as handling the Fast and Furious operation and issues related to whistleblowers. The DOJ remains a critical institution in upholding the rule of law. The Biden administration has faced its share of dubious decisions about investigations and prosecutions.
American Pride
Finally, both administrations have attacked American pride through various factors, including political, economic, and social dynamics.
Therefore, it is evident that Obama is “still running the show” without any doubt.
The scariest thing is that Biden’s story is being blocked on social media and is nowhere in the NY Times, the L.A. Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS, and is minimally covered in the WSJ.
Let us keep in mind that there are not many differences between the D.C. Beltway elitist class politicians of either party.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Amil Imanihttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAmil Imani2023-11-30 04:55:412023-11-30 04:57:05Guess Who’s Still Running the Show
Under the leadership of a noted racial equity activist the Social Security Administration (SSA) has mistakenly overpaid beneficiaries tens of billions of dollars, including a 65% spike in overpayments in one year. In 2023 the agency with a stated mission of ensuring equity and accessibility by addressing systemic barriers to participation and a commitment to providing services to underserved communities made a whopping $23 billion in overpayments, according to its latest Agency Financial Report. The figure is a marked increase over the already stunning $11.1 billion in overpayments that SSA erroneously made in 2022.
SSA’s dreadful habit of overpaying billions in benefits goes back years as American taxpayers get stuck with the hefty price because most of the money is never recovered. In the last few years, the agency has doled out between $6 billion and $7 billion in new overpayments annually, the new report reveals. It shows that most of the 2022 overpayments, around $6.5 billion, occurred within the Old-Age Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) programs which provide monthly benefits to qualified retired and disabled workers and their dependents and to survivors of insured workers. Eligibility and benefit amounts are determined by the worker’s contributions to Social Security. In prior years the problem was mainly in the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program which helps low-income elderly and disabled adults as well as children. In 2022 SSI distributed north of $4.6 billion in overpayments.
At a congressional hearing earlier this year SSA Commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi told federal lawmakers that her agency is trying to recover the money by sending out millions of “overpayment notices” to those who erroneously got extra cash. Kijakazi said 1,028,389 people got the notices in 2022 and 986,912 in fiscal 2023, which ended in September. Kijakazi is a renowned racial equity proponent with a storied career of researching—and tackling—structural racism and the racial wealth gap in both government and high-profile nonprofits. She has served as co-chair of the National Advisory Council on Eliminating the Black-White Wealth Gap at the leftist Center for American Progress and on the Washington, D.C. Equitable Recovery Advisory Group. In mid-2021 President Joe Biden named Kijakazi acting SSA Commissioner after previously appointing her to a lower-level position of deputy commissioner for retirement and disability policy.
In the new agency financial report Kijakazi reveals that in 2023 she began to rebuild the SSA workforce by adding nearly 4,000 employees, yet problems persist. “We made progress toward eliminating our hearings backlog,” the commissioner writes in the report’s opening message, adding that “we ended FY 2023 with 321,819 cases pending, the lowest level since 2000.” The commissioner proceeds to highlight all the great things her agency has accomplished, including working to eliminate a backlog, reducing wait times for claims and improving organizational efficiency. “As good stewards of our programs, we strive to reduce improper payments and combat waste, fraud and abuse through our quality reviews, cost-effective program integrity work, and payment accuracy efforts.” Kijakazi ends her opening message by writing that there are “no material weaknesses in our internal controls.”
Nevertheless, buried deep in the exhaustive 216-page report the agency discloses the billions it has overpaid in the last few years despite establishing a special Improper Payment Prevention Team in 2019 tasked with developing strategies to determine the underlying cause of payment errors and developing corrective action plans. SSA issues over $1 trillion in benefit payments annually and preventing overpayments can be as simple as providing employees with a “comprehensive tool” when calculating benefits manually. In fact, SSA found that it could have avoided approximately 73,000 overpayments totaling more than $368 million in 2022 if it had furnished a “comprehensive tool” for employees to do their job correctly. “Preventing improper payments is more advantageous than recovering them after they are made because SSA does not have to expend additional resources to recover the overpayments…” the report states.
Morano: “COP 28 is shaping up to be a doubling down on the green agenda despite the massive failure on a grand global scale. We will report on the energy rationing, blackouts, and economic disruption from the failed UN-pushed policies globally. This UN climate summit is planning nothing short of a Great Food Reset for USA. See: COP28 UN climate summit to officially target meat eating! ‘Nations will be told to curb their excessive appetite for meat’ to enforce UN plan for ‘food’s climate transition’Morano: “Make no mistake, this UN climate summit will continue the push for the collapse of our once plentiful energy, food supply, and transportation. COP 28 aims to force a ‘climate transition’ for our meat and food supply. All the usual suspects will be gathering once again: Bill Gates, King Charles, John Kerry, and the World Economic Forum. The UN’s COP 28 is nothing short of a climate/Great Reset summit in Dubai, where public health bureaucracy and climate merge & Democracy goes to die.” By Marc Morano – November 29, 2023
Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano will attend the UN’s COP 28 climate summit in Dubai, joining a rogue team of climate skeptics from CFACT to expose the climate agenda.
Roger Pielke Jr.: “Global Climate Policy Hasn’t Made Much Difference on Energy Transitions” … “COP28 is expecting 70,000 participants, more than double those of COP27. Climate is now a full-scale industry, with fortunes and careers to be made, and perhaps lost.”
Background on COP 28:
Washington Post: ‘He won a Nobel Prize. Then he started denying climate change.’ John Clauser shared the Nobel in physics last year. Now he’s a self-described ‘denier’ of the overwhelming scientific consensus on a warming planet.
The UN COP 28 website explains: “COP28 UAE will take place at Expo City Dubai from November 30-December 12, 2023. The Conference is expected to convene over 70,000 participants.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Marc Moranohttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMarc Morano2023-11-29 15:58:302023-11-29 15:58:30Morano to attend UN climate summit in Dubai – Warns of Great Reset summit where ‘Democracy goes to die’
I urge the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, to take action to address this issue of rampant shoplifting and organized theft. I have heard the governor vetoed a proposed bill to establish a task force to combat organized theft. This decision has left the Retail Council of New York State, which represents retailers in the state, thoroughly disappointed.
The New York Police Department reported that 327 individuals were responsible for over a third of the retail thefts in 2022. These individuals were arrested a total of 6,000 times! What does this mean? They are arrested after the crime and then let off so they can return to their merry ways again! Isn’t it pedestrian common sense to ensure that repeat criminals are held accountable?
The National Retail Federation also reported national shrinkage losses of $112 billion in 2022, indicating a widespread problem across the retail industry.
Retailers are now taking preventative measures to combat this issue. For example, Dollar Tree has said it plans to remove goods from its stores like men’s underwear, an item most prone to retail theft. Retailers are also ramping up prevention methods, with 34% of respondents increasing internal payroll to support risks related to retail crime and 46% increasing the use of third-party security personnel, among other methods.
Since there is no other go, I suggest that they also take these measures to prevent shoplifting and organized theft:
Surveillance and Security Measures: Increase their surveillance capabilities to monitor their stores and deter shoplifters. This includes installing security cameras throughout the store and parking lot to detect and prevent criminal activity. They should also consider using electronic locks and other technologies to secure their stores.
Inventory Management: Retailers need to optimize their inventory management to identify discrepancies that may indicate high-theft items. This involves completing frequent physical counts to verify the information.
Policy Collaboration: Retailers also need to extensively collaborate with policing and government bodies to tackle the rise in shoplifting. This should include sharing intelligence with policing, understanding the tactics used by organized retail crime gangs, and identifying more offenders.
Customer Engagement: This is a must. Increase the visibility of high-theft items and acknowledge all customers to deter potential theft. It is better to create a single entry point and exit for the self-check area and staff it with a customer service monitor to enhance transaction monitoring.
Technological Solutions: The cost will be ultimately justified, so the retailers need to start using digital signage to display real-time video of customers as they shop, acting as a deterrent. They should also consider using cloud-based digital signage to mount small profile Smart TV screens adjacent to high ticket items and electronics.
Staffing and Training: This is the core of all preventive measures. Staff self-checkout areas with customer service monitors to indicate to potential thieves that they are being watched. Train your employees to handle self-checkout areas and monitor transactions.
One might also consider using low-tech measures, such as public-facing video monitors, giving front-end staff walkie-talkies, and installing a mirror on the kiosk to curb shoplifting at self-checkout lanes. Rather than stand-alone, this would help to complement more expensive high-tech ones to reduce inventory losses. Resource-rich companies like Walmart already use AI-powered cameras to recognize items and human behavior. The system alerts nearby employees of accidentally missed or intentionally skipped merchandise scans.
Given the apathy of our lawmakers, retailers should go for a multi-faceted approach to tackle the rise in shoplifting and organized theft. No single measure can eliminate theft; only a combination of strategies can effectively deter potential thieves.
The overall results might be somewhat mixed, but taking measures to safeguard your business is better than doing nothing and letting your stores get looted in broad daylight.
However, I understand that the effectiveness of these measures can vary depending on the specific context and implementation. Therefore, it should be the number one priority for the voters to urge the governor to take immediate action!
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Amil Imanihttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngAmil Imani2023-11-29 15:38:552023-11-29 15:40:24Widespread Shoplifting in America
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have grown so diverse that they now include policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. The segregated classes are called “affinity” classes, and they aim to reduce the so-called “academic achievement gap” by making black and Latino students feel more comfortable in class.
As Evanston, Ill. School Board Vice President Monique Parsons described the problem this month, “Our black students are, for lack of a better word … at the bottom, consistently still. And they are being outperformed consistently.” Evanston could have offered extra tutoring, parent engagement programs, or similar interventions. Instead, they offered special black-only classes taught by black teachers, on the theory that black students would learn better without white peers around.
Evanston is not the only community to offer race-segregated classrooms. Woke strongholds such as Minneapolis, Seattle, San Francisco, and Oakland have been offering race-specific high school electives focusing on subjects like African-American history since at least 2015. Evanston’s innovation was to expand the concept of race-segregated classrooms to math and English classes, such as Algebra 2 and AP Calculus.
Of course, federal non-discrimination laws forbid school districts from separating students on the basis of race, but the Evanston school district attempts to sidestep these laws by making the classes voluntary. Is that acceptable? To answer that question, consider what would have happened if Arkansas high schools in the 1950s had offered voluntary, whites-only classes to make white students feel more comfortable.
“In this example, the school system is failing to educate a portion of students. Rather than blame themselves for failing to prepare students to advance academically, this school system asks students to segregate themselves based on race,” Meg Kilgannon, Family Research Council’s senior fellow for Education Studies, told The Washington Stand. “The students must do it themselves so the school doesn’t violate civil rights laws that protect them from racial segregation.”
Fortunately, Evanston’s racial segregation scheme has not encountered universal participation. Approximately 200 of the high school’s 3,600 students (a little more than 5%) are attending race-segregated classes. About 25% of the student population is black, and about 20% is Latino, which comes out to about one in nine black students and one in seven Latino students attending the segregated classes. While not universal, these numbers still represent a sizable percentage of the school’s minority populations.
Regardless, the problem lies in the principle, not the implementation.
“We would all agree that it would be wrong if white people were looking to create spaces where everyone was white, but somehow the calculation is supposed to be different if black or brown people want to create spaces where no one is white,” Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement Joseph Backholm told TWS.
In August 2023, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) informed educators in a “Dear Colleague” letter, “OCR generally will open an investigation under Title VI [a civil rights non-discrimination law] where there are allegations that the use of a curriculum or program separates students or otherwise treats them differently based on their race” (emphasis added). That is precisely what Evanston’s program does, even if it is voluntary.
“This is a great example of how wokeness changes our moral evaluations,” Backholm explained. “In wokelandia, a person labeled an oppressor can do exactly the same thing as one of the oppressed, but it is wrong for one and right for the other. It’s very bad moral reasoning.”
Evanston has distinguished itself in recent years for its zeal to address past discrimination through present discrimination. The city became the first in America to approve reparations payments for black Americans in 2021. In 2019, the city council passed a resolution declaring Evanston “an anti-racist city” and “acknowledg[ing] that the trauma inflicted on people of color by persistent white supremacist ideology results in psychological harm affecting educational, economic, and social outcomes; and conjures painful memories of our City’s past …”
Such self-abasement might be understandable if the city had been the site of some notorious lynching or a KKK hotbed. Instead, Evanston was founded by Methodists — the backbone of the abolition movement — and incorporated in 1863 — the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The city’s zeal to apologize for racism seems to outpace its actual record of racial discrimination.
Countering racism infuses Evanston’s current policy of racially-segregated classes, too. “Equity guides many of the district’s decisions,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “embodied in a stated board goal: ‘Recognizing that racism is the most devastating factor contributing to the diminished achievement of students, ETHS will strive to eliminate the predictability of academic achievement based upon race.’”
Kilgannon said this “deeply troubling” goal “summarizes quite precisely the problem with ‘equity’ as a worldview-guiding policy.” She explained, “Student achievement has many factors. ‘Centering’ racism as the most devastating factor will not produce better academic outcomes and is likely to produce an even more toxic environment for children of every race.”
Indeed, students who choose to participate in the racially-segregated classes may have already bought into that woke indoctrination. By segregating themselves, they will miss out on the opportunity to learn and grow from interacting with people who are different from them. They will encounter expectations that don’t prepare them for the real world. They will accept the false premise that their skin color arbitrarily limits their potential academic success. Meanwhile, the students — white, black, and Latino — who stay behind in the mixed classes also miss out on interactions with their peers.
“In athletics, all play together. They don’t have a white team, a black team, and a Latino team,” argued Jay Sabatino, a former high school teacher, principal, and superintendent in Illinois public schools, who retired after 30 years in education. “They have one Evanston team. All contribute, and all make mistakes. If a student in class or on the basketball court feels unsafe because he made a mistake, the teacher should address that. A safe environment (physically and emotionally) is the result of an excellent school.”
“What I fear is happening is that these students are being given the impression that their skin color is the most important thing about them,” Backholm agreed, “and that they need protection from people who don’t look like them. If that’s the case, these segregated classrooms will end up giving them a much greater handicap in life than whatever math deficiencies they may have.”
“As long as the program is voluntary, I can accept it more than if it is ‘the way we do things,’” Sabatino told TWS. But he expressed concerns about the process, based upon the WSJ’s reporting that the school district was dodging media inquiries and had not published data on the program’s success over the past four years. “Transparency in these decisions (at a district or school level) should be paramount. That Evanston would not respond to questions should throw up a red flag to the community.” Additionally, “Any district that does not look at the data critically and report out on them is not operating optimally. This isn’t an administrator’s school; it’s the community’s.”
“This example is one of the many reasons we encourage Christians to run for school board, and why we support in prayer Christians serving in schools as teachers and staff,” said Kilgannon. “Only a system devoid of God can produce this kind of situation. Christians are needed now more than ever in education of every kind.”
America’s educational establishment — such as national teachers’ unions and education training programs — are pushing schools to embed godless, toxic ideologies based on Marxism into curriculums, instruction, and every aspect of school life. They instruct students to classify everyone as either oppressor or oppressed, based not upon their individual behavior but upon their belonging to groups. Many of these groups, which determine someone’s moral standing according to woke ideology, are based upon unchangeable physical characteristics, such as a person’s skin color or ethnicity.
Creating special classes for certain “oppressed” groups (blacks and Latinos) to escape from the supposed “oppressors” (whites), as Evanston school district has done, is just another method for subtly advancing this radical indoctrination agenda. But will it actually help students learn better in AP calculus class? The case to make for it is not very persuasive.
Instead of imbibing untested racial ideology, there are time-tested methods for academic improvement which Evanston could try. Based on his 30 years of experience, Sabatino said, “I’ll always endorse this: Hard work and perseverance lead to success.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2023-11-29 12:39:152023-11-29 12:39:15Progressive Public High School Offers Race-Segregated Classes
The time has come to discuss the Biden administration’s relationship with Israel. With each passing day, two things become obvious. First, Israel cannot fight the war without U.S. resupply of the Israel Defense Forces. As a consequence, Israel is beholden to the administration’s directives. And second, if Israel follows the Biden administration’s directives, it will lose the war.
Israel’s dependence on the United States was stated bluntly by retired IDF Maj. General Yitzhak Brick in an interview earlier this week.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
Brick went on to explain that President Joe Biden’s demand that Israel permit “humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza means that he is demanding that Israel keep Hamas fully supplied with food, water and fuel.
His demand that Israel minimize Palestinian civilian casualties endangers IDF soldiers and renders the expansion of the ground offensive into central and southern Gaza, where the bulk of Hamas’s force is now located, almost impossible to carry out. Brick suggested various forms of long-term tunnel warfare and other suggestions for how the IDF may be able to defeat Hamas over time while operating within the constraints that Biden and his top advisors are dictating.
It is hard to judge whether Brick’s suggestions are workable without access to situational intelligence about conditions on the ground in southern Gaza. At a minimum, it is clear that Biden’s preference for the lives of civilians in Gaza over the lives of IDF soldiers on the ground ensures that far more soldiers will be killed in the fighting than would otherwise. Three weeks ago, the administration began demanding that Israel limit (or cancel entirely) its pre-ground battle aerial bombings. Consequently, in the week that preceded this week’s “humanitarian pause,” the IDF’s battle losses were overwhelmingly the consequence of sniper fire from Hamas terrorists hiding in buildings that the air force did not destroy before the battles, due to U.S. pressure.
Then there is the issue of the hostages. Israel is duty-bound to the hostages, their families and Israeli society as a whole to rescue them. There are two ways to do this. Israel can bow to Hamas’s demands, as it is presently doing by suspending its offensive, and endangering Israel’s soldiers and civilians by permitting Hamas to rebuild and reorganize its forces, and by releasing terrorists from its prisons and retuning them to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. Or it can renew its military operation, locate the hostages and rescue them itself. Clearly, the second option is preferable.
Securing aid from America
Until Monday, it appeared the reason that Israel had accepted the deal it is currently operating under owed to its inability to locate the hostages. The London-based Daily Express reported on Monday that the real reason Israel is not rescuing the hostages—and instead agreed to the current deal with all of its tactical and strategic costs—is related to the Biden administration’s directive not to harm Palestinian civilians.
Based on Israeli sources, the British Daily Express reported that Israel knows where many of the hostages are located. It has opted not to rescue them because Hamas is holding the hostages among civilians. Rescuing them would involve collateral damage to those Palestinians and risk U.S. resupply, which Israel cannot fight without.
Here it is important to note that the number of actual civilians that have died as a result of Israel’s bombings remains unknown. On Oct. 25, Biden acknowledged that the Gaza Health Ministry’s data on civilian casualties lacks credibility in light of the fact that the Health Ministry is simply an organ of Hamas and reports the numbers it is told to report by Hamas’s terror masters. That data counts every dead terrorist as a dead civilian.
Israelis were thrilled with Biden’s statement. But the next day, he apologized for it. According to Fox News, in a meeting with Muslim American leaders on Oct. 26, Biden apologized for telling the truth.
“I’m sorry. I’m disappointed with myself,” he said.
Since Oct. 26, the administration has embraced as fact Hamas’s casualty counts and uses them as the basis for its demand that Israel minimize Palestinian casualties. The administration’s willingness to ignore the fallacies at the heart of those data indicates that its policy is based on something other than concern for Palestinian civilians, and therefore is not a tactical challenge that Israel may be capable of contending with and still win.
To be sure, Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have all expressed their solidarity with Israel, as well as their revulsion at Hamas’s actions and desire to see the genocidal jihadist terror group defeated. And to be sure, Biden has taken steps to resupply Israel—requesting $14.3 billion in military supplies to Israel (although the assistance has yet to be approved by Congress or signed into law by Biden). These positions and at least partial actions lend credence to Brick’s assessment, shared by the IDF and the government, that the challenge the Biden administration’s position on civilian casualties in Gaza is an operational or tactical challenge and not a strategic conundrum.
Dealing with Fatah and the P.A.<
But there are additional indications that Biden doesn’t want Israel to win. First, there is the issue of Egypt. Due to the U.S. decision to support Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s determination to prevent Gazans from fleeing to Egypt or to a third country through Egypt, the million or so Gazans who evacuated the northern end of the Strip during the fighting are now concentrated in the south. Among them are the bulk of Hamas’s forces, which Israel must destroy to win the war. Facing the U.S.-backed Egyptian refusal to permit these civilians to leave Gaza on the one hand and the U.S. directive to keep civilian casualties close to zero on the other, Israel is facing an impossible operational challenge. Brick may be right that a low-key, slow offensive would be capable of achieving the goal. But he may be wrong. Certainly, a more conventional operation would have a much higher chance of succeeding.
To this must be added the Biden administration’s demands for a post-war settlement. Israel’s goal is not only to defeat Hamas now but to prevent it from rebuilding and to prevent other terror groups from emerging in a post-war Gaza. To this end, at a minimum, Israel will be required to take two actions. First, it must retain permanent military control over all of Gaza. Second, Israel must seize a buffer zone several kilometers wide on the Gaza side of the border to protect civilian communities and military bases from a repeat of Oct. 7.
Biden and his advisers oppose both of these goals. Not only do they completely oppose Israeli military control over Gaza and the establishment of buffer zones inside Gaza, they demand that in a post-war settlement, Israel end its maritime blockade of the Gaza coast, and permit everything and anything to enter Gaza from the sea. In other words, the U.S. position is to permit terrorist forces whether they call themselves Hamas or anything else—to rebuild their capabilities unfettered in post-war Gaza.
Even worse, the administration’s position is that Gaza must be ruled by the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority after the war has ended, and that Gaza be united with Judea and Samaria in a post-war era, and together receive full sovereignty. In other words, the administration’s war goal is to establish a Fatah-dominated Palestinian state in these areas. On its own, this position is antithetical not only to an Israeli victory in the war. It represents an existential threat to Israel’s continued existence. Fatah—and the P.A. it runs—is a terrorist organization and regime. The P.A.’s U.S.-armed and funded security forces are Hamas’s junior partners in terror. As Eugene Kontorovich and Itamar Marcus reported in The Wall Street Journal this week, P.A.-controlled Fatah terrorists from Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group posted videos of its members in Gaza participating in Hamas’s Oct. 7 slaughter. Fatah terrorists killed, tortured and kidnapped Israelis, and took videos of their actions.
Unlike Gaza, Judea and Samaria are a stone’s throw from all of Israel’s major population centers, and half a million Israelis live in cities and villages throughout Judea and Samaria. Last Friday night, the threat posed by Palestinian terrorist and paramilitary forces in Judea and Samaria to the lives of millions of Israelis came into sharp relief with the public lynching in the city of Tulkarm of two Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israeli counter-terror operations. To the roars of a crowd of thousands—secured by P.A. security forces—Hamas publicly hanged the two men from an electricity tower. The two men’s bodies showed signs of brutal torture that preceded their execution. Tulkarm is controlled by the P.A. It is located less than a kilometer from the Cross Israel Highway and a few minutes’ drive to Kfar Yona and Netanya.
Israel’s dependence on U.S. weapons makes it impossible for the Netanyahu government to publicly air the strategic threat the administration’s policies pose to its war effort and its long-term ability to survive in the post-Oct. 7 Middle East. Israel cannot risk additional stress to its position vis-à-vis the Biden administration and wants to avoid exposing the rift to its enemies already emboldened from Gaza to Lebanon, Yemen to Iran.
Congressional lawmakers face no such constraints, however. Moreover, they have an interest in exposing the truth and working to compel a change in the administration’s Hamas-enabling policies. Polling data shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans support Israel in this war and want it to destroy Hamas. The overwhelming majority of lawmakers from both parties share their views. To date, the Republican majority in the House has made no effort to exercise oversight over the Biden administration’s policies in relation to Israel’s war with Hamas, largely due to the Israeli government’s unwillingness to air the actual state of relations.
As the humanitarian pause is extended to secure the release of additional hostages and before the Christmas recess, House Republicans and like-minded Democrats should open hearings to compel the administration to explain its policies. Specifically, it should be asked to explain how Israel can defeat Hamas given the constraints the administration is placing on IDF operations. The administration should also be asked why it supports the P.A., given the P.A.’s involvement, support and defense of Hamas’s invasion of Israel, and the slaughter of its civilians on Oct. 7. Congress should also ensure that the aid package, when passed, contains no conditions on Israel’s use of the weapons it will receive.
Lawmakers must understand the source of the Israeli government’s fulsome praise for Biden. They should then take action to prevent the administration from maintaining its policy of paying lip service to an Israeli victory while preventing Israel from achieving one.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Center For Security Policyhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngCenter For Security Policy2023-11-29 12:18:012023-12-01 04:05:31Biden is the primary obstacle to Israeli victory
