Remove Congress from Washington

Making laws shouldn’t be a full-time job—the idea that we’d treat it as such would have struck the delegates to the first United States Congress as very peculiar. 

by Dan Gelernter for American Greatness

Making laws shouldn’t be a full-time job—the idea that we’d treat it as such would have struck the delegates to the first United States Congress as very peculiar. 

We’ve seen so many photographs of Washington pols flouting their own rules on social distancing and so forth that new stories about this or that congressman caught in flagrante are barely worth reading. We already know the story: People in government live such cosseted, enchanted lives that they seem surprised we even bother to get outraged. Of course they don’t follow the rules they make for us—why should they? 

It’s easy to see why our senators and congressmen get such swelled heads: The salary is $174,000 per year (Nancy Pelosi, as speaker, gets $223,500, which she apparently spends entirely on hair styling). Meanwhile, real median income in the United States was $36,000 per year in 2019. So, to start with, our congressmen believe the work they do is worth five times the work the average American does. 

But salary is the least significant part of the story: U.S. Representatives get an average of $1.4 million per year in office expenses, which includes $945,000 per year for staff. To put this into perspective, the Encyclopedia of the United States Congress reports that, before the Civil War, congressmen had neither staff nor offices and “most members worked at their desks on the floor.” Imagine that. 

Having a huge staff makes the real difference in how our representatives live. They have “administrative assistants” (servants) to take care of all the details that we ordinary people have to tend to ourselves: We have to book our own travel tickets, make our own doctors’ appointments, get our own cars serviced. We have to spend time on hold with the credit card company, the insurance company, the phone company, the internet company. Real life involves being on hold a lot.  

Our representatives don’t do any of this: They have people to be on hold for them. Their insurance is arranged for. They don’t have to call the doctor to reschedule appointments. And you can be damned sure that none of the people who voted for a ban on plastic shopping bags (as exists in New York, Seattle, California, and other leftist utopias) ever have to buy their own groceries. Real life contains a lot of these little nuisances. In fact, these nuisances are precisely what makes life difficult for regular people: Buying our own groceries was already enough of a pain before we had to remember to take reusable bags to the store. But Mayor Bill de Blasio wouldn’t know anything about that. 

More than anything else, personal assistants separate politicians from their worst creation: bureaucracy. Congressmen don’t wait in line at the DMV. They don’t stand in line to mail their own packages. They don’t apply for licenses or permits. They don’t do their own taxes to save a little money. They don’t do paperwork. They don’t fill out forms. They are totally isolated from the red tape which they inflict on the rest of us. No wonder they think government works so well: They never have to experience it. (And neither do their kids, whom they keep well clear of public schools.) 

In a previous piece, I suggested some remedies, such as fixing congressional salaries to the median income and requiring politicians to use the public services they endorse—which should include riding the subway and sending their kids to the worst-performing public school in their constituency. 

But there is a more fundamental remedy available: In 1790, when Congress seated representatives from all 13 states for the first time, there were 65 congressmen representing, as reported by our first census, a population of 3.9 million. Which means each congressman represented about 60,000 constituents. But as the population grew, we realized that of course you can’t fit an arbitrarily large number of people in a single building, so the Apportionment Act of 1911 limited congress to its current 435 seats. Today, congressmen represent an average of three-quarters of a million constituents: It is representation on a totally different scale. 

But if there is one thing that politicians can claim they successfully helped us prove in 2020, it’s that all sorts of businesses can function perfectly well from home.  

Congress could do that. 

Now that we no longer need to be in the same room to discuss the issues (not that real debate has happened on the House floor in recent decades) it’s obvious that congressmen and senators could better represent their constituents if they were closer to them, living in their own states and dealing with local issues. The beltway high life must be pretty distracting, after all. So how about this: Congress can do remote. Congress can Zoom. No more fancy office buildings in D.C.. No taxpayer-funded second homes. No office staff. Representatives can live like the people they represent. 

The Capitol Building could be preserved as a reminder of a simpler, earlier time, when congressmen worked alone all day at their desks and Americans were welcome to walk in whenever they pleased. 

And let’s scrap the Apportionment Act, which is just a regular law, not in the Constitution, and instead have one representative for every 60,000 Americans, just as we had at our founding. Congressional districts would be small enough that constituents could actually get in touch with their congressmen. And congressmen themselves, of whom there would be about 5500, would be relatively unimportant, just as our founders intended. 

Making laws shouldn’t be a full-time job—the idea that we’d treat it as such would have struck the delegates to the first United States Congress as very peculiar. Texas, whose legislature meets every other year, has the right idea: Our representatives should be gainfully employed doing regular-people things most of the time. Above all, they should be required to live life on the same terms as “we the people.” That means booking your own appointments, waiting on hold, and standing in line. I can’t afford a personal assistant. And, when you’re spending my tax dollars, neither can you.

X22, Red Pill News, and more-Oct 27

 

Evening, folks! Here's tonight's news:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/10/watch-project-veritas-part-ii-sr-advisor-reveals-nj-governor-murphy-secretly-funneled-40-million-taxpayer-funds-illegals-plans-give-millions-says-truth-like-politica/

America Gone Mad

A report from abroad: Knowledgeable British and Europeans not only do not think America is back, they think it has gone mad.

by Conrad Black for American Greatness

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.” 

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

From the European perspective, American leadership of the West has produced excellent results and very few unpleasant surprises since the United States stepped into that role under Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. At that time, the entire future of Western civilization rested essentially upon the shoulders of just two men, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and it was the epochal good fortune of all of us that they were more than equal to their great task. The level of acuity and success of the subsequent administrations, as the competence of government of any nation must, has fluctuated. But the emphasis was on continuity, and the containment policy elaborated in the Truman Administration was generally followed through to the great bloodless victory of the West, as the Soviet Union crumbled and international Communism as we had known it evaporated.

No one could foresee that, just 30 years after the hammer-and-sickle was hauled down over the Kremlin and Russia reverted to the European borders that it had held when it was only the Grand Duchy of Muscovy 400 years ago, the international Left would have taken over the conservation and ecology bandwagon and manipulated the leading capitalist countries into a savage assault on their own economies to reduce carbon emissions. No one could have anticipated that some African Americans would have celebrated their emancipation and the elevation of an African American president by lionizing antiwhite extremists and producing policing policies that have facilitated a vertiginous spike in violent crime in America. 

Unforeseeable Crises

Even two years ago no one could have foreseen that the Chinese would inadvertently release a virus which the entire Western world would obligingly respond to by shutting down almost their entire economy for a year and increasing the money supply by 30 percent—producing an economic upheaval that will linger for a long time. And there is no precedent for the completely avoidable and shaming debacle of the American defection from its own alliance and helter-skelter flight from Afghanistan, leaving thousands of desperate people of many nationalities who had relied upon the United States, to fend for themselves against the new terrorist regime that seized power there (and $85 billion of U.S. military hardware along with it).

No one could have foreseen that the egregious chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley—who appears to have been stuffed into his over-decorated tunic and bears more evidences of military distinction than victorious five-star combat generals George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, and Dwight D. Eisenhower combined—would promise his Chinese analogue that he would warn him if President Trump intended to attack China, that he agreed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that his commander-in-chief (Trump) was insane, that he would proudly help institute “diversity, equity, and inclusion” lessons in the Armed Forces, and that he would inform a congressional committee while under oath that he had warned Biden about the dangers of his Afghan policy (warnings the president professes not to have received). We have now also learned that despite President Trump’s hugely expensive renovation of the American military, it now has no answer to Chinese and Russian hypersonic weapons. 

Milley and the rest of his over-promoted cabal were too busy politicizing their apolitical offices and confusing the ranks with their historical revisionism to assure the comprehensive defense of the United States, consult normally with allies serving at American request in the mission in Afghanistan, or to demand a sane evacuation plan when the commander-in-chief determined to scuttle the 20-year Afghan deployment. 

Flummoxed by Biden

Various well-informed British and Europeans told me that they found a variety of utterances by Joe Biden and his spokespeople grievously inappropriate or absurd. Most upsetting were Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ po-faced assurance that “the border is closed” while on the other half of the split-screen people were simultaneously wading or walking into the country illegally; climate czar John Kerry importuning the Chinese government to decelerate their pell-mell commissioning of new coal-fired power plants; Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s fatuous lamentation about the “lack of diversity” in the new Taliban government in Afghanistan; and White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s assertion that the administration “welcomed the competition” of Russia’s hypersonic nuclear-tipped missiles. The Internet assures a very widespread transmission of such howlers and the next time Biden or Blinken lay the egg about America being “back” and trusted, the Washington Post should dedicate its entire front page to Pinocchio.

The British and Europeans have always worried about the Americans, largely out of envy and continental vanity which produced disbelief that any other country could perform the role of the world’s leading power more effectively than Britain and the other major European countries had done. They feared that Harry Truman was a rube, Dwight Eisenhower an aging golfer, that JFK and Clinton and Obama were too inexperienced, that LBJ knew nothing of the world, that Nixon was devious, Ford and Carter were not up to it, Reagan was a mere actor, the Bushes were too inarticulate, and that Trump was completely infeasible. They warmed to most of those men, (except Trump, though he is recognized as uncategorizable and inexplicably formidable), but they are completely flummoxed by Biden.   

For three years ending in 2019, Britain had a prime minister who professed to be enacting the wishes of the narrow public majority in favor of withdrawing from the European Union by continuing in that Union and pretending to secede: Theresa May was articulate and diligent but when the plausibility of trying to reconcile contradictory options became clear, she was advised that her support had vanished and she left the prime minister’s office as if fired from a cannon. The thought of the most successful alliance in history being “led” for three more years by an American president whose round-the-clock gaffes are not protected in Europe as Biden is in the United States by a totalitarian social media platform cartel and terminally biased national political media is a subject of profound and general disconcertion. 

Despite my substantial agreement with their concerns, I vigorously attempted to defend the American interest. The best I could do was to remind them that the United States was the most successful country in history and always worked out its problems and that even after three more years of this ramshackle defeatism, a nation as great as America could quickly be restored to its traditional confidence and solidity. I was not entirely persuasive: my knowledgeable British and European friends not only do not think America is back, they think it has gone mad.

The Left Is Everything They Hate

The Left’s policy prescriptions are the black mirror in 

which their own personality is reflected and amplified.

by Dan Gelernter for American Greatness

If there is one lesson I learned working in the startup industry, it’s that people tend to assume everyone else will behave the way they behave. This was a revealing education in human behavior. Someone who accuses everyone of cheating is likely to be a cheat. Someone who tends to be trusting is likely to be trustworthy.

Unfortunately, of course, trusting types don’t always make the best businessmen: This quirk of human nature, the tendency to see everyone else through one’s own reflection, often makes victims of the best people. There is nothing quite as rotten as seeing a crook accuse an honest man of being a crook.

And it does make me wonder about many of the things the Left says: Do they accuse people of “not paying their fair share” of taxes because they know, in their Silicon Valley mansions, that their own lifestyles are wildly divergent from the economic views they espouse? Do they think that parents can’t be trusted to raise and educate their children because they themselves raise Hunter Bidens?

Do they believe people can’t be trusted with guns because they themselves can’t be trusted with guns? Anyone who has grown up around guns—before he fires his first shot—learns that every gun is to be treated as loaded: Sweeping someone with the muzzle even of an unloaded gun will get you banned for life from any firing range I’ve ever visited. But perhaps if you don’t have the training or the common sense, you assume nobody has.

Does the Left claim that society is irretrievably sexist because they themselves are sexist? They talk a good game on women’s rights, but they side with the alleged rapist and against the victim in the Loudoun county rape case. Bill Clinton continues to be welcomed and adored in polite Beltway company and elite academia, even though he has an epic record of sexual predation. And his wife Hillary was perfectly willing to help disparage and discredit Bill’s accusers for the sake of her own power. All of Hollywood knew for years everything the public now knows about Harvey Weinstein, but they still went to his parties, and continued to do so right up until their private knowledge became public.

But there is something beyond the Left’s usual odd behavior when their affection for a rapist exceeds their sympathy for a victim: The Left has broken away from equality of rights into a bizarre sphere where they claim everything men have traditionally done is what everyone should want to do. They claim that everything women have traditionally done is worthless. Validation is on an exclusively male scale. The Left isn’t just sexist in this respect—it is misogynist. It loathes womanhood and envies manhood (while understanding neither and failing at both).

Does the Left claim that we are all racist, and born racist, because they themselves are racist? I am speaking here not of casually offensive remarks, or even a certain governor’s blackface costumes: I mean the deeply held conviction that certain races are inferior, and can succeed (i.e., can “be like us”) only with extensive and patronizing assistance. What conclusion should we draw from statements such as “poor kids are just as bright as white kids” or the suggestion that blacks and Hispanics don’t necessarily “know how to get online” (both courtesy of Joe Biden)? American blacks were gaining in wealth faster than any other demographic when LBJ enacted the Great Society. Since then, the Left has used minorities as a permanent underclass who are expected to supply votes and menial labor in exchange for handouts on which dependence is encouraged. 

Finally, does the Left accuse everyone of trying to overthrow democracy because that is precisely what the Left is doing? How does #TheResistance of the Trump years square with gulag-style prisons where January 6 protestors can be punished and tortured before trial? How does General Mark Milley’s concern that Trump would attempt to remain in power past the end of his term square with Milley’s decision to take the executive power into his own hands? How does the claim that Republicans want to suppress voter freedom square with the Time article on “a well-funded cabal of powerful people” that spent hundreds of millions guaranteeing a “proper” result in 2020? How does the proposal for a vaccine passport square with opposing photo ID for voting?

Just as the man who suspects he’s always being cheated thinks of himself as impeccably honest, and considers himself driven to cheat only in order to defend himself, the Left projects its own flaws on society at large as an excuse for its own behavior—as expiation for its own sins, as atonement for its own weaknesses. The Left’s policy prescriptions are the black mirror in which their own personality is reflected and amplified.

VIDEO: Sheriff Press Conference Added + Someone Must Go to Prison for the Killing of Halyna Hutchins

by Dennis Prager for American Greatness

If no one goes to prison for actor Alec Baldwin’s accidental killing of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, our society will have failed a crucial moral test.

We will be saying human life is not sacred; that it, in effect, is of little or no consequence.

The killing was, we presume, unintentional (though we do not know for sure, as the possibility remains that someone had motive to load the gun with real ammunition). But that does not mean that no one should be held culpable and punished. Society must regard the taking of human life — even when unintentional — as something terrible.

I learned this principle from the Bible, which was, until the last century, the source of America’s and the Western world’s moral values.

This principle is repeated over and over in the Bible’s first five books (the Torah), the source of all biblical laws. This repetition strongly indicates how seriously the Bible takes this issue.

Example one:

Exodus 21:28: “When an ox gores a man or a woman to death, the ox shall be stoned …”

The obvious question is: Why would the ox be put to death? It is surely not guilty of murder; oxen have no free will. The reason it is put to death is that the killing of a human being cannot go unpunished.

The Jewish Bible scholar, professor Nahum Sarna, wrote:

“The execution of the ox was carried out in the presence, and with the participation, of the entire community (the animal was stoned, not merely killed) — implying the killing of a human being is a source of mass pollution and the proceedings had an expiatory function. The killing of a homicidal beast is ordained in Genesis 9:5-6: ‘For your own life-blood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast … Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in His image did God make man.’ The sanctity of human life is such as to make bloodshed the consummate offense, one viewed with unspeakable horror. Both man and beast that destroy human life are thereafter tainted by bloodguilt.”

Example two:

Deuteronomy 19:5: “(If) a man goes with his neighbor into a grove to cut wood; and as his hand swings the ax to cut down a tree, the ax-head flies off the handle and strikes the other so that he dies, that man shall flee to one of these cities and live.”

Again, the Bible describes a homicide that is entirely accidental. But the person who accidentally committed the homicide is not free to live a normal life. (SET ITAL) He cannot go on with life as if nothing happened. (END ITAL) While he is not to be executed, he must flee to one of three “cities of refuge” in ancient Israel. There he may not be killed or otherwise hurt by a member of the killed man’s family. But he is not a completely free man.

In my Bible commentary, “The Rational Bible,” I quote Leeor Gottlieb, a professor of Bible at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University: “The Torah is morally ahead of some modern societies, in which people’s lives go on nearly uninterrupted if they killed unintentionally.”

As the Bible explains five verses later:

“Thus blood of the innocent will not be shed, bringing bloodguilt upon you in the land that the Lord your God is allotting to you.”

Human bloodshed brings bloodguilt upon the land.

Example three:

Deuteronomy 21:1-4 and 7: “If, in the land that the Lord your God is assigning you to possess, someone slain is found lying in the open, the identity of the slayer not being known, your elders and magistrates shall go out and measure the distances from the corpse to the nearby towns … And they shall make this declaration: ‘Our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it done. Absolve, O Lord, Your people Israel whom You redeemed, and do not let guilt for the blood of the innocent remain among Your people Israel.’ And they will be absolved of bloodguilt.”

Unlike the previous instance, in which the (unintentional) killer is known, the killer of the slain man found “in the open” is not known. Nevertheless, the community is still held accountable and must ask for forgiveness for not preventing a homicide.

Example four:

The final example is not biblical but from my radio show. Many years ago, a woman called to tell me about an ostrich raised on her family’s ostrich farm. One day, this ostrich kicked her father to death. I asked the woman what was done to the ostrich. “Nothing,” she replied.

Given my biblical background, I was taken aback.

“So you tell people who visit your farm, ‘This is the ostrich that killed my father’?”

“Yes,” she responded.

In my view, that cheapened her father’s life and death.

How much more so will Halyna Hutchins’ life and death be cheapened if no one pays a steep price — for a death that was entirely preventable had proper precautions been followed?

But given how little the Bible means to most Americans today, I would not be surprised if no one goes to prison.

Virginia Politics Is a Very Narrow Ideological Segment Where Inside Clubs Play

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse

There is a great deal of political media time devoted to the Virginia gubernatorial election that takes place next week.  There is also a major disconnect in the analysis of Virginia politics and what takes place there, so it’s worth pausing and reminding everyone about its unique status.

When an event happens in New York City, the scale of media coverage is so disproportionate to the issue it has historically been laughable.  The media are centered in NYC, so the media focus on events in NYC as if the rest of the country cares.  We don’t.  A waterline break in a NYC subway station gets the scale of national media coverage as if Hoover dam collapsed; most Americans just roll their eyes.

However, because of the proximity to Washington DC, and because of where almost all the federal workers inside the DC system live, that same scale of skewed emphasis is also evident in Virginia when it comes to anything political.

Virginia politics is where the UniParty swamp creatures argue among themselves.  In Virginia the elites in the DNC club debate their high-brow outlooks with the elites in the RNC club.  Virginia is where the traditional DC political establishment of both clubs gather socially to pontificate about their importance in the world of everything political.

Is the whole state like this?  No.  However, the DC beltway is so influential and so populous the other parts of the state are essentially irrelevant to election outcomes.

As the U.S. federal government grew, so too did the swamp physically expand to make room for all the high-minded bureaucrats who run the machine.  Northern and Eastern Virginia were taken over and absorbed into the swamp, the rest of Virginia was cast into the role of Oliver asking for a bit more soup.

When Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were talking about smelly WalMart people, they were really just encapsulating the reality that exists in Virginia, elites -vs- proles, they were not lying; they just said the accepted quiet part out loud and a lot more people saw it, that’s all.

What passes for an acceptable Republican in Virginia is the Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney and John McCain brands.  There is almost no difference between an establishment Republican and an establishment Democrat in this region. They eat together, hang out together, party together and generally live their best swamp life together.   As a result, their election debates are usually on nuanced cultural issues.

In the widely covered current governors race, the difference between former governor Terry McAuliffe (Democrat) and first-time Republican candidate Glen Youngkin, is very small.   The clubs keep it that way; and no, they do not care about your opinion.  Anyone who challenges the internecine club system in Virginia will quickly see themselves removed, and the club(s) will modify the party rules to avoid any further encroachment.

Democrat Terry McAuliffe messed things up for his club when he said parents should not be able to influence what happens in their children’s schools.  Republican Glen Youngkin seized on that opportunity to enhance his club….. and as usual, that’s now the central focal point of the Virginia race.

Notice, neither candidate talks much about forced vaccines, workers losing their jobs over vaccines, vaccine passports, tax punishments, job losses or inflation, because the club leaders have instructed the club candidates to chew the fat on an educational and cultural issue they deem to carry national importance.  Additionally, notice how Youngkin will not talk positively about Donald Trump and has not wanted any support whatsoever from Trump because his consultants believe the MAGA mindset is too controversial for the electorate.

You may remember a similar scenario in 2014 when Tom Cotton was running for the Senate in Arkansas and the GOeP club (writ large) told Cotton to tone himself down to a light pastel in order to appeal to “moderate” and “women” voters.  Unlike Youngkin, Tom Cotton refused the consultant advice and went full wolverine against the democrat incumbent Mark Pryor.  Throughout the race club pollsters and DNC media said the Arkansas race was tight and Cotton would likely lose if he kept being aggressive and pro-constitution (a Tea Party theme) in his campaign.  On election night, Cotton won by 17 points.

This milquetoast approach to elections is where the terms “suburban women’s vote” or “suburban soccer moms” comes back into play, as both clubs debate which club has better parenting skills.  Meanwhile, the political consultants are paid to figure out which catch-phrase has the best cultural acceptance rate. Watching this level of political theater is almost as painful as being forced to watch CNN cover a blown water main in New York City, because inevitably we are going to hear the same tired narrative from the Republican pundit class…. “This has national implications.”  No, no it doesn’t.

Vote for Youngkin because at least you’ll have a fighting chance and he’s not a communist.  But don’t consider a state-wide race in Virginia, fraught with nuanced shades of purple, to be a referendum on how the nation feels as a whole.  In Virginia the grassroots divisions are bold, but the party club divisions are almost invisible.

The Virginia Governor’s race is akin to two lovers debating whether Mercedes or BMW will be their next SUV….

…..And that is exactly why RNC President Ronna McDaniel is willing leave the spa a little early, put down her white wine spritzer, walk away from the crustless triangle sandwich buffet and give everyone her opinion on what really matters to American voters.

WaPo Turns to Victim Shaming of a Minor to Preserve Narrative in Loudoun County School Rape Case

Brad Slager reporting for RedState

For the sake of framing, in order to explain the problem with the behavior of The Washington Post, let us briefly look back at the media firestorm that was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hysteria. Think back as Justice Kavanaugh was accused, when anyone dared challenge the testimony of Christine Blasey-Ford or asked for particulars and witnesses, it was called victim oppression leveled by the GOP. When a collection of other baseless accusations were trotted out, the lack of evidence was bypassed over the seriousness of the accusations. Accusers were sacrosanct, their testimonies were considered gospel, and anyone who dared question the veracity was branded as heretics. 

As we are now seeing in Loudoun County, Virginia, those granite firm standards of female protections are more fluid than a Jell-O mold left on the hood of an idling Humvee in Death Valley at high noon. In this case, in which a female teenager was assaulted in a school bathroom by a classmate, there have been multiple levels of negligence. The school board has been reticent to act, the media have been forced to cover a story they wanted to bury, and gubernatorial candidate Terry Mcauliffe has been derailed by his loud support of school administrators and dismissive approach to parents.

It has become obvious how none of the usual political figures are orally assaulting microphones over this case. Notably silent are the caterwauling feminist groups. Absent is Alyssa Milano weeping her bromides of female oppression in the name of an underage victim. It is all because it has been political theater, and now at The Washington Post they have turned a complete 180 on the scripting as its latest report turns on the victim, all in order to massage the narrative because this story has become more problematic for the left.

AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File

The school board has made itself a vat of roiling controversy for some time. Blocking kids from returning to class and mask mandate ordinances were bad enough, then they had to heap on Critical Race Theory curriculums to add to the mess. Then opening bathroom mores to appease students claiming gender dysmorphia led to the case of a teen girl being sexually assaulted. The father was arrested when he confronted the school board, and the national organization issued a letter proclaiming protesting parents to be domestic terrorists. 

This has been a crap-fest, with a fecal juggler opening act and a synchronized septic swimming routine as an encore, and now The Washington Post wants to add more compost to the proceedings.

In a report on the court ruling regarding this case, writer Justin Jouvenal noted testimony from the defendant’s lawyers that the two youths in question had a history of consensual sex, but the attorney for Loudoun County said the victim would regularly turn down the requests for sex from the defendant. Then on Twitter, Jouvenal felt a need to highlight what he deems to be an important aspect of the story. He brings up the sexual history of the victim, in a way not stipulated in his article.

There is no reason to do this, other than to create doubt or confusion in the story. That this story already has a finality to it makes his inclusion of the victim’s past character all the more repulsive, coming from the self-styled “justice reporter.” The judge in the case made the ruling that is the juvenile court equivalent of a guilty verdict. The same attacker is also accused of another sexual assault of a different student at another school in the Loudoun District system, and there are questions as to why the attacker was permitted to attend classes while charged with a serious sexual crime. 

These issues have placed a negative focus on the school board, for both the handling of this problematic individual as well as the new policy that may have granted the defendant leeway to use the bathrooms in this fashion, as they identify as gender-fluid. Instead, The Washington Post feels it acceptable to toss out all the prior standards of female protections and resort to victim-shaming. 

This becomes an amazing revelation because for years we were lectured at loudly about the new standards and protocols regarding females and charges of sexual assault. Their words were to be heeded, their character to be protected above all else, and the severity of the charges had to be respected. To now not only see this turn but to have it occur with an underage girl is all the more unsettling. Looking over this should reveal for once that so many of these assault accusation standards are a matter of media convenience, and the lectured rules that are delivered are merely enforced politically.

Obama Says Parent Concerns About School Rapes, Porn, And Learning Loss Are ‘Fake Outrage’

Barack Obama put politics ahead of fundamental parental concerns and tried gaslighting Virginia voters about what’s happening in their own backyards.

Kelsey Bolar reporting for The Federalist

⛔This article displays blurred explicit pictures and descriptions of sexual activity from books offered to children in public schools.

Over the weekend, former President Barack Obama dismissed conservative media and Virginia parents as peddling “fake outrage” over recent scandals involving the state’s public schools.

“We don’t have time to be wasted on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage, the right-wing media’s pedals to juice their ratings,” Obama said while campaigning for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, adding: “Instead of stoking anger aimed at school boards and administrators, who are just trying to keep our kids safe,… we should be making it easier for teachers and schools to give our kids the world-class education they deserve, and [to do so] safely while they are in the classroom.”

Obama’s remarks come on the heels of a string of controversies involving Virginia public schools: A high school freshman allegedly sodomized in the school bathroom by a “skirt-wearing male student” in a “gender fluid” bathroom. A subsequent cover-up by the school board, whose superintendent lied about the incident while the board was trying to pass a new transgender policy. The transferring of the suspect to another school, where he allegedly committed a second sexual assault less than five months later. Child porn and pedophilia in public school libraries. Shocking Alexandria school violence.

Indeed, the many controversies involving Virginia public schools were enough trigger the resignation of Loudoun County School Board member Beth Barts, an investigation by the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, and an admission by Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler that they “failed to provide” a “safe, welcoming, and affirming environment.” The events were also enough to cause enrollment in Fairfax County’s public schools, one of the most sought-after school districts in 2019, to fall by more than 10,000 students since the start of the lockdowns.

Most recently, they were explicit enough to be banned from being aired on Virginia TV.

Too Explicit for 11 p.m. Virginia TV

After Stacy Langton, a mother of a student at Fairfax County Public Schools, complained to her local school board about books she found in the high school library, Independent Women’s Voice produced a TV advertisement exposing some of that content. The goal was to raise awareness about the material available to young teenagers in schools.

The content we found inside one of these books, “Gender Queer,” a memoir by Maia Kobabe, featured illustrations of a “nonbinary and asexual” individual performing oral sex on a male, “vagina slime,” “hip thrusting,” and “a massive painful boner that lasted all day.”

The ad was rejected as too explicit to run during the 11 p.m. hour on TV in Virginia. Some stations are willing to run the ad with the graphic images blurred, but others think even the blurred images are too offensive. Understandably so.

Parents Push Back

As Carrie Lukas, vice president of Independent Women’s Voice and a Virginia mom of five asked, “Why are our schools so much less protective about what high school students, as young as 14, are exposed to than TV stations catering to adults?”

Virginia state law explicitly states that “a parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.” When government officials and schools are working overtime to take away that right, to make sure that people—including many parents—don’t know what’s actually happening in their children’s schools, parents have an obligation to speak up.

But at the behest of the nation’s largest school board association, President Biden’s Justice Department labeled these parents potential “domestic terrorists.” McAuliffe says he doesn’t think parents “should be telling schools what they should teach.” And Obama suggests parental outrage over these instances is “fake.”

As a parent and a former president, Obama should empathize with the father whose daughter was allegedly raped, the parents whose children are getting beat up and exposed to pornography in school, and the children who have suffered irreversible learning loss from lockdowns. Instead, he put politics ahead of fundamental parental concerns and tried gaslighting Virginia voters about what’s happening in their own backyards.

While campaigning for Democrats in the state, Obama went so far as to accuse Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin of concentrating on controversial educational issues instead of “serious problems that affect serious people.” Yes—because no serious person would complain about unserious problems such as severe learning loss, violence, exposing children to pornography, and child rape.