How Dare He Pick on Communism?

Once again, Florida’s Ron DeSantis proves he has all the right enemies.

by Bruce Bawer for American Greatness

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, you just might be named Ron DeSantis.

Let’s recap. On April 22, the Florida governor signed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which, in the words of USA Today, “prohibits any teaching that could make students feel they bear personal responsibility for historic wrongs because of their race, color, sex or national origin.”

The law was necessary because, as you can see in any number of YouTube videos of school-board meetings around the country, young children have indeed been taught, in accordance with critical race theory and other poisonous postmodern pap, that if they’re white or male they’re oppressors, bearing guilt for the actions of long-dead people who looked like them, and if they’re black or female, by the same logic, they’re victims. 

Six days later, DeSantis signed the “Parental Rights in Education Act,” which forbids kindergarten teachers in Florida from talking to their pupils about such topics as masturbation, ejaculation, and oral sex—an act his enemies dishonestly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

This law was necessary too, because, as you can see in other videos (many of which have been curated on the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account) young schoolchildren are indeed being taught all kinds of things about sex that nobody, until the day before yesterday, would have considered remotely appropriate. 

Then, on May 9, DeSantis signed a third bill. It designates November 7 of each year as “Victims of Communism Day” and mandates that schoolchildren in Florida be taught about Communism for at least 45 minutes a year.

Like the two laws before it, this one, too, was necessary. All American schools teach about Nazism, and make it clear to students that Hitler was evil.

But Communism? Stalin? Not so much.

The Holocaust? Horrible. The Gulag? The what? Mao’s Cultural Revolution? Huh? An October 2020 YouGov poll showed that 64 percent of Americans don’t know that Communist China killed more people than Nazi Germany, that 49 percent of Americans (up from 40 percent in 2019) view socialism favorably, and that 18 percent of Americans belonging to Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) prefer communism to capitalism.

Disgraceful, then, but no surprise, that at the Jezebel website you could find one Kylie Cheung, a 2019 graduate of the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in political science who writes “about gender, power, and identity at the intersections of culture and politics,” responding to Florida’s anti-Communism with ridicule.

DeSantis, Cheung sneered, “will have you know he is a strong proponent of freedom. Within mere weeks of signing legislation to all but prohibit the word ‘gay’ from being uttered at Florida schools”—an utter falsehood—“and trying to pull books out of classrooms for mentioning anything having to do with race”—another lie—“DeSantis on Monday signed a bill to establish Nov. 7 as ‘Victims of Communism Day.’”

Quoting DeSantis to the effect that communism’s death toll “exceeds 100 million,” Cheung mocked that as a “random number, which he and other conservatives frequently pull out of thin air.” So much for the 65 million killed in Communist China, the 20 million killed in the USSR, and the millions more killed in North Korea, Cambodia, and elsewhere. 

With a name like Cheung, you’d think the girl, despite her tender age, might happen to be aware that it was a Communist Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, who racked up the highest number of kills in human history. And she might not be quite so glib about it.

“For any impressionable Florida kids that may be reading this,” writes Cheung, “please note that there have never been any ‘true’ communist countries, owing largely to violent intervention from the US and other western superpowers. But that hasn’t stopped American propagandist and revisionist histories from slapping the label on really any country the US doesn’t like.”

Shocking. And yet, not really. These days, if you send your brat to a “top” college like USC, that’s pretty much the picture of 20th century history they’ll leave with.

Which, as it happens, is exactly why Florida needs the “Victims of Communism” Law.

You may be inclined to dismiss Cheung’s article as the work of a brainwashed kid writing for a crazy feminist website. But her view of DeSantis’ law on communism seemed to be widely shared.

At Orlando Weekly, Ryan Dailey and Alex Galbraith joined Cheung in questioning the figure of 100 million victims, although they attributed the number to “the widely discredited Black Book of Communism.” This is like quibbling over whether Hitler killed 6 million Jews or merely five-and-a-half million. 

In a news story about the new law, Danielle J. Brown of the Florida Phoenix, which reports on political developments in that state’s capital, felt obliged to interject: “Keep in mind that it is legal to be a Communist in America.”

Reprinting the Phoenix piece, the FlaglerLive website paired a photo of DeSantis with one of Joe McCarthy, implying that teaching about Communism was tantamount to McCarthyism.

In Esquire, Charles P. Pierce also harked back to the McCarthy era, commenting that “Florida parents may soon be sending their children to public school in 1956 . . . . This is Cold War Crazy come out of hibernation.”

Meanwhile, Paul Blest’s article at Vice begins:

Acknowledging that queer people exist and have human relationships? Bad. Nuanced conversations about America and race in school and the workplace? Also bad. Nearly hour-long nakedly political lessons on the “victims of communism”? Good—and mandatory, if you’re a public school in Florida.

So addressing ignorance about the deadliest ideology in human history is “nakedly political.” I guess it is, if you’re a Democrat who thinks Communism is keen.

At the Palm Beach Post, Richard Rampell recalled taking “a required high school course called ‘Americanism vs. Communism’ at my segregated high school” 55 years ago, a course he now recognizes as “nothing less than naked propaganda due to anti-communist hysteria at the time,” taught by a man who “told us he would not sell his house to a black family because he ‘wouldn’t do that to his neighbors.’” So because that teacher was both anticommunist and racist, anticommunism is somehow intrinsically linked to racism? For DeSantis to require lessons about communist atrocities, complained Rampell, “is rich,” given that he “doesn’t want children to learn of the horrors of our history of slavery.” 

(Who is Richard Rampell? His LinkedIn page shows that he recently retired as manager of “the largest CPA in Palm Beach, FL,” focusing on “high net worth individuals and families, businesses, nonprofit and governmental organizations and forensics.” Funny how eager many uber-capitalists these days are to defend the name of communism.)

At the website of WJCT News in Jacksonville, Cyd Hoskinson was flippant: “Nov. 7 was already National Bittersweet-Chocolate-with-Almonds Day, National Canine Lymphoma Awareness Day and National Retinol Day. Now it’s Victims of Communism Day in Florida.”

Finally, get a load of what ran in the Miami Herald, south Florida’s newspaper of record. Fabiola Santiago, a veteran journalist who escaped Cuba in her childhood, actually likened Florida under DeSantis to Cuba under Castro.

Under the obscene headline, “Wait until students figure out that DeSantis’ Florida and communism are bedfellows!” Santiago accused DeSantis of Havana-style “school indoctrination for political purposes.” And she compared American parents who’ve opposed textbooks containing propaganda—such as math books in which critical race theory is ham-handedly jammed into arithmetic problems—to Cuban communists.

For Santiago, in other words, opposing propaganda is equivalent to pushing propaganda. 

Like Cheung and some of the others I’ve cited here, Santiago simply lied about DeSantis’ “WOKE” and “Parental Rights” laws. “Nothing that makes whites uncomfortable,” she asserted, can be taught in Florida classrooms. Ridiculous. Also prohibited is anything “about being gay or trans.” No: a teacher is perfectly free to tell kids whether he’s gay or straight; but from kindergarten to third grade, Florida draws the line at graphic classroom discussions of actual sex acts.

“It all reminds me,” claimed Santiago, outrageously, “of the atmosphere of repression during my elementary school education in Cuba.” Right.

As for the victims of communism law, Santiago asked, how dare DeSantis insist on lessons about the “poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence and suppression of speech” under communism while forbidding lessons about “the ‘poverty, starvation, migration, systemic lethal violence and suppression of speech’ to which Blacks have been—and still are—subjected to in this country”?

In fact, Florida schools don’t hide the darker side of U.S. history from kids. Nowadays, no American school does. Surely Santiago knows this. Surely she knows, too, that it’s obscene to compare the lives of black Americans today to people who were oppressed, jailed, tortured, and murdered under Stalin and Mao.  

I didn’t attend elementary school in Castro’s Cuba. But José, my best friend in middle school, did. He’d escaped Cuba with his family—including his father, who, like Santiago, was a journalist. In fact, he was an anti-Castro journalist, and had been thrown in one of Castro’s prisons, where he was tortured and permanently blinded. Communists did a lot of that sort of thing to opposition journalists. I suspect that Santiago knows that, too. And if she really believed for a second that DeSantis is even remotely comparable to Castro, she’d have high-tailed it out of the Sunshine State the morning after his election. 

On her Twitter page, by the way, Santiago describes herself as a “world traveler”—a label she’d never have been able to claim, needless to say, if she’d spent her life on Castro’s island prison.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- May 18

 

With no more political related news to keep me occupied for the rest of the week, I'm back in my 'won't stop thinking about what that surprise needs to be on Sunday' mindset.

Here's a blog post of mine from earlier. I sound like I'm being reasonable and not sounding way too desperate to get a win, right?

Here's tonight's news:

Putin’s Current Objectives in Ukraine

Failure to understand the fundamentals of Russian military interventions could help transform what seems like a Russian embarrassment into yet another shameful moment for the Biden Administration.

by Hicham Tohme for American Greatness

A month and a half into his invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the decision to withdraw all of the Russian troops from the northern front. His plan to occupy the Ukrainian capital Kyiv was in shambles, as Ukrainian resistance proved too stubborn and resilient for what seemed to be an ill-prepared and poorly led Russian army. Russian troops diverted their attention to the east of the country, moving to fully occupy the Donbass region, and the southern parts of Ukraine, overlooking the Black Sea.

If we are to believe public officials and the mainstream media, this retreat signifies a resounding defeat for Russia. A more robust and sober analysis, however, reveals that Russia has gone back to its measured, calculating, and pragmatic military intervention playbook, one which it successfully followed over the past decade and a half in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine. In these past three instances, Russia managed to achieve its objectives at minimal cost and with very little serious opposition.

Indeed, Russia’s current redeployment means, first and foremost, more straightforward logistics and safer supply lines for its now concentrated troops. It leaves its armored divisions better protected, since they no longer have to endure nightmarish scenarios, like the one where they were stretched in a 40-mile single file line, ready to be picked off at will by Ukrainian fighters. It can now resort to the use of local militias and paramilitary forces that have been fighting in the Donbass since 2014. They know the terrain and can thus counter Ukrainian asymmetric tactics with their own. Most importantly, this redeployment refocuses Russian attention on an achievable objective, the simple and absolute conquest of Ukraine’s eastern provinces and its southern shoreline.

Such an approach to the battlefield is calculated; it drives Russia’s own human and financial costs of invasion down. It is equally pragmatic and rational, as Russian leadership looks at the battleground with realistic eyes, only going after targets it knows it can achieve and setting objectives it recognizes as feasible. The near future does not bode well for Ukraine if Russia’s invasion continues along this path.

In fact, it is extremely likely that Russia will seek to further expand its territorial gains, particularly as it sets its eyes on Odessa, the last Ukrainian coastal bastion. With the Russian-friendly Transnistria to its west, a Russian naval blockade from the south, and advancing Russian troops from Crimea and Kherson in the East, Odessa will likely be overrun soon. This would be a triple victory for Putin.

First, Odessa is central to Russian national history, as it witnessed some of the most important battles in the defense of the Orthodox Russian Empire against the Islamic Ottoman Caliphate, particularly since it was none other than Czarina Catherine the Great who conquered it, quite a historical figure for Putin to contend with and even draw parallels to. It was not by mistake that, during his Victory Day speech on May 8, Putin mentioned the names of Rumyantsev, Potemkin, and Suvorov, generals serving under Catherine during her victorious war against the Turks in the early 1770s.

Second, the conquest of Odessa would effectively cut off Ukraine from any naval access point. This would put further strain on Ukraine’s commerce as it loses its naval trade routes, the primary point of export for its massive agricultural and industrial production.

Finally, it will link the territories Russia occupies to the Moldovan enclave of Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region, which shares similar secessionist tendencies as those of Abkhazia and Ossetia in Georgia, and Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine. The implications here are quite clear, as Moldova probably sees itself as the next target for Russian aggression in the name of protecting ethnic Russian minorities.

Given this analysis of Russia’s new approach to its war in Ukraine, it becomes essential for anyone who desires to see an end to the conflict to understand the Russian rationale and properly counter it. 

So far, the West’s sanctions have done nothing to deter Putin. The military aid sent to Ukraine, as useful as it was in defending against Russian advances, will be ineffective in helping Ukrainians dislodge Russian troops from territories they already occupy. In fact, Washington officials should stop their meritless self-congratulatory media prancing and take cue from French President Emmanuel Macron, who rightly said: “We will have a peace to build tomorrow. [ . . .] But it will not be done in denial, nor in exclusion of each other, nor even in humiliation.” 

Failure to recognize this might just turn the tables and transform a historic Russian embarrassment into another shameful moment for the Biden Administration. God knows it has already done enough to degrade American global standing. 

Laying Siege to the Institutions

Laying Siege to the Institutions

Christopher F. Rufo

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on April 5, 2022, during a two-week teaching residency at Hillsdale as a Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.

Why do I say that we need to lay siege to our institutions? Because of what has happened to our institutions since the 1960s.

The 1960s saw the rise of new and radical ideologies in America that now seem commonplace—ideologies based on ideas like identity politics and cultural revolution. There is a direct line between those ideas born in the ’60s and the public policies being adopted today in leftist-run cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago. 

The leftist dream of a working-class rebellion in America fizzled after the ’60s. By the mid-1970s, radical groups like the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground had faded from prominence. But the leftist dreamers didn’t give up. Abandoning hope of a Russian-style revolution, they settled on a more sophisticated strategy—waging a revolution not of the proletariat, but of the elites, and specifically of the knowledge elites. It would proceed not by taking over the means of production, but by taking control of education and culture—a strategy that German Marxist Rudi Dutschke, a student activist in the 1960s, called “the long march through the institutions.” 

This idea is traceable to Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in the 1930s of “capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”

This march through our institutions, begun a half-century ago, has now proved largely successful. Over the past two years, I’ve looked at the federal bureaucracy, the universities, K-12 schools, and big corporations. And what I’ve found is that the revolutionary ideas of the ’60s have been repackaged, repurposed, and injected into American life at the institutional level.

Most Americans are shocked to discover this. We’ve all seen the outrage of parents over the past two years as they learned that their young children were being divided according to their skin color and deemed oppressed or oppressors in public school classrooms. Parents began expressing their outrage against critical race theory not only in school board meetings, but at the polls. This made big news in last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, and the demographic of the now-widespread voter rebellion shows that it crosses party lines. 

The Case of the Disney Company

There has been a similar response following the more recent revelations about the Walt Disney Company—a company founded 99 years ago and associated in the public mind with wholesome family entertainment. 

I’ve been reporting on Disney for more than a year, and I have good sources inside the company. I broke a story last year about Disney forcing employees to engage in a critical race theory training program that denounced America as fundamentally racist, had its white employees complete a “white privilege checklist,” and included exercises on “decolonizing” bookshelves.

Disney’s first reaction was to deflect. In response to accusations of racism, the company issued a press release denying the charge. Incredibly, it offered as proof the fact that it had produced the movie Black Panther—a kind of corporate variation on “I’m not racist, some of my best friends are black.” This ridiculous response suggests that Disney executives were caught totally off guard. The elites who run our institutions, after all, are not accustomed to being challenged.

Disney eventually deleted information on the controversial training program from its internal website. But all things remaining the same, the program will resurface. This wasn’t, after all, a case of well-intentioned people making a mistake. Leftist ideologies are now baked into the structures of these institutions.

A much bigger controversy began when the Disney Company waded into a political fight with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. DeSantis had signed a bill, passed by the state legislature, that prohibited teaching about gender ideology, sexual orientation, and sexuality in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade classrooms. Despite the fact that its opponents gave this bill an intentionally misleading name—the “Don’t Say Gay” bill—it is supported, depending on the questions used by pollsters, by between 60 and 80 percent of Floridians. 

Acting against its own apparent business interest, Disney—the most famous children’s entertainment corporation in history—came out publicly in opposition to this bill banning discussions of gender identity in elementary classrooms prior to the fourth grade. In an official statement, it declared that the company’s goal was “for this law to be repealed . . . or struck down in the courts.” 

Shortly thereafter, my sources at Disney leaked a video to me of an hour-and-40-minute company-wide meeting about the controversy. And what did the video reveal? In a series of unedited clips that I released on social media, an executive producer at Disney said that she had been inserting what she called a “not-so-secret gay agenda” into children’s programming, targeting kids as young as two years old, and had experienced no pushback. A production coordinator said that he had created a tracking program to make sure that the company was including enough transgender, non-binary, and asexual characters. The president of Disney’s general entertainment content referenced a Disney initiative declaring that “50 percent of regular and recurring characters across Disney General Entertainment will come from underrepresented groups.” And a diversity and inclusion manager talked about the company’s new policy of doing away with the terms “ladies and gentlemen” and “boys and girls” at Disney theme parks.

These discussions weren’t taking place in an Ivy League faculty lounge, but among high-level executives at Walt Disney. Americans were shocked, and rightfully so. The unmistakable gist of the video was that Disney was secretly trying to change, in a fundamental way, how children think about sexuality by engineering a narrative based on gender ideology.

Disney executives had marched into this controversy beating their chests, talking trash to Governor DeSantis, and committing the company to the overthrow of the bill protecting young children. But the leaked videos quickly generated over 100 million media impressions, and with public opinion heavily on the other side—not only in Florida, but nationwide—Disney was pummeled. People started canceling their subscriptions to Disney’s streaming service, canceling planned trips to Disney theme parks, canceling Disney cruises, and thinking twice about letting their children watch Disney movies. 

Elected officials noticed, too. The Florida legislature and Governor DeSantis have already revoked the special governance and tax status Disney has enjoyed since the 1960s. Disney’s stock value plummeted nearly $50 billion in less than two months. And now Members of Congress are asking why Disney deserves automatic copyright extensions on things like Mickey Mouse—copyrights that customarily have a 28-year limit. If Congress lets Disney’s various copyrights expire next year, it will cost Disney additional multiple billions of dollars.

Doing further research into Disney’s track record regarding children and sexual predators, by the way, I discovered that the company has a notorious pattern, going back over a decade, of having a significant number of its employees arrested for child sex crimes such as child pornography, child exploitation, and child rape. And although a company can’t be held responsible for everything its employees do on their own time, I was able to find two cases of Disney complicity. In the first, Disney authorities allegedly told a Disney security guard to keep her mouth shut when she discovered that a Disney employee was molesting a young boy on a Disney cruise ship. This allowed the employee to evade arrest, after which Disney flew him back home to India so he couldn’t be held accountable. In the other case, I found that the cruise trade association of which Disney is a member had opposed and then helped water down legislation that would have required Disney and other cruise lines to report sexual abuse on their cruise ships in a timely manner.

In summary, Disney’s record on the issue of children and sexuality casts doubt on its claim to moral authority.

***

The lesson I’ve drawn from reporting on institutions that promote ideologies such as critical race theory and radical gender theory is that they have been captured at the structural level and can’t be reformed from within. So the solution is not a long counter-march through the institutions. You can’t replace bad directors of diversity, equity, and inclusion with good ones. The ideology is baked in. That’s why I call for a siege strategy.

This means, first, that you have to be aggressive. You have to fight on terms that you define. In responding to opponents of the Florida bill, for instance, don’t argue against “teaching diversity and inclusion,” but against sexualizing young children. And don’t pull your punches. We will never win if we play by the rules set by the elites who are undermining our country. We can be polite and lose every battle or we can be impolite and actually deliver results for the great majority of Americans who are fighting for their small businesses, fighting for their jobs, fighting for their families.

Second, you have to mobilize popular support. This requires ripping the veil off of what our institutions are doing through real investigation and reporting so that Americans can make informed choices. We live in an information society, and if we don’t get the truth out, we will never gain traction against the narratives being constantly refashioned and pushed by the Left. 

Less than two years ago, an infinitesimal number of Americans knew about critical race theory. Through investigation and reporting, we’ve brought that number up to 75 percent. The public now opposes critical race theory by a two-to-one margin, and it is being hounded out of schools and other places. This kind of action is a model for dealing with every ideology and institution that is undermining the public good and America’s future.

Remember that institutions don’t choose these ideologies democratically—they don’t ask people or employees to vote for them. They impose them by fiat, through bureaucratic, not democratic rule. So it isn’t surprising that the institutions lose big when we force their agendas into the political arena. What politician or campaign manager in their right mind would ignore an issue that is supported by a two-to-one margin? So-called conservative politicians who do ignore such issues—or who oppose bringing them up out of a false sense of decorum—aren’t on the people’s and the country’s side. 

With public institutions like K-12 education, another crucial step is to decentralize them. It is centralization and bureaucratization that makes it possible for a minority of activists to take control and impose their ideologies. Decentralizing means reducing federal and state controls in favor of local control—and it ultimately means something like universal school choice, placing power in parents’ hands. Too many parents today have no escape mechanism from substandard schools controlled by leftist ideologues. Universal school choice—meaning that public education funding goes directly to parents rather than schools—would fix that.

Conservatives have for too long been resistant to attacking the credibility of our institutions. Trust in institutions is a natural conservative tendency. But conservatives need to stop focusing on abstract concepts and open their eyes. Our institutions are dragging our country in a disastrous direction, actively undermining all that makes America great.

To some extent, the institutions are now destroying their own credibility. Look at the public health bureaucracy and teachers’ unions, which acted in concert to shut down schools and keep children needlessly masked—and for far too long. As a result, there has been an explosion in homeschooling, as well as in the number of alternative K-12 schools such as the ones Hillsdale College is helping to launch around the country. What is needed is to build alternative or parallel institutions and businesses in all areas. There is no reason, for example, why plenty of high production value children’s entertainment can’t be produced outside the ideological confines of the Walt Disney Company.

In conclusion, we make a mistake in thinking about politics simply in terms of a Left versus Right dynamic. That dynamic is significant, but where the opportunity really lies today is focusing on a top versus bottom dynamic. An elite class, representing a small number of people with influence in the knowledge-based institutions, are acting in their own interest and against the interest of the vast majority of the American people—those who are still attached to the idea that America is a force for good and who think, to take just one example, that young children should be protected from the imposition of radical gender ideology.

In terms of the top versus bottom dynamic, the choice today is between the American Revolution of 1776 and the leftist revolution of the 1960s. The first offers a continued unfolding of America’s founding principles of freedom and equality. The second ends up in nihilism and demoralization, just as the Weather Underground ended up in a bombed-out basement in Greenwich Village in the 1970s. 

Even those of us who are temperamentally predisposed to defense must recognize that offense—laying siege to the institutions—is what is now demanded.

PolitiFact Is to Fact What Pravda Was to Truth

 PolitiFact Is to Fact What Pravda Was to Truth

During a recent broadcast, I said that once Elon Musk takes control of Twitter, "Twitter will be flooded with hate, and a lot of it will come from people on the Left who want to show how hate-filled it is. It's like their race-hoax industry. If you see a noose on a college dorm of a black student, the odds are overwhelming that the noose was put there by a black student. If you see the N-word on a dormitory building, the odds are overwhelming that a black student actually did that. We're filled with race hoaxes."

One of the better-known self-proclaimed fact-checkers, PolitiFact, declared my claim "false."

They offered no refutation of what I said and provided no examples of nooses or the N-word on campuses perpetrated by white supremacists. Instead, they made a self-defeating argument: "Experts who track hate crimes told PolitiFact that there isn't even a nationwide data source that Prager could have used to pin down the number of incidents -- real or fake -- that specifically involved hanging a noose or scrawling the racist insult on college buildings or grounds."

So, if there is no such database, how could PolitiFact declare what I said "false"? At most, they could say "maybe true, maybe false."

Then they quote a man who devotes his professional life to lying about how racist America is: Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. "Mr. Prager is long on hyperbole and bigotry and short on facts," said Levin. "What Prager claimed 'is a lie.'"

The very fact that PolitiFact cites Levin proves how unserious PolitiFact is about pursuing truth. 

PolitiFact cites FBI statistics -- about "all hate crimes," not about campus nooses or N-word graffiti on dormitories, which is specifically what I spoke about. That was another dishonest ploy on PolitiFact's part. Moreover, if you look up all the examples of "hate crimes" on the FBI list, the list is completely irrelevant to what I said -- it lists hate crimes regarding "gender," "gender identity," "disability," "commerce violations," "drug offenses," "gambling offenses," and many more examples of hate crimes having nothing to do with racism, let alone racism on campuses. It was fraudulent of PolitiFact to cite the FBI stats.

So, then, here are just a few examples of race hoaxes concerning graffiti and nooses on campuses over the last 15 years. If PolitiFact can show that these examples are not in fact hoaxes or, alternatively, provide an equal number of verified examples, PolitiFact's assessment of my claim may be valid. If PolitiFact cannot do so, it lied.

In 2007, Madonna G. Constantine, a psychology and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, claimed she found a noose at her door. ABC News described her as "a respected professor at Columbia University Teachers College... This incident is the latest in a growing number of noose incidents in the United States, since the one that punctuated the racially charged controversy in Jena, LA." 

The subsequent investigation revealed that Constantine made it all up. And it also turned out that the racial controversy about a "noose incident" in Jena, Louisiana, had nothing to do with a noose.

In 2013, Oberlin College shut down classes after a series of purported hate crimes. According to The Oberlin Review... anti-black and anti-gay vandalism/"hate speech" have plagued the campus. "Whites Only" was written above a water fountain, "N----- Oven" was written inside the elevator, and "No N-----s" was written on a dormitory bathroom door. Activists implied the incidents were tied to Black History Month, as was a menacing person on campus who allegedly donned a "KKK hood and robe" near a black dormitory known as "Afrikan Heritage House."

It was all a hoax. No one wore a KKK hood and robe. It was a woman wearing a coat. Cornell University law professor William Jacobson, who tracked the Oberlin story on his blog, Legal Insurrection, said the fraudulent incidents "may be the greatest race hoax since Tawana Brawley."

In 2013, at Vassar College, messages such as "Avoid Being B-----s," "F--- N-----s," and "Hey Tranny. Know Your Place" were all a hoax carried out by the left-wing leader of the school's official "Bias Incident Response Team."

In 2013, at the University of Iowa, a black student claimed he was beaten up at a bar, prompting massive campus outrage. But police later determined the alleged victim was actually "an active participant and even an instigator" in the bar brawl. 

In 2013, at Clemson University, administrators accused white students of a "hate-crime" -- banana peels hanging from a tree branch -- they knew was a hoax. The incident was dubbed "bananagate."

"Why are phony 'hate crimes' so common, especially on college campuses?" James Taranto asked in The Wall Street Journal on May 2, 2013. Why didn't PolitiFact, which has been around since 2007, rate Taranto?

In 2014, a University of Chicago student who claimed his Facebook page was hacked and filled with racist and violent messages against him and another student faked the attack. He was a white leftist.

In 2015, a Muslim University of Texas student claimed she was stalked and threatened by an anti-Muslim man with a gun. She later confessed she made up the incident.

In 2015, University of Delaware students discovered three "nooses" near the hall where the Black Lives Matter group had protested conservative commentator Katie Pavlich the day before. It turned out the objects were "remnants of paper lanterns" leftover from a previous event.

In 2015, a bag of poop was found on the doorstep of Vanderbilt University's Black Cultural Center. Most of the school initially believed it was put there due to racism. It turned out that a blind female student walking her dog could not find a trash can to throw away the guide dog's excrement.

In 2015, at Kean University, the person behind the "i will kill every black male and female at kean university" tweet and other similar ones was a black female activist, a former president of its Pan-African Student Union.

In 2015, at Delta College in Michigan, a social media post read, "I'm going to shoot every black person I can on campus. Starting tomorrow morning." It was posted by a black student.

In 2014, a Grand Valley State University student who found racist graffiti -- "black b---- die" and "f--- black history month" -- on her dorm room door's whiteboard in mid-February was the person who put it there, the Grand Valley Police Department announced.

In 2016, at Elon University in North Carolina, a scribbled "Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista" after the 2016 election turned out to be written by a Latino student. 

In 2016, three black SUNY-Albany students fabricated a racial hate crime. They alleged they were the targets of racial slurs and attacked by a group of white men on a bus. But video evidence and 911 audio showed the women were the instigators. 

In 2016, ABC News reported that Bowling Green University "police say student lied about politically driven attack." Eleesha Long (a black student) said she was assaulted and called a racial slur, but she made the story up.

In 2016, a female Muslim Baruch College student who claimed she was assaulted on a New York subway train by "three drunk white men" shouting "Donald Trump!" was arrested for making up the whole thing.

In 2017, The College Fix chronicled 17 race hoaxes on campuses. 

One example: "The University of Southern California's Department of Public Safety confirmed that the person who had adhered a sign reading 'No Black People Allowed' that featured a makeshift confederate flag and '#MAGA' on a gate of a campus residence was African American."

Another example: "Some black Air Force Academy cadets discovered racial slurs written on their dorm doors, including 'Go home n-----.'" Two months later, a black student was determined to have written the slurs.

In 2017, a black man filed a false police report about graffiti containing the N-word and a threat he painted on his own car near Kansas State University.

In 2018, The College Fix determined the student responsible for racially charged graffiti found at the University of Maryland was black.

In 2018, a threat on social media that had targeted African American students at Chesapeake High School in Maryland was written by a black student.

In 2018, a black student at Goucher College was charged with malicious destruction of property after investigators determined he was responsible for graffiti that targeted specific individuals -- including himself.

In 2021, The College Fix "identified eleven confirmed hoaxes [and] six likely hoaxes."

In 2022, Illinois law enforcement announced that a black female student at Southern Illinois University would be charged with filing a false police report claiming she received notes saying, "DIE B----" and "BLACK PEOPLE DON'T BELONG."

PolitiFact is owned by the Poynter Institute, a left-wing organization funded in part by George Soros. The primary purpose of Poynter and PolitiFact is to malign conservatives, just as they did me. But the real punk in this story is Brian Levin, director of the hate center known by its Orwellian name, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. Let him provide an equal or greater number of true examples of N-word graffiti and nooses on campuses placed by white supremacists. If he doesn't, he is lying. Which would not be surprising. As I've said all of my life, truth is a liberal value and it is a conservative value. It is not a left-wing value.

Dennis Prager COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM

FDA Will Ease Enforcement of Baby Formula Regulations To Address Shortage

FDA Will Ease Enforcement of Baby Formula Regulations To Address Shortage

Elizabeth Nolan Brown5.17.2022 9:30 AM

(Ivy Ceballo/ZUMA Press/Newscom)

Easing labeling and WIC rules is expected to get more baby formula to consumers. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has emerged as one major impediment to ending America's current shortage of baby formula. Now, the agency is taking small steps to get out of the way.

The infant formula shortage arose in response to a recall of formulas produced at an Abbott Laboratories facility in Michigan and the temporary shutdown of that plant.

In a healthy and competitive environment, the shutdown of one facility shouldn't have sent such shock waves through the formula market of the entire country. But the American baby formula market is both highly concentrated and a beneficiary of immense government protectionism in the form of trade restrictions and other regulations. Easing some of these rules and fees could allow more foreign formula to flood U.S. shelves, alleviating the current shortage and ending the state-created hold that a few big companies have over the U.S. market.

Baby formulas made in the European Union could be a good substitute since many of them already meet most safety and nutritional standardsset by the FDA. But because a lot of these formula brands don't meet all FDA labeling requirements, they've been placed on the agency's "red alert" list, meaning they cannot be imported, sold, or purchased here and shipments will be detained if discovered.

Formula brands can be placed on this list for "transgressions" that are incredibly minor, such as not listing nutrients in a specific order or failing to include step-by-step pictures of how to prepare the formula in close proximity to the written directions for use. This means failure to meet these very specific yet arbitrary labeling rules can keep perfectly safe and nutritious formula from getting to U.S. customers.

On Monday, the FDA announced that it would temporarily ease enforcement of some labeling rules in order to allow for the importation of foreign formulas that meet U.S. safety and nutrition regulations but may run afoul of label requirements. To this end, the FDA issued new guidance for baby formula manufacturers, foreign and domestic, effective now through November 14, 2022.

"Today's action paves the way for companies who don't normally distribute their infant formula products in the U.S. to do so efficiently and safely," said FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf in a statement. "We anticipate that those products that can quickly meet safety and nutrition standards could hit U.S. stores in a matter of weeks."

Current regulations "require an infant formula manufacturer to submit notice (i.e., a new infant formula submission) to FDA at least 90 days before the infant formula is introduced or delivered for introduction into interstate commerce," notes the agency in the new guidance. To be permitted, infant formula must contain specified levels of protein, fat, essential fatty acids, 15 vitamins, and 12 minerals, as well as meet FDA labeling requirements.

Under the new guidance, the FDA will decide on a case-by-case basis whether "to allow the introduction into interstate commerce (including importation) of infant formula that is safe and nutritionally adequate, but that may not comply with all statutory and regulatory requirements." Formula manufacturers can submit safety and nutrition information to the FDA to be granted a reprieve from enforcement of these regulations. 

"The extent to which we exercise enforcement discretion may vary," states the new FDA guidance on baby formula:

For example, an infant formula whose label does not list the nutrients in the order required … would need an exercise of enforcement discretion regarding that particular labeling requirement, and FDA may determine that enforcement discretion is appropriate. In contrast, an infant formula whose level for a specific nutrient is below the minimum that we require or does not contain a specific nutrient we require might not be an appropriate candidate for enforcement discretion, especially if the low level or absence of the nutrient could present a safety issue for infants.

The Biden administration is also urging states to loosen up other regulations that are making it harder for American families to find and buy baby formula right now.

"About half of infant formula nationwide is purchased by participants using WIC benefits," noted the White House in a fact sheet last week, referring to the federally run nutrition program for low-income women, infants, and children. Because of this, WIC program requirements for eligible formula (set by both the federal government and states) greatly influence the type of formula that U.S. manufacturers produce.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture "is urging states to allow WIC recipients to use their WIC benefits on a wider variety of products so that if certain sizes or types of formula are out of stock, they can use their benefits on those that are in stock," stated the White House. "And, USDA is urging states to relax their requirements that stores keep a certain amount of formula in stock. This will offer relief to retailers and allow companies to manage inventories to meet demand."

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials eased rules regarding everything from telemedicine to take-out sales of alcoholic beverages, showing that many of these rules weren't necessary in the first place. Perhaps one silver lining of the current formula crisis is that it will do the same thing for excessive regulation of baby formula.

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Do Kamala’s speechwriters secretly hate her?

It really is the only logical explanation.

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort

You know, back in 2017, I suggested that whoever maintained then-Senator Kamala Harris’ Twitter account secretly hated her because Kamala’s tweets made her sound like a complete idiot. And now I’m starting to suspect Vice President Kamala’s speechwriters secretly hate Kamala too.

Who am I kidding? Secretly? There’s no “secretly” about it at this point.

We all know how terrible Kamala is at speaking extemporaneously.

Like this:

And this:

The woman is incapable of formulating a coherent sentence on the fly.

I’ve also pointed out how much Kamala relies on the phrase “in terms of” when speaking off the cuff. It’s like a rhetorical burp she interjects whenever she’s struggling to find her way to a point.

But when Kamala’s speechwriters are the ones providing the script, shouldn’t we expect a more polished product?

If Kamala’s speechwriters wanted her to sound articulate and smart, she would sound articulate and smart.

But even in her prepared speeches, Kamala still sounds like a fourth-grader giving a book report on a book she didn’t read.

This is the latest example of remarks prepared in advance by Kamala’s speechwriters:

As always, it’s best to read it out loud to yourself:

“That is especially true when it comes to the climate crisis, which is why we will work together and continue to work together to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements that we will convene to work together on to galvanize global action.”

Good gracious. That’s one long run-on sentence.

Reading it out loud really hammers it home, doesn’t it?

Kamala’s speechwriters hate her. There is no other explanation for that hot mess of a run-on sentence.

But you know, that “work together” part sounds a little familiar.

I think Kamala’s speechwriters cribbed it from these remarks when Veep went to France:

“We must together work together. To see where we are, where we are headed, where we are going in our vision for where we should be. But also see it as a moment, yes, to together address the challenges and to work on the opportunities.”

I’m telling you, they hate this woman as much as the person who ran her Twitter feed when she was a Senator.

Then again, given how awful Kamala is to work for, it doesn’t surprise me in the least if the people who haven’t quit on her yet are spending their time finding ways to make her sound ridiculous every time she opens her mouth.