Tag Archive for: California

Sarah Idan, Miss Iraq and Ardent Zionist, Now Running For Congress

Sarah Idan is a former Miss Iraq who, at the Miss Universe pageant in 2017, met and became close friends with Miss Israel, Adar Gandelsman. She took a selfie of them together, and posted it on social media, with the caption “Peace and Love from Miss Iraq and Miss Israel.” To make matters worse, in the swimsuit competition, she appeared in a bikini. Both these transgressions — the selfie with Miss Israel, and the bikini she wore — caused a terrific backlash from angry Muslims; Idan was stripped of her Iraqi citizenship, and was deluged with death threats. Her widowed mother and siblings were forced to flee Iraq. The two beauty queens continued to meet and post joint messages, with photos, on Instagram. The accounts of both girls were, of course, hacked.

In June 2018, Sarah Idan accepted Adar Gandelsman’s invitation to visit Israel. After all, once she had received thousands of death threats, a few thousand more weren’t going to stop her from traveling to Israel. In for a penny, in for a pound. She fell in love, she says, with Israel, and with its people, who greeted her in the market of Mahane Yehuda like a movie star. In Israel, she said later, she felt right at home in an environment that was strangely familiar: the sights and sounds of a Middle East open market, so much like what she had experienced in Baghdad and Damascus.

While in Israel, she spoke with many Jews from Arab countries, and learned about the 850,000 Jews who had had to flee Arab lands during and after the 1948 war. She posted photos of herself visiting Israeli sites, and eating Iraqi food in Jerusalem restaurants. Later she reminisced about her trip: “It actually felt weird—the people look like my people. And the city looks like Damascus, like Syria, and I’ve been there, so everything seems familiar to me.”

In August 2019, she testified on behalf of Israel at a meeting in Geneva of the UN Human Rights Council, in what must have been a most uncomfortable appearance for the Arab and Muslim delegates.

In December 2019, at the invitation of Israel’s UN ambassador, Sarah Idan attended an event held at Israel’s UN Mission to mark the expulsion of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East following the establishment of the State of Israel. She spoke feelingly about what she had learned about this issue when she visited Israel, according to a report in Algemeiner“I was very surprised and especially touched by the experience of visiting the Babylonian Heritage Museum in Or Yehuda — which serves as a center to honor the heritage and history of Iraqi Jews.”

She said she felt a strong bond with Iraqi-born Jews in Israel: “I was born in Baghdad and felt very connected to the Iraqi Jews I met in Jerusalem, who welcomed me with open arms and with so much love, even though my country treated them unfairly. I was overwhelmed when I saw pictures of Iraqi government stamps on their passport saying ‘one-way exit — not allowed to return.’ I told them I was utterly ashamed.

Sadly, the 3,000-year chapter of Jewish life in Iraq, along with the larger Middle East and North Africa, came to an abrupt and traumatic end – and much of this is the result of antisemitism,” she said.

She has become a kind of unofficial ambassador for Israel, speaking up passionately for the Jewish state from her unusual perspective as a Muslim Iraqi. She believes the conflict is perpetuated by “the belief systems taught in Muslim countries, which are antisemitic” and is reinforced by biased media.

Idan had worked as an interpreter for the American army in Iraq, and as a result she was given a green card. She moved to America, and in 2015 became an American citizen. She is now living in California.

In March, she announced she would be running for Congress in 2024, as a Democrat, from the 30th Congressional District. She should win in a walk. She’s made all the right enemies. She’s already had a few exchanges on Twitter with the unbearable Ilhan Omar, responding to one of Omar’s tweets with this:

I don’t stand for your anti-American, antisemitic, Muslim Brotherhood agenda, using this democracy to further your…Islamic socialism goals of dividing and weakening our country.”

And in announcing her candidacy for Congress, she said: “I would just be the opposite of Ilhan Omar. I’m a Democrat and liberal, but I don’t think like her – I don’t hate this country.” Idan has said she wants to make war on “wokeism.”

And once in the House, her intelligence, her knowledge of Iraqi Muslims and Israeli Jews, her clear-eyed fury at antisemites, and – let’s face it — her good looks, will be a nightmare for Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and the sour-faced crew at CAIR. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have any interest in a liberal Democrat from California. But for Sarah Idan, I’ll happily make an exception.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Two Street Riots, One Weekend: The Violent Legacy of Anti-Parent Policies

Hundreds of people blocking streets, looting stores, and destroying property should not be normal occurrences. They are not normal in a peaceful, prosperous society. Alas, they are increasingly normal in America’s large cities. Unusually violent street incidents in Chicago and Los Angeles over the weekend illustrate the nation’s civilizational decline and point to at least one of the (many) causes.

Videos captured early Sunday morning show that a mob approximately 100 strong smashed through a glass door at an Arco gas station in Compton, California and ransacked the place while the overnight clerk hid in the bathroom. The “mob of looters … left a trail of destruction” at multiple stores, according to one local news report, while another said sheriff’s deputies received reports of gunshots in the area. Police arrived too late to stop the mayhem — not to mention being wildly outnumbered — but are reviewing video for possible charges.

The incident was apparently related to illegal street takeovers — at least three occurred Sunday night — connected to illegal street racing. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Sergeant Clarence Williams said the street takeovers occur “just about every weekend.” Local resident Kevin Evans said of the perpetrators, “I don’t think they are Compton residents. We don’t tear up our own city like this.” (That hasn’t always been true.)

Meanwhile in Chicago, hundreds of teens swarmed the city’s downtown area on Saturday night, climbing on buses, smashing car windows, attacking bystanders, and generally creating chaos. Two teens were taken to the hospital with gunshot wounds, while a woman said her husband was hospitalized after a crowd smashed their windshield and beat him severely. The under-age crowd attempted to enter Millennium Park, where people under 21 are not allowed without an adult. Assisted by SWAT teams, hundreds of Chicago police attempted to restore order and escort tourists to safety. Police arrested nine adults and six juveniles, a slim fraction of the lawbreakers that night.

Saturday’s violence wasn’t the first time. On Friday, “a similar gathering” of hundreds of teens at 31st Street Beach turned violent when a 14-year-old was shot, and other cars were damaged, including one set on fire. One eyewitness described “kids fighting, chasing each other, some of them got guns.” The incidents also echo last year’s “Teen Takeover,” when, Chicago’s downtown was plunged into “absolute chaos” as mayoral candidate Paul Vallas tweeted. “Juveniles jumping on top of buses, cars, terrorizing residents, tourists & businesses. These mass groups fought CPD [Chicago Police Department] & only minimal arrests were made.” Sadly, Chicago’s routine violence only receives widespread attention when it spills out into affluent neighborhoods.

Multiple eyewitnesses laid at least part of the blame for the Chicago chaos at the feet of parents. “What’s it going to take?” asked one witness. “The community has to step up, parents have to step up, we can’t keep blaming politicians and waiting on them.” Outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot made the same point. “Parents and guardians must know where their children are and be responsible for their actions. Instilling the important values of respect for people and property must begin at home.”

Another anonymous Chicago native perhaps said it best, “Where are their parents at? That’s my question.”

That’s a great question. First, it rightly intuits that parents bear a responsibility for their children’s moral formation.

Second, it points toward at least a piece of the solution: parents are absent because they have been shut out of a position of influence in their children’s lives — by design. Education experts believe they know better than parents and therefore can supersede a parent’s authority. “I have a master’s degree,” testified Arizona teacher Alicia Messing. “What do the parents have?” She added, “the purpose of public education is not to teach only what parents want their children to be taught, it is to teach them what society needs them to be taught.”

Left-wing politicians are 110% behind the arrogant absolutism of the Educrats. As former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe accidentally said out loud in the 2021 campaign, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Of course, that predictably unpopular narrative — McAuliffe lost his bid to retake the governor’s mansion — has leftists such as White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre or Education Secretary Miguel Cardona searching around for a more sympathetic framing. They much prefer a “parents versus Republican politicians” narrative to the “parents versus teachers” reality.

As a result, more than 5,000 schools now allow — or require! — teachers to hide a child’s gender identity from parents, according to a report by Parents Defending Education. Schools have stocked closets with clothing so that students can cross-dress at school to keep their gender identity secret from their parents. They have continued to stonewall parents, even after parents have sued them, or their children attempted suicide. One Wisconsin teacher posted in her classroom, “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now.”

If parents lack the moral authority to even know when their children attempt suicide, how can they be expected to effectively steer their teens away from street crime?

Both Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) — which are also home to some of the nation’s most powerful teachers unions — endorse this radical, new agenda of hiding essential information about a students’ identity from their parents.

It gets worse. After undermining parental influence, many schools are training children up to be left-wing activists. New curricula, some of which has been promoted in mainstream media, not only claims that activism makes children better students and better citizens, but teaches them how to do it. It’s no accident that high school students — or even younger — routinely walk out of class to participate in left-wing protests; their teachers are training and encouraging them to do so. Sure enough, there is evidence — although they try to downplay it — that LAUSD and CPS are encouraging their students in activism. Why, then, are we surprised when youth in Los Angeles and Chicago take over the streets?

Illinois state Senator Robert Peters (D), the senate black caucus chair, explicitly identified the Chicago violence with political activism, “I would look at the behavior of young people as a political act and statement. It’s a mass protest against poverty and segregation.” There’s only one problem: the word for non-governmental actors employing violence in pursuit of a political objective is not “protest”; it’s “terrorism.” For that reason, let’s hope Mr. Peters is incorrect.

“One of God’s great gifts to humanity is restraint. And when those restraints are taken off of a society, horrible things happen,” Dr. Al Mohler said last week on “Washington Watch.” “Frankly, you look at America’s major cities, [and] you don’t see much restraint about anything.” This past weekend made his point.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.


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.

A Brief History of California’s Eugenics Program (1909-2013)

After decades of forced sterilizations followed by feeble apologies, California is shifting to the endgame of its century-long sterilization program: taxing innocent citizens to pay off its victims.


It is a commonsense view that government spending is generally inefficient compared to spending by private people and businesses. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously argued, “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”

This point about economic efficiency may be true, but it often lets government officials off the hook far too easy. A chilling example of this is how California is currently dealing with its long history of forcing sterilization on unwilling victims and then legislatively immunizing themselves from responsibility.

If you were a taxpayer in the Golden State as recently as 2010, your earnings probably helped fund the forced sterilizations of hundreds of inmates such as the Native American woman Moonlight Pulido.

“While in prison in 2005, Pulido said a doctor told her he needed to remove two ‘growths’ that could be cancer,” the Associated Press reported earlier this month. “She signed a form and had surgery. Later, something didn’t feel right. She was constantly sweating and not feeling like herself. She asked a nurse, who told her she had had a full hysterectomy, a procedure that removes the uterus and the cervix, and sometimes other parts of the reproductive system.”

“I felt like less than a woman,” Pulido told reporter Adam Beam. “We’re the only life-givers, we’re the only ones that can give life and he stole that blessing from me.”

Pulido was not alone. Other victims of this ghoulish policy shared stories with media, including Kimberly Jeffrey, who recalled resisting a tubal ligation procedure while she was sedated and strapped to an operating table.

“Being treated like I was less than human produced in me a despair,” Jeffrey told NPR.

Kelli Dillon, a former inmate at Central California women’s facility, explained how she found out that her ovaries had been removed in 2001 without her knowledge or consent after she was told surgeons were going to take a biopsy and remove a cyst.

“It was like my life wasn’t worth anything. Somebody felt I had nothing to contribute to the point where they had to find this sneaky and diabolical way to take my ability to have children,” Dillon told the Guardian in 2021.

It was not until years later, while still a member of the California State prison system, that Dillon began to realize other inmates were receiving hysterectomies and sterilization procedures without their knowledge, often after being told the procedures “were necessary to look for cancers or correcting gynecological issues.”

If the perpetrators of these violations were held accountable for their actions, such atrocities would be less likely to happen. But instead of being brought to justice for their malfeasance, the California State government is forcing innocent people to pay the price and getting off virtually scott free themselves. It is this sort of application for the expropriation of funds from private and productive citizens that has allowed governments to terrorize their citizens since time immemorial—a pattern that will have no reason to end until measures have been taken to eliminate the power of governments to enact such cruel legislation.

Timeline: California’s Forced Sterilization

1909: The state government of California created a sterilization program that became the largest eugenics movement in the United States, sterilizing more than 20,000 unwilling victims and also inspiring eugenics practices in Nazi Germany. The practices were carried out in public hospitals and other tax-funded institutions for the disabled and mentally ill, because people with disabilities or mental illnesses were deemed unfit for reproduction.

1927: By now the eugenics movement had become mainstream in the United States. It was widely thought among elite American policymakers that the human population could be improved by coercively preventing the reproduction of disliked demographics such as the disabled, the poor, the “feebleminded,” and even people deemed “sexual deviants” such as rapists, prostitutes, or even women who had sex out of wedlock. California’s constitutional right to continue its eugenics practices was enshrined by the United States Supreme Court in the Buck v. Bell case, in which the right of the state of Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck (who the state falsely declared “feebleminded”) against her will was upheld—and with it the rights of other state governments to make similar decisions for their inhabitants.

Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (considered an idol of “progressivism” in his time and still by some today) stated, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

And thus, he concluded in a famous line that, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

1968-1974: Although the eugenics movement had peaked in the 1930s, California government officials oversaw continued tax-funded sterilizations into the later half of the 20th century. For example, according to an official document released by Los Angeles County five years ago apologizing for a series of sterilizations county officials had overseen between 1968 and 1974, “Over 200 women who delivered babies at the Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, the majority of whom were low income and born in Mexico, were possibly coerced into getting postpartum tubal ligations. At least some of the women were not aware they had been sterilized, and only learned that they had lost their reproductive rights during subsequent doctors’ visits. It is significant and necessary to acknowledge the irreparable harm inflicted onto the women who were subjected to these coerced sterilizations at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, and to their families.“

1979: California’s eugenics laws were repealed, supposedly ending the practice of state-funded eugenics in CA.

1999 – 2010: California’s eugenics movement was mysteriously revived, but this time under the guise of prison healthcare. According to the Associated Press less than two years ago, “Sterilizations in California prisons appear to date to 1999, when the state changed its policy for unknown reasons to include a sterilization procedure known as “tubal ligation” as part of inmates’ medical care. Over the next decade, women reported they were coerced into this procedure, with some not fully understanding the ramifications.”

2003: While the California government was still funding involuntary sterilizations in their state prisons, California Governor Gray Davis apologized on behalf of “the people of California” for the government’s “past” eugenicist actions. “To the victims and their families of this past injustice, the people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering you endured over the years,” the apology read. “Our hearts are heavy for the pain caused by eugenics. It was a sad and regrettable chapter in the state’s history, and it is one that must never be repeated again.”

2013: The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR, now Reveal) discovered that between 1997 and 2010 California state officials spent at least $147,460 of taxpayer funds to sterilize 148 female inmates. The above-quoted Moonlight Pulido, Kimberly Jeffrey, and Kelli Dillon were just three among them. Many of the records of these sterilizations were “lost or destroyed,” the Associated Press reports. NPR notes that the true number of illicit sterilizations during that period may have been significantly higher than reported, and that the operations appeared to disproportionately target repeat offenders.

The CIR’s claims were denied by the few state officials who commented in this early phase of the scandal. Valley State Prison’s former OB-GYN Dr. James Heinrich claimed that all sterilized inmates had consented to the operations. He even justified this use of tax dollars in a way that seemed to echo Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s disregard for the value of human life back in 1927. “Over a 10-year period, [$147,460] isn’t a huge amount of money compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children — as they procreated more,” Heinrich said according to NPR.

2014: Prompted by the CIR’s findings, auditors conducted their own investigation to confirm or disconfirm the CIR’s claims. “A state audit found 144 women were sterilized between 2005 and 2013 with little or no evidence they were counseled or offered alternative treatments,” the audit found. The auditors’ report, published at www.auditor.ca.gov, found that the misconduct had occurred with the oversight of either the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation or California Correctional Health Care Services.

“This report concludes that during our eight-year audit period, 144 female inmates were sterilized by a procedure known as bilateral tubal ligation, a surgery generally performed for the sole purpose of sterilization,” the auditors wrote.

Later that year, in response to the revelations, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill supposedly written to prohibit future involuntary sterilizations in California prisons. However, as reporting from the Guardian noted, “While the bill passed unanimously, its carefully negotiated language allowed the state to escape further responsibility.”

2021: The California government approved legislation intended to compensate its sterilization victims through tax-funded reparations payments. The program will pay out at least $15,000 to any applicant who can prove to have been one of the victims.

2022-2023: California is searching for the victims that are still alive today, of which there are believed to be more than 600, according to reporting from the Associated Press in 2021 (although many of the victims never knew what was done to them, so it is unclear how they would know to apply for reparations). The government’s search strategy consists of sending posters, flyers, and fact sheets to libraries, prisons, and other establishments across the state, the AP reported this month.

After a year of searching, the government has approved only 51 out of 310 reparations applicants, denied 103 people’s applications, and closed three incomplete applications. According to the AP, “They say it’s difficult to verify the applications as many records have been lost or destroyed.” Therefore, according to Executive Officer of the California Victim Compensation Board Lynda Gledhill, “We try to find all the information we can and sometimes we just have to hope that somebody maybe can find more detailed information on their own. We’re just sometimes not able to verify what happened.”

Of the 51 victims who have been approved for reparations payments, three were sterilized under California’s eugenics laws that were repealed in 1979. The rest were sterilized more recently.

2024: The $4.5 million reparations program, for which an additional $2 million is being spent on advertising, will end.

Any victims still unpaid will have lost their chance to be compensated for the damages to their bodies, sexual identities, human dignity, and potential to pass their genes onto future generations.

The “public servants” governing California appropriated funds from innocent citizens against their will, used those funds to capture and sterilize involuntary victims, “lost or destroyed” the associated records, passed legislation to protect themselves from responsibility (after being caught), finally decided to pay reparations but passed the cost onto unwilling innocent citizens instead of facing any financial or legal repercussions themselves, and have only paid 51 out of at least 600 living victims now that about half the term of the reparations program has passed.

The above history of self-serving legislation and empty apologies confirms the suspicion common sense should lead us to anyway—namely that California government institutions cannot be trusted to legislatively protect the citizenry from continued atrocities given that the atrocities in question are often perpetrated by the government institutions themselves.

When unjustified coercion is consistently used by a group of people, the way to stop them is to impose costs on the guilty individuals that they themselves must suffer until their transgressions are atoned for. It is good that (albeit grossly inadequate) reparations are being paid, but until the perpetrators of the crimes are the ones to pay the price, the crucial lessons will not be learned and the crucial incentives not imposed.

There are several destructive institutions that allowed these eugenics operations to take place, but among them is the practice of government taxation itself. It allowed the perpetrators to conduct their operations without incurring personal expense, and through taxation the innocent many are now being scapegoated to protect the guilty few from what punishments they might otherwise be forced by the outrage of the public to endure.

If the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity aren’t going to be jailed for life or otherwise severely punished as any private citizen likely would for committing the same offenses, then at the very least the citizens who involuntarily pay their salaries and fund the programs of their twisted imaginations could be struggling to end the forced involvement of the citizenry that finances such programs with their tax payments.

If your tax dollars were spent solely to improve the health, education, and protection from violence of your fellow countrymen, instead of often funding the exact opposite of all these things as has been the case in California, then opposing the predation of tax collectors would not be quite so urgent. But in the real world, those malevolent enough (or those sufficiently under the sway of malevolent ideas) to think they should get to spend your money against your will often turn out to be malevolent in many other ways as well.

There are plenty of reasons one might struggle against government taxation. Perhaps you’re a poor or middle-class laborer at pains to afford your childrens’ education. Perhaps you’re a visionary entrepreneur trying to fund some world-changing new technological or medical research.

But at least as good a reason as any to oppose your wealth being confiscated is to prevent institutions such as the California State government from spending another dime on their campaigns of terror and reproductive destruction.

AUTHOR

Saul Zimet

Saul Zimet is a Website and Data Coordinator for HumanProgress.org at the Cato Institute and a graduate student in economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Federal Judge Blocks Gavin Newsom’s War Against the Freedom of Speech

At times, frankly, it’s pretty slim pickings for every party, but this is ridiculous: Old Joe Biden is looking increasingly unlikely to repeat his president act after January 20, 2025, and California Governor Gavin Newsom is now the Democrats’ rising star.

Yes, that Gavin Newsom, the one who is relentlessly destroying California with ever more intrusive and expensive nanny state socialist measures that are leading Californians to flee in droves: the state is experiencing a population decline for the first time in recorded history.

But Newsom is popular among Leftists because he is a socialist, and even better (as far as they’re concerned), an authoritarian who eagerly tramples upon the First Amendment in his lust to crack down on dissent. As the Left grows ever more open about its opposition to our Constitutional rights, Newsom’s disdain for the freedom of speech makes him look increasingly like the Democrat of the future, if the future belongs to Mao. But now he has encountered a small obstacle, in the form of a federal judge.

Back in September 2022, Newsom signed Assembly Bill 2098, a law prohibiting the dissemination of “misinformation” on the COVID hysteria. Specifically, according to a Thursday report in the San Francisco Gate, it established penalties for physicians who departed from “the contemporary scientific consensus” regarding COVID. Now that this “consensus” is being shown to have been based more on groupthink and political objectives rather than dispassionate and objective scientific analysis, Newsom’s bill appears to be particularly insidious. And it is: “misinformation” and “disinformation” are labels that today’s enemies of freedom use in order to suppress speech that gets in the way of their agenda while fooling Leftist rubes into thinking they’re performing a valuable public service. Newsom, not surprisingly, is an enthusiastic proponent of such deceptions.

According to the governor himself, of course, this fascist little bill was perfect, as it was “narrowly tailored to apply only to those egregious instances in which a licensee is acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the required standard of care while interacting directly with a patient under their care.” However, the Gate notes that “in an SFGATE op-ed last year, California physician Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg argued that AB 2098’s definition of ‘misinformation’ was too broad and that ‘the contemporary scientific consensus’ is always changing.” Indeed. If anything is obvious about COVID at this point, it’s that. And so “Høeg and other doctors sued the state, alleging that the law violates the First Amendment’s free speech protections and 14th Amendment’s due process protections.” Obviously it does.

Now a federal judge has recognized that fact. On Wednesday, Judge William B. Shubb shot down Newsom’s free-speech-destroying measure, and had strong words for it in his opinion: “Defendants argue that while the scientific consensus may sometimes be difficult to define, there is a clear scientific consensus on certain issues — for example, that apples contain sugar, that measles is caused by a virus, or that Down’s syndrome is caused by a chromosomal abnormality. However, AB 2098 does not apply the term ‘scientific consensus’ to such basic facts, but rather to COVID-19 — a disease that scientists have only been studying for a few years, and about which scientific conclusions have been hotly contested. COVID-19 is a quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus.”

Imagine if Gavin Newsom had had the marvelous opportunity to be walking on this planet in the year 1632. There is no doubt whatsoever about it: he would have been one of those insisting that Galileo obey the clear scientific consensus that the sun revolved around the earth, and would happily have burned him at the stake if he continued to insist otherwise. The contents of the orthodoxy and the heresy have changed, but otherwise the situation is the same: Gavin Newsom would have been a zealous Inquisitor. And Judge Shubb further embarrassed California’s Grand Inquisitor by pointing out that the definition of “misinformation” included in AB 2098 was “grammatically incoherent” and consequently thus “unconstitutionally vague.” The Gate adds that Shubb “had signaled he would grant the doctors’ request at a Monday hearing, in which he told California’s lawyers that their definition of ‘misinformation’ was ‘nonsense.’”

Totalitarians don’t give up when they encounter obstacles, and so Newsom will persist. The Gate notes that Shubb’s ruling was “not a final judgment on the constitutionality of the law but rather a temporary halt against enforcement while litigation continues. California can appeal to have the injunction lifted,” and you can be sure that it will. Although little noted among patriots, the war against the freedom of speech is the Left’s primary focus at this point. If Leftists can destroy it, under the guise of protecting the public against such trumped-up bogeymen as “hate speech” and “misinformation,” they will have a free hand to implement the rest of their sinister agenda. That’s why this small victory against AB 2098 should be celebrated, and imitated.

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

California — The Place You Oughta Leave

For all its faults, many people still think of California as “the place you oughta be,” as one long-ago sitcom theme song has it. Besides swimmin’ pools and movie stars, it has temperate weather year-round, beautiful beaches, breathtaking scenery, and amazing things to see and do. 

Unfortunately, the political progressives who run the state are dragging it down. The taxes, regulations, and bizarre social policies they’ve put in place are driving people away. The latest proposal to hit the drawing board is a new wealth tax that would go after the billionaires whose tax payments are keeping the state going. 

It’s as though they’re intent on killing the goose, as the fairy tale puts it, that lays the golden eggs.

The latest proposal, if it gains any kind of steam, is sure to drive away the remaining investors, job creators, and the people who actually pay taxes who have not yet fled the state because of the high taxes, declining public school performance, rising crime and the failure to prosecute those who commit them (if they’re caught) and other outrageous ideas like $5 million payments to individuals as reparations for slavery plus the establishment of an annual guaranteed income worth $97,000 in today’s dollars.

California was never a “slave state” – at least not in the traditional sense of the term. The wealth tax proposal introduced in the legislature on January 23, 2023, may make it seem like one if it passes. 

Unlike an income tax, which is determined based on what you bring in each year, wealth taxes are assessed based on everything you own. It’s a tax on the whole Magilla, as my great uncle used to say, with all that implies. 

The bill, A.B. 259, calls for the imposition of a yearly tax of 1.5% of any California resident’s total, global net worth “in excess of $1,000,000,000, or in excess of $500,000,000 in the case of a married taxpayer filing separately.” 

That may not seem like a lot. The rate is low, and it only applies to billionaires. Then again, that’s what people thought about the income tax when it was first introduced, at a low rate, applying only to millionaires and multi-millionaires. 

As the bill is currently written, it’s an easy tax to escape. All one must do is give up one’s California residence which, given that the top income tax rate is already 13%, doesn’t seem like much of a hardship. Except it doesn’t take into account what would happen to the people left who are left behind. 

Demographer Wendell Cox, who runs the Demographia.com website and who studies the economic impact of interstate migration, says a global wealth tax would “likely accelerate the already substantial migration out of California, which has been driving out middle-income households with its unconscionably high cost of living and taxation.”

He’s not wrong. The effect of out-migration is already being felt in substantial ways. After the 2020 census, and for the first time since statehood in 1850, California lost a congressional seat. That’s a big deal.

Looking at who pays taxes in California, Cox believes a wealth tax would have a disastrous effect on the state’s economy. “Those with the highest incomes, only 0.5% of the population, pay 40% of the state income tax revenue, meaning the new tax could drive out more revenue than it raises, as wealthy taxpayers leave for more friendly states,” he says.

California has an expansive social safety net and is forced to absorb an unknown number of undocumented workers into its economy every year thanks to the illegal crossings that occur every day over the border with Mexico. All that comes at a great cost. If the cash cows in Silicon Valley and other parts of Northern California and the hedge fund managers and investors around Los Angeles take the introduction of a wealth tax as an indication of what’s coming, the numbers of dollars taken out of the state as the people who generate them relocate to no-tax Texas or Tennessee could be catastrophic. 

It’s all avoidable. Yet for some unfathomable reason, the people in power there now, from Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom on down seem intent on the state where people used to go to claim their share of the America Dream into a kind of neo-socialist nightmare. Newsom wants to be president in the worst way, but if the Californication of the United States is what he has in mind, we’ll pass, thank you. 

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

AUTHOR

PETER ROFF

A former UPI political writer and U.S. News and World Report columnist, Peter Roff is a Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network media fellow. Contact him at RoffColumns AT mail.com or on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.

RELATED ARTICLE: JAMES PINKERTON: Ron DeSantis And Gavin Newsom Offer Dueling Definitions Of ‘Freedom’

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Gov. Newsom Claims State That Bans Cars and Speech Offers ‘Freedom For All’

You can do anything in California except open a business, walk down the street, or buy a home.


Gov. Gavin Newsom, the democratic choice of the enlightened ballot harvesters of California, desperately wants to be president. Despite pledging not to run against Biden, he’s continuing to posture by announcing an “anti-Jan 6” march (whatever the hell that is) for his inauguration. The one-party governor of one of the most corrupt states in America then spent his speech ranting about Republicans in other states.

California’s unelected governor wants to reframe freedom to mean mandatory masks and car bans. Not to mention state censorship of online speech.

Freedom is slavery, slavery is freedom.

Gavin Newsom triumphantly marched toward California’s statehouse to deliver an inaugural speech that celebrated California’s freedoms and the state’s resistance to forces that “want to take the nation backward.”

“More than any people, in any place, California has bridged the historical expanse between freedom for some, and freedom for all,” he said under cloudy but dry skies for the first time in days.

“Freedom is our essence, our brand name – the abiding idea that right here anyone from anywhere can accomplish anything.”

Except work freelance, drive a truck, buy a car, get disposable utensils, buy a fur coat, install a gas stove or any of the tens of thousands of things that the Democrat one-party system has banned in some or all of the state.

You can do anything in California except open a business, walk down the street, gas up your car or buy a home. It’s the land of dreams, the hotel you check into and then escape through the back window.

California is so incredibly free that, like North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, everyone is running away.

Gov. Newsom has the unique honor of presiding over a population loss every year in office.

“California’s population continues to dwindle. The state’s population declined by 114,000 people from about 39,143,000 in 2021 to 39,029,000 in 2020, new estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau show. It marks the third straight year that California has reported a loss.”

While Texas and Florida, the states he’s attacking, are gaining people, the only folks California is gaining are coming illegally over the border.

That and sex predators.

Unlike other states, Newsom said, California safeguards freedoms like “the freedom for teachers to teach, freedom from litmus tests about their political party or the person they love.”

California safeguards the right of teachers to “love” the kids of their choice. Republican teachers however get fired.

“They make it harder to vote and easier to buy illegal guns. They silence speech, fire teachers, kidnap migrants, subjugate women, attack the Special Olympics, and even demonize Mickey Mouse,” he said about conservative leaders like DeSantis. “All camouflaged under a hijacking of the word ‘freedom.’”

Whereas in California, Mickey Mouse can expose himself to children. Freedom!

In California, public school teachers, whose insane salaries are subsidized by property taxes no new residents can afford to pay unless they’re millionaires, can groom 9-year-olds. Freedom!

In California, vagrants and junkies have a right to camp in front of your home, but you have to wait 3 years to get a permit to have any work done. Freedom!

In California, a race riot is a civil right while trying to defend yourself against them is a crime. Freedom!

In California, shoplifting is legal, but opening a business isn’t. Freedom!

Wait, why is everyone fleeing the land of the fee and the home of the slave? Wait for the reparations. Stay for the car ban. Or the mandatory ethnic studies. And the race riots. And the tax hikes.

Big population drops in L.A., San Francisco transform state – Los Angeles Times

Why are you leaving the home of freedom? Why?

Do you have something against systemic racism, child abuse, mentally ill vagrants smoking crack, high taxes, and no legal rights whatsoever, you reactionary bigot. You’re taking the nation “backward”.

And California is going backward. Instead of, Go West, Young Man, it’s now Go East.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. National Transportation Safety Board Official Warns of Risks Posed by Heavy Electric Vehicles

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Gavin Newsom Shells Out $1.6 Million To Stop Climate Measure That Would Raise Taxes On The Rich

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s reelection campaign spent over $1.6 million to oppose a climate initiative that would raise taxes on millionaires to help low-income Californians buy electric cars. Despite this, Newsom, who is a multimillionaire, has previously touted his administration’s efforts to rapidly cut carbon emissions and get more electric vehicles (EVs) on the road.

Newsom, who boasts an estimated net worth of around $20 million, signed a bill in September to codify ambitious emissions reduction targets and praised the California Air Resources Board’s decision to ban all gasoline-powered car sales by 2035. However, Newsom’s campaign gave $1,617,216 to the “No on 30” committee, which opposes Proposition 30, a ballot measure that institutes an additional 1.75% tax on individuals that make over $2 million a year to help disadvantaged Californians buy EVs, according to campaign finance disclosures filed Tuesday.

Newsom aims to make his state’s auto industry “all-electric” by 2035 and will spend $10 billion of taxpayers’ money to “aggressively fight the climate crisis” by phasing out gas cars and building EV infrastructure. The Democrat called Proposition 30 an irresponsible “special interest carve-out” and argued that the proposed law was designed to “funnel” state income tax to Lyft, a large rideshare company, according to a statement Newsom’s campaign provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Newsom aims to make his state’s auto industry “all-electric” by 2035 and will spend $10 billion of taxpayers’ money to “aggressively fight the climate crisis” by phasing out gas cars and building EV infrastructure. The Democrat called Proposition 30 an irresponsible “special interest carve-out” and argued that the proposed law was designed to “funnel” state income tax to Lyft, a large rideshare company, according to a statement Newsom’s campaign provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

“California’s tax revenues are famously volatile, and this measure would make our state’s finances more unstable − all so that special interests can benefit,” Newsom said in the statement. “Californians should know that just this year our state committed $10 billion for electric vehicles and their infrastructure, part of a $54 billion nation-leading package to fight climate change and build a zero-emission future.”

A small percentage of California taxpayers would fund Proposition 30’s EV initiatives as only 35,000 of the state’s residents reported adjusted gross incomes greater than $2 million, according to 2019 statistics published by the state’s Franchise Tax Board.

Although the measure could help Lyft by raising money to help the company’s drivers buy electric cars, environmentalists began drafting the measure before the company became involved, CEO of California Environmental Voters Mary Creasman told CBS News. A Lyft spokeswoman previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that none of the $3.5 billion to $5 billion in tax revenue generated by the law was “earmarked” for the rideshare industry.

Californians will vote to implement or reject Proposition 30 on Nov. 8.

AUTHOR

JACK MCEVOY

Energy & environment reporter.

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After Mandating Electric Vehicles, Newsom Campaigns Against Law That Would Raise Taxes On His Donors To Fund EVs

Common Sense Tells Us That There Is No Viable Alternative to Fossil Fuels

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

U.S. State GDPs Compared to Entire Countries

It’s pretty difficult to even comprehend how ridiculously large the US economy is.


Click here to view the U.S. State GDPs Compared to Entire Countries map.

The map above (click to view and enlarge) matches the economic output (Gross Domestic Product) for each US state (and the District of Columbia) in 2018 to a foreign country with a comparable nominal GDP last year, using data from the BEA for GDP by US state (average of Q2 and Q3 state GDP, since Q4 data aren’t yet available) and data for GDP by country from the International Monetary Fund. Like in past years, for each US state (and the District of Columbia), I’ve identified the country closest in economic size in 2018 (measured by nominal GDP) and those matching countries are displayed in the map above and in the table below. Obviously, in some cases, the closest match was a country that produced slightly more, or slightly less, economic output in 2018 than a given US state.

It’s pretty difficult to even comprehend how ridiculously large the US economy is, and the map above helps put America’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $20.5 trillion ($20,500,000,000,000) in 2018 into perspective by comparing the economic size (GDP) of individual US states to other country’s entire national output. For example:

  1. America’s largest state economy is California, which produced nearly $3 trillion of economic output in 2018, more than the United Kingdom’s GDP last year of $2.8 trillion. Consider this: California has a labor force of 19.6 million compared to the labor force in the UK of 34 million (World Bank data here). Amazingly, it required a labor force 75% larger (and 14.5 million more people) in the UK to produce the same economic output last year as California! That’s a testament to the superior, world-class productivity of the American worker. Further, California as a separate country would have been the 5th largest economy in the world last year, ahead of the UK ($2.81 trillion), France ($2.79 trillion) and India ($2.61 trillion).
  2. America’s second largest state economy—Texas—produced nearly $1.8 trillion of economic output in 2018, which would have ranked the Lone Star State as the world’s 10th largest economy last year. GDP in Texas was slightly higher than Canada’s GDP last year of $1.73 trillion. However, to produce about the same amount of economic output as Texas required a labor force in Canada (20.1 million) that was nearly 50% larger than the labor force in the state of Texas (13.9 million). That is, it required a labor force of 6.2 million more workers in Canada to produce roughly the same output as Texas last year. Another example of the world-class productivity of the American workforce.
  3. America’s third largest state economy—New York with a GDP in 2018 of $1.68 trillion—produced slightly more economic output last year than South Korea ($1.65 trillion). As a separate country, New York would have ranked as the world’s 11th largest economy last year, ahead of No. 12 South Korea, No. 13 Russia ($1.57 trillion) and No. 14 Spain ($1.43 trillion). Amazingly, it required a labor force in South Korea of 28 million that was nearly three times larger than New York’s (9.7 million) to produce roughly the same amount of economic output last year! More evidence of the world-class productivity of American workers.
  4. Other comparisons: Florida (about $1 trillion) produced almost the same amount of GDP in 2018 as Mexico ($1.19  trillion), even though Florida’s labor force of 10.2 million less than 20% of the size of Mexico’s workforce of 59 million.
  5. Even with all of its oil wealth, Saudi Arabia’s GDP in 2018 at $683 billion was below the GDP of US states like Pennsylvania ($793 billion) and Illinois ($863 billion).

Overall, the US produced 24.3% of world GDP in 2017, with only about 4.3% of the world’s population. Four of America’s states (California, Texas, New York and Florida) produced more than $1 trillion in output and as separate countries would have ranked in the world’s top 16 largest economies last year. Together, those four US states produced nearly $7.5 trillion in economic output last year, and as a separate country would have ranked as the world’s third-largest economy.

Adjusted for the size of the workforce, there might not be any country in the world that produces as much output per worker as the US, thanks to the world-class productivity of the American workforce. The map above and the statistics summarized here help remind us of the enormity of the economic powerhouse we live and work in.

So let’s not lose sight of how ridiculously large and powerful the US economy is, and how much wealth, output, and prosperity is being created every day in the largest economic engine there has ever been in human history. This comparison is also a reminder that it was largely free markets, free trade, and capitalism that propelled the US from a minor British colony in the 1700s into a global economic superpower and the world’s largest economy, with individual US states producing the equivalent economic output of entire countries.

This article is reprinted with permission from The American Enterprise Institute.

AUTHOR

Mark J. Perry

Mark J. Perry is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Not a Single U.S. State Is Requiring Kids to Get Vaccinated to Attend Public School. Why?

Economics may offer a clue as to why not one state is mandating vaccination to attend school in the 2022-2023 school year, even though many government officials support coercive vaccination policies.


September has arrived and many children are back in public schools (though fewer than previous years).

At a recent event, one parent joked to me we’re now officially in “vaccine season.” The comment made me laugh, but there’s at least a kernel of truth to it. It’s not unusual for states to require that children receive an array of vaccinations—from polio, diphtheria, and chickenpox to measles, mumps, and meningitis—to be enrolled in a public school system.

One vaccine that parents will not find on any state’s required list in 2022 are the Covid-19 shots, which have been a source of great debate in the US and other countries.

While a few US cities continue to push vaccine mandates to attend, Pew Charitable Trusts pointed out earlier this year that states have been surprisingly wary of mandating Covid shots for children.

“[Only] two states—California and Louisiana—have added COVID-19 vaccines to the list of immunizations mandated for schoolchildren,” Michael Ollove pointed out in January. “Both requirements would be enforced next school year, and then only if the vaccines receive full authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

Things have changed since then.

In May, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards announced the Louisiana Department of Health would not require children attending the state’s daycares or K-12 schools to provide proof of vaccination. California, which in October 2021 became the first state to announce Covid vaccine requirements for school, announced in April that it would not require vaccination, noting the vaccines had not at that time been approved by the FDA for all school-age children. (They are now.)

The fact that not a single US state is requiring students to be vaccinated against Covid to attend K-12 school is probably a bit surprising to readers. (It was to this author.)

I’d like to think that policymakers and politicians finally woke up to the fact that vaccine mandates are immoral, inhumane, and a clear violation of bodily integrity. But that seems unlikely considering that many vaccine mandates remain in place, particularly at the federal and municipal levels.

It’s also possible that lawmakers have realized vaccinated individuals can still get sick and spread the virus, and therefore concluded vaccinations are a matter of personal health, not public health. Yet once again this theory is undermined by the presence of other vaccine mandates that remain in place. Some may contend that we’ve simply beaten the virus and mandates are no longer necessary, but official statistics show Covid deaths and cases remain stubbornly high.

So what’s the answer?

What’s most likely is that political considerations are at play. Yet this thesis too, at first blush, appears to be undermined by the reality that polls show Americans support Covid vaccine mandates in schools.

Some basic economics, however, can help us see that the politics are more complicated than that.

Public Choice Theory is a field of economics pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan and economist Gordon Tullock. It rests on a simple assumption: politicians and bureaucrats make decisions primarily based on self-interest and incentives just like everyone else, not out of an altruistic goal of serving “the public good.” (This is why public choice economists have dubbed it “politics without romance.”)

I’ve previously pointed out that politicians were incentivized during the pandemic to embrace Covid restrictions even if they didn’t work because of the political climate in 2020. The absence of government regulations was viewed as actual violence by some public health experts, and those who didn’t embrace strict interventions were accused of genocide.

Moreover, the costs of these regulations tended to be dispersed, delayed, and hidden from view. Depression, drug overdoses, lost learning, and speech impediments were among the consequences of NPIs (Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions) imposed by governments. But the results of these policies were relatively “unseen” (to use a term from the 19th century economist Frederic Bastiat), at least compared to Covid deaths, which public health officials, the media, and even ordinary citizens tracked obsessively.

The costs of NPIs were quite serious, but they were quite low politically for the reasons stated above. The political costs of keeping a state open were much higher. No politician wants to explain why Mrs. Jackson, the 60-year-old math teacher, died from Covid while schools in your state remained open. (It would be just as tragic if Mrs. Jackson had died at home when schools were closed, but at least no politician would be blamed for her death in this case.)

In other words, the incentive structure early in the pandemic encouraged interventions, even if those interventions were ineffective and ultimately ended up doing more harm than good.

The incentive structure for vaccines is very different, particularly for young people.

Children can and do die from Covid, of course, but their risk is extremely low compared to other age groups. Even more important, perhaps, is that the costs of mandatory vaccination are not delayed, dispersed, or hidden from view. They are immediate, concentrated, and highly visible.

The sad reality is that vaccine injuries, though rare, do occur, as the CDC notes. And when they occur, they are the opposite of “unseen,” which means the political repercussions have the potential to be swift—and severe.

After all, when a young person dies after taking a vaccine designed to protect him, it’s a tragedy. When a young person dies of myocarditis after taking a vaccine he was forced to take to attend school, it’s a tragic event and a political disaster with a wide radius, even if some studies show the risk of myocarditis is greater after Covid infection than after Covid vaccination.

All of this analysis is dark and a bit troubling, of course. Now you see why they call public choice theory “politics without romance.”

But it might help explain why even state leaders comfortable with mandatory vaccination and vaccine passports have been reluctant to compel children to get the shot, even if they truly believe it could save lives.

Whether mandatory vaccination would have done more harm than good is a question we’ll never know, though it’s a debate that will likely continue for years to come. But because vaccines have the power to both save lives and claim lives, the decision to accept or refuse them can only morally be made by one person: the individual (or parents, if the decision concerns a child).

So at least state leaders are getting it right this time, even if they are doing so for the wrong reasons.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Public Schools Are Spending Money Like Crazy, Despite Sharp Enrollment Declines

This pattern of spending is unsustainable. These schools are bleeding money.


The public education system has been failing students for years. From misappropriating funds to providing inadequate lessons and passing illiterate students; public schools are losing support. Despite this they continue receiving extensive budgets which do not properly represent enrollment rates, attendance numbers, or staffing issues.

While it is true that 2020 was an extremely difficult year for these taxpayer-funded institutions, those who blame the Covid-19 pandemic are using it as a scapegoat. Before the extensive government pandemic response, the nation was experiencing a teacher shortage and a political takeover of public schools — the likes of which had never been experienced — which has only increased during the political battle over public health issues.

Since 2013 conflicts between teachers and school boards have been reported. This specifically hindered interest in the teaching profession.

In 2015 student interest in the teaching profession dropped by 5 percent in just a year and has continued to decline. Although arguments over teacher pay have been brought to the forefront of the situation, elementary and secondary school teachers made an average of over $63,000 during the 2019-2020 school year, and since then districts have increased pay and added massive bonuses to attract educators back to the profession, inflating budgets, yet still the teacher shortage remains.

New students entering the teaching profession continues to decline as teachers unions and school boards not only battle themselves, but parents as well. Instead of listening to the communities they serve, these powerful organizations are pushing their own political ideologies in the classroom. Educational focus has shifted from teaching core classes like math, science, and history, to identity-based practices which promote critical race theory (CRT) and gender theory.

The National School Board Association itself has fought to persuade schools to adopt CRT and the 1619 project. These race-focused lessons have yet to produce successful results. Because of this, families have disputed replacing sound lessons with untested classroom theories. When expressing their concerns at school board meetings these parents were silenced, and even publicly smeared as “domestic terrorists.”

In addition, during the pandemic various school boards and teachers unions fought to keep children isolated and masked long after it was deemed safe for them to return to in-person learning. Yet, educators still wished to receive full pay as students suffered from widespread learning loss and achievement gaps. It was even discovered that the American Federation of Teachers influenced CDC reopening guidelines, indicating that their power held sway over school health policies, arguably even more than factual public health data.

Parents quickly recognized the harmful effects of lockdowns and long-term masking. Schools which remained locked down longer saw the sharpest enrollment declines. These are, coincidentally, in highly progressive areas where CRT and other identity based lessons have been adopted by teachers and districts.

In 2019 math was deemed a “racist” subject in the state of Washington. By 2021, 70% of students in the area were failing math and more than half failed English. In nearby Oregon, reading and writing requirements have been removed to offer more “equitable” education experiences, and even test taking was deemed “racist” by the National Education Association.

In addition, the Biden Administration is leading the Department of Education to bring race to the forefront of American education on a national level. Instead of allowing states to choose what is best for their populations, government grants are now being awarded based on the implementation of identity-based education practices.

Public school officials have been quick to blame the pandemic for increasing student failures, but teaching equity over performance has yet to lead students to academic excellenceLearning loss is plaguing students across the nation, and instead of utilizing COVID relief money to ensure that students achievement gaps are filled in before Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds (ESSR) expire, progressive states have allocated masses of these taxpayer dollars for identity based lessons.

Taxpayer funded ESSR money was swiftly approved and distributed with little to no oversight during the pandemic. Because of this, less than half of public schools have used COVID relief money to update HVAC units and reduce viral illness transmissions. Instead, districts in New York, California, Illinois, and Minnesota openly spent their pandemic dollars on political endeavors.

The California Department of Education received $15.1 billion in ESSR funding. Instead of focusing all of these taxpayer dollars on public health concerns the state funneled portions of this money into “implicit bias training,” “ethnic studies,” and “LGBTQ+ cultural competency.”

Similarly, New York gained $9 billion in emergency funding. This money was not primarily focused on keeping students healthy or improving classroom air quality but, “anti-racism,” “anti-bias,” “socio-emotional learning,” and “diversity, equity, inclusion,” lessons.

Illinois has also utilized masses of pandemic-relief money to institute equity plans with a specific focus on “anti-racism.” Minnesota took their $1.15 billion in ESSR funds and decided to use a portion of this massive payout for “culturally responsive” training and addressing “gender bias,” with a focus on gender affirmation.

COVID relief funds have been abused and directed to non-pandemic related educational services. All the while, students continue to fail at record rates and leave the public education system entirely.

Public schools are funded by local, state, and federal taxes. Funding is determined by varying factors which usually include student performance, enrollment rates, and attendance. Yet despite experiencing drops in all of these criteria, somehow states are still increasing budgets.

California — which has lost 2.6% of public school students since the start of the pandemic — has approved the largest education budget in the state’s history. This massive increase comes as California’s largest public school district has experienced a 40% chronic absenteeism rate. This reflects a national trend.

A third of Chicago schools are at least half empty, but that didn’t stop the Chicago Board of Education from increasing their 2022 budget from what was approved in 2021. In Washington DC, public school reading and math proficiency has dropped, and enrollment has stagnated, but the mayor proposed a 5.9% budget increase.

PennsylvaniaMinnesota, and other states have all continued spending more despite serving fewer students. These public schools are bleeding money and costing taxpayers billions in debt that will eventually have to be repaid.

Public schools received record amounts of funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite this, school boards and teachers unions have allowed politics to dominate their policies and teaching practices. As a result, student success rates have suffered, and families are walking away from the system while lawmakers are passing budget increases that only further tax communities.

This pattern of spending is unsustainable. These schools are bleeding money. There is currently no end in sight as districts continue this trend into the 2022-2023 school year and beyond.

AUTHOR

Jessica Marie Baumgartner

Jessica is an education news reporter, homeschooling mother of 4, and author of “Homeschooling on a Budget,” whose work has been featured by: “The Epoch Times,” “The Federalist,” “The New American,” “The American Spectator,” “American Thinker,” “St. Louis Post Dispatch,” and many more.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Biden Admin Handed California The Power To Mandate EVs Nationwide

  • California instituted a new regulation on Thursday that will ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035; the rule, which was permitted by the Biden administration, could accelerate the nationwide transition to electric cars.
  • “I don’t think Congress gave that authority to California, specifically to set their own standards for greenhouse gases,” former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
  • “Blue states will follow California’s lead and hand manufacturers a mandate to make only EVs, regardless of what is economically or physically possible,” Steve Milloy, a member of former President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, told the DCNF.

California has passed a new regulation that will ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles; the new emissions rule, which was permitted by the Biden administration, will have wide-ranging effects beyond California and could accelerate the nationwide transition to electric cars.

California’s Air Resources Board (CARB) finalized a rule Thursday that will outlaw the sale of gas-fueled cars by 2035. The law may push an increasing number of states to adopt similar rules and force Americans to exclusively buy electric vehicles (EVs) as numerous Democrat-run states such as New York, Massachusetts and Maryland routinely adopt California’s “clean car” standards, according to data from the Maryland Department of the Environment.

President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) restored California’s Clean Air Act waiver in March, which gave the state legal authority to set its strict vehicle emissions standards, according to a press release. The Trump administration formally revoked the waiver in September 2019, stating that California did not need specific emissions standards as the environmental problems caused by emissions were not unique to the state.

“During the Trump administration, we tried to codify and articulate that California did not have the authority to set greenhouse gas standards,” former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I don’t think Congress gave that authority to California, specifically to set their own standards for greenhouse gases.”

Furthermore, 17 Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit in May against the EPA after it reinstated California’s waiver, according to legal filings.

“This leaves California with a slice of its sovereign authority that Congress withdraws from every other state,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey told the DCNF about the EPA’s ruling. “The EPA cannot selectively waive the Act’s preemption for California alone because that favoritism violates the states’ equal sovereignty.”

Moreover, the attorneys general argue that California’s waiver puts a “burden of compliance on auto-manufacturers” as automakers will have to cater to both California’s new rules and the mainline federal regulations, according to legal documents.

The state’s ban will require 100% of new cars sold in California, the country’s largest auto market, to be free of fossil fuel emissions by 2035. Interim targets also require 35% of vehicles sold in the state by 2026 to produce zero emissions, rising to 68% by 2030.

“It’s 100% by 2035, but it’s 35% by 2026, California has between 11% and 13% EVs as its total share of cars,” Wheeler said. “It’s unrealistic … they can’t get to 35% EVs by 2026 let alone 68% by 2030.”

California hopes to enforce this rule through a mandate which could penalize automakers up to $20,000 per vehicle if they fail to meet the state’s sales quotas, a CARB spokesman told the DCNF.

“The California ban represents an irresponsible and likely illegal approach to rulemaking, given the highly integrated interstate nature of the auto industry, one national standard is extremely important,” Mandy Gunasekara, former chief of staff of the EPA, told the DCNF. “California is attempting to create a legally dubious workaround where vehicle standards are set by liberal politics instead of technical realities.”

The 14 Democrat-led states, including California, make up roughly a third of the U.S. auto market, according to NPR.

“Blue states will follow California’s lead and hand manufacturers a mandate to make only EVs, regardless of what is economically or physically possible,” Steve Milloy, a member of former President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, told the DCNF. “You’re going to force people to buy a more expensive car that will last half the time.”

The average price of a new electric car is approximately $66,000, according to Kelley Blue Book.

“If automakers are only making electric cars because of the rule and government subsidies, then there won’t be any gas cars on the market,” Milloy stated.

The EPA also reinstated and enhanced an Obama-era federal fuel regulation in December 2021 that is less strict than California’s proposed standards, stating that passenger cars must have a fuel economy of 55 mpg by 2026, up from the current 40 mpg, according to an EPA regulatory update. Both the California and government regulations will support the Biden administration’s aggressive climate agenda, which seeks to phase out fossil fuels and promote “clean energy” technologies.

“It’s being done for PR purposes … the electricity infrastructure isn’t there and it’s not anticipated to be there,” Wheeler stated. “Nobody in the electricity industry will tell you that they will be able to power a state fleet consisting of only EVs by 2035.”

The average number of EVs sold in the U.S. was roughly 607,000 in 2021 while the total number of cars purchased was about 3.34 million, according to Statista.

Newsom’s office and the EPA did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

JACK MCEVOY

Energy and environmental reporter.

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Data Show California Is a Living Example of the Good Intentions Fallacy

“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”


During a speech at Harvard several years ago, Charlie Munger related a story about a surgeon who removed “bushel baskets full of normal gallbladders” from patients. The doctor was eventually removed, but much later than he should have been.

Munger, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, wondered what motivated the doctor, so he asked a surgeon who participated in the removal of the physician.

“He thought that the gallbladder was the source of all medical evil, and if you really love your patients, you couldn’t get that organ out rapidly enough,” the physician explained.

The doctor was not motivated by profit or sadism; he very much believed he was doing right.

The anecdote is a perfect illustration of the righteousness fallacy, which Barry Brownstein noted is rampant in modern politics and a key driver of democratic socialism.

The Righteousness Fallacy (also known as the fallacy of good intentions) is described by author Dr. Bo Bennett as the idea that one is correct because their intentions are pure.

It recently occurred to me that California is a perfect example of this fallacy. Consider these three facts about the Golden State:

  1. California spends about $98.5 billion annually on welfare—the most in the US—but has the highest poverty rate in America.
  2. California has the highest income tax rate in the US, at 13.3 percent, but the fourth greatest income inequality of the 50 states.
  3. California has one of the most regulated housing markets in America, yet it has the highest homeless population in American and ranks 49th (per capita) in housing supply.

That politicians would persist with harmful policies should come as little surprise. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once observed the uncanny proclivity of politicians “to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman described the danger of such thinking.

[The threat comes] … from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us. Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve the great social changes they envision, they’re anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident in their ability to do so. Yet… Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

I don’t doubt that California lawmakers, like the physician who was removing healthy gall bladders, believe they are doing the right thing. Yet they, like the physician, need to wake up to reality and realize they aren’t making people better.

AUTHOR

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Hamas-linked CAIR enraged after San Jose city council rejects mayor’s Qatar trip over Sharia misogyny

Hamas-linked CAIR is demanding that the San Jose City Council now submit to its “education” about Islam, which would be on the order of “Don’t believe your lying eyes, believe our smooth deceptions.” They’re enraged here again that people they thought were reliably Leftist — city council members in a far-Left city in a far-Left state — would be so “Islamophobic” as to notice Sharia misogyny. The Leftist-Islamic alliance is once again showing signs of strain.

The ferociously antisemitic Billoo has called upon Muslims to oppose “even the polite Zionist.”

CAIR-SFBA Says Islamophobia from San Jose City Council Members ‘Unacceptable,’ Calls for Meeting to Offer Education on Islam

by Ismail Allison, Hamas-linked CAIR, June 10, 2022:

(SANTA CLARA, CA, 6/10/2022) – The San Francisco Bay Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SFBA) today condemned Islamophobic rhetoric by San Jose City Council members related to Mayor Sam Liccardo’s planned trip to Qatar. CAIR-SFBA also called for a meeting with City Council members to offer education on Islam.

Mayor Liccardo’s plans to travel to the Qatari capital of Doha were rejected by the City Council through a 8-3 vote over alleged human rights concerns. The mayor was reportedly invited by authorities in Doha to attend Qatar Foundation’s Environment and Energy Research Institute from 11-13 June to learn about the institute’s water conservation efforts.

Some council members reportedly cited Islam’s legal code, the shariah, in their arguments against the mayor’s trip. One council member reportedly said she would be scared to go to Qatar as a woman. The mayor reportedly said there were elements of Islamic law in Qatar’s legal system indicating the state is unjust.

The city council has previously approved visits to Israel as well as Saudi Arabia, despite human rights allegations from numerous organizations.

In a statement, CAIR-SFBA Executive Director Zahra Billoo said:

“The Islamophobic rhetoric employed by San Jose officials is completely unacceptable. The arguments used against the Mayor’s trip to Qatar contain some of the oldest anti-Muslim tropes in the book, and the fact that the city council claimed to be concerned over human rights abuses while approving visits to serial human rights abusers Israel and Saudi Arabia is deeply hypocritical. 

“We call on city council members and Mayor Liccardo to meet with representatives of our organization and the Muslim community for dialogue and education on Islam and to correct some of the misunderstandings apparent from this incident.”

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

High Gas Prices are Caused by Governments, Not Companies

When Governor Newsom and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern met to announce a deal between the tiny country and the broken state, it was another example of California illegally enacting its own foreign policy. And a reminder of why California gas prices are so high.

The memorandum had California promising to be “carbon neutral” by 2045 and to promote the “environmental integrity of carbon pricing instruments”. California’s crooked carbon pricing schemes have become notorious for both their worthlessness and their corruption.

And California drivers are paying the price.

report from Stillwater Associates last year found that California consumers were paying an extra $1.19 a gallon. This year the added costs include a 51 cent state excise tax, an 18 cent sales tax, 20 cents for Fuels Under the Cap, part of the state’s corrupt environmental cap and trade program and 17 cents for the Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

Californians are paying a $1.41 federal and state tax markup on $3 bucks of crude.

Or almost half.

Biden and other Democrats have blamed corporate profits, but the gas stations and suppliers are making a mere 33 cents a gallon or less than a third of the state’s added $1.08 in various taxes. Even the refiners are only making 72 cents. The biggest piece of the pie is coming from the taxes, many of them hidden, imposed by Democrats in the name of saving the planet.

While Newsom and Big Green describe some of these taxes as “allowances” and “credits” as part of a “marketplace”, they are really a corrupt scheme to force consumers to pay money to special interests and politically connected companies under the guise of “saving the planet”.

The Left now attacks Elon Musk, but California’s environmental regulations kept Tesla profitable. For example, in 2020, Tesla reported $428 million in sales from “regulatory credits” amounting to “four times Tesla’s $104 million of net profit for the quarter”. In the first quarter of 2021, Tesla sold $518 million in “credits” and Autoweek noted that it was making “more money selling credits and bitcoin than cars.” Credits are like bitcoins the government forces you to buy.

Regulatory credits are a corrupt environmental scam in which car makers who sell regular cars to ordinary people have to buy “credits” from electric car makers like Tesla, who sell to the rich, and then pass on the high costs on to working class and middle class car buyers.

The dirty truth about California’s electric car market is that it’s subsidized by people who can’t afford them. And the same situation applies to gas prices with their burden of green taxes.

Democrats sold the fuel taxes as penalties on polluters. They claimed that imposing them would “make the polluters pay”. Few Californians seemed to understand that by “polluters”, the Sacramento political establishment meant the single mother picking up her son from school, the supermarket cashier commuting to work, and everyone else who can’t afford a Tesla.

The California average gas price is now over $6 a gallon, compared to $4.60 for the rest of the country, because Democrats are making ordinary drivers, whom they call “polluters”, pay.

Gov. Newsom is touting his new deal with New Zealand, even though most California environmentalists have turned on the corrupt green scam that’s killing the state.

ProPublica, a leftist group, noted that, “California’s oil and gas industry actually rose 3.5% since cap and trade began.” While the idea that there’s anything wrong with carbon is an environmentalist hoax that props up corrupt green special interests, the Brown-Newsom green tax isn’t even coming close to accomplishing the stated goals that is the basis for those taxes.

Bloomberg article last month began by arguing that, “California’s carbon market was supposed to be a model for the US, harnessing the power of capitalism to fight climate change in the world’s fifth-biggest economy. But nearly 10 years after ‘cap and trade’ began, there’s little proof the system has had much direct impact on curbing planet-warming pollutants.”

Before bitcoin, environmentalists created an imaginary “carbon currency” and a marketplace around it that forced ordinary consumers to fund corporate bribery of top Democrats. Some of the biggest companies in the country boast of going “carbon neutral” by 2030, 2045 or 2980, when what that actually means is that they’re buying “carbon offsets” and changing nothing.

The carbon scam has made the right sorts of people rich and everyone else much poorer.

California began trading “emissions” in the 90s with the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM).A decade later, Anne Sholtz, an environmental law academic and emissions broker who helped set up the program, had been arrested by the EPA on wire fraud charges.

Sholtz had all but invented the modern electronic pollution marketplace. She met with Al Gore and gave plenty of interviews until she was arrested for trying to trade credits she didn’t have.

But can there be fraud when the whole thing is a scam?

Big Green created a massive industry based on trading indulgences from government environmental mandates. An industry now worth billions, is being touted to investors as having the potential to hit $100 billion or $200 billion or infinity by 2030. It’s an industry that, unlike those it’s using the government and leftist activists to shake down, is worth nothing, produces nothing, and exists purely as a rent-seeking parasite destroying American living standards.

Each company and investor joining the regulatory Ponzi scheme is now motivated to pressure governments, local and national, to impose more taxes and push more companies into the market so that those who got in earlier will steal more from those who come in later. This perverse socialist mockery of capitalism is depicted as “saving the planet” even though it has failed to do anything to move the dial even on the environmental hoax that justifies its existence.

And that is one reason why California’s gas prices are some of the highest in the nation.

But like vegans, legal shoplifting, and shopping bag bans, what starts in California, doesn’t stay there. Biden and Senate Democrats have tried to impose a national carbon tax on Americans.

Had Senator Manchin not rejected last year’s proposed carbon tax, the whole country would have been hit with a tax of at least another 18 cents per gallon. Senator Whitehouse’s proposal would have added about 14 cents a gallon, but would have increased “5 percent above inflation annually.” That kicker, also a part of California’s gas taxes, is what’s really making them rise.

And that’s just for starters.

The Obama administration was proposing a carbon tax that would have added over 40 cents per gallon. The EU’s $75 per ton carbon tax applied here would mean over 60 cents more per gallon. A former Carter adviser has proposed a tax that would be closer to 90 cents.

And it would only go up from there.

California is a cautionary tale that when environmentalists, leftists, and other Democrats claim that they want to “make polluters pay”, they mean you.

Driving by a Los Angeles gas station last week, I saw that the price was approaching 7 bucks.

They’re making us pay. Every single day.

AUTHOR

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

RELATED ARTICLE: White House disarray: Low approval ratings rattle Biden, ‘frighten’ Democrats

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Massive Drug Smuggling Tunnel Found Between Mexico And U.S.

Authorities discovered a large cross-border drug smuggling tunnel in California, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California announced Monday.

The tunnel, linking Otay Mesa, California and Tijuana, Mexico, was 1,744 feet long, 61 feet deep and 4 feet in diameter, and had reinforced walls, a rail system and electricity, according to the Attorney’s Office. The tunnel was about 350 feet from the border with Mexico, U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman said during a press conference.

Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) agents discovered the tunnel Friday while on surveillance of a residence that was used for cocaine smuggling in March, according to the Attorney’s Office. As a result of the bust, six people were charged with conspiring to distribute 1,762 pounds of cocaine.

“There is no more light at the end of this narco-tunnel. We will take down every subterranean smuggling route we find to keep illicit drugs from reaching our streets and destroying our families and communities,” Grossman said in a statement.

Authorities were able to make several arrests while following vehicles going in and out of the warehouse to pick up drugs, according to a complaint. Agents pulled over the individuals, finding narcotics in their cars.

“The San Diego law enforcement community has multiple investigative task forces that highly prioritize tunnel detection- exemplified by this tunnel discovery by the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) San Diego led Costa Pacifico Money Laundering Task Force. The San Diego law enforcement community throughout the years has consistently shown its ability to detect and remediate tunnels while bringing those responsible to justice,” HSI San Diego Special Agent in Charge Chad Plantz said in a statement.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.