The Revolution Is Winning

Article written by Andrew C. McCarthy in "National Review":

Radicals from the 1960s and 1970s now hold powerful positions in government and academia
 
This is what the revolution looks like.

Weather Underground terrorists, who made no secret of being anti-AmeriKKKan “small-c” communists, are having more success than they could have dreamed of in the 1960s.

They are dominating the language. You know that whole “white privilege” nostrum that we’re paying universities $60K per year to drum into our children’s brains? It is derived from their lamentation of “white skin privilege.” In their ideology, the revolution to overthrow the capitalist, racist, imperialist system summoned them — lily white radicals — to abandon their privilege and embrace the armed struggle.

Among their most influential thinkers was Bill Ayers. He got a windfall from the government’s failure to prosecute him for the bombings he carried out and the mass murders he planned but was insufficiently competent to execute. It was a second career as a “Distinguished Professor of Education” at the University of Illinois. As Sol Stern relates in a 2006 City Journal essay that should be required reading today, this entailed designing curricula used by today’s hard-Left academics, based on what Ayers saw as a moral imperative to convert schools into social-justice indoctrination labs.

It worked.

Of course, in the days before they brought the revolution into the classroom, they pursued it on urban streets, prioritizing war on cops. To the avant-garde, the police are the pointy end of the oppressive government spear, enforcing its laws and imposing the racist society’s caste system. For the revolution to succeed, the police have to be discredited, defunded, and defanged. For the Weather Underground, that meant branching into such radical offshoots as the May 19 Communist Organization and conspiring with black separatists.

So it was that such Weather confederates as Susan Rosenberg, Kathy Boudin, and David Gilbert, among others, teamed with the Black Liberation Army to carry out the infamous 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored truck at the Nanuet Mall near Nyack, N.Y. At the time, Rosenberg was already a suspect in the 1979 New Jersey jailbreak of Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army leader who had been convicted of murdering New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. Chesimard fled the country and was given asylum by Fidel Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba, where she has lived ever since.

In robbing the Brinks truck, the terrorists shot at the security guards, murdering one of them, Peter Paige. In a firefight with Nyack police while trying to escape, they killed Sergeant Edward O’Grady and Officer Waverly Brown — the latter a Korean War veteran who had joined the force in 1966, the first African American to serve in Nyack’s police department. Rosenberg went on the lam, finally captured three years later in possession of over 700 pounds of explosives she and her fellow radicals were planning to use in additional mayhem. A federal judge in New Jersey sentenced her to 58 years’ imprisonment.

Boudin and Gilbert had left their 14-month-old son, Chesa, with a sitter in order to participate in the Brinks heist. But unlike Rosenberg, they were captured right after the bloody shootouts. Boudin was sentenced to a minimum 20 years’ imprisonment (with a maximum life sentence), and Gilbert to 75 years’ imprisonment.

With his parents in custody, young Chesa Boudin was raised by their confederates, Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Like Ayers, Dohrn was a Weather Underground leader who became an academic after eluding significant prosecution for their bombings and mass-murder conspiracies — though she did do a short stint of jail time for contempt after defying a grand-jury subpoena to testify about Rosenberg.

In addition to his American academic work, Ayers became a supporter of the late Communist dictator Hugo Chávez’s education programs in Venezuela. There, in a 2006 speech with the strongman looking on, Ayers proclaimed, “Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educación es revolución!” Later, Chesa Boudin would follow in Ayers’s footsteps, working as a translator and think-tank researcher for Chávez’s regime.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, Ayers and Dohrn seamlessly became prominent in Democratic Party politics. At their Hyde Park home in 1995, they held a coming-out party for an ambitious political unknown, a community organizer named Barack Obama. Two years later, the future president breathlessly endorsed Ayers’s polemic, A Kind and Just Parent?, as a “searing and timely account.” The book is an indictment of the U.S. criminal-justice system, which Ayers likens to South Africa under apartheid. As Stanley Kurtz has recounted, Ayers helped pave Obama’s way into the radical Left’s extensive fundraising networks; the two collaborated as board members of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, doling out more than $100 million to community organizers and education “reformers.”

Susan Rosenberg’s terrorism sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton in 2001, part of the scandalous array of clemency grants on his last day in office. (I was then a senior federal prosecutor and had just spent months successfully arguing against her release.) Instantly, she was offered teaching positions at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and, later, Hamilton College, though protests by parents and alumni forced the first to be short-lived and the second declined.

Not to worry, though. By 2020, she was recruited to become vice-chair of the Board of Directors at Thousand Currents, after years as an “activist” in the thriving fields of criminal-justice “reform” and prisoners’ rights. (In the media-Democrat complex and on the campus, former terrorists who’ve found new ways to march the revolution through our institutions are transmogrified into “social-justice activists”). Like the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Thousand Currents is a grant-making foundation of the radical Left, similarly tapped into its fundraising networks — such groups as the W. K. Kellogg Foundation (a deep-pocketed non-profit that promotes racial causes and also supports the Tides Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, among other heavyweight donor organizations) and the NoVo Foundation (funded and controlled by the Buffett family).

Currently, Thousand Currents’ signal project is Black Lives Matter.

The principal organizational framework for BLM is the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, run by three women: Opal Tometti, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors — the last of whom, in a 2015 interview, observed, “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”

Since George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police in late May, BLM has been flooded with donations. Its operations are opaque, however, and it has not qualified for non-profit status. To navigate around this inconvenience, the BLM Global Network Foundation is sponsored by Thousand Currents, which has non-profit status — meaning donors can make tax-deductible contributions to Thousand Currents, which, in turn, supports BLM. The arrangement appears to trace back to 2016, when the Kellogg Foundation provided Thousand Currents with $900,000 for “building the infrastructure and capacity of the national #BlackLivesMatter to support and strengthen their local chapters’ organizing capacity.”

Like Rosenberg, Kathy Boudin has landed on her feet. David Gilbert remains in custody serving his murder sentences (though, as his Wikipedia bio indicates, he has achieved the coveted “activist” status), but Boudin was granted parole in 2003. I know you’ll be stunned to learn that Columbia University quickly rolled out the red carpet for her to pursue a doctorate at Teachers College. She is now not only an adjunct professor at Columbia’s School of Social Work, but also a co-founder and co-director of its, yes, “Center for Justice.”

Meanwhile, Chesa Boudin, the son of Boudin and Gilbert raised by Ayers and Dohrn, is a rising political star. Just 39, he has authored the memoir Gringo: A Coming of Age in Latin America, studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, gotten a law degree from Yale, completed a stint in a big-city public defender’s office, and, just last year, been elected that city’s chief prosecutor —  district attorney for San Francisco.

Boudin’s candidacy was backed by the Left’s financial network, BLM, and such luminaries as Communist icon Angela Davis and Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), the avowed socialist, who appears to be the most influential supporter of the Joe Biden presidential campaign. At the victory party the night of Boudin’s election, ecstatic supporters chanted “F*** POA!” (i.e., the Police Officers Association). He had run on a platform of ending what he sees as undue law-enforcement focus on people of color, thwarting federal action against “undocumented” immigrants, and prioritizing investigations of — not by — the police.

He’s making good on these promises. For example, he has stopped bringing charges that include a sentencing enhancement California’s legislature enacted to curb gang violence, fretting that it is disproportionately applied to people of color.

Just a few weeks ago, moreover, he announced a new initiative: The district attorney’s office will no longer charge cases that rely on information from police officers said to have engaged in misconduct — including excessive force or racial bias. Of course, while police must on occasion use superior force in order to subdue criminals, we’ve seen in recent months that any law-enforcement use of force is now liable to be condemned as excessive. And racial bias, even in the absence of proof of conscious discrimination, is claimed to be “unconscious”; it is derived from statistical voodoo that scrutinizes the race and ethnicity of suspects in police encounters while studiously ignoring the offensive behavior that may have prompted police action. Boudin explained that his office has established a “Trial Integrity Unit,” which is compiling a list of cops as to whom there have been misconduct claims. The list is to be updated regularly.

 

That is, it is an ongoing, open-ended investigation of the police department, for the benefit of criminals.

The goals of the revolution have never changed. It has simply airbrushed its terrorist leaders into prominent public scholars and “activists” with a passion for “change” and “justice.” The revolution has lots of money, organization, control of the schools, support from one of the nation’s two major political parties, and the media megaphone. That is why the revolution is winning. The 1960s never ended, they just paved the way for today.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-revolution-is-winning/

Locking America Down Again Is Exactly What China Wants Because It Will Ruin Us

Stop trying to make lockdowns happen again. 

The world can't afford it.

Joy Pullman writing at The Federalist

The governors of Texas and California, the nation’s two most populous states, recently reimposed coronavirus lockdowns despite falling death rates and health-care capacity far beyond hospitalization rates. Numerous other governors have delayed re-openings or reversed them in similar situations.

Lockdowns are not necessary to prevent coronavirus deaths, since the current capacity for treating cases is far above what is needed and people are going to get this disease until there’s a cure. Further, lockdowns accelerate systemic weaknesses such as our national debt, poor education, large numbers of working-age men who do not work, failure to pay for decades of overspending at both the national and state levels, tendency to bail out corrupt institutions such as schools, big business, and hospitals, and bloated health care system.

The Chinese Communist Party knows of all this. That is why it has expertly manipulated American corporate media’s anti-American biases to undermine their biggest competitor for control of the world.

Lockdowns of Western nations, and chiefly of the United States, are China’s only hope for achieving this long-term plan in its coronavirus-weakened state. Thus, continuing to play into this mass-murdering regime’s hands through cuckolded American leadership will have far more deadly consequences than coronavirus. This is why the lockdowns need to end now, and never come back again.

Keeping a Knee on Our Economy Will Kill Our Country

A July 13 New York Times article says the re-shutdowns are killing the willpower of small business owners to keep their doors open, even after Congress threw $660 billion in deficit spending at them.

“We did everything we were supposed to do,” Texas karaoke club owner Mick Larkin told the Times. “When [Gov. Rick Abbott] shut us down again, and after I put out all that money to meet their rules, I just said, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’”

Estimates say between 66,000 and 110,000 small businesses may already have closed for good during the coronavirus panic.

“Small businesses account for 44 percent of all U.S. economic activity, according to the S.B.A., and closures on such an immense scale could devastate the country’s economic growth,” the Times observes. “…Many small businesses are also finding it onerous keep up with constantly changing local guidelines, while others are deciding that no matter what their local officials say, it just is not safe to keep going.”

There is a hard limit to how much fake economic activity current and future taxpayers can float. We had already reached it before coronavirus hit. A bailout economy will crash irrevocably at some point. No matter how much Congress thinks they can suspend the laws of nature, never-ending economic inflation through accelerating claims on future American earners’ incomes is utterly unsustainable.

Americans cannot afford a Potemkin economy. The first step toward getting to a real economy is to end lockdowns and never impose them again.

We Have No More Equity to Mortgage Our Kids’ Futures

Keeping schools shut down, or only partially opening them, also suffocates our economy by making it difficult for two-income families and single parents to support themselves. It is simply not possible to work full-time and teach children full-time, which is what online schooling requires of working parents.

School shutdowns also hobble American society long-term, as they and online schooling both significantly reduce how much children learn, especially in math. Math competence strongly predicts a nation’s economic future, to the point that one estimate finds if U.S. kids just learned as much math as Canadian kids do, our nation would increase its gross domestic product by $77 trillion over the next 80 years.

It’s therefore quite reasonable to assume that setting kids back in math by a year or two, as continued coronavirus schooling will do (it’s already set them back in math almost a year), will short our economy tens of trillions of dollars — right at the time trillions in unfunded entitlements for Baby Boomers will come due. We simply can’t afford that, and China knows it.

Besides harming our country, shutdowns harm children. There is next to zero risk to children’s health of going back to school, as evidence from myriad first-world countries show. There is a massive risk to kids’ futures of depriving them of a good education. One estimate found keeping U.S. kids’ math knowledge to pre-pandemic levels instead of raising it to Canada’s would deprive them of an estimated 20 percent in additional income for every year of their lives that they work.

Doing what China wants in continued lockdowns will not just hamstring American kids financially, it will bequeath them a far more dangerous world in which an aggressive, mass-murdering regime that deliberately sent a deadly virus abroad grows in power as their nation’s ability to deflect that power decays. In 20 years, America’s kids will not be impressed that we spared grownups some unsubstantiated unease in return for condemning the next generation to a much higher likelihood of poverty, a bankrupted social safety net, and a homeland at the mercy of a bloodthirsty global power.

Media Push U.S. Politicians to Fulfill Communist Plans

In urging lockdowns, therefore, U.S. media has amplified and helped implement Communist goals. The Chinese Communist Party endorsed, promulgated, and lobbied for strict lockdowns with the goal of kneecapping foreign competitors, including the United States. As Michael P. Senger pointed out on Twitter based on a June New York Times article, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “launched a massive social media campaign in Italy to advertise its coronavirus lockdown measures in early March.”

Democrats spent three years spinning a presidential impeachment out of a few Facebook memes from Russian trolls and bots in 2016. This NYT article and a long ProPublica report provide evidence that the CCP has been using a far bigger propaganda campaign to destroy the United States through economic suicide and destruction of social cohesion. And it’s working.

It is no exaggeration to say that the world’s future depends on the United States acting strategically to counter Chinese propaganda and aims rather than strangling ourselves on lies. Our economy and military sustain the world. China is the number one beneficiary if we choke, and it has been wanting to challenge the United States for dominant global power for decades. They needed another generation or two to be able to get there.

The CCP strategy for achieving that has been promising its citizens political competence and economic advancement in exchange for severe repression that allows for directing the nation’s entire economy into soft and hard global power. Coronavirus strikes at the heart of both these strategies. That’s the CCP’s main leverage over the Chinese (besides terrorizing people). So the only way Xi Jinping staves off losing his head over mismanaging this outbreak is by bringing the world down with him.

The CCP is fighting for its life and its 100-year plan to get us to stay locked down. Keeping freedom alive for the world requires that they don’t win. Key to fighting back is following Sweden and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s successful coronavirus management strategies: End government lockdowns, and allow American citizens to act on their own judgments about coronavirus risks.

Federalism Under Fire

 

Article by Michael Swartz in "The Patriot Post":

The onset of the coronavirus has created a different America than the one we knew just six short months ago, but President Donald Trump’s approach to dealing with it has also beautifully illustrated a trend that has overtaken our constitutional republic in recent decades.

Back in January, the president created the White House Coronavirus Task Force. With that entity in hand, it was perhaps expected that President Trump would use his executive powers to take control of the situation. Accordingly, the president “charged the Task Force with leading the United States Government response to the novel 2019 coronavirus and with keeping him apprised of developments.”

While the Task Force has made a celebrity out of the previously obscure Dr. Anthony Fauci, those media experts expecting President Trump to be the tyrant they always assumed him to be were shocked by the hands-off approach he’s taken in dealing with the Wuhan flu and its effects. Of course, since they’re stuck on “Orange Man Bad,” they now complain that Trump doesn’t take the virus seriously enough.

But true to our intended federalist system of government, President Trump has chosen to allow each individual state significant license in handling the outbreak within its borders. At first, nearly every state shut itself down in response to the virus, a mid-March action that was initially believed to require 15 days, then extended to Easter as an “aspirational goal”. Once Easter came and went and the virus stayed on, we began to experience the open-ended (or never-ending) lockdown we see today.

Federalism has thus created a nation where state situations run the gamut from needing a second shutdown like in California to never really shutting down at all (smiling at you, South Dakota). This may sound like a poor way to do policy, but a one-size-fits-all approach would likely be causing healthy South Dakotans to chafe under a lockdown they didn’t need because the outbreak was half a country away. Government tends to respond to the worst-case scenario in these situations, and the coronavirus more than proved that point.

And so did the media. As we’ve seen, states handling the China Virus as they see fit have created a media feeding frenzy. Those that were the first to open up and begin putting people back to work and reversing the severe economic downturn have been raked over the coals of public opinion, while utter failures like the governor of New York are taking tone-deaf victory laps and being accorded heroic status.

In their coverage of COVID-19 and their cheerleading of policy ideas like Joe Biden’s promise to make mask wearing mandatory, we can more clearly see that the media and its leftist allies have instilled the idea into Americans that the only good solution is a big-government federal solution. A decade ago, a different president began “fundamentally transforming” America by shifting power over healthcare to the federal government — and the media cheered, labeling as racists those “deplorables” who objected. Back then, the people stood against the concept of federalizing the health-insurance industry, but once Trump and the GOP came to power and sought to defund ObamaCare, the media mustered the means necessary to preserve it.

Yet we can’t just reflexively blame the media, either. Some place the blame on the two-party system, but Zachary Faria argues in a recent Washington Examiner op-ed, “The problem of polarization in politics is not the existence of the two-party system but the gradual and ongoing nationalization of power, especially in the hands of the president. When these issues are pulled out of the local legislatures and made into national questions, the localities get left behind.”

Once states became dependent on the fiscal narcotic of Uncle Sam’s largesse, legislators bent on increasing federal power began placing preconditions on the states to retain their share of funding. For example, a state seeking its full share of federal highway dollars must ensure that its impaired-driving laws conform to a particular standard for blood-alcohol limits. For generations, members of Congress have won or lost reelection based on just how well they bring home the bacon, but people forget that the price of the bacon is borne by everyone.

Thanks to all that conditioning, those who used to make their case for change to city hall now bypass that step and take demands directly to the street, preferably with breathless news coverage. Thus we see Minneapolis voting to disband its police force after the death of George Floyd while begging for federal taxpayer money to pay for the rioting local authorities allowed. Uncle Sam apparently owns an ever-growing money tree.

There will come a day, though, when other people’s money runs out, so encouraging a state-level response to a national crisis may be good practice for the future. States can still be the creators of their own success, but too many states have citizens who believe that this requires too much work and independent thought.

If listening to the drumbeat of negative media has led you to become one of those citizens, it’s time to turn off the noise and reevaluate the situation. There’s still a place for personal responsibility in this country, and the biggest rewards often come from taking a risk — just like those who founded this nation did. It’s a shame this teachable moment had to come from a pandemic.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/72226?mailing_id=5203&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.5203&utm_campaign=weekend_snapshot&utm_content=body

Let’s Be Honest for a Minute – Americans Want to Fight, Not Work Out Ideas

 

 Article by Clint Fargeau in "RedState":

Have you ever observed a guy in a bar laughing too loud, getting in other people’s space, and concluded: “That guy is looking to get in a fight”?

That’s the whole United States right now.

I was reading Christopher Caldwell’s essay on the roots of America’s partisan divide the other day. He makes a fascinating argument: the two seminal dates in American history are not 1619 and 1787, but rather 1787 and 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act passed.

That year, for all intents and purposes, a second constitution was created. American constitutional law pivoted from the ethos of ‘one law for all’ to ‘different laws for different races, sexes, sexual orientations, etc.’–seemingly a move to boost the historically disadvantaged but actually a regression to tiered inequality which America had slowly but surely been moving away from since the founding with votes for women, desegregation, and decriminalization of homosexuality.

The civil rights constitution turned old injustices around and granted poorly defined identity groups permanent privileges not available to Americans as a whole (‘privilege’ = ‘private law’).

Caldwell writes:

Now we can apply this insight to parties. So overpowering is the hegemony of the civil rights constitution of 1964 over the Constitution of 1787, that the country naturally sorts itself into a party of those who have benefitted by it and a party of those who have been harmed by it.

The new constitution separates the populace into (1) a coalition of identity groups who receive special treatment from the courts and government (the Democratic Party) and (2) everybody else (the Republican Party), who cling to the original Constitution which supposedly undergirds the nation but gets treated in practice like a relic.

Why aren’t Americans–and particularly conservatives–discussing big ideas like Caldwell’s at every dinner table, in every article, and every social media thread?

Because Americans as a people are spoiling for a fight. They don’t want ideas. The populace has lost faith in the power of ideas to bring positive social change and unity to the body politic. Like a wound-up guy in a bar, Americans antagonize one another into a shirt-tearing brawl to vent their terminal frustration.

The media has foregone discussion and transformed into a octagon for cage fighting. Opinion columnists taunt and sneer, heaping fuel on the fire of grievances while vilifying the president and whole sections of the American public. Even supposed “impartial news” is curated to inflame conflict, rationalize intolerance, and draw attention in the crowded marketplace.

While it’s easy to point to the media as the cause of the fighting, that would be a mistake. Willing combatants must stand ready for egging on to work. America’s commentariat are just the loudest and most obnoxious bystanders encircling the snarling, bareknuckle pugilists in the center. Americans want to get in a fight or to watch stand-ins duke it out–in the press, in our elections, in the streets with bats and bike locks.

As Caldwell’s formulation makes clear, liberals and conservatives today are not defined so much by what they are *for* as what they are *against*. Conservatives rally against the modern ‘some are more equal than others’ constitution; and liberals rally against conservatives–which, technically speaking, makes liberals the new conservatives, since Democrats are trying to ‘conserve’ the constitution of 1964, while Republicans are trying to knock it down.

Politics has become once again a brutal spectator sport–but unlike old times, also a reality-TV event. Politics is something that other people do, far off in capitals, not locally. Americans are bored, disconnected, and largely powerless. As John Gray points out in Straw Dogs:

Whatever they become, tyrannies begin as festivals of the depressed. Dictators may come to power on the back of chaos, but their unspoken promise is that they will relieve the boredom of their subjects.

Perhaps we have put too much weight on ideas and political philosophy. We trusted that abstractions could somehow win out, even when more and more people stand ignorant or antagonistic to those abstractions. A good fight might restore Americans’ perspective on why societies unify around ideas in the first place: blood on the streets makes them slippery.


https://www.redstate.com/diary/clint-fargeau/2020/07/18/998565/

Coronavirus cases soar in France's Brittany region as summer holidays begin

The coronavirus reproduction rate in the popular French tourist region of Brittany has risen sharply in the last week.
Plans to make face masks compulsory in enclosed public spaces were brought forward on Thursday in the Finistere region of Brittany and Mayenne region near the Loire Valley after concerns over a spike in COVID-19 cases.

 Western and southern France, both popular with tourists, were relatively spared during the height of the country's outbreak between March and May.


However, focus has now turned to those regions as the R number - a key measure of how fast coronavirus is spreading - in Brittany rose from 0.92 on 10 July to 2.62 by 14 July.
It means for every person infected with COVID-19, they will pass it on to between two and three other people, with a number of less than one needed to gradually contain the disease.

The number is one of several indicators authorities are watching to decide whether tougher restrictions need to be reimposed after France's lockdown ended in May.

 "It's a worrying number because it means the epidemic is taking off again," Professor Eric Caumes, an infectious disease specialist at the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris told BFM TV.



Brittany's regional health agency said the rising case numbers are also linked to a 50% increase in testing in the area over the past week, and said there are only three people in intensive care with the virus in the region.
More than 30,000 people have died with COVID-19 in France but the number of deaths and people in intensive care had been falling.



As the summer holiday season approaches daily cases have increased as people gather in larger groups and travellers have been allowed back into France.
Professor Caumes said Paris hospitals had not seen any new cases in June, but since the start of July two or three infected people a day have been coming in - a similar number to February.
"It is possible that what is happening in Paris is nothing compared to what is happening in other regions of France which were not hit by the first epidemic wave and risk facing an epidemic wave," he said.
The rest of France will have to wear masks in indoor public places from next week.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-cases-soar-in-frances-brittany-region-as-summer-holidays-begin-12030616

Private Schools Are Adapting ...

Reason

Private Schools Are Adapting to Lockdown Better Than the Public School Monopoly

A new survey finds parents are substantially more satisfied with private and charter schools’ responses to the pandemic than they were with those of traditional public schools.

Corey A. DeAngelis7.17.2020 11:45 AM

(Arrowsmith2/Dreamstime.com) 

More than 120,000 American schools have closed since March, a change affecting more than 55 million students. As we approach August, an intense debate about reopening schools has been brewing. One side argues that schools should reopen so that families can return to work and children can receive the education taxpayers have paid for. The other side says that schools cannot reopen safely without $116 billion more in federal funding, on top of the $13 billion already allocated to states to reopen schools.

This debate wouldn't be so contentious if we funded students instead of school systems. The funding could follow children to wherever their families feel they would receive an effective education, be it a district-run school, a charter school, a private school, or a home setting. In that situation, if an individual school decided not to reopen—or if it reopened unsafely or inadequately—families could take their children's education dollars elsewhere.

That is how food stamp funding currently works. If a neighborhood grocery store refuses to reopen, it may be inconvenient, but families wouldn't be devastated; they could take their money elsewhere. Imagine if you were forced to pay your neighborhood Walmart the same amount of money each week regardless of whether they provided your family with any groceries. The store would have little incentive to reopen in an effective or timely manner.

It sounds absurd. But you have essentially just imagined today's compulsory K–12 school system.

And it's even worse than that. Even if the institution were required to provide goods and services through online or other platforms, it would still have weak incentives to get things right, because families would still be powerless.

New data show that's precisely what happened with the K–12 school system during the lockdown. 

A nationally representative survey conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs found that private and charter schools were substantially more likely to continue providing students with meaningful education services during the lockdown than traditional public schools.

The survey found that private and charter school teachers were more than twice as likely to meet with students daily than teachers at district-run schools. Private and charter schools were about 20 percent more likely to introduce new content to their students during the lockdown. About 1 in every 4 traditional public schools simply provided review material for what students had already learned before the closures. Arlington Public Schools, for example, decided in April not to teach students any new material for the rest of the school year.

Another national survey, this one conducted by Common Sense Media, found similar results. Private school students were more than twice as likely to connect with their teachers each day, and about 1.5 times as likely to attend online classes during the closures.

A recent report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education found that only 1 in 3 school districts examined required teachers to deliver instruction during the lockdown, and less than half of all districts expected teachers to take attendance or check in with students regularly.

And just yesterday, The New York Times reported that in many towns, private schools are reopening while public schools are staying closed.

Traditional school systems' failure to adapt to COVID-19 helps explain why many families are turning toward homeschooling. A new nationally representative survey by EdChoice and Morning Consult just found that the pandemic has made families about 2.4 times as likely to have a more favorable view of homeschooling as they are to have a less favorable view. Another national poll, this one by RealClear Opinion Research, found that 40 percent of American families say they are now "more likely" to homeschool after the lockdowns end. So many families in North Carolina committed to homeschooling this month that they crashed the state government's website.

This might also explain why the new national Education Next survey found that parents were substantially more satisfied with private and charter schools' responses to the pandemic than they were with those of district-run schools. Parents of children in private and charter schools were at least 50 percent more likely to report being "very satisfied" with the instruction provided during the lockdown than parents of children in traditional public schools.

These results aren't surprising. Private schools can adapt to change more effectively because they are less hampered down by onerous regulationsthan their government-run counterparts. Choice schools also have real incentives to provide meaningful educations to their students while reopening safely. Private and charter schools know that their customers—families—can walk away and take their money with them if they fail to meet their needs.

K–12 students have been getting the short end of the stick for far too long. But it doesn't have to be this way: We could fund students directly and truly empower families. Legislators in Pennsylvania and Maryland have already made proposals to partially fund families directly in the fall. Hopefully they'll succeed—and hopefully more states will follow.

Declassified Strzok Notes Debunk 2017 NYT Article on Trump Campaign Russia Collusion

Zachary Evans reporting for National Review 

Former FBI agent Peter Strzok debunked a February 14, 2017, article in The New York Times on possible contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, noting that the agency had seen no evidence of connections between campaign officials and Russian officers.

Strzok’s type-written comments on the Times article were declassified by the FBI on Thursday, along with several other documents that are currently available on the website of the Senate Judiciary Committee. It is not clear exactly when Strzok typed those comments.

“The comments of Peter Strzok regarding the February 14 New York Times article are devastating in that they are an admission that there was no reliable evidence that anyone from the Trump Campaign was working with Russian Intelligence Agencies in any form,” Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said in a statement.

The Times article asserts that “phone records and intercepted calls” showed that Trump campaign officials had contact with members of the Russian intelligence services.

“This statement is misleading and inaccurate as written,” Strzok wrote of the passage. 

“We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [intelligence officers].”

Strzok clarified that an associate of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been in contact with Russian intelligence and that former campaign official Carter Page had been in contact with Russian intelligence before he joined the campaign. However, Strzok writes, “we are unaware of any calls with any Russian government official in which Manafort was a party.”

Strzok wrote three times in his notes that the FBI was not aware of any contact between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence. Contact between the campaign and other Russian officials was “almost entirely” with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and the Russian Embassy’s congressional liaison. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently conducting an investigation into the procurement of FISA warrants against Page. The Justice Department Inspector General report on those warrants stated that the FBI made numerous errors and omissions in its applications for FISA warrants against Page.

Declassified transcripts of conversations from late 2016 through early 2017 between Kislyak and former national-security adviser Michael Flynn revealedthat the two had discussed deescalating tensions after outgoing President Obama imposed sanctions on Russia. Former FBI director James Comey told Obama that the conversations between Kislyak and Flynn “appear legit,” according to separate notes taken by Strzok.

The FBI fired Strzok after the agent’s anti-Trump texts were leaked.

Intersectionality Vs. America

Townhall

Intersectionality Vs. America

Josh Hammer

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

Source: AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

As the nation grapples in the throes of a once-a-generation soul search, the battle lines of our cold civil war between the Americanists and the civilizational arsonists only continue to harden.

This week saw the stunning public resignation of Bari Weiss as a New York Times opinion editor and columnist. In her cri de coeur, Weiss lamented the monolithic intellectual hegemony forcibly imposed at The Times by the left's ascendant neo-Jacobin radicals -- the dutiful foot soldiers of what Wesley Yang calls the "successor ideology." In her plea, Weiss identifies Twitter -- a synecdoche, of sorts, for leftist mob rule -- as The Times' "ultimate editor." What's more, Weiss, a proud Jew and recent author of a book about fighting anti-Semitism, decried her cowardly Times ex-colleagues who'd complain about her "writing about the Jews again."

Politically, Weiss is an old-school liberal centrist. But at the nation's paper of record, traditional liberalism has been overrun by a successor ideology that is committed not to tolerance and pluralism but to multiculturalism, identity politics and the pseudo-intellectual grift that is "intersectionality." The problem with these faddish schools of "thought" is both straightforward and terrifying: They are not merely totalitarian; they are at war with the very concept of America.

Under the tenets of the successor ideology, there is right and there is wrong. However, rather than using the barometer of moral truth, right and wrong are judged as our would-be ochlocracy defines the terms.

According to the partisans of identity politics, right and wrong do not rely upon neutral appeals to truth, justice, egalitarianism or any other criteria that, for millennia, have guided Western political theory. Rather, right and wrong rely upon hierarchical appeals to gender, skin pigmentation, religious belief (or, more often, nonbelief), immigration status, sexual orientation and other categories of assigned "privilege."

To the multiculturalist or the intersectionalist, homogenous groupthink ought to be foisted upon an unsuspecting people, with the idiosyncratic beliefs and preferences of the less "privileged" necessarily elevated, by very identitarian nature of an expositor, over the beliefs and preferences of the more "privileged." So "brown" Palestinian-Arabs must be elevated over "white" Israelis (itself a demographic mischaracterization). The insurrectionist, anti-Western civilization platform of the Black Lives Matter movement - which lists on its official website organizational goals such as "disrupt(ing) the Western-prescribed nuclear family" and "freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking" -- cannot be called into question because the word "Black" is used in the name.

This is poisonous claptrap -- a blight upon America's founding ideals and a cancer upon the basic norms of civic comity without which a unified republic cannot endure. Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 244th birthday of a nation famously founded on the proposition "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." In a land conceived on that noble premise, there is no room for a politics of crass racial strife and other forms of rank identitarian subjugation. It is no exaggeration to claim that contemporary peddlers of such a morally bankrupt view of the world are the modern-day intellectual successors of the antebellum- and Jim Crow-era racists; they, too, viewed American society through a prism of race-based "right" and "wrong." The two are flip sides of the same coin -- a coin that is utter anathema to the Declaration of Independence.

On a more tangible level, a view of politics based on overarching hierarchies of "privilege" is also toxic to the sustainability of a civil society. Such a view of the world, predicated upon the diminution of individual moral agency and the pitting of identity-based groups against each other, sows dissension by its very nature. Those deemed "privileged," or non-"woke," are punished accordingly. White Christians always fit the bill. But so do Jews, despite their status as the world's single most historically oppressed people and that we are living through a period of rising global Jew-hatred.

Thus, we see complaints about Weiss spilling too much digital ink about Jewish issues. We see professional athletes, like DeSean Jackson, invoke infamous anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan on social media. We see "#JewishPrivilege" trend on Twitter. By purporting to fight bigotry, the intersectionalists deliberately excuse -- and affirmatively abet -- another form of bigotry. Such is the nature of a zero-sum conceptualization of politics.

Our crossroads has never been clearer. Veer left for wokeness. Veer right for Americanism. Only one choice can save a country now teetering on the brink.

Federal Officers Deployed To Curb Portland’s Violence While Some Local Leaders Refuse To Accept Help

Allison Schuster reporting for The Federalist

Chaos has overtaken the streets of Portland, Oregon for nearly fifty straight days since violent riots and protests erupted following the death of George Floyd toward the end of May. Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf traveled to the city this week and released a statement addressing the lawlessness seizing the community.

“The city of Portland has been under siege for 47 straight days by a violent mob while local political leaders refuse to restore order to protect their city,” he said. “Each night, lawless anarchists destroy and desecrate property, including the federal courthouse, and attack the brave law enforcement officers protecting it.”

Wolf detailed the destruction and violence that began consuming the city May 29, describing multiple daily attacks on citizen’s safety and well-being that have persisted for months.

In only the short month of May, Portlanders saw several of their courthouses, private buildings, and federal buildings graffitied. Highlights from June and July include further damage to federal and private property, the police dispersing the crowd while protesters used animal seeds, rocks, hammers, fireworks, rifles, commercial grade lasers to cause eye damage, stun guns, spray paint, pipe bombs, and fire against the officers. July 7 was considered a “Night of Rage,” when nearly a nearly 500-person riot broke out, assaulting officers with rocks, bottles, lasers, and fireworks. The rioters also threatened law enforcement officers’ physical safety by publishing their personal information.

Due to Secretary Wolf’s new dedication to ending the excessive violence consuming the city and threatening the lives of officers and law-abiding citizens, federal law enforcement officers arrived on July 10 to help suppress the violence.

Despite his abundant failure to tame any of the downtown destruction, liberal Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler announced on Twitter his dissatisfaction with Wolf’s actions in bringing in help. This was following his Twitter announcement earlier in the week that he had contacted Wolf, asking for the aid of federal officers.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, however, took the opportunity to accuse Trump of sending the federal law enforcement as a means of garnering “political points in Ohio or Iowa.” She then demanded that he remove the officers from the city. The county sheriff also refused to meet with Wolf over fear that it was “becoming highly politicized.”

Wolf, however, urged local leaders to work together to focus on reinstating law and order in his statement.

“This siege can end if state and local officials decide to take appropriate action instead of refusing to enforce the law. DHS will not abdicate its solemn duty to protect federal facilities and those within them. Again, I reiterate the Department’s offer to assist local and state leaders to bring an end to the violence perpetuated by anarchists.”

After months of their city’s destruction with no end in sight, Wolf took the first meaningful step in calling attention to and actively combating violence. Meanwhile, it seems the city’s and state’s far-left leaders are content to continue to watch Oregon fall as long as they give no political props to anyone within the Trump administration.

Democrats Spent Tens of Millions to...

FreeBeacon

Democrats Spent Tens of Millions to Destroy 

the Hopes and Dreams of These Qualified Black Candidates

Who's down with BIPOC? Not the DSCC.

Andrew StilesJuly 16, 2020 5:00 PM

2020 Election

Democrats spent more than $50 million this cycle to ensure that white candidates won the party's Senate nomination in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Texas. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of the hopes and dreams of qualified black candidates attempting to bring more diversity to Congress.

White candidates Amy McGrath in Kentucky, Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, and MJ Hegar in Texas received early backing from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), which helped them win primary races against qualified black opponents.

McGrath, who has raised $41 million in her pointless bid to unseat Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), narrowly defeated black state lawmaker Charles Booker in June after winning the DSCC's endorsement in February.

Prominent Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) endorsedMcGrath as early as July 2019, when McGrath first announced her candidacy. Warren, a BIPOC politician best known for saying whatever she thinks will make her more popular with wealthy white liberals, flip-flopped on her endorsement by backing Booker days before the primary and weeks after the death of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests against racial injustice.

In North Carolina, Cunningham handily defeated state lawmaker Erica Smith, a former Boeing engineer who attempted to become just the third black woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Cunningham was receiving financial assistance from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) since the moment he announced his candidacy in June 2019.

The DSCC officially endorsed Cunningham later that year, prompting a fiery statement from Smith. She alleged that Democratic leaders had promised her "unequivocally, that they were not, had not, did not intend to endorse in the primary." She denounced the DSCC's efforts to "sway this U.S. Senate election away from the voices and voters of North Carolina" as "unacceptable." At a campaign event in January, Smith suggested that "Sen. Schumer, for whatever reason, did not want an African American running for Senate in North Carolina."

Cunningham has raised almost $15 million and was assisted in the primary by VoteVets, a pro-Democrat super PAC that spent $6 million on ads supporting his candidacy. The DSCC pitched in $330,000 in ad spending, in addition to the $1.5 million it gave the North Carolina Democratic Party. Cunningham's victory was the realization of Schumer's dream to nominate a white candidate who would spend the entire campaign "in a windowless basement raising money" to fund attack ads against his opponent, Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.).

Smith wasn't the only black candidate to complain about the DSCC's racial bias during the primaries. In December 2019, when the DSCC announced its endorsement of MJ Hegar, a white person running for Senate in Texas, the Texas Coalition of Black Democrats denounced the "disrespectful" attempt to "rig" the primary. The DSCC's endorsement came at the expense of black state lawmaker Royce West, who called it a "slap in the face" and accused party leaders of "trying to lock African Americans out of the process."

Last month, the same group of black Democrats denounced the DSCC again for trying to "cheat" West out of a chance to become the state's first African-American U.S. senator. The group, which represents thousands of black lawmakers in Texas, accused the DSCC of contacting donors and urging them not to support West's campaign.

"It's the same basic problem we have broadly speaking in America—whenever African Americans have an opportunity to advance, they get undercut," said Carroll Robinson, the group's chairman. "And it's sad that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is doing it, and I wish they would stop."

Hegar, who has raised $6.5 million in addition to the $3.4 million the DSCC already spent in Texas, defeated West on July 14 by just 4.2 points.

Many Democrats had hoped 2020 would be the year that qualified candidates of color finally got their chance to shine. Donors and party leaders apparently felt otherwise. They spent millions to keep black candidates from appearing on the ballot alongside presidential nominee Joe Biden, a 77-year-old white man.