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The Other Thanksgiving Story

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By Neland Nobel

It really is about being grateful, which is something too few of our spoiled citizens appreciate.  But since the holiday is being weaponized by “woke culture”, there are some other elements of the story to think about.

The short version, the way it is taught today, is that greedy Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Bay.  Half of the Pilgrims died from disease and starvation the first winter. Befriended by kind Indians, they barely survived and gave thanks to the Almighty.  Then, the Pilgrims went on to colonize the natives.  Today, one of the Indian tribes most closely associated with the Pilgrims regrets they gave them help.

Thus like Columbus Day, much of the meaning of Thanksgiving gets lost in the culture wars of today.  It has been turned into a story about the evils of colonizing and European culture, and an elevation of the indigenous to almost mythical levels.

It really is about being grateful, which is something too few of our spoiled citizens appreciate.  But since the holiday is being weaponized by “woke culture”, there are some other elements of the story to think about.

What are the sheer odds of things coming together the way they did?  If not a product of Devine Providence, the story is remarkable by the extremely low odds things could unfold the way they did.

One of the first is being blown off course and landing precisely at a spot where native people had been wiped out by a plague.  If one had to land in cold Massachusetts, they by chance found a good spot.  They found depopulated villages, mass graves, and a Wampanoag society devasted well before the Pilgrims arrived.  They did not seize native land, it was abandoned.

As to the help they received, the story of Squanto is remarkable just for its improbability.  Taken likely by English sailors fishing the region, he was sold into slavery, wound up in Spain, learned European languages, was befriended by religious monks, and remarkably then returned to his people who had been wiped out. He did not die in slavery, did not succumb to European diseases, and was likely one of the only English-speaking natives in the whole region.  And, he showed up just in the nick of time and preferred to live his life among the English until his death.  What are the odds of that?

His introduction was just as improbable.  Another Indian, who had learned some English named Samoset contacted the Pilgrims.  His first words were reported to be “do you have any beer”, a question that can be appreciated today as well.  It was through this colorful introduction that Squanto met the Pilgrims and helped them learn planting procedures.

Then there is the strategic alliance formed between the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims. 

The Indians of North America had not reached the level of sophistication of their fellow tribesmen in South America.  They did not have the wheel, work metals, a recorded language, or writing.  They were stone age people set on a collision course with a more technologically advanced “alien” civilization.  Wherever that occurred, in Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, or Australia, the outcome would not be good for the natives.

The leader of the Wampanoag, Massasoit, knew his plague-weakened tribe was in serious trouble.  But the threat was not the Pilgrims. An aggressive and more powerful tribe, the Narragansetts, would likely subjugate his people.  It was not uncommon among North American tribes to kill and torture their rivals, seize their land, enslave their women and children, and on occasion, eat them.

Lost by most is the diplomatic maneuvering that occurred.  Massasoit sought out the Pilgrims for a military alliance against another tribe.  The Pilgrims entered into a peace treaty with them.  The treaty provisions basically said that none of Massasoit’s men would harm the Pilgrims, and if they did, they would be sent to the Pilgrims for punishment and if anyone went to war with Massasoit, the Pilgrims and their flintlocks would come to their aid.  Does that sound like colonizing to you?

To be sure, unjust things to native Americans occurred later, but why blame the Pilgrims?

Further, several years later, Massasoit became gravely ill and went blind.  The Pilgrims were sent out to visit him and were told he was dead.

But, they found Massasoit alive but near death, and one Edward Winslow gave him medicine, scraped his throat, and gave him chicken soup (no kidding). The chief regained his eyesight, began to eat once again, and recovered.  

Grateful for the care, Massasoit revealed a plot by other Indians to wipe out the Pilgrims.  Armed with this vital intelligence, Miles Standish, with the help of Massasoit’s men, defeated the plot before it could materialize.  Massasoit remained a friend of the Pilgrims until his death. Does that sound like colonizing to you?

What are the odds that the primitive medicine practiced by the Pilgrims could work such miracles on Massasoit, and that he in turn would reveal a plot by other Indians to destroy the Pilgrims?

Isn’t it interesting that those today who hate the idea of migrants from Europe landing in North America are the ones in favor of migrants displacing the people in Texas and Arizona?

And as to the Indian leaders today who take to the Washington Post to voice their regrets about helping the Pilgrims, both the Post and the Indian leaders are guilty of “presentism”, or view all historical events through the prism of today’s woke ideology.

Both sides cooperated with each other for good reason.  They needed each other for survival. It might not be too much to say that descendants today of the Wampanoag might not be around to criticize the Pilgrims were it not for the alliance formed between Massasoit and the Europeans.

Finally, in the diary of William Bradford, we learn about another challenge the Pilgrims beat.  This is one of their own makings.  It was socialism.

At first, all production was to be shared, regardless of one’s effort.  Individuals farmed collective land.  As a result, production dropped and starvation stalked the land.  There was no incentive to work.  Basically, it was “universal basic income”. Bradford reversed course, allowing private plots and making individuals responsible for themselves.  The Pilgrims were not only saved by Squanto, but by capitalism.

So there is a lot of interesting history in the back story to Thanksgiving to reflect upon if you can get through the distortions so frequently pedaled today.  Even the nature of history itself is a subject of the Thanksgiving experience.  It is said that history is written by the victors.  Today, it is written by the victors on behalf of the losers. 

The Pilgrims put much of their history down in writing.  The natives used oral history.  The quality of the two is not equivalent.  It is hard enough to get the facts straight and interpreted fairly from original written documents. But oral history has no objective tether to the facts.  Just listening to the yarns of relatives should prove that to you.  Ever notice how events you were party to get changed over the years, embellished sometimes beyond recognition?

Try to have an accurate depiction of events passed on down from 400 years ago.  It is just not possible.  This truth is likely painful to those that revere “oral history.”

No, the Pilgrims were not perfect, but they were not devils either.  The treaty with the Wampanoag, initiated by Massasoit is evidence of that, as was their medical care of him.

It is not a good thing for a nation to have every element of its history turned into an evil crime.  A strong civilization should be able to critique itself, but constant exaggeration and selective negative history can undermine belief in one’s country and civilization.  Why defend it, if that is the case?

A nation’s history is not solely defined by its shortcomings, nor is its destiny. The Pilgrims conducted themselves pretty well given the time in which they lived.

Those who want to undermine America use distortions of history for their own purposes.

Thanksgiving is actually a remarkable and improbable story.  It either was divine intervention or one of the most implausible sets of circumstances one can imagine.

Those actually participating in the events were religious and saw their salvation in religious terms.  Their survival hung on a miraculous set of events.

Today, we can look back at the development of a wonderful country that has its warts to be sure, but still remains a beacon to those who want to find a better life.

We have not been wiped out by war, disease, socialism, or starvation.  Lots of people have had that fate.  We haven’t.  Be thankful for that.

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Arizona Charter School Students Outperforming Most of Nation

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By Tom Joyce

If Arizona eighth-grade charter school students were a separate state, they would rank first nationally in math.

Arizona’s charter schools, if separated from their public school counterparts, have eighth graders that perform at higher levels than nearly any other state.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, better known as the Nation’s Report Card, found that Arizona district and charter students scored at approximately the national average in fourth and eighth-grade math and reading NAEP testing.

But, the analysis found that eighth-grade charter school students in Arizona significantly outperformed others. If Arizona eighth-grade charter school students were a separate state, they would rank first nationally in math and second in reading, only behind New Jersey.

“State and federal testing has repeatedly demonstrated that Arizona charter schools and students consistently outperform their district counterparts, despite receiving nearly $2,000 less in per-pupil funding,” Dr. Matthew Ladner, Director of the Arizona Center for Student Opportunity, said in a press release. “The past few years have been difficult for all schools, but we applaud Arizona charter schools for continuing to raise the bar for student achievement in our state.”

The NAEP exam is usually given to a random sampling of fourth and eighth-grade students in every state each year. It was suspended in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the test resumed in 2022. The results also indicate that there has been a decline in academic progress due to the government’s reaction to the pandemic, particularly in math.

In Arizona, fourth-grade students in both district and charter schools saw a decline in mathematics and reading scores in that stretch.

However, on eighth-grade math and reading, Arizona charter students scored about one full grade level better than their district peers.

“Arizona charter schools helped lead our state’s academic recovery following the Great Recession,” Dr. Ladner said in the release. “The challenges Arizona students now face are arguably even bigger now, but I am confident in the creativity, innovation and expertise of the charter sector to once again lead the way.”

*****

This article was published by Chalkboard Review and is reproduced with permission.

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Kathy Hoffman Concedes in Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Race

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By Tom Joyce

Photo Credit: Matt York/AP Photo

Incumbent Democrat Kathy Hoffman conceded in the race for Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction on Thursday morning [November 17].

Hoffman trailed Republican Tom Horne by 8,718 votes as of Thursday morning. Horne was leading the race 50.2% to 49.8%, according to the Arizona Secretary of State’s office.

Here is the concession statement Hoffman posted on her Facebook page:

“After a hard-fought race, we came up short. I want to thank my supporters, volunteers, and staff who stood by me during this election. And I especially want to thank my family for all of their love and support.

“Serving as Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction has been among the greatest honors and privileges of my life. I’m proud of the incredible work we did. And I remain more inspired than ever by the amazing students, educators, and schools across our state. Our future is bright because of you.

“Lastly, congratulations to Katie Hobbs, Adrian Fontes for Arizona Secretary of State, Senator Mark Kelly, Yes On 308 and every pro public education school board candidate for their wins. Our state will be in better hands with you all at the helm.”

Hoffman served one term as the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction. She won her 2018 bid for the position before facing this defeat.

For Horne, 77, this is a familiar post.

Previously, Horne served two terms as the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction from 2003 to 2011. Then, he served as Arizona’s Attorney General from 2011 to 2015. However, he lost a primary to fellow Republican Mark Brnovich when running for re-election in 2014.

Horne had not issued any statement on his victory as of Thursday morning.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square – AZ and is reproduced with permission.

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The Dangers of Woke Law

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By John O. McGinnis

Paul Clement, the best Supreme Court advocate of his generation, won an epochal Second Amendment victory for his clients this past summer. The august law firm of Kirkland & Ellis, where he was a partner, rewarded him by offering the choice of dropping his clients or leaving the firm. And he left. His representation of an individual’s right to bear arms had likely offended the sensibilities of many of his partners and associates because they did not like this kind of liberty.

This defenestration is the analogue in the law firm world to what is happening at many elite college campuses: a pall of orthodoxy has descended that brooks little or no dissent. And just as orthodoxy on campus undermines the epistemically open function that universities perform in liberal societies, so do actions like that of Kirkland & Ellis undermine the function lawyers must perform to support the liberal order.

The notion that ours is a “government not of men, but of laws” is central to the classically liberal theory of politics. A government of men controls by discretion but a government of laws controls by rules which are transparent to the public and allow citizens to plan. But laws are often not entirely clear, so men and women legitimately dispute over their content. Thus, a central purpose of the legal system is to clarify the content of these rules through adversarial presentations that result in authoritative decisions by neutral tribunals.

This function of law has implications for the responsibilities of lawyers. In representing clients, they provide a service to society as a whole by making arguments that result in the clarification and application of the rules that govern us. Thus, even if they are representing someone open to moral criticism, like an alleged criminal or tortfeasor, they help the world by clarifying the law.

It is not a fair criticism, therefore, to complain about lawyers’ representation so long as they make arguments within the bounds of the law. Indeed, they may even disagree with the actions they defend. John Adams, an undoubted American patriot, famously defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. Nor should a lawyer abandon a client once representation is undertaken, as Kirkland tried to force Clement to do, because the client or the cause he espouses has become unpopular.

The Servant of the Damned by David Enrich is premised on a new illiberal order of law, where law firms should eschew bad corporations (“the damned”), even if these clients have plausible or even winning arguments on the merits. The book is a sustained attack on one law firm, Jones Day, but its broader message comports with what may be called “woke law.” Only those deemed virtuous enough or those with causes deemed virtuous by people like Enrich deserve excellent representation, except for alleged criminals, who must continue to have a constitutional right to counsel. And not surprisingly, the law firm attacked is one that has a critical mass of conservative lawyers (although, like almost all of its peers, most of its lawyers’ political contributions go to Democrats). Enrich’s normative thesis is linked to a more descriptive one: that law firms once operated with more virtue but now have become greedy mercenaries, ready to represent anyone with enough cash. Jones Day also exemplifies this transformation as it grew from a Cleveland firm to a global powerhouse.

Enrich is an indefatigable reporter of fact, and the one benefit of his book is that he provides enough facts to undermine both his normative and descriptive thesis if the proper context is added. For instance, while he condemns Jones Day for representing various modern corporations, like tobacco companies and polluters, he celebrates the older version of the firm for representing a steel company that in the 1950s defied President Truman’s order to seize its mills. What he leaves out is that this executive order was issued to end a labor dispute on terms favorable to labor unions and was necessary, according to Truman, to win the war in Korea. Under the standards that encourage lawyers to determine the virtue of their clients’ underlying cause, that representation could have easily been dismissed as advancing the interests of a greedy, unpatriotic company at the expense both of workers and the national war effort. With the hindsight of history, that perspective is wrong, because whatever one thought of the company and Truman’s policy, the Jones Day lawyers advanced a plausible separation of powers argument about the appropriately circumscribed role of the executive. The result of their efforts was the landmark decision in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, which held that the President can regulate our property only with authorization from Congress.

When in more recent times, lawyers at Jones Days represent tobacco companies pursuing claims that their advertising is protected as commercial speech, they are advancing our legal system no less than their predecessors. Their clients might be impugned, but their arguments help define the contours of an important First Amendment doctrine. Even when these lawyers show that the illness of a sympathetic plaintiff was caused not by smoking but by other poor health habits, lawyers are serving the legal system by forcing proof of causation—one of the key elements in a typical tort suit. Perhaps the Constitution should be amended or tort law revised, but in a government of laws, those rules must govern until changed according to the rules of the system.

Law firms became bigger because government became bigger, creating, ex ante, a need for more lawyers to comply with regulation and, ex post, a need for more lawyers to address the litigation generated by regulation.

Enrich does note that in two cases Jones Day lawyers were accused of ethical breaches which went beyond zealous representation of their clients. And here I have much sympathy with his concern as an abstract matter: both the judiciary and bar need to do a better job at enforcing ethical rules on attorneys, regardless of whom they represent. (For instance, the state auditor of California recently showed that the state bar failed to discipline even lawyers who repeatedly violated the rules of professional responsibility.) But Enrich overreaches in his certainty that the allegations against Jones Day lawyers show that it is a particularly bad firm. Indeed, there was never a final determination that any ethical breach occurred. In one case, the firm settled on terms that even Enrich recognizes were not unfavorable to Jones Day. Lawyers of all people recognize that settling litigation even when your side is right can be wise, because litigation is costly and uncertain. And in the other case, the appellate court reversed the sanction of the district court. Enrich says that the reversal was on a technicality, but the “technicality” went to the lower court’s failure to give the lawyer proper notice about the sanction. Again, Enrich has trouble recognizing that such enforcement of technicalities is one way that courts protect our liberties.

His descriptive thesis about why Jones Day and other firms have become businesses-like behemoths without as much regard for professional norms is not strong either. He credits Steven Brill’s claim that the publication of law firm revenues and profits in his magazine, The American Lawyer, was the reason that firms focused on the bottom line and began to poach the stars at other firms.

But legal journalism was the result rather than the cause of the forces making law firms bigger, more competitive, and thus of more public interest. They became bigger because government became bigger, creating, ex ante, a need for more lawyers to comply with regulation and, ex post, a need for more lawyers to address the litigation generated by regulation. While Enrich seems to deplore the fact the law firms started to add lobbying to their arsenal of weapons, he quotes John McCain as denouncing of one Jones Day’s clients: “Such companies must be judged guilty until proven innocent.” With legislators like that, is it any wonder law firms felt the need to expand into lobbying to advance their core role of protecting their clients’ liberty and property from governmental overreach?

Law also became more competitive. To be fair, Enrich does note that the Supreme Court permitted legal advertising, but he does not make enough of the importance of that decision in leading to competition: a firm poaches famous lawyers in part because they advertise the power of the firm. And even more important than advertising has been the rise of powerful general counsel at corporations—again driven by the increased importance of regulation—who monitor and pit law firms against one another for the best delivery of legal services. Thus, as lawyers have become more important actors in a highly regulated society, the best naturally command ever higher compensation and competitive demand for their talents, and law firms need ever larger armies of foot soldiers to support them. There is no need to resort to explanations rooted in greed or innovative legal publications.

The objectivity in Enrich’s book is also marred by his patently left-wing politics. The damned are always corporations rather than regulators, even if regulators can themselves decrease economic growth and competition, harming millions of people. Moreover, one of the bases of his indictment of Jones Day is that more of their attorneys went to work for Donald Trump than from any other law firm. Enrich clearly dislikes Trump and his policies, but he never shows that the Jones Day lawyers acted unethically in their work for him as President. Some became judges as a result, but rewarding good lawyers in this way is something that happens in every administration. Some Jones Day lawyers became disgruntled with the firm’s representation of Trump, but given the intense feelings Trump elicited, that is not a surprise either.

Enrich’s disdain for the conservative side of the political spectrum manifests itself in some obvious mistakes. He says, for instance, that as a law professor, Antonin Scalia “helped establish the Federalist Society to put conservatives on the federal bench.” The Federalist Society was actually established by a handful of students in the early 1980s to inject some greater debate at monolithically left-wing law schools. The idea that a student organization even with the help of a law professor could influence the selection of federal judges would have been regarded as risible at the time. As the Federalist Society grew in the following decades to become a network of lawyers as well students, some of those lawyers themselves became influential in judicial selection, although the Society took no position on judges or on any other legal issue, unlike other legal organizations such as the ABA.

There is a widespread debate about whether we have hit “peak wokeism.” Whatever the answer in the wider world, Kirkland’s parting with Clement and the publication of Enrich’s book both suggest that the answer in the legal profession is no. And when lawyers are canceled for representing clients with plausible legal arguments, the results are worse than campus wokeism, because legal representation protects the rule of law and thus the liberty of us all.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

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PARENT TO SCHOOL BOARD: “Am I a Cat?”

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By Editorial Staff

Editors’ Note: We urge all readers of The Prickly Pear to watch this short video presentation by a very astute and wise mother speaking truth to power at a school board meeting. It is tragic that this reality check  from a parent to a ‘woke’ school board actively destroying the reality and critical thinking of America’s children needs to occur but it is critical that it does. Parents must have a ‘life or death’ fighting mindset for the proper education (not indoctrination) of our children and the restoration of our nation. The ‘wokeness’ brought by teachers, their unions, and the ‘diversity’ idiocy of too many school board members must be stopped now.

A parent dressed in a cat costume at a school board meeting and “identified as a cat”. Her speech was clear, concise, and powerful. It also revealed the absurd notion that a grown man with mental health issues and enjoys dressing up in high heels and lip stick, has any business teaching our children in the classroom.

Woman demonstrates on how to handle a school board pic.twitter.com/w3xGGsVopg

— • ᗰISᕼKᗩ™ • (@kingojungle) November 16, 2022

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Education as a Battleground

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By Imprimis Digest

The following is adapted from remarks delivered on November 3, 2022, at a Hillsdale College reception in Santa Clara, California.

If you want to see the problem with American education, look at a chart illustrating the comparative growth in the number of students, teachers, and district administrators in our public schools in the period between 2000 and 2019. (See the chart here.) The number of district administrators grew by a whopping 87.6 percent during these years, far outstripping the growth in the number of students (7.6 percent) and teachers (8.7 percent).

In illustrating the difference in these rates of growth, the chart also illustrates a fundamental change that has come over our nation as a whole during this period—a change in how we govern ourselves and how we live. To say a change is fundamental means that it concerns the foundation of things. If the foundation changes, then the things built on it are changed. Education is fundamental, and it has changed radically. This has changed everything else.

One way of describing the change in education today is that it provides a different answer than we have ever known to the question: who owns American children? Of course, no one actually owns the children. They are human beings, and insofar as they are owned, they own themselves. But by nature, they require a long time to grow up—much longer than most creatures—and someone must act on their behalf until they mature. Who is to do that?

Not many people raise this question explicitly, but implicitly it is everywhere. For example, it is contained in the question: who gets to decide what children learn? It is contained more catastrophically in the question: who decides what we tell children about sex? 

Are these decisions the province of professional educators, who claim to be experts? Or are they the province of parents, who rely on common sense and love to guide them? In other words, is the title to govern children established by expertise or by nature as exhibited in parenthood? The first is available to a professionally educated few. The second is available to any human being who will take the trouble.

The natural answer to this question is contained in the way human beings come to be. Prior to recent scientific “advances,” every child has been the result of a natural process to which people have a natural attraction. “Natural” here does not mean what every single person wants or does—it means the way things work unless we humans intervene. 

In its essence, “nature” means the process of begetting and growth by which a mature, living thing comes to be. Not quite every human being is attracted to the natural process of human reproduction, but nearly all are—and when the process works to produce a baby, it works that way and no other way. 

This process of human reproduction and growth works for two reasons. The first is that human beings, when mature, are capable of so much more than other creatures. Almost from birth we learn to talk, a rational function that indicates decisive differences from other creatures. Because of reason and speech we are moral beings, capable of distinguishing among kinds of things and therefore of knowing and doing right and wrong. Also because of them we are social beings, able to understand and explain things to one another that other creatures do not understand and cannot discuss. This draws us closer together than even herd or swarm animals. 

We are unique in possessing these capacities, and it is in this specific respect that our nation’s founders declared that “all men are created equal.” This equality has nothing to do with the color of anyone. Its source is the unique, immaterial, rational soul of the human being. One of my teachers used to respond to the claims of animal rights advocates that one must not be cruel to any creature, but that only those who can talk are entitled to vote. 

The second reason in nature that makes human reproduction unique is our especially long period of maturation. For months, human babies are simply helpless; without constant attention they will starve. For years afterwards they must develop the skills and knowledge that are uniquely available to the human being. Both the skills and the knowledge are natural, meaning all human beings can obtain them, but both take time. Each child does the work of obtaining them, but each child needs help. Modern educators often mistake the work of helping them to learn for actually doing the learning for them. The second is impossible.

The skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic are direct exercises of the rational faculty. They are in principle the same thing as talking, and in principle every child will learn much of them unassisted. Just watch a child grow up to the age of two. He or she begins very early to respond to things with comprehension. Words soon follow. Children copy adults for the use of words, but they are doing all the work of learning. Little wonder that human beings take a long time to mature: they have so much to learn. 

Raising a child has always been difficult and expensive. With rare exceptions, it has always been true that the parents who conceive the child raise him the best. And throughout American history, it has been thought that the family is the cradle of good citizenship and therefore of free and just politics. Public education is as old as our nation—but only lately has it adopted the purpose of supplanting the family and controlling parents. 

[ *** ]

The political successes of Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida, Governor Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, and many other politicians in other states have largely been won on this battleground of education. One can look in history or in literature to see the danger of where the idea of supplanting the family might lead. Study the education practices that existed in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and that exist today in Communist China. Or read the terrifying account in Orwell’s 1984. They tell us that children, by distorting their natural desire to grow up and end their dependence, can be recruited to the purposes of despotic regimes, even to the extent of denouncing their parents to the state.

We do not yet have this in America. But we do have children being turned against their country by being indoctrinated to look on its past—of which all parents, of course, are in some way a part—as a shameful time of irredeemable injustice. We also increasingly have children being encouraged to speak of their sexual proclivities at an age when they can hardly think of them. 

To cite just one example, Christopher Rufo has discovered, on the website of the Michigan Department of Education, detailed instructions for how teachers should open the question with students of their sexual orientation—or maybe I should say sexual direction, since “orientation” implies something constant, whereas children are now being taught that sexuality is “fluid” and can take them anywhere. 

Also on the website are detailed instructions on how to keep this activity from the parents. And as we learned last year, when parents get angry and complain of things like this, the FBI is likely to become interested.

Who “owns” the child, then? The choice is between the parents, who have taken the trouble to have and raise the child—and who, in almost all cases, will give their lives to support the child for as long as it takes and longer—or the educational bureaucracy, which is more likely than a parent to look upon the child as an asset in a social engineering project to rearrange government and society. 

[ *** ]

The revolutionary force behind this social engineering project is a set of ideas installed in just about every university today. Its smiting arm is the administrative state, an element of America’s ruling class. The administrative state has something over 20 million employees, many of them at the federal but most at the state level. Directly and indirectly, they make rules about half the economy, which means they affect all of it. 

Most of the bureaucrats who staff the administrative state have permanent jobs. The idea behind this was that if they do not fear dismissal and have excellent pay and benefits that can’t be reduced, then they will be politically neutral. Today, of course, the public employee unions that represent this administrative state are the largest contributors in politics and give overwhelmingly to one side. They are the very definition of partisanship.

The fiction is that these bureaucrats are highly trained, dispassionate, nonpartisan, and professional, and that therefore they can do a better job, of almost anything, than somebody outside the system can do. They proceed by rules that over time have become ever more hopelessly complex. Only they can read these rules—and, for the most part, they read them as they please. 

Judges have up to now, for the most part, given deference to the bureaucrats’ reading of their own rules. It is a rare happy fact that this judicial practice is under challenge in the courts. If it should ever become settled doctrine that the bureaucracy is constrained by the strict letter of the laws made by elected legislators and enforced by elected executives, that will exercise some restraint upon the administrative state. That explains why, after decades of defending judicial supremacy, progressives are beginning to question the authority of the courts and speak openly about packing the Supreme Court.

[ *** ]

Public education is an important component of the prevailing administrative system. The roots of the system are in Washington, D.C., and the tendrils reach into every town and hamlet that has a public school. These tendrils retain some measure of freedom, especially in red states where legislatures do not go along automatically. In some red states, the growth of administrators has been somewhat slower than average. But this growth has been rapid and large everywhere. In every state, the result has been to remove authority and money away from the schools where the students learn. In every state, the authority and money drained from the schools have flowed toward the bureaucracy. 

The political battle over this issue is fraught with dishonesty. Any criticism of public education is immediately styled as a criticism of teachers. But as the numbers show, the public education system works to the detriment of teachers and for the benefit of bureaucrats. The teachers unions themselves, some of the largest of the public employee unions, claim to be defending teachers and children. That cannot be more than half true, given that they are defending an administrative system that has grown by leaps and bounds while the number of teachers has grown very little.

Worse even than this is the tendency the system sets in all of us. Bureaucracy is a set of processes, a series of prescribed steps not unlike instructions for assembling a toy. First this happens, then that happens, and then the next thing. The processes proceed according to rules. It is a profession unto itself to gain competence in navigating these rules, but nobody is really competent. Today we tend too much to think that this kind of process is the only thing that can give legitimacy to something. A history curriculum is adopted, not because it gives a true account of the unchangeable things that have already happened, but because it has survived a process. The process is dominated by “stakeholders”—mostly people who have a financial or political interest in what is taught. They are mostly not teachers or scholars but advocates. And so we adopt our textbooks, our lesson plans, and our state standardized tests with a view to future political outcomes once the kids grow up. 

I have said and written many times that the political contest between parents and people who make an independent living, on the one hand, and the administrative state and all its mighty forces on the other, is the key political contest of our time. Today that seems truer than ever. The lines are clearly formed.

[ *** ]

As long as our representative institutions work in response to the public will, there is thankfully no need for violence. As the Declaration of Independence says, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”

The Declaration guides us in our peaceful pursuits, too. In naming the causes of the American Revolution, it gives a guide to maintaining free and responsible government. The long middle section of the Declaration accuses the King of interfering with representative government, violating the separation of powers, undermining the independence of the judiciary, and failing to suppress violence. 

And in an apposite phrase, it says of the King: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

So it is today. And so it is our duty to defend our American way of life.

AUTHOR

Larry P. Arnn

President, Hillsdale College

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

Taxpayer-funded Middle East Studies Centers at U.S. Universities Promote Anti-U.S. Propaganda and ‘Islamophobia’ Myths thumbnail

Taxpayer-funded Middle East Studies Centers at U.S. Universities Promote Anti-U.S. Propaganda and ‘Islamophobia’ Myths

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By Jihad Watch

It’s good to see the National Association of Scholars acknowledging this and documenting it in detail. Jihad Watch has been warning about and documenting it for years, and as a result has been one of the targets of the scurrilous pro-jihad, pro-Sharia propaganda mills that operate out of these compromised universities today. A whole generation has now been propagandized with the “Islamophobia” myth and much more.

U.S. gives $2.9m to Universities that promote anti-West ideologies

Open The Books, November 14, 2022:

While there are more than 50 Middle East Studies Centers at American universities, training students in the culture and languages of the region, 11 are designated National Resource Centers, which provides federal funds.

According to a new report by the National Association of Scholars, the 11 centers each get $260,000 in Title VI funding through the Department of Education to the tune of $2.9 million a year.

They are at Columbia University, George Washington University, Georgetown University, Indiana University, New York University, University of Arizona, UCLA, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, UNC/Duke University partnership.

The report, Hijacked: The Capture of America’s Middle East Studies Centers, says the centers have veered far afield their purpose, now pushing overtly anti-West ideologies focusing on social issues such as Islamophobia and immigration at the university level, and even push critical race theory to K–12 educators….

Yale University courses are frequently rife with progressive dogmas, including requiring students to read such as, “Islam Today: Jihad and Fundamentalism,” which attempts to reframe the most dangerous aspects of Islam as a “reactive force to Western colonialism,” according to the report.

“By only presenting students with books that advance a pro-immigration agenda, educators sidestep meaningful debate on the issue and bias students toward their own progressive views,” Arnold wrote in the report. “The bias of these centers has been documented for years. It’s time for taxpayers to be taken off the hook for these activist centers.”…

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED ARTICLES:

Afghanistan: Supreme leader orders full implementation of Sharia, including public executions, stonings, amputations

Austria: Muslim migrant forces his wife to wear hijab, stabs her 11 times, says ‘I just wanted to scare her’

Australia: Teen converts to Islam, plots jihad massacre at home, opts instead to blow himself up in Iraq

Italy: Muslim arrested for torture and abuse of two people, including a teenager, who refused to fight for ISIS

Morocco: Muslims chase and brutally beat LGBT person

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

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4 Realities Conservatives Must Swallow In The Wake Of The 2022 Midterms

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By Peter Burfeind

The electorate has crossed a point of no return, shattering previous assumptions conservatives had baked in.

Unlike the left, the stunning under-performance of Republicans on Tuesday should not be an opportunity for screaming at the cosmos. It’s a reality check, and the sooner we adapt to reality, the sooner we can be optimistic about the future.

So what are the realities conservatives must face based on Tuesday’s shock? I see four things.

Donald Trump Has Jumped the Shark

Donald Trump was a great president who did conventional Republican things conservatives dreamed about for decades. He’s absolutely responsible for 10,000 fewer babies being aborted due to his conservative appointments to the Supreme Court and their role in overturning Roe v. Wade. He kept us out of war. He kept Russia at bay. He brought up Chinese aggression as an issue. He kept North Korea silent. He fixed NAFTA. I could go on.

But he will never win the presidency again, and the candidates he endorses do not do well. Given the fundamentals of this election cycle, the open seats in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada should have been easy wins. Instead, they were weighed down by the Trump name and the stupid Jan. 6 incident that everyone wants to forget about except Donald Trump and those who leverage his obsession with it into a leftist passion.

Trump’s recent putdowns of Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbing him “DeSanctimonious” and telling him to back off a presidential run, were the last straw for me and many conservatives. We need to be done with him.

Two years ago, I wrote an article in these pages comparing Trump’s 2020 loss to Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death, arguing his loss will make his movement more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine. I still believe that. He’s brought new constituencies into the GOP. But a key implicit point of that argument is, Obi-Wan Kenobi died. He didn’t get in the way of Luke Skywalker’s (ahem, DeSantis’s, ahem!) rise.

‘Democrat’ Is Shorthand for ‘I Gotta Get Mine!’

The electorate has crossed a point of no return, shattering previous assumptions. Everyone predicted the fundamentals of the economy would determine harsh losses for Democrats. Yet here we are. A frighteningly close majority of voters don’t care how massive government spending combined with strangling our oil production has led to economic decline.

Clearly, a sizeable part of the electorate has baked into it a transactional relationship with the Democrat brand that gives the party a reliable handicap regardless of what’s happening in the real world. “Democrat” is now shorthand for livelihood security, essentially for one’s career in the bureaucracy or one’s government entitlements.

The Republican brand is more about principles and ideas that in the long run perform better in the aggregate. This is a hard sell among an electorate, especially among younger voters, who have not been trained to think critically about second- and third-order effects, for instance, with Biden’s student loan bailout program.

Republicans will not do well simply being against what Democrats are for. They will need to figure out a way to frame their goals in big-time, tangible ways that have a direct effect on voters and overwhelm their natural adherence to the government party.

Examples of this would be an overhaul of the public education system to a system of vouchers, constitutional amendments clarifying deployment of the armed forces, or policy positions on climate change based not on stopping it, but adapting to it through free-market forces, working with and not against the fossil fuel industry.

The GOP Must Adapt to Snowflake America

The Arizona governor race should have been an easy win for the GOP. I loved Kari Lake’s spunky, confident, in-your-face style, but she got beat by a timid snowflake who was afraid to debate her and came off as kind of mousy.

However, to many Arizona voters, Lake seems grating while something appeals to them in Hobbs. The “own the libs” tone that so many conservatives expect and love probably doesn’t work in the suburbs or college towns.

I remember a few years back, conservatives had a sporting time with “pajama boy,” the pajama-wearing millennial Obama used to market the Affordable Care Act. I thought at the time, “Who on earth is this marketing ploy appealing to?” I was troubled by voices in the conservative wilderness crying out, “Pajama boy is the future. Ignore him to your peril.”

They are right. The “pajama boy” ethos is a symptom of the new “safetyism” that’s enabled the “coddling of America.” A Hobbs “literally shaking” from a mean Lake trying to own her resonates with that safety-seeking swath of the electorate.

Adjusting to that reality doesn’t mean giving up the rugged individualism, rough-and-tumble ethos marking conservativism, but it does mean perhaps framing our goals differently. Aren’t conservatives ultimately about being the watchdogs of culture, protecting (not scaring off) the little lambs?

GOP Must Adapt to How Elections Are Run

Early voting and voting by mail completely changed how elections are run. The exciting news about polls moving favorably toward the GOP didn’t matter if much of the electorate had already voted. Democrats did not seem interested in late-October debates or even winning the argument; what do they know that we don’t know?

What they know is that elections are not about “winning votes” or even “getting out to vote” so much as they are about gathering ballots. (Read this very carefully.)

The Democrats have breached the chasm between “registered voter” and “likely voter.” That chasm used to favor the GOP. It suggested there was a part of the liberal caucus who would only vote Democratic if they had the energy to get to a voting booth. That “if” was always a big “if.”   That’s one reason why midterm elections were seasons of GOP success.

No more. Through mail-in voting and early voting, the Democrats can connect an awful lot of bodies to an awful lot of “D”-marked ballots, demanding little energy at all to do so. They understand that this is where elections are won.

Conservatives can scream at the cosmos all they want about this new reality. It’s not going away. Adapt or die. Start building an army of volunteers to guide the hands of senile rural folk, shut-ins, and off-the-radar types to the “R” box, en masse.

Conservatives Can Still Be Optimistic

There are solutions to every one of these realities, so while disappointed, I’m not as despairing as many others are. Conservatives should not be despairing. Why?  Because (1) politics is not our religion, so we’ve got other sources of optimism in our families, churches, and jobs; and (2) Horace’s dictum endures — you can chase out nature with a pitchfork, but it will always come running back.

The fundamentals of reality remain in play. As long as leftism means a compulsion toward magical thinking on the laws of nature, we will always have an ally in the natural order. But far be it from conservatives to fall for magical thinking about their future.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

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Demand They Strike Their Colors

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By Michael Watson

Emily Oster, an economics professor at Brown University, caused a stir with an opinion piece in The Atlantic, the venerable magazine now owned by liberal mega-donor Laurene Powell Jobs through her Emerson Collective. In it, Oster called for a “pandemic amnesty” for those who encouraged ultimately pointless intrusions on life amid COVID-19.

This was seized upon by one of the worst actors of the crisis, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, with a simple Twitter statement: “I agree.” To those who endured the school closures in states institutionally loyal to Weingarten and her fellow teachers’ unionists, this is like seeing a warship’s ensign flying: a sign that the adversary, whatever the reality of the situation, does not believe itself defeated.

In Denial

First, one must remember Weingarten has attempted to obscure her role in extended school closures, which are increasingly proven to have been utterly destructive to American students. Weingarten has affirmed that she and her union “wanted kids in school,” a claim that is “true” only in the most technical sense and contrary to the reality that teachers unions lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue the most restrictive “reopening” guidance possible. It is also inconsistent with the reality in states most loyal to the teachers union agenda, which saw the most extended closures long beyond the point at which a reasonable person could assume them to be necessary for public health.

Second, one looks with concern upon teachers unionists’ unwillingness to admit the costs of school closures. Consistent with her support for “amnesty,” Weingarten has attempted to deflect criticism of school closures by claiming that all students, in-person and remote alike, suffered learning loss. Unless those who discouraged school openings acknowledge the harm done by the policy, it remains “on the table” if the political winds shift again. And then there are those in Weingarten’s AFT who are more openly radical, like United Teachers Los Angeles president Cecily Mayart-Cruz, who told a journalist in 2021, “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables” in response to questions about Los Angeles’s school closures. That does not sound like a leader prepared to accept responsibility for her atrocious public policy demands.

No Surrender

Finally, one must ask if the ultra-restrictionists to whom Oster would give amnesty have in fact struck their colors and ended hostile action. Bethany Mandel—the conservative writer and children’s book editor who was famously tarred as “grandma killer” for advocating the reopening the National Zoo in Washington, DC, among other things—notes,

Even now, at the end of 2022, children who are speech-delayed—thanks to being surrounded by masked caregivers during a critical developmental stage—are, in some areas, expected to do speech therapy while wearing a mask, with a masked therapist.

Like the crew of a stricken warship that “has not yet begun to fight,” the forces of pandemic theater have not demonstrated surrender. They are suing in courts to retain their powers to force masking and even proposing new federal pandemic powers, with blame only for the supposed “tsunami of misinformation” that led “rural and conservative areas” to doubt their diktats. (For her part Mandel was proved prescient. The Friends of the National Zoo, a private nonprofit that had supported programming at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo since 1958, dissolved its partnership with the Zoo “following the debilitating financial impact of COVID-19 on both organizations” in 2021.)

There cannot be amnesty; there cannot be ceasefire, in the COVID-19 response debate until the side that engaged in hostile actions ceases those actions and gives up. Oster is in no position to offer such surrender: By the standards of her professional managerial class, she was remarkably lenient, advocating for school reopenings before they became politically necessary. The side that followed the teachers unions’ demands must strike its flag and vow never to carry out hostile action again.

Until then, alas, the fight continues.

****

This article was published by Capital Research Center and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

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Medical Education Slides Into Intolerant Wokeness

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By Thomas C. Patterson

One of the things I appreciated most during my 30 years practicing medicine in Community Hospital ERs was that there, race just didn’t matter very much. ERs were open to all and there was one standard of care for all races and classes.

That was then. Today a wave of intolerant wokeness is sweeping over the house of medicine, insisting that medicine is shot through with systemic racism and that research and education efforts must be diverted from medical science to “dismantling white supremacy“ in medicine.

The Association of American Medical Colleges recently introduced their new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) guidelines, which require that all medical students be taught to practice “allyship” when “witnessing injustice such as “microaggressions”.

Residents should use their more advanced knowledge of intersectionality in making clinical decisions. (Just when you thought that race-based medical protocols were in our dark past.). Faculty are charged with teaching how “systems of power, privilege, and oppression inform policies and practices”.

Medical schools are enthusiastically falling in line. Examples abound. In 2021 the Anti-racism Task Force at Columbia and the Diversity Task Force at Indiana University, joined by the University of Texas and other medical schools, endorsed the recommended AAMC “competencies”. “Health equity“ concepts have become a prominent component of medical education.

The University of North Carolina is one of many schools that not only teach “social justice“ and “anti-racism“, but use medical school applications to ensure compliance with principles of diversity in race, gender, and sexual orientation. Applicants who demonstrate reluctance toward the DEI agenda are weeded out in the application process. Oregon Health and Science University faculty are among those evaluated on their “DEA, anti-racism and social justice core competencies“ in performance appraisals.

The University of Arizona is on board too, with some additional twists. All faculty and staff are required to complete six hours of DEI training and complete one Implicit Association Test annually (in spite of its dubious relevance). Each of the 17 clinical departments is required to hold 3 DEI credit-eligible events per year. All departments also have designated “diversity champions“ to oversee compliance and round up laggards.

This is bad, very bad news for medical education, future doctors and their patients. Even before DEI was a thing, the quality of medical instruction had been in decline. Incoming students are less qualified and fail rates on board exams are climbing, partly because some students from groups that have been historically underserved are either allowed to skip the Medical College Admissions Test or are admitted with lower scores than those required from white and Asian applicants.

But instead of beefing up instruction in anatomy, physiology, and other disciplines that might come in handy when actually practicing medicine, medical schools are spending instructional time on such matters as white privilege and anti-racism, including critical race theory.

CRT includes the notion that white people are inherently prejudiced against people of color and that there really is nothing they can do but acknowledge their defect, apologize and grant compensating privileges to people of contrasting skin color, who by definition are incapable of bigotry. Dissenters from this new orthodoxy can be accused of “micro-aggressions” and “repressive practices” with ominous repercussions for their careers.

This intellectual intolerance also extends to those skeptical of “gender-affirming care“ for adolescents, the new practice of providing permanent medical and surgical alterations to gender-confused school children, so that they can for the rest of their lives pretend to be the gender they choose when a teen. What could go wrong?

Several countries, including the UK, Sweden, and France are now pulling back from relying on the judgments of impressionable adolescents for such drastic remediation, but dissenters in the US are still punished.

Medical educators who teach students that racism and mutilation are okay when officially approved should humbly recall the history of their own profession. Modern medicine has been of immeasurable benefit to mankind. But when evidence-based science is ignored and authority replaces free inquiry, bad things happen.

Bleeding and purging, eugenics, thalidomide, lobotomies and nonsterile wound probing are among the historical results. It is the duty of the medical profession to protect us from such horrors, not promote them.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

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EXPLICIT: Prestigious Connecticut Private School Educator Details Sexual Fantasies with High School Students

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By Project Veritas

*CLICK HERE TO TWEET THE VIDEO*

Project Veritas released a new video today exposing an educator working at a prestigious Connecticut private school, Iman Rasti, for sexually explicit statements he made about his current high school students.

Rasti, Director of Greens Farms Academy’s Writing Center, teaches Middle School English, and is the Seventh Grade Dean, was recorded fantasizing about young female pupils. He even admits that his thoughts could get him in trouble at work.

Here is some of what is featured in the video:

  • Iman Rasti, Director of Writing Center; Middle School English Teacher; Seventh Grade Dean at Greens Farms Academy: “That possibly means me losing my job, my reputation — it’s way too risky. Like, one thing they [students] do these days, they sit down in front of me, they purposefully sit down somewhere in the class that is literally directly in front of me. They spread their legs wide open and that is just brutal. Brutal.”
  • Rasti: “Every day there is different panties on: green, black, white and they [students] make sure — it’s like they talk to each other, the three of them do that.”
  • Rasti: “They open their legs, and I am teaching, and I see what I see. They make sure that the panties are positioned in a way that I actually see the thing.”
  • Rasti: “Well, how can you concentrate? How can you continue talking with your classroom when you see that? I don’t know for women — if you see, I don’t know, I guess for women it’s sexy to see a man with a hard on. Maybe it’s sexy, I don’t know…They [students] are naughty.”
  • Rasti: “So, you see a 15-year-old girl, and next year they come back to school, and she is a woman. She is a woman. There is no way — she has gained weight, just, doing nothing, so it is clear that she has had sex. A lot of sex.”
  • GREENS FARMS ACADEMY RESPONDS: “We have just been made aware of a report of inappropriate comments allegedly made by a teacher at GFA. We are placing the employee on leave and will be promptly investigating this matter and taking appropriate action.” – Michelle Levi, spokesperson for Greens Farms Academy.

You can watch the full video HERE.

As a result of these statements by Rasti, Project Veritas decided to reach out to retired State Police Officer, Corporal Thomas McAndrew, who spent 25 years on the force leading major crime investigations and profiling offenders in the state of Pennsylvania.

McAndrew said that Rasti’s remarks raise concerns.

“It’s just very concerning that he would lose that judgment — of the difference between what position he is in,” McAndrew said.

“Concern with the fact that this is where his mindset is. His mindset is not in welcoming back a teenager who is a student, but instead, he’s obsessed with a sexual connotation or the sexual aspect of that student. Why his mind would go there is very concerning. Again, fantasy is one thing, thinking it is another thing. But when he has blurred the lines and started to justify all of his behavior, it is certainly a concern to us,” he said.

“It is predatory. When somebody is this obsessed with a fantasy, it starts to rule their life. They start to move in a direction of losing the concept of reality. The reality is he’s a teacher. He’s in a power position. He should be worried about educating these children. Instead, his focus is more on constantly — it seems, constantly obsessed with sexual aspects of these children.”

*CLICK HERE TO TWEET THE VIDEO*

EDITORS NOTE: This Project Veritas video exposé is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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SCOTUS Should End Racial Categories

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By Craig J. Cantoni

For justification, the Supreme Court of the United States should look at the discriminatory consequences of a 1922 Supreme Court ruling that attempted to define “white.”   

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on the constitutionality of racial preferences in college admissions. The case was brought on behalf of Asians but applies to all “races.”

The following related questions also should be addressed by the court.

First, does the categorizing of Americans into the six racial/ethnic categories of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American lead to more or less discrimination and divisiveness?

Second, of the hundreds of unique ethnocultural groups in the US and world, which ones belong in which category?

Third, how do colleges and other institutions identify who belongs in which official category?

Those aren’t glib questions. They are critical questions in view of the fact that the six categories are used for more than college admissions. They also are used in hiring decisions, promotion decisions, and diversity and inclusion decisions.

Some say that race is obvious from physical appearance and is captured very well by the six official categories.  For example, it’s obvious that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is white and Justice Clarence Thomas is black. Besides, the argument goes, it’s the reality of human nature to see race in people’s physical appearance.

The essence of this argument is, “We know one when we see one.”

But do we? Should we?

Take Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Based solely on appearance, she’d be seen as a white justice because she looks white—or at least as white as my Italian ancestors. But she is categorized as Hispanic, due to her ethnicity. Left without their own category are scores of other ethnic groups, many of which are mired in poverty and smaller in numbers than Hispanics.

Then there is the science. Physical appearance as an indicator of race is problematic in light of DNA. Of the twenty thousand or so genes in the Human Genome, only a tiny fraction determines skin color, hair texture, facial shape, and other superficial indicators of race. Also, about three percent of the genes of many people, including probably this writer, can be traced to Neanderthals. Moreover, there is the complicating factor of intermarriage, which is like putting genes in a blender and seeing what physical appearance is the result.

The intellectual somersaults of attempting to define race would be hilarious if it were not for the injustices that such attempts have produced throughout history. Woke Americans who believe that whites were immune from such injustices are embarrassingly ignorant of history.

A history lesson:

In the early decades of the twentieth century, “white” was defined very carefully, very narrowly, and very exclusionary in America. It was defined by the Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment to mean anyone who was Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Excluded from the definition were Jews, Poles, Italians, and other peoples from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Not only were these other people seen as non-white, but they were described in the vilest language possible as being genetically, cognitively, and culturally inferior to WASPs.

The definitional issue came to a head after the First World War, when a question arose about whether all non-citizen soldiers who served in the US military had a right of return to America and ultimately citizenship.  It arose because an act called the Emergency Act was being considered in Congress to stop immigration for two years.

The case was brought on behalf of an East Indian who was denied a right of return and citizenship.

In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that of the non-native-born, citizenship was open only to whites and “persons of African descent.”  (The latter were included because of legislation that had been passed during Reconstruction.)  People of “Asiatic descent,” as the court referred to as the East Indians, were not white and thus ineligible for a right of return.   

An aside:  Ironically, East Indians now rank first in income in the US.  Perhaps this is due to them not being treated paternalistically and not becoming dependent on the welfare state.

The WASP establishment quickly found ways of getting around the decision, in order to continue treating non-WASP Europeans as non-white. One way was to use the pseudo-science of Race Science—which was very popular at the time and endorsed by leading universities—to establish that Italians and others were of Asiatic descent. Another was to subsequently pass the Immigration Act of 1924 to restrict the emigration of people from non-WASP countries.

In the meantime, the State Department did what it could to classify non-WASPs as non-white. After a visit to Europe, State Department officials wrote the following about prospective European immigrants who were not WASPs: Sicilians were “small in stature and of a low order of intelligence”; Polish and Russian Jews were “filthy, un-American and often dangerous in their habits”; and the people of Warsaw were “decidedly inferior . . . physically, mentally and morally.” (Source:  The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent.)

Similar views formed the basis of the horrific Eugenics movement, a decades-long movement that was led by leading progressives.  

The views were shared by leading newspapers, magazines, universities, and other establishment institutions. One of them was the New York Times, which warned that American institutions were being menaced by swarms of aliens who were bringing “diseases of ignorance and Bolshevism,” as well as “loathsome diseases of the flesh.”

Another was the Saturday Evening Post. Its purported expert on immigration was interviewed in Kennebunkport, Maine, by the Boston Herald. A few days later, the Herald ran the headline, DANGER THAT WORLD SCUM WILL DEMORALIZE AMERICA.

Many of those institutions still exist today but now see themselves as woke. As a result, they support racial preferences in colleges and in diversity and inclusion initiatives in government, industry, and elsewhere—preferences that exclude whites (and Asians).  They don’t define “white,” but what they mean by the word can be inferred from the ethnocultural groups that they exclude from the preferences.

WASPs are one of the excluded white groups, ironically. So are Americans of Jewish descent and of Eastern and Southern European descent. The same for scores of other whitish-looking minority groups, such as Armenians, Turks, Syrians, Greeks, and Iranians.

One hundred years ago, whites were categorized in a way that furthered discrimination.  Today, they are categorized in a way that furthers discrimination. Likewise for Asians. 

This is progress? This is social justice?

It’s time for the Supreme Court to stop the intellectual acrobatics.

*****

Craig J. Cantoni is an author and former business executive who spent a career at the vanguard of equal rights and equal opportunity.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

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Affirmative Action: Does Diversity Offer a Sporting Chance?

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By Paul Schwennesen

I received a letter yesterday from Harvard’s outgoing president Drew Gilpin Faust, asking me to close ranks against an oncoming political attack from a student-rights group that is demanding—brace yourself—that college acceptance standards be tied to scholarly excellence instead of accidents of birth. This “divisive” attack (the president’s word, not mine) from Students for Fair Admissions is attempting to advance a meritocratic agenda that will, it is feared, destroy the sacred idol of big-D Diversity.

Divisiveness and Diversity

I looked up this shadowy, reactionary group of agitators. Their mission is to “… support and participate in litigation that will restore the original principles of our nation’s civil rights movement: A student’s race and ethnicity should not be factors that either harm or help that student to gain admission to a competitive university.” The group has ties to the Republican right, which is the kiss of death in today’s toxic stew of identity politics. This is odd, because frankly Republicans have a much better track record of real commitment to egalitarian principles than the Democratic Party (which, for instance, voted overwhelmingly against the Civil Rights Act). In today’s Orwellian world, however, treating people differently based on the color of their skin is the hallmark of woke progressive thinking. Meanwhile, placing the content of someone’s character before the color of his or her skin is, well, racist.

Harvard says it will “react swiftly and thoughtfully to defend diversity as the source of our strength and our excellence … [a] diverse student body enables us to enrich, to educate, and to challenge one another.” In the abstract sense, I couldn’t agree more. Diversity is a good thing. But diversity of what, exactly? While Harvard is attempting (somewhat credibly, and probably with the best of intentions) to cobble together a variegated group of students with all the appropriate hues and gender affiliations, it is less clear they are doing an adequate job of welcoming students with a diversity of the most important trait: thought. As if student bodies were some kind of exotic menagerie, Harvard has done a fine job carefully selecting crops of students who look diverse based on superficialities, but have been notoriously poor at selecting groups of students with a diversity of intellectual persuasion.

Sporting Odds

A process that selects academic winners and losers on the basis of “background” is considered not only acceptable, but eminently desirable today. I discussed this with a friend who vigorously defended the sensibility of affirmative action programs for giving students from a less privileged background a “fighting chance” in the great race that is life.

By that logic, I asked this friend (a former college athlete), if it wouldn’t make sense to require that sports, which have remained largely clear of such social manipulations (Title IX notwithstanding) to toe the same line? Would it not be just to establish a protocol for sporting awards that manages for a diverse winner’s group that accounts for the vagaries of upbringing and relative advantages of the contestants? After all, admission to a coveted university is an “award” every bit as much as admission to an elite sporting team or gold medal. My friend found the suggestion ridiculous, even bordering on offensive.

Perhaps. As I watch Russia pummel Saudi Arabia in the World Cup, oughtn’t the Saudis who have, shall we say, a mixed history of sport, be given a sanctioned handicap against the clearly better-prepared Russians? Shouldn’t the results of the Olympic 100-meter dash account for “life experience” in ways that ensure a representative sampling?

Shouldn’t college athletic teams (let alone the NBA and NFL) hew to the same standards of ethnic diversity that drive college entrance protocols? On closer thought, my friend is right—it is indeed ridiculous and offensive.

The problem, of course, is that “commitment to diversity” is not a meaningful goal. No person, committee, or policy is wise enough to be able to judiciously micromanage the complicated set of characteristics that define “diversity.” Inevitably, in pursuit of one form of diversity, another is lost because the pursuit of diversity involves choosing winners and losers for the coveted slots in each freshman class. And next thing you know, you have Asian Americans bitterly and righteously complaining of unjustly being discriminated against at Harvard.

Commitment to excellence, and a commensurate pledge to helping others achieve it is far much more credible. If there are systematic issues with underrepresented groups (such as poor or conservative kids) effectively being locked out of the halls of wealth and privilege, then we must apply efforts toward diligently aiding those kids in the communities where they are from. Help them to write better essays, learn calculus, or play the violin, not to guess (and hope) that the accidents of their birth may happen to favor them this particular year. Help them meet and exceed entrance exam standards, rather than by playing schoolmarm wicket-keeper.  In short, make academic excellence as pure as sporting excellence.

Harvard’s president tells me that,

…as a university community, we are bound across differences by a shared commitment to learning, to pursuing truth, and to embracing the rigor and respect of argument and evidence. We never give up on the promise of a world made better by an assumption revisited, an understanding expanded, or a truth questioned—again and again and again.

Agreed. And to that end, I’d like to question the truth of Diversity as an end unto itself, to revisit the assumption that discrimination, when done by the “right people” and for the “right reasons” is okay.

*****

This article was published by Law and Liberty and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

After Destroying Your Kids’ Education, Teachers Unions Think We Should All Just Hug It Out thumbnail

After Destroying Your Kids’ Education, Teachers Unions Think We Should All Just Hug It Out

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By Christopher Jacobs

One couldn’t help but notice the ironic timing. One week after the release of results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed a historically large decline in student test scores during Covid-induced lockdowns, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten tweeted out approval of an article in The Atlantic calling for “a pandemic amnesty.”

Apart from the obvious quip of whether there’s an amnesty the left will not support, Weingarten represents perhaps the last person who has the right to advance this message. School lockdowns went on for far longer than they needed to, thanks to Weingarten and her union cronies — and America’s children paid the price. Parents across the country can and should take offense at Weingarten’s dismissive attempt at self-absolution.

Public Schools’ Prolonged Shutdowns

Weingarten’s intervention aside, The Atlantic article has more than a nugget of truth in it. At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know a lot about Covid — exactly how and where it was transmitted, how to treat it, and so much else. In such an environment, people obviously would make statements they thought were true, and promote policies they thought beneficial, only to discover that later evidence proved them wrong.

To that end, writer and professor Emily Oster makes a fair point:

There is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people — people who cared about children and teachers — advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.

Notice the key qualifier here: “In spring and summer 2020,” people had little information about how Covid spread, and therefore (in Oster’s view) school lockdowns seemed reasonable.

But lockdowns didn’t last only through spring and summer 2020. In many cases, they lasted through the spring of 2021. A tracker of schools’ opening status found that a majority of public schools did not go back to fully in-person learning until the week of April 19, 2021. That’s more than one year after the pandemic began, and well after the period in which Oster argues incomplete and imperfect information should excuse public officials’ poor policy choices. Well into January 2021, at least 1 in 6 public schools remained fully remote, with the schoolhouse doors shut to all would-be learners.

By contrast, an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, released on the heels of the dismal NAEP scores nationwide, notes that Catholic schools took a different approach. Most Catholic schools had reopened their doors by the fall of 2020. And whereas public school students’ test scores dropped dramatically from pre-pandemic levels, scores in Catholic schools actually rose — particularly for African American and Hispanic students.

In other words, by the fall of 2020, school closures, and the drop in test scores that appear to have been caused by the same, represented a policy choice, one that Weingarten and the AFT embraced.

Pro-Lockdown Unions

To her credit, Oster notes that she advocated for school reopenings, and (wrongly, in my view) received harsh criticism at the time for doing so. Weingarten and the organization she heads, on the other hand, didn’t just support prolonged shutdowns — they worked behind the scenes to keep schools closed.

Documents released pursuant to Freedom of Information Act requests revealed how, within weeks of the Biden administration taking office, the American Federation of Teachers received a draft copy of Centers for Disease Control guidance on reopening schools. Several AFT-suggested passages raising doubts about school reopenings were adopted almost verbatim by the CDC, leading one public health expert to ask why “this political group [i.e., the AFT] gets to help formulate scientific guidance for our major [federal] public health organization. … This is not how science-based guidelines should work or be put together.”

Having found herself on the wrong side of history for promoting prolonged lockdowns, Weingarten has spent the past several months trying to rewrite it. However, her claims that AFT supported prompt school reopenings sparked so much pushback that she apparently now wishes to move beyond the entire matter.

America’s Children Suffered

Oster’s article argues that, in the interests of moving forward, “we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go.” Certainly, perpetual gloating and/or insults won’t advance anyone’s long-term interests, even if they may make people temporarily feel self-satisfied.

But between the two extremes of forgetting history entirely or, to take a more cynical view, putting it in the proverbial memory hole and holding a perpetual grudge stands the appropriate middle ground, where people 1) admit fault and 2) take steps to make amends.

In the case of school lockdowns and their devastating effects, the solutions seem obvious. Even if she won’t offer her resignation as AFT president, will Weingarten admit that she and her organization got things wrong by casting doubt on reopening in AFT’s clandestine communications with the CDC? Will the public school teachers who spent months and months out of the classroom during the 2020-21 academic year commit to doing more in terms of after-school tutoring, to make up for the poor policies their union adhered to for far too long?

The American people should not try to exact vengeance on political leaders who made erroneous policy choices — but they have every reason to demand accountability, including from “leaders” such as Weingarten who fail to admit their mistakes. The children who could suffer the effects of pandemic-era learning loss for years, or even decades, to come should expect no less.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

Election Day is tomorrow – Tuesday, November 8th. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots – 90% in Maricopa County).

If you have not submitted your mail-in ballot yet, DO NOT MAIL IT IN OR ‘DROP IT OFF’  ON TUESDAY AT YOUR POLLING STATION. It won’t be counted on Tuesday and may not be counted for many days or at all. 

If you have failed to ‘mail-in’ your ballot yet, surrender the ballot at the polling station on Tuesday, show your driver’s license and actually fill out a new ballot and vote in person. Your vote will be tabulated and counted for the evening announcement of election results.

MSNBC claims that efforts to remove pornography from public schools are ‘book banning’ thumbnail

MSNBC claims that efforts to remove pornography from public schools are ‘book banning’

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By Judicial Watch

“Book banning is much more than just the removal of books from school libraries.” — Reza Aslan

Actually, that’s all it is: an effort to remove explicitly pornographic material such as Gender Queer from public libraries and public schools. But Ali Velshi and Reza Aslan are in the business of stoking Leftist hysteria, and they love posturing as the courageous enlightened against the benighted, willfully stupid bigots.

If Velshi is serious about his “Banned Book Club,” however, let him feature an author whose books are not subject to an official ban, but to the de facto ban of Leftist conformism. Let him discuss a book that cuts against the Left’s authoritarian agenda. Don’t hold your breath.

Velshi Banned Book Club: The Concerted Effort to Ban Books

NBCUniversal, November 5, 2022:

Book banning is much more than just the removal of books from school libraries. It has become a rallying cry for the Christian Right, and a wedge issue for these upcoming midterm elections. So how do you speak to religious fundamentalists about an issue like book banning? Reza Aslan, author of “Beyond Fundamentalism” has an answer, “The way that you defeat religiously-inspired hate is with religiously-inspired love….

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED TWEET:

Why is the Left fighting to make pornography available to children? Because this is a revolutionary moment for them. Everything must be upended — including the innocence of children.

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 8, 2022

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‘Palestinian’ girl: ‘Daddy gave me a machine gun and a rifle. We will achieve victory over America and Israel.’

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

Colorado elementary school officials hid student gender transition from parents, emails show thumbnail

Colorado elementary school officials hid student gender transition from parents, emails show

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By The Geller Report

There was a time, not too long ago, when the school nurse couldn’t give your child an aspirin or Tylenol without parental permission. This cannot stand. Whatever it takes to take back our children, regain our freedom must be done.

Colorado elementary school officials hid student gender transition from parents, emails show

By Jeremiah Poff, Washington Examiner, November 04, 2022:

Officials at an elementary school in Colorado discussed how to defy the wishes of parents who did not want the school to accommodate their child’s request to transition to a different gender socially.

According to internal emails obtained through a public-records request by the parent activist group Parents Defending Education, an official at Laurel Elementary School in Fort Collins, Colorado, asked administrators if they should disregard a parent’s request that their child be addressed by their legal name and pronouns corresponding to their biological sex.

“I’m wondering about what to do when an elementary school student has expressed their pronouns and chosen name but their parents directly tell school staff not to call the student by those pronouns,” the unnamed official said in an email dated April 4, 2022. “I feel very strongly about supporting the student but have heard that we legally have to follow the parents’ direction due to the age of the child (elementary school).”

The Laurel Elementary School administrator’s request for information was forwarded to a Poudre School District official, who directed the administrator to follow the student’s wishes for what name to be called but use the student’s legal name in conversations with the child’s parents.

“The school should use the student’s affirming name and pronouns at school and use their legal name and corresponding pronouns when talking with the family until they are supportive of the student’s new name and pronouns,” the email says.

Poudre School District did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the past year, school districts across the country have faced the ire of parents for facilitating so-called “social gender transitions” for students of all ages without the permission or knowledge of the child’s parent. The practice has led to several lawsuits and has prompted some elected officials to explore ways to ban the practice.

In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Parents Defending Education’s director of outreach, Erika Sanzi, blasted the school officials’ discussions as “unconscionable.”

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Federal Judge Orders School to Announce Conservative Student’s Statement on Proposal 3

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By Thomas More Law Center

ANN ARBOR, MI — Finding that Skyline High School sought “to silence Plaintiffs’ appropriate speech as to Proposal 3,” Federal District Court Judge, Paul D. Borman, on November 4, ordered the school to read the conservative senior and Republican Club President’s statement “over the Skyline High School’s public address service during ordinary announcements on Monday, November 7, 2022.”  The Court granted the Plaintiffs’ request for a Temporary Restraining Order once the announcement was modified to meet the Court’s concern.  Nevertheless, despite Skyline’s continued objection to the modified announcement, the Court ordered the following announcement to be read:

Attention Students

Are you interested in joining our efforts to protect the health of women and children.

If proposal 3 is passed it would eliminate health and safety regulations, legalize late term and partial birth abortion, no longer require physicians to perform abortions, and eliminate informed consent laws.

If so, email us at skylinerepublicanclub@gmail. com

On November 1, the Thomas More Law Center (“TMLC”), a national nonprofit public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, filed the federal lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan against the Ann Arbor Public Schools and officials of Skyline High School located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  The lawsuit, claiming blatant discrimination, alleging several violations of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Equal Access Act, was filed on behalf of David Nielsen and his minor son, (“Plaintiff”), a senior and president of the Republican Club and the Republican Club as a separate plaintiff.

Erin Mersino, TMLC’s Chief of Supreme Court and Appellate Practice is handling the case.  She commented, “The Constitution protects a student’s right to have a different viewpoint from others and share it within the walls of a public school.  How else will students learn tolerance toward opinions to which they disagree or how to thrive in our pluralistic society?”  The Supreme Court cautioned against viewpoint discrimination in the schools, warning it creates “enclaves of totalitarianism.”

Richard Thompson, TMLC President, stressed that one of TMLC’s main goals is defending students’ rights: “Public schools across our nation are stifling the free speech of conservative students and organizations.  We are working to defend their constitutional rights — rights which the Supreme Court so famously said, they do not lose by merely entering the schoolhouse gate.”

Skyline High School officials routinely have allowed students and student groups to share pro-choice and left leaning viewpoints over its public address system to promote abortion, Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood.  The school has also allowed student clubs to promote the Black Lives Matter movement, express views on the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial, promote the idea of climate change, and promote the visit of a democratic congresswoman seeking re-election.  In short, Skyline High School’s record shows it does not hesitate to share certain viewpoints over the morning announcements.

After Plaintiffs submitted their announcement, they received an email from the school stating that “your announcement is not going to be read or posted due to its political nature.”  That same day, Plaintiffs met with the principal’s secretary who rejected the announcement and confirmed that the announcement was not read because, in his opinion, it was “political.”  Given the school’s history of allowing other viewpoints to be shared freely, the school’s process and decision did not appear fair.

TMLC then sent a letter to the Ann Arbor Public Schools on behalf of Plaintiffs, requesting that the announcement be read.  A few days later, they responded to TMLC but denied wrongdoing, while continuing to censor Plaintiffs’ speech.  The next day, on November 1, TMLC filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.  The lawsuit, which claims blatant discrimination, alleges that the school violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and the Equal Access Act.

On November 2, TMLC filed a motion for a temporary restraining order, asking the Court to require that the announcement be shared over the school’s public address system at the earliest possible time.  The Court held a hearing on November 4.  The hearing lasted approximately 1.5 hours.  At the end of the hearing, Judge Borman announced that the motion would be granted and published his ruling shortly afterward.

In his ruling, Judge Borman found that the “Plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits of their First Amendment claim” and further that “Defendants seek to silence Plaintiffs’ appropriate speech by refusing to broadcast it with their morning announcements.” 

Judge Borman’s order respects the idea that all students and student clubs should be treated equally, and none favored.

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What This Election is About

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By Bruce Bialosky

Editors’ Note: It is no secret that The Prickly Pear believes strongly in the exceptional character of America since its founding as a Republic with individual sovereignty and government by consent of ‘We the People’. What is occurring today with the political party currently in control of the federal government is a direct result of radical and far left policies under a tragically compromised President. The past two years have been a nightmarish experience and insult for everyday Americans. Our national condition from economics to public safety, an engineered invasion of our southern border, dangerous foreign policy and a disgusting racial divide is front and center to most citizens casting their votes in this midterm election. It is important to recognize that the ideology defining Democrat public policy is not just at the federal level. Arizona Democrat candidates in this election cycle from the top of the ticket to the bottom are of the same ilk – radical ‘progressive’ and now evolving into a true socialist nature. As the author makes clear below, it is really time to vote them out. We fervently hope that a resounding Democrat electoral defeat will begin their transition back to a constitutional and foundational support of our American way of life and governing.

Yes, we are having an election next week and there could not be a clearer choice. In fact, there never has been.

I understand why some people wanted to toss Donald Trump out of office. He has a great ability to say things in ridiculously stupid ways. But he had this country in a rather good place until his replacement took over.

Let’s recount what has happened since Mr. Biden took over:

1. He has given away over $426 billion of our money to people who made a choice to take out college loans and now somehow feel oppressed. That does not include the billions he has already given away through other college loan relief programs. And yet he has proposed zero reforms to prevent this from happening again.

2. Parents in this country finally woke up to the fact the country’s public schools are dismal. This is the best thing that came out of the pandemic. They have come to realize that teachers’ unions have negligible interest in our children. The already horrific performance of these schools only became worse. Standardized test scores have plummeted from their already dismal levels. It is easy to brand the teachers’ unions as the most racist organizations in the country based on their performance with black and Hispanic children and their adamant opposition to charter schools.

3. Mr. Biden passed multiple bills that unnecessarily handed out money to people. Congress had just passed a trillion-dollar pandemic relief bill in late 2020 that had not filtered into the system when he assumed office. Then in March of 2021, the Democrats and Biden passed another $1.9 billion bill. And another. And another.

4. They committed $1.2 trillion to infrastructure. Has anyone seen any benefit from this yet? If there were bridges being fixed and roads being built it would be on the front pages of the NYT and WaPo. None to be seen.

5. These actions have caused inflation to soar. They keep blaming others as if printing $5 trillion with nothing to support it was of no consequence. This administration claims inflation is worldwide as if the largest economy in the world has nothing to do with it. As Milton Friedman stated in 1978, only Washington can cause inflation because only Washington can print money.

6. Crime has soared across the nation largely because of Democrat policies combined with Democrat DAs that favor criminals over law-abiding citizens. Forget the historically stupid idea of defunding the police. The idea of no bail laws has caused multiple repeat offenders to go back on the streets and repeat their crimes over and over and over again. If you are not looking over your shoulder in a big city, you are a fool. This is their doing.

7. The stock market has tumbled in the last year losing well over 20% of its value. This is a direct cause of Biden and his party’s leadership. This has cost hardworking Americans trillions of dollars in lost savings.

8. The way we withdrew from Afghanistan was probably the most embarrassing moment in foreign relations since the British burned our Capitol.

9. That clearly emboldened the maniac in Russia to push forward and attack Ukraine. Many countries supported defending Ukraine. But where have they been in terms of real support? Running their mouths does nothing without real backup. The Baltic states and Poland have done their fair share, but the others? Where is Biden demanding equitable support? Just wait until the place must be rebuilt and see who carries the load.

10. Biden’s horrific idea to go back into negotiating with Iran. They were virtually broke, and he gave them money. Then he turned his back on Israel and the Abraham Accords countries. Biden does not understand that only the Left in America and Iran are still buying the pile of camel manure shoveled by the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia would be in the accords by now if it were not for Biden. And a Democrat told me he really liked Biden’s foreign policy.

11. Then there is the granddaddy of the horrible policy decisions. Biden has decided to abandon any sense of border enforcement. We now have millions of new people in the country without proper immigration. The Democrats like to point to the failure of bipartisan immigration reform. No, this is on Biden and his lying surrogates who tell us the border is secure. People from all over the planet have come here. We have no idea who they are, whether they are good people and whether they can add to our country as legions of legal immigrants have before. And then there is the flood of drugs, largely fentanyl, which is killing our citizens at outrageous rates.

Did I miss anything? Yes, these people should be voted out because of their constantly scaring people by saying our democracy is in danger. No, it isn’t and just because you are going to lose an election just reminds people you are a speck in the history of the planet.

Instead of changing course to retain power in Washington, the Democrats and their allies in the MSM have resorted to personal attacks on Republican candidates because they cannot argue on the issues.

The Dems have their own flawed candidates. Katie Hobbs, a candidate for Governor in Arizona, makes Karine Jean-Pierre seem like a wordsmith. No discussion about that. Mandela Barnes, a U.S. Senate candidate in Wisconsin, seems like a normal person. But up close he is just a Leftist who makes AOC appear mainstream.

Then there is the king of freak candidates, John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Way before he had his stroke this guy was plain weird. Walking around in a hoodie is not going to make you seem like working folk when your parents supported you until you were 49 years old. On public policy, this gentleman makes Bernie Sanders seem like Mitch McConnell. He is out there as far as one gets without being a member of the Sandinistas. Yet the press attacks Republicans.

And then there are Stacey Abrams and Robert Francis O’Rourke. They are special.

This election is all about public policy. If you feel safer, more affluent, and more secure, and your children or grandchildren are on track to a brighter future, then you should vote for the Democrats.

I personally cannot fathom how anyone based on the above would not vote these people out.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). On October 12th, he ballots were mailed to all voters registered for mail-in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘Election day’ is next Tuesday November 8.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

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The Atlantic Magazine Floats Covid Amnesty

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By Neland Nobel

Perhaps sensing a groundswell of a political backlash against politicians and officials, the Atlantic magazine, long a purveyor of progressive politics, has run a major article suggesting “amnesty” for people that abused their power, and abused other people, because of Covid. Interestingly, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers (the teacher’s union) is making a similar call.

The thrust of the article and similar arguments is that as a society, we didn’t know what was happening, and therefore misbehavior should be forgiven. Covid was new and we just didn’t know enough. That this was written by a female economics professor is all the more astounding.

While it is true officials did not fully understand Covid and were bullied by bogus “computer models”, contemporaneous evidence was available, the decision to lockdown was a policy made at the highest levels of government, and then mimicked at the state level. 

Rather than locking in the vulnerable, the healthy were locked in their homes.

Moreover, it seems odd that a professor of economics cannot figure out that if you close down the national (and world) economy, force people to stay home, and arbitrarily allow some people to work, and not others, this would screw up the economy. Some decisions don’t require reams of contemporaneous data, just logic, and understanding.

The government went way too far. While shutting down production (supply), it ginned up demand by massive deficit spending, culminating by simply handing out newly minted dollars directly to citizens (demand), regardless of financial condition, in the form of direct stimulus checks. One simply needs to understand supply and demand to know that lockdown would cause a disaster.

We will give her credit, however, for noting that what was done to people was wrong. Much of what was done was done under the name of “science”. Yet social distancing was not effective, nor were most masks, and nor were forced vaccination. There are those who won’t admit that – just witness the attempt by the government to force infants and children to receive Covid vaccines. This cohort of the population has demonstrated that they rarely die of the virus but may suffer negative long-term health issues from taking it. Yet some officials remain unrelenting even today, suggesting it become part of the normal childhood immunization protocols.

However, it was clear early on, it was the elderly with co-morbidities that were in jeopardy, not the general population.  It was also known very early, that the virus was smaller than most masks and therefore was about as effective as putting up a chain link fence to stop mosquitoes.  Yet, officials went ahead and created a mask panic that had people wearing them outdoors and even alone in their cars.

As mentioned, at least she seems to recognize that the lockdown was wrong, and therefore, she suggests amnesty because officials were working with the best information they had. You can’t ask for forgiveness unless you have done something that needs forgiveness.

But we argue contrary information was available. There was a choice made to ignore it and further, to punish those that disagreed. For example, the Great Barrington Declaration came early in the process and was not only ridiculed by the legacy government press but actions were taken by CDC officials to suppress alternative opinions. Further, they colluded with social media companies that de-platformed scientists, doctors, and citizens that might disagree with the government’s interpretation of things.

The irony is, the lack of information she decries,  was mostly because the government suppressed research and doctors who had a different point of view.  In short, they were the cause of their own lack of information and thus the harmful decisions that followed as a consequence.

Moreover, one could agree for example, that vaccinations work (subsequently disproven) but still take the position that forcing people to take it, and firing them for not doing so, was wrong. While Covid may have been new, what government can and can’t do is written into our Constitution. Simply because authorities are concerned, or have an opinion, does not give them the right to suspend the Constitution and ride roughshod over our liberties.

As far as the information problem. we at The Prickly Pear also had to work with the available information at the time period, and we responded by defending liberty and publishing the Great Barrington Declaration.  That is because he read other than government edicts and read our Constitution.

Officials could have done that as well. They chose not to.

As mentioned before, while this “amnesty movement” is starting to roll, there are many officials that simply don’t acknowledge they did anything wrong, either on the medical or legal front. Many continue to double down on failed policies. Even today, with what we know, California has moved to hurt doctors that may have disagreed by pulling their medical licenses.

Internationally, we got to watch the difference between Sweden’s response and those of China.  The difference in approach was clearly evident and we ran numerous articles on Sweden. The contention of the Atlantic that we just did not know, is blatantly disingenuous. The information was not only ignored, but it was also suppressed, and anyone who brought the contrary information to light felt the full weight of government and social stigma.

At the state level, some states had harsh regimes (typically Democrat-dominated states) while more conservative states like Florida had a light hand. Some like Arizona tried to thread the needle and go midway on policies. Information soon became available that states with the light touch had no worse results than states with a heavy hand. We reported that at the time. Yet left-leaning states persisted in their policies and in some cases, doubled down even in the face of contrary information.

So, the central thesis of the Atlantic article is simply wrong. Officials were not working with the best and latest information they had. They did not follow the Constitution. Therefore, they should be forgiven? Really? Rather, the government actively suppressed information they did not like and became even more draconian. Further, you might remember the Governor of New Jersey when asked about the legality of his measures said he had not consulted the Bill of Rights.

Last time we checked, elected officials swear to uphold the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is still the first ten amendments to that document.

The government may well have funded the research which set this plague loose on the world, then they covered it up, covered up the results of vaccine tests, and worked to censure dissidents and punish them. This needs to be investigated, not swept under the rug by amnesty.

Sorry, the abuse of power is not forgivable. You can’t ride roughshod over the Constitution, put small businesses into bankruptcy, fire people from their jobs, have the elderly die alone in depression, cause a wave of teenage suicides, ruin the education of children, and scare the hell out of people without consequences.

Those officials that abused their power should be, at the least, be relieved of their jobs.

As to the reactions citizens had to other citizens, it got pretty nasty, even within families. It ruined holidays and severed friendships. But it generally broke down to those that chose to follow government guidelines and those that were skeptical of those recommendations. Therefore, the source of the strife among people can still be traced directly back to our elected and unelected government officials. On a personal level, a case for amnesty might be made. But among officials, no way. They must be held accountable.

Further, the role of “science”, the collapse of medical integrity, and the dominant funding of research from the government are all fertile areas to criticize. Scientists should know better and so should doctors, as they took an oath to do no harm. They too should be held accountable.

The same can be said of the media, which fanned the flames of panic and government overreach. Like in so many other areas, journalism failed to do the job of an independent investigator and just became the mouthpiece for government officials. They simply could not get enough of Dr. Fauci.

Holding officials to account is an important part of our democratic civic duty. We do not want to make the same mistakes again, and if there is no punishment, there is no barrier to repeating the same mistakes.

You can see many of the same scientific and attitudinal problems surfacing with the Green New Deal, and the forced conversion of the world to their chosen energy choices. Therefore, to avoid government overreach in areas unrelated to Covid, it is right and proper to call to account those government officials that abused their power during Covid.

Amnesty no. A fair trial, yes.

TAKE ACTION

How Not to Vote in Arizona

The 2022 midterm election is fast approaching. The system for voting in Arizona is predominantly by mail-in ballots (around 80% of all ballots). On October 12th, he ballots were mailed to all voters registered for mail-in voting in the 2022 midterm elections. ‘Election day’ is next Tuesday November 8.

Once upon a time when all voters went to the polls on the day of election, the tabulated results were announced the night of the election date. If the result of a specific race was razor thin and less than a legislated margin, a recount might prevent the naming of a winner. That was the exception for calling the results of the election.

It is still this way in most first world countries but not the United States and certainly not Arizona. Voting rules (some unconstitutional) were dramatically altered in many states in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic.

We at The Prickly Pear are very concerned about the flaws in Arizona’s predominant ‘mail-in’ voting system.

Please click on the red TAKE ACTION link below to learn How Not to Vote in Arizona as a mail-in ballot voter and to be certain your vote is included in the count the evening of November 8th.

School Official Removes Student’s American Flag Despite Pride Flag Displays Across Campus thumbnail

School Official Removes Student’s American Flag Despite Pride Flag Displays Across Campus

/in , , , , /by

By The Daily Caller

School officials at Trinity College in Connecticut removed two patriotic flags hanging from a student’s dorm room while seemingly allowing other students to hang Pride flags, according to viral video footage posted to TikTok.

Two students hung a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and an American flag with a blue, red, and green line representing law enforcement, firefighters, and federal agents. Under the supervision of the self-described Director of Housing Operations, an alleged school administrator removed the flags from the dorm. Students protested the removal of the flags, according to a video of the interaction.

“Who are you touching our flags? You have no right to do this,” said one student who claimed ownership of the flags.

“You were directed to take it down,” an alleged school official responded. “The dean’s office has requested — put your phone away.”

“Absolutely not,” the student said. “I have every right to record and you know that. This is America. We have the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, freedom of expression. I don’t know why you’re taking our flags down.”

The alleged administrator directed the two students recording the interaction to visit the dean’s office. The duo alleged in the video that while other students were directed to remove their flags, only the American flag and the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag were physically removed.

“Why are you targeting us specifically,” one student asked.

“[Other students are] being asked, but ours are being ripped off,” another student said.

WATCH:

.@TrinityCollege forcibly removed a student’s “don’t tread on me” American Flag and a red, blue, and green line flag. Meanwhile pride flags are allowed to stay hanging. pic.twitter.com/AG892oaRyv

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 31, 2022

An online commentator noted that the college previously displayed Pride flags around campus.

Kristen Cole, a senior director of media relations at Trinity College, told the Daily Caller that the dean was enforcing the Student Handbook.

“The Trinity College Student Handbook states that objects are not allowed to be placed outside of residence hall windows for safety reasons,” Cole said.

The handbook states that “no objects of any type (including liquid), may be thrown, dropped, pushed out of, placed outside of, or allowed to fall from any residential building window. Students found responsible for such actions will face residential censure.”

Cole admitted that the event showcased how the rules are applied inconsistently on campus.

“The event has highlighted the need for more consistent enforcement of handbook rules, and the college is working with the student body to create awareness and compliance,” Cole said. “The dean’s office will directly work with students for more consistent enforcement.”

The Daily Caller was unable to contact the two students in the video.

AUTHOR

CHRISSY CLARK

Education reporter.

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

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