My nephew Steve recently informed me that he and his wife Andrea – lifelong New Yorkers – want to move west. Highest on their list of priorities for a future home is fulfilling the educational needs of their kids, 5-year-old Danny and 4-year-old Molly. Having lived in the Golden State for almost 40 years, they sought my advice. The conversation went something like this:
Steve: So how are the schools in your neck of the woods?
Me: Well, looking at the big picture, not very good. Just 34% of California 4th-graders scored proficient in math on the pre-pandemic 2019 NAEP, placing the state 44th nationwide. And now, due to the teacher union-orchestrated school shutdowns, math scores of California’s 8th-graders show they have the knowledge and skills of 5th-graders, according to an analysis of the state’s 2021 Smarter Balanced test. California also has thelowest literacy ratein the country. That may be due in part to our large immigrant population, but other similar states like Texas, Arizona and Florida have fewer illiterates.
Steve: But I’ve heard the state doesn’t spend enough money on education. Is that true?
Me: Nope. Before the latest barrage of post-pandemic money, California was in the middle of the spending pack nationally, yet we’re way below average in student proficiency. And people are noticing. Between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, public school enrollment in California dropped by more than175,000 students.
Steve: But wasn’t that due to the pandemic?
Me: Okay, yeah, in part. But the pandemic alerted many to the power of the California Teachers Association, the most powerful teachers union in the country. In March 2021, the U.S. Department of Education released data showing that California lagged behind almost every other state in the country in reopening schools, largely at the insistence of CTA. People took note and according to a recent poll, Californians are the least supportive of local teachers’ unions than voters in any other state polled – with 29% of voters viewing teachers unions negatively. Several studies have shown that Covid-related school shutdowns occurred more frequently in states and municipalities with strong teachers unions.
Steve: Sounds like the teachers unions aren’t really for the kids, huh?
Me: Ya think! At the union’s behest, firing bad teachers is just about impossible. In fact, ten years ago, a case was brought against CTA, claiming that on average, just 2.2 of the state’s 300,000 teachers (0.0008 percent) were dismissed for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance in any given year. Compare that to 8 percent of employees in the private sector dismissed annually for cause.
Steve: So basically, you’re saying that there are maybe 24,000 teachers who have no business in the classroom?
Me: Yes, and the bad news about CTA doesn’t stop there. In March, the union hosted a gathering in Los Angeles titled “2022 Equity & Human Rights Conference.” The purpose of the meeting was to ensure that teachers stressed the important things to children. No, not the three Rs, but rather diversity, equity and gender studies.
Steve: Gender studies? Uh, I’ve heard about that. But Danny is a traditional boy who likes riding his bike in the mud and Molly is a girl who likes to dress up her dolls. And Andrea and I are just fine with that.
Me: Hah! Say that in a school in Weirdifornia and you might be arrested as a Neanderthal. In fact, in much of the state your kids can be brainwashed on sexual and gender matters, and you’ll never know about it. In Ventura, for example, lawyers recently gave a webinar which gave teachers suggestions on how to encourage their students to embrace a new gender identity without their parents finding out…..
…..Steve: No, please don’t. Is there any good news?
Me: Yes! But it’s in Arizona. Its public education system is not world class, but it beats California in almost every category. And most importantly, the legislature has just passed a universal Educational Savings Account (ESA) bill. When Gov. Doug Ducey’s signs HB 2853 into law, every family in Arizona will be eligible for the program. Participants will receive about $6,400 per year per child, which can be used at the parents’ discretion for private school, homeschooling, learning pods, tutoring, or any other kinds of educational services that best fit their kids’ needs outside the traditional public school system. Any family that wishes to opt out of their local public school – or who already has – would be allowed to join the ESA program under the bill. In brief, this ESA ensures that all families have the freedom to choose whatever form of education best fits their child’s needs.
Steve: Wow! That’s terrific! But doesn’t a set-up like that cost taxpayers more money?
Me: To the contrary. As the Goldwater Institute explains, “…the ESA program costs roughly $6,400 for a typical student, compared to the more than $11,000 that state and local taxpayers spend on each public school student (not even counting the cost of federal spending on top of that. Each time a student leaves a public school for an ESA, over $600 is immediately added back to the public school system, even though it no longer serves that child—which means there is more money for public school students on a per-pupil basis, thanks to the ESA program.”
Steve: I’m speechless. Who could be against such a program?
Me: I’ll give you one guess.
Steve: The teachers union?
Me: You’re catching on, Steve! The Arizona Teachers Association insists that programs like this “take scarce funding from public schools, are rooted in racism, and don’t give parents real choice.” This should tell you that teachers unions excel at one thing.
Steve: Which is?
Me: Lying……
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues.
Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-07-14 04:00:002022-07-14 04:00:00California, Arizona Offer Startling Contrast in Educational Scenarios
There’s an emerging scientific consensus that mask mandates have not been effective in curbing the spread of Covid-19.
A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that mask mandates did little to nothing to curb the spread of Covid-19. The latest research further undermines the controversial policy.
A new study analyzing a pair of schools in Fargo, North Dakota—one which had a mask mandate in place in the fall of the 2021-2022 academic year and one that did not—provides more evidence that mask mandates are ineffective public policy.
“Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students,” researchers at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Davis concluded.
The findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, were published on July 1 in a preprint paper on Research Square.
‘It Should Have Been Included in the Summary’
Supporters of mask mandates will say one preprint study is hardly conclusive proof that mask mandates have been ineffective during the pandemic, and they’d be right.
Unfortunately, the latest research represents just one spoke in the wheel (to borrow an expression from a farmer I know). An abundance of research shows mask mandates in schools have been ineffective policy, including a robust Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study from 2020 analyzing some 90,000 students in 169 Georgia elementary schools in November and December.
“The 21% lower incidence in schools that required mask use among students was not statistically significant compared with schools where mask use was optional,” the CDC admitted in the report.
If you hadn’t heard that the CDC’s own research showed no statistically significant difference in schools that had mask mandates in place and those that did not, you can be forgiven. The CDC buried the finding, choosing not to include it in the summary of the report, a practice scientists describe as “file drawering.”
“That a masking requirement of students failed to show independent benefit is a finding of consequence and great interest,” Vinay Prasad, an associate professor in University of California, San Francisco’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, toldThe New Yorker last year. “It should have been included in the summary.”
The CDC never explained why it opted to not include the finding in its summary, but one obvious theory is that the CDC simply didn’t wish to highlight the fact that its own scientific research found its controversial policy was ineffective.
Despite its best efforts, however, evidence continues to mount suggesting that mask mandates are not effective at reducing the spread of Covid.
Asheville masked (and still masks, apparently) harrrderrrr than any other place in North Carolina. So, how did their case trend compare to the rest of the state? Almost identical. pic.twitter.com/f65wqgJP1T
Writing in The New York Times on May 31, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David Leonhardt said that copious amounts of evidence show mask mandates appear to have little to no correlation with the spread of Covid.
“In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spreadat a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seemto have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despitealmost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.
Advocates of mandates sometimes argue that they do have a big effect even if it is not evident in populationwide data, because of how many other factors are at play. But this argument seems unpersuasive.”
There are many theories on why mask mandates appear to be so ineffective, a phenomenon Leonhardt sees as a kind of paradox because some scientific research shows masking is an effective method of preventing the spread.
Perhaps the masks people wear are of low quality. Perhaps the masks are being worn improperly. Maybe people in mandated settings remove facial coverings frequently. Perhaps the studies suggesting masks are effective at virus control are flawed or incomplete.
Whatever the reason, there’s an emerging scientific consensus that mask mandates have not been effective in curbing the spread of Covid.
A Different Theory on Why Mandates Failed
Decades from now, scientists will likely still be exploring why mask mandates were so ineffective during the Great Coronavirus Pandemic. Theories we can’t even imagine today will be offered, discussed, and debated.
One thesis that will likely not be explored is the idea that the means were all wrong.
The great economist Ludwig von Mises once observed that the state is fundamentally an organ of coercion, of force.
“The worship of the state is the worship of force,” Mises said. Force, we often forget, isn’t just an immoral way to organize society. It’s often ineffective. In his 1969 book Let Freedom Reign, FEE’s founder Leonard Read argued the means we choose matter much more than the ends we seek.
“Ends, goals, aims are but the hope for things to come…not…reality… from which may safely be taken the standards for right conduct…Many of the most monstrous deeds in human history have been perpetrated in the name of doing good—in pursuit of some ‘noble’ goal. They illustrate the fallacy that the end justifies the means.
Examine carefully the means employed, judging them in terms of right and wrong, and the end will take care of itself.”
The ends planners sought—less community spread—were noble. The means they used to achieve those ends—government force—were not. (If you do not believe mask mandates constitute force, review the videos of the Alabama woman body-slammed by a police officer and the New York mother thrown to the ground by NYPD officers. Both conflicts began over violations of mask protocols.)
Whether the lackluster results of mask mandates stem from their rotten means is debatable, of course.
But one person, at least, would not have been surprised by the sterile results: Leonard Read. Read understood that means matter more than ends, “the bloom pre-exists in the seed.”
This is why Americans would do well to remember that force is a dangerous foundation for a society, even if one’s ends are pure—and that it’s not too late to reimagine a world based on voluntary action.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-07-11 16:51:272022-07-11 16:51:27‘Limited to No Impact’: Study Provides More Evidence That School Mask Mandates Are Not Effective
In Massachusetts where I live, average private school tuition hovers around $23,000. For secular private schools, the cost is typically much higher, with Boston-area private school tuition often exceeding $40,000. This price tag is way too high for most families to afford, but emerging microschools are typically a fraction of the cost of other private education options.
For example, the Wilder School is a new Acton Academy-affiliated microschool that costs about $12,000 a year, while Life Rediscovered, a new homeschool resource center offering up to five days a week of full-day, drop-off learning, costs about $10,000. Even established local microschools, such as Bay State Learning Center that was founded in 2014 and that I wrote about in Unschooled, have similar tuition costs and frequently offer financial aid or sliding scale tuition.
These tuition costs are still too high for many families to afford, but they are more accessible than many other existing private options. Supporting the creation and growth of more microschool programs through deregulation and by removing entrepreneurial barriers would reduce costs even further.
Today’s education reformers who are interested in expanding education options typically focus on school choice policies that redistribute existing taxpayer funding of education to families to use toward approved education-related expenses, including tuition. These efforts succeed in weakening government control of education and providing more learning options to more families, as the recent introduction of universal school choice in Arizona demonstrates. They should be commended and replicated. But school choice policies aren’t the only ways to expand education options and access.
Encouraging the proliferation of private, low-cost microschools, hybrid schools, and learning pods is an important, and often overlooked, opportunity to offer more low- and middle-income families more education options without taxpayer money.
This is the key emphasis in James Tooley’s excellent book, The Beautiful Tree, where he describes a vast network of small, low-cost, unregulated private schools that he discovered in some of the poorest slums and most remote rural villages in India, China, and throughout the African continent.
In these places, where parents were astonishingly poor and government-run schools were often readily available and conveniently located, the parents instead chose these unregistered private schools for their children.
Tooley himself was surprised by this, given that his consulting work brought him first to the Indian city of Hyderabad to assess the status of elite private schools. Reflecting on his journey in a 2020 article republished by FEE, Tooley wrote:
“So, on a day off from consultancy, I went into Hyderabad’s slums, down an alleyway and found a small school in a residential building. It wasn’t a state school, but a low-cost private one, charging in those days about $1 a month. Then I found another, and another, and soon I was connected to a federation of 500 of these low-cost private schools, serving poor and low-income communities across the region.”
The microschools, hybrid schools, and learning pods that are sprouting across the US represent a patchwork of low-cost, private education options similar to the schools discovered by Tooley. These microschool models are very often low-cost, unregistered, private education options that serve a local community eager to abandon government-run schooling. Scattered throughout urban, suburban, and rural areas, these pods and microschools are formed by parents or teachers, or both, who are showing that they can offer low-cost, private education options that parents want and where children thrive.
A main barrier to the continued proliferation of these learning models is the fear of encroaching government oversight and regulation. Tooley expressed the same concern about the low-cost private schools that he discovered around the world.
“Sometimes governments try to close these schools altogether,” he wrote. “More commonly they pass regulations that impose impossible conditions, such as the need for very large playgrounds in areas of urban overcrowding, or the insistence that all teachers must achieve the same level of certification and pay as their government counterparts, even though this would make it impossible for the schools to charge low fees.”
Preventing government involvement in the free-market of education choices is crucial to the creation, expansion, and accessibility of these emerging learning models.
Some states are trying to enact policies to protect learning pods and microschools. West Virginia, for example, recently passed legislation recognizing learning pods and microschools and loosening state compulsory school attendance laws for the students attending such programs.
In addition to preventing regulation of these emerging, innovative private learning models, state and local policymakers can reduce the many barriers to entry and operation that education entrepreneurs encounter. For example, local zoning restrictions often limit where and how microschools, hybrid schools, and learning pods can operate, often pushing these programs into undesirable locations on busy streets or without access to outdoor space for children’s play.
Deregulation, along with removing common barriers to education entrepreneurship, can help to unleash education innovation and encourage a vibrant, affordable marketplace of learning possibilities.
Listen to Kerry’s weekly LiberatED Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, and Stitcher, and sign up for her email newsletter to stay up-to-date on educational news and trends from a free-market perspective.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-07-09 15:53:222022-07-09 15:53:22Why Government Is the Biggest Obstacle to Educational Freedom
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed a bill expanding access toschool choice to all students Thursday.
In signing House Bill 2853 into law, all Arizona’s school-age children will be eligible for the Empowerment Scholarship Account. It’s a state-funded account that allows parents to spend money on tuition and other education expenses. Previously, the program was limited to disabled students, those in failing schools, and other specific circumstances.
“This is a monumental moment for all of Arizona’s students. Our kids will no longer be locked in underperforming schools. Today, we’re unlocking a whole new world of opportunity for them and their parents,” Ducey said, according to a press release. “With this legislation, Arizona cements itself as the top state for school choice and as the first state in the nation to offer all families the option to choose the school setting that works best for them. Every family in Arizona should have access to high-quality education with dedicated teachers.”
This is truly a win for all K-12 students.The program will now be available to more than 1.1 million students across the state. The average ESA spends $6,400, legislative analysts have previously estimated.
The bill also gives the Arizona Department of Education $2.2 million and allows for the hiring of 26 new workers to aid in administering the expanded program. The report also found that school choice programs nationwide saved taxpayers an average of $7,500 per student that participated.
House Majority Leader Ben Toma, R-Peoria, said education dollars shouldn’t be tied to one building.
“It was my privilege to sponsor the most expansive school choice law in the nation, opening Empowerment Scholarship Account eligibility to all school-age children without restriction,” Toma said. “In Arizona, we fund students, not systems, because we know one size does not fit all students.”
Goldwater Institute President and CEO Victor Riches said the program will benefit children with varying educational needs.
“Families deserve the right to choose the best education option for their children, regardless of zip code. This reform empowers parents weary of a one-size-fits-all approach to public education to customize their children’s schooling based on their unique needs,” Riches said. “States around the nation should follow Arizona’s lead and pass legislation that funds students, not systems.”
Save Our Schools Arizona announced on Wednesday that it would lead a push to get a veto initiative on the 2024 ballot that would scale back the program if successful.
“Stopping the privatization of Arizona’s public schools has been our mission for 5 years. Now, lawmakers have defied the will of AZ voters by attempting once more to pass universal ESA vouchers & dismantle public education – but we won’t let them win,” the organization said.
The nonprofit and others argue that school choice saps funding from public schools that receive tax dollars based on attendance.
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Individual rights is the founding principle of this great nation. Meritocracy (not a predetermined outcome) is what made this country great.
The Marxist takeover of government schools is a declaration of civil war.
Would you turn your children over to a kidnapper? Pedophile? Rapist? Destroyer? Pull your kids out of government schools before they are irrevocably damaged.
FIRST ON FOX: The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is training teachers and staff that “merit” and “individualism” are concepts rooted in “whiteness” that must be challenged in schools.
LAUSD required all employees to undergo “implicit/unconscious bias training” guided by Tyrone Howard, a critical race theory (CRT) advocate and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, prior to the 2021-2022 school year.
The training materials, which were obtained by Fox News Digital through a California Public Records Act (PRA) request, instructed educators to work toward being “antiracist” by challenging whiteness at school, which Howard argued exists in the concepts of “merit” and “individualism.”
“This idea that white is the standard, white is the norm, white is our default has to be challenged,” Howard said in the training video.
Merit, or meritocracy, “assumes that each person operates and achieves based on his or her own personal capacity,” the training handout reads. “It incorporates the notion that the work put forth, the effort invested, explains why some groups and individuals do well and others do not. It does not consider historical factors or account for opportunities, advantages, and privileges to which some groups have access both historically and in the present.”
“The idea of meritocracy,” Howard said in the video, “I think we have to challenge that because we have to recognize that some groups have had much more opportunities, some groups have had far more advantages, and some groups have certain types of privileges that other groups have not had.”
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) required all employees to undergo “implicit/unconscious bias training” prior to the 2021-2022 school year. (Screenshot / Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD))
Meanwhile, individualism, according to the training handout, “proposes that each person is responsible for his or her outcomes. It is very much tied to merit, wherein group responsibility and accountability are not goals. Personal success and achievement are the goals. This belief operates from a survival-of-the-fittest approach that stresses singular pursuit and accomplishment.”
Howard argued in the video that “the notion of individualism runs counter” to many LAUSD students’ “own cultural norms, which say ‘it’s not about me, it’s about we.’”
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-07-08 13:51:142022-07-08 13:51:14Los Angeles Public Schools Training Teachers That ‘Merit,’ ‘Individualism’ Rooted in ‘Whiteness’
Fairfax County Public Schools is instructing teachers and administrators to forgo parents’ permission when a student requests to use a bathroom or locker room associated with his or her so-called gender identity, according to screenshots of a mandatory faculty training module obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The district will also allow schoolchildren without parental consent to change their names and on its virtual learning portal “identify as male, female, or nonbinary.” Teachers could not proceed with the “Supporting Gender-Expansive and Transgender Youth” training until they checked the correct boxes, regardless of their personal beliefs.
Fairfax County Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment. A county teacher said it was unclear what penalties teachers face for refusing to comply.
The teacher training module is the latest instance in which a public school board has implemented controversial policies without parental consent. A New Jersey public middle school forced students to watch a video about hormone treatment without notifying parents beforehand, the Free Beaconreported in March. Parents have informed the Free Beacon their children “socially transitioned” to another gender at school without their knowledge.
The news comes as parents nationwide have agitated for more oversight of public education. A Fairfax County School Board meeting in June saw dozens of parents turn out to oppose handbook rules that suspend students starting in fourth grade for using the wrong pronouns to refer to gender-nonconforming classmates. The school board adopted the handbook amid parents’ objections that the rules violate the First Amendment by compelling speech.
Three parents with children in the school district have formed an ad hoc “shadow board” to monitor and rebut the Fairfax County School Board. Its first meeting, which was held opposite the county school board’s own meeting on Thursday, discussed recent lawsuits the district faces for sexual assault accusations, the prospect of sex education becoming co-ed to accommodate transgender students, and pushback by left-leaning education groups after Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin (R.) initiated a tip line to report “divisive practices” in public schools. The Virginia Association of School Superintendents, which is now headed by Fairfax superintendent Scott Brabrand, called in a March 10 letter for the tip line to be “terminated.”
Members of the so-called shadow board say the current school board is out of step with parents’ demands for quality education for their children.
“It is unconscionable that even with plummeting standardized test scores and record-level teacher vacancies in Fairfax County Public Schools, board members remain hyper-focused on politicizing education,” Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, a Fairfax mom of three and shadow board member, told the Free Beacon. “This recent ‘gender-inclusive’ training, meant to indoctrinate teachers and keep parents from knowing critical information about their own children, is irresponsible and borderline criminal.”
Luke Berg, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, told the Free Beacon the teacher training is also unconstitutional.
“Policies like this violate parents’ constitutional right to raise their kids,” Berg said. “We are currently suing two Wisconsin school districts over similar policies, and I’m aware of roughly 10 other lawsuits around the country on the same topic, including two in Virginia—one against the Harrisonburg City school district and another against Loudoun County Public Schools.”
Republican members of Congress including Sen. Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Rep. Jim Banks (Ind.) have written companion pieces of legislation to stop such policies. The Empower Parents To Protect Their Kids Act, which was introduced in the Senate in October and in the House in June, cuts federal funding for schools that conceal information about students’ gender identity from parents or pressure students to go through with a gender transition.
“Schools should never be allowed to impose radical, harmful gender ideology on children—especially without parents’ knowledge and consent,” Cotton said.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-07-07 12:52:112022-07-07 12:52:11Virginia School District Prohibits Teachers From Contacting Parents When Children Change Gender
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it received 194 pages of records from District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) which show DC officials pushed segregated “Affinity Spaces” on the basis of race and sexual identity.
Judicial Watch obtained the records in response to a June 24, 2021, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for:
Records identifying the number of affinity spaces hosted by District of Columbia Public Schools from August 31, 2020 to June 24, 2021.
Records identifying the topics discussed during any affinity spaces hosted by District of Columbia Public Schools from August 31, 2020 to June 24, 2021.
Records inviting students, faculty, and staff to affinity spaces hosted by District of Columbia Public Schools from August 31, 2020 to June 24, 2021.
Records, including policies and procedures, regarding the creation and use of “affinity spaces.”
Any analyses of whether affinity spaces excluding students, faculty, and staff who identify as a specific race or gender is consistent with district and federal law, including but not limited to 42 U.S.C. 2000d and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
DCPS staff: The Equity Strategy and Programming Team initially launched affinity spaces as safe spaces for you to reflect and process following the murder of George Floyd, and we are going to continue them throughout the 21-22 school year as a place for folks to reflect and continue to learn and grow.
One way to process in a safe space is through affinity. Affinity spaces are gathering opportunities for people who share a common identity. This space will be organized based on the racial identities represented in Central Office as we aim to lean into the Courageous Conversation condition of isolating race.
DCPS Central Office staff from the Equity, Community Action and SEL [Social and Emotional Learning] Teams will co-facilitate these affinity groups in collaboration with volunteers at least once a month but more frequently as requested by the group.
A form in the presentation asks respondents to submit their pronouns, which include she/her, she/they, he/him, he/they, they/them, ze/hir, she/he/they, or “other.”
DCPS staff is asked to select “Which racial affinity group(s) do you plan to join via Teams? (Select all that apply to you and your racial identities. A separate calendar/Teams invite will come from the DCPS Equity calendar.):”
Asian American Pacific Islander
Black/African American, Hispanic/Latinx
Indigenous/Native American, Multi-Racial, White
I am not represented by any of these options and want to recommend another group.
The form adds: “As we define race, it can be easy to conflate race with ethnicity or nationality because the definition and boundaries are always changing. Use the US Census (https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html ) as a guide but do not let it limit you based on how you personally identify racially.
The form also asks if respondents are interested in new LGBTQIA+ “Affinity Spaces.” Those spaces are divided into “BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of Color) LGBTQIA+” and “White LGBTQIA+.”
A DCPS memo details events to be held in June 2021 and is titled “Proposed Engagement in Response to Recent Racial Incidents” begins: “These are troubling times. I imagine that we all are struggling to make sense of the murder of George Floyd and the continued racial violence and racism that people of color, but black people specifically, endure at the hands of the police, other systems and individuals.”
A table of proposed events in the memo includes an “Affinity Group Brown Bag” that is described as a “Moderated space for CO [Central Office] staff to reflect, connect, feel, share, strategize in smaller, affinity (Black, White, Latinx, Asian) space: Focus on self-awareness, identity and cultural awareness.”
An undated email from the DCPS Equity Team to AAPI Affinity (DCPS); Black Affinity (DCPS); Hispanic/Latinx Affinity (DCPS); Multi-Racial Affinity (DCPS); White Affinity (DCPS); and many individual DCPS members with the subject line “Cross-Racial Affinity Space (led by the Multi-Racial Affinity Group)” informs recipients that: “The Multi-Racial Affinity group is tentative to lead a cross-racial affinity space during the week of August 9th – August 13th [2020]”:
Cross-Racial Affinity Space Schedule
The current schedule for cross-racial dialogue is as follows (open to all affinity group members) to be led by respective affinity groups). Dates may change if conflicts arise for a majority of attendees:
October: To be led by the Hispanic/Latino/Latinx affinity group
December: To be led by the White affinity group
February: To be led by the Black affinity group
May: To be led by the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) affinity group
August: To be led by the Multi-Racial affinity group
[ … ]
A few guiding norms and goals for all affinity spaces:
Go beyond celebration: Central Office (CO) affinity spaces will ensure that the conversation translates identity-related issues into action that helps mitigate those issues in our teams, offices and CO.
Isolate Race: CO affinity spaces will leverage the Courageous Conversation protocol [no longer available on the IEL website] – especially the norm of isolating race – in dialogue and collaboration.
Create Cross-Racial Learning Opportunities: CO affinity spaces will come together in one space for interracial dialogue and learning led by a respective affinity group every other month.
A January 26, 2021, email from former DCPS Equity Strategy and Programming Team member Elizabeth Rene, who now works at Google, introduces to her then-colleagues what is called the “Anti-Racist Educator University,” which is touted as the first such endeavor “led by any school district.” The email states:
Many of you have engaged in conversations about race and equity with your students, families and colleagues. However, many more of you have asked how to translate those conversations into action.
Anti-Racist Educator University is an opportunity to proactively apply what we’ve learned about race and equity to our daily practice in the classroom as well as shifting policies, mindsets and culture.
Anti-Racist Educator University is a strategic lever that provides DCPS educators with shared learning rooted in a collective commitment to active anti-racism….
A June 16, 2021, email from Samuel Cuadro of DCPS to Principal Katie Lundgren and several colleagues states: “[T]he goal of these affinity groups is to create a safe space among colleagues to process the impacts of racism and white supremacy within our school community and identify collective actions to take as individuals and as groups.”
“These shocking documents show, in evident violation of the Constitution and civil rights laws, that the public school system of our nation’s capital pushed blatant racial segregation among its staff based on radical, divisive CRT principles,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
Judicial Watch recently released records revealing critical race theory (CRT) instruction at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. One training slide contains a graphic titled “MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN THE USA.”
CFPB records obtained in February 2022 included a PowerPoint presentation titled “Race and gender based microaggressions” that was used for training at the organization.
In June 2022, Judicial Watch announced that today it has appealed a federal court decision dismissing a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of David Flynn, a Massachusetts father who was fired from his position as high school football coach after he raised concerns over Black Lives Matter/critical race theory being taught in his daughter’s seventh-grade ancient history class
In January, Judicial Watch announced that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for all FBI records related to the October 4, 2021, memorandum issued by Attorney General Garland targeting parents who raised objections to Critical Race Theory in schools.
In November 2021, Judicial Watch announced that it received two sets of new records related to the teaching of critical race theory in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS), Maryland’s largest school system. The new records include a training course with information about a book titled “Antiracist Baby” that introduces the youngest readers to “the concept and power of antiracism,” and says it’s the “perfect gift” for “ages baby to age 3.”
Records received from Loudoun County, VA, that Judicial Watch made public in October 2021, revealed a coordinated effort to advance critical race theory initiatives in Loudoun County public schools despite widespread public opposition.
Also in October 2021, Judicial Watch announced that it received a training document from a whistleblower in the Westerly School District of Rhode Island, which details how Westerly Public Schools are using teachers to push critical race theory in classrooms.
Records from Wellesley Public Schools in Massachusetts, released by Judicial Watch in June 2021, confirmed the use of “affinity spaces” that divide students and staff based on race as a priority and objective of the school district’s “diversity, equity and inclusion” plan. The school district alsoadmitted that between September 1, 2020 and May 17, 2021, it created “five distinct” segregated spaces.
There’s an apocryphal story about Leyzer Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto – an artificial language created with the utopian aim of promoting global harmony through linguistic uniformity. As the story goes, Zamenhof gave the opening address at the first international conference of Esperanto speakers and, wishing to welcome his audience as warmly as possible, he gave the most universal greeting he could think of: “Vos makht a Yid?” As a Jew from Bialystok, Zamenhof spoke Yiddish and Hebrew (as well as German, French, Polish, and Belarusian); and mythical though the story may be, it illustrates how prior generations maintained both their Jewish heritage and cultural literacy. Even the original proponents of the Haskalah (“Enlightenment”) sought to work within a Jewish cultural framework while they discouraged ritual observance and clashed with the religious establishment.
Zamenhof’s story evokes a time when, regardless of observance level, a Jew’s worldview was shaped by knowledge of Tanakh, rabbinic literature, Hebrew language, and Jewish culture and history. And it remains relevant because it contrasts withthe erosion of Jewish literacy among today’s secular and non-Orthodox Jews, communal establishment organizations, and lettered professionals, academics, and intellectuals.
As an adjunct professor of criminal justice at a local college (one of several hats I wear), I use text materials suggested or approved by my department, but they sometimes contain material troubling from a Jewish perspective. The authors all have advanced degrees and are experts in their fields; and those with Jewish names sometimes include Jewish reference points in their works. I often find the use of Judaic subject matter in this way perfunctory, however, illustrating that secular academic achievement does not correlate with Jewish literacy. In fact, religious or moral insights inserted into course materials often seem to track the secular ideologies prevalent on university campuses today, while references to traditional sources show limited understanding of sacred text.
This is especially apparent in books and class materials discussing the evolution of the criminal justice system from its roots in the concept of lex talionis to its modern emphasis on rehabilitation. One common thesis holds that criminal justice in its earliest form was primarily retributive (which it was), and by way of example equates the ancient Code of Hammurabi with the dictum of “an Eye for an Eye” from the Torah (Shemot 21:24-26). Despite the supposed similarities, however, there are fundamental differences between Babylonian law and the Torah; and relating the two suggests a lack of scriptural understanding.
Scholars concur that Hammurabi’s law was mechanically brutal – with offenders who caused loss of life or limb being subjected to the same harms inflicted upon their victims. Pursuant to that code, one who gouged out an eye had his own eye removed as punishment; and the Torah’s law regarding “eye for an eye” is often depicted as analogous in application. But the original language does not support such an interpretation. Rather, a review of the verse in Hebrew accentuates the great disparity between Torah law and Hammurabi.
In Hebrew, the Torah verse of “an eye for an eye” reads thus: “Ayin tachat ayin, regel tachat rahgel, sheyn tachat sheyn.” Though this verse is commonly translated into English as “eye for eye, foot for foot, tooth for tooth,” its meaning in the original language is quite different. Because the word “tachat” means “under,” “instead of,” or in “place of” depending on context, the verse actually refers to the value of an eye for the damage caused to an eye (or a foot, tooth, and so on). Accordingly, justice is served according to Torah law by compensating victims for the value of their injuries, not by maiming the perpetrators in kind; and this meaning is further reinforced by the Torah chapters that follow, which speak at greater length about the laws regarding restitution and compensation for physical and economic damages.
There is no doubt about the meaning of this verse because the same grammatical construction is used to similar effect elsewhere in the Torah; for example, during the binding of Yitzchak, when G-d instructed Avraham not to sacrifice the boy, whereupon Avraham offered a ram caught in a thicket “tachat b’no,” which means “instead of his son.” (Bereishit, 22:12-13.) Or earlier in Genesis when Kayin (Cain) killed Hevel (Abel), after which Chava (Eve) bore another son, Shet (Seth), prompting her to praise G-d for giving her “zerah acheir tachat Hevel,” or “other offspring in place of Hevel.” (Bereishit, 4:25.)
When I discuss this material in class, I use the common misunderstanding of the biblical verse as a springboard for a short Hebrew lesson illustrating the moral and ethical differences between the Torah and Hammurabi. This usually prompts some students to ask how other professors often seem to misunderstand the meaning of Hebrew scripture, and my answer is that having a PhD in one field does not make one an expert in all fields. Nevertheless, students tend to give professors with Jewish names credence whenever they incorporate scriptural concepts, assuming they know traditional Jewish source material simply because of their background.
Another subject I teach is legal and judicial ethics, and some of the text materials for that class discuss the influence of world religions on the evolution of the criminal justice system. In comparing the foundational literature of various world religions, one such text suggests that Jewish belief is based on the Torah, not the “Bible.” But this assertion is not correct. It would be more accurate to say that Jewish belief and practice are drawn from the Tanakh – the acronym for Torah, Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings), which together constitute the Hebrew Bible. Although Tanakh differs significantly from Christian and Muslim scriptures, it nevertheless includes more than just the Five Books of Moses that comprise the Torah.
Again, after my students read the text, I correct their misimpressions by explaining what the Hebrew Bible consists of and how it differs from the Christian canon and understanding of Tanakh (dubbed the “Old Testament” by church fathers to imply its supersession by a new covenant). I also explain how Jewish moral values come from the entire Tanakh of which the Torah is but one component, albeit the foundational one. Some students are surprised by professors who seem unfamiliar with the deeper meaning of scriptural concepts referenced in their lessons. Until my class, these students never questioned the veracity of such inclusions in their textbooks and study materials. They just assumed that being a Jew makes one an expert on all things Jewish, and being a professor connotes rectitude.
But the reality is that unless they come from traditional backgrounds or have studied Jewish history, religion, language and culture, secular scholars generally know little more about traditional Judaism than anybody else from their secular milieu.
And that milieu has included generations of Jews who never learned the language, traditions, or history of their ancestors – including scholars and academics who patronize Judaism as trivial, archaic, or irrelevant. Consequently, Jewish literacy is not a priority in an academic world where misinformation about Jews and Israel abounds. Many believe, for example, that modern Israel’s history began only in 1948 and know nothing about the ancient Jewish Commonwealths that composed the Jewish homeland. Still more believe that a country called Palestine once existed there, despite its absence from the pages of history. And that yet others believe Jewishness is defined by faith alone, when in fact it is an amalgam of religious, ethnic, and national elements comprising a unique ethnoreligious identity.
And in western society they tend to conflate Jewish values with progressive ideals and liberal politics. Whether they do so through artifice or ignorance, Jewish professors and intellectuals who hold this way are often deemed authoritative by students and acolytes who know even less about Judaism.
Most academics and politicians are not rabbis, but when they use Jewishness to validate political statements or moral pronouncements – or even when they don’t intend to make any statements at all – their ethnicity implies credibility regardless of their actual Jewish IQ. The result is highly visible intellectuals who are considered authoritative spokespersons based on their heritage, not because they necessarily know anything about authentic Jewish tradition. And when prestige and veracity are bestowed thus, Jewish illiteracy can be legitimized to the detriment of Jewish historical integrity.
If they wish to speak authoritatively regarding Judaism’s core tenets and beliefs, they should first learn what constitutes Jewish law, tradition, and values. And it’s not progressive ideology. In the world of Jewish scholarship, such authority is earned from the pursuit of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding – it is not presumed simply because of one’s ancestry.
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The First Amendment to the Constitution provides in clear, unmistakable language that “Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. This rule applies to the States under the Fourteenth Amendment. Although one might suppose that the clarity of the Free Exercise Clause (as it is commonly known) would deter unscrupulous politicians from restricting religious freedom, that has not been the case in California. Gavin Newsom, the far-Left governor of California, seized the opportunity afforded by the Plandemic to prohibit and outlaw religious services during the Plandemic’s duration — or at least until Newsom decided in his absolute and sole discretion to relax the restrictions. Here is a man who lacks either the wit to understand the Constitution or the integrity to be guided by it.
It was during this season of Newsom’s outlawing of the normal and customary practice of religion (that is, religious services inside a house of worship with the congregation present) that I, my wife, my son, and my mother-in-law went to a public park to pray. We took turns reciting passages from the Old and New Testaments, sang a few hymns, and engaged in silent prayer. The park was nearly deserted, and no one protested what we were doing or took steps to stop us. We were free to pray. In that regard, we were more fortunate than Joseph A. Kennedy, an almost 20-year U.S. Marine Corps veteran and a high school football coach in Bremerton, Washington. Coach Kennedy had the temerity to quietly pray to his Creator after the end of football games, and for that act he was fired by the Bremerton School District and its religion-hating apparatchiks. Had he merely taken a knee to protest alleged social injustice ala Colin Kaepernick, he undoubtedly would have been applauded by the School District and permitted to retain his position as football coach. But because prayer is not welcome at Bremerton school football events as far as these apparatchiks are concerned, he was fired.
We should all be grateful to Coach Kennedy that he did not elect to acquiesce in this gross and tyrannical violation of his right to freely exercise his religion. Instead, this man of great courage and tenacity filed a complaint against the Bremerton School District in United States District Court. After much litigation, the case made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States. On June 27, 2022, the Supreme Court determined in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that the School District had unlawfully and unconstitutionally fired Coach Kennedy for silently praying after football games.
The facts in greater detail are these. Joseph Kennedy began working as a football coach at Bremerton High School in 2008. Like other coaches across the country, he made it a practice to give thanks to God through prayer on the playing field at the end of each game. For more than seven years, no one complained about this. However, in or around September 2015, Coach Kennedy’s prayers came to the attention of Bremerton School District’s top management (ironically, as the result of positive comments made by an opposing football coach). Anxious to suppress religion and prayer to God, the District used the cudgel of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to inform Kennedy that the District was taking away his right to freely exercise his religion because that right “must yield as far as necessary to avoid school endorsement of religious activities.” In response, Coach Kennedy told the District that he sought only the opportunity to wait until the game was over and the players had left the field and then to walk to midfield and say a short, private, personal prayer. The District responded with an ultimatum on October 16, 2015: Coach Kennedy was forbidden to engage in any overt actions that could appear to a reasonable observer to endorse prayer while he was on duty. One week later, the District sent him a letter telling him he could only pray after a game if he did so behind closed doors where no one could see him. After the final game of the season on October 26, 2015, Coach Kennedy went to midfield after the players had left to engage in post-game traditions, knelt alone, and offered a brief prayer. While he was praying, other adults — but no school-age team players — joined him.
The District then placed Coach Kennedy on administrative leave, gave him a poor performance evaluation for the 2015 season (even though he had received uniformly positive evaluations every year since 2008), and declined to renew his contract.
As mentioned earlier, Coach Kennedy filed a complaint in United States District Court, and litigation ensued. The lower federal courts, siding with the School District, generally treated the Free Exercise Clause of the Constitutional as a second-class right, subservient to the prohibitions of the Establishment Clause. But the Supreme Court of the United States thought otherwise. Justice Gorsuch, writing the opinion for a 6-3 majority, held that it was unconstitutional for the School District to effectively fire Coach Kennedy for praying. The First Amendment, according to the Supreme Court, doubly protects religious speech — both the Free Exercise Clause and the Free Speech Clause protect prayers and religious speech. The Supreme Court determined that “[t]he District disciplined him only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his players after three games in October 2015.” (Italics in the original). In the majority’s view, the Free Exercise Clause “protects not only the right to harbor religious beliefs inwardly and secretly. It does perhaps its most important work by protecting the ability of those who hold religious beliefs of all kinds to live out their faiths in daily life through ‘the performance (or abstention from) physical acts.’”
Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Breyer and Kagan. Justice Sotomayor cited Wallace v. Jaffree (1985) (mandatory moment of silence for prayer unconstitutional); Engel v. Vitale (1962) (nonmandatory recitation of one-sentence prayer unconstitutional); and Lee v. Weisman (1992) (non-denominational general benediction at a graduation ceremony held unconstitutional).
The problem, though, is that these same precedents exhibit extreme judicial hostility toward religion so overwhelming that it effectively transforms the right to freely exercise one’s religion into a second-class right, something that the Left has been doing for decades with respect to the Second Amendment right to bear arms.Stated plainly, the argument that the government is establishing a religion whenever a governmental employee offers a nondenominational prayer in public is absurd on its face.
When the Constitution was drafted and ratified, the Framers had in mind England’s establishment of the Church of England as the official state church. This has never happened in the United States of America and, moreover, has never even come close to happening on any state-wide scale. Whenever an objection is raised that a particular policy or event violates the Establishment Clause, the question that should be asked is “what religion is the government seeking to establish?” The Roman Catholic Church? The Baptist Church? The Jewish faith? The Islamic faith? Hinduism? Buddhism? Unless the proponent of the argument that the Establishment Clause is being violated can point to a specific religion that is being “established” in the 18th-century sense of such term (in other words, England’s establishment of the Church of England as the official state religion), the argument should be summarily rejected, and there should be a finding that no violation of the Establishment Clause has occurred or is occurring.
Thus, a law that provides school funding for Catholic schools but not Jewish or Hindu schools would cross the boundary and be unconstitutional, but a law providing funding for all religious schools irrespective of the denomination would pass muster. Similarly, a non-denominational invocation or prayer by a government employee at a public gathering does not violate the Establishment Clause because no particular religion is being established. Although God-hating atheists in our country undoubtedly would disagree, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not require us to abandon prayers to the Almighty in public discourse.
It’s time to end judicial hostility to religion and the tendency of courts to view the right to freely exercise one’s religion as a second-class right. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District goes part of the way toward this objective, but more Supreme Court case law is needed.
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Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
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It may have been the worst Super Bowl commercial ever. Chelsea Handler and Sarah Silverman are competing with one another, trying to use their cell phones in preposterous places. Silverman, still talking to Handler, is delivering a baby in an underground bunker. Handing the baby to the mother, she glances down and sees the sex. “Sorry!” she tells the parents. “It’s a boy.”
I flinched. I’ve never heard these words in the delivery room, but the sentiment is familiar. I’ve made the “it’s a boy” announcement five times; some people just can’t resist offering their condolences. This poor woman! Will she ever “get her girl”? They probably had a mental picture of me buried in fire trucks and plastic soldiers, while baseballs crashed through my windows.
That’s not really so far wrong, but I don’t mind. Little girls are delightful, but I love my band of brothers. I am very conscious of the tremendous honor and obligation of being, at least for the present, the defining female presence in the lives of six males. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. My eldest sons are just reaching their teens. Already our conversations are vastly more interesting than most of the classroom discussions I remember from my days as a college professor. All five of them were born within nine years, so they’re truly growing up together, and their schoolteachers comment on what a tight-knit bunch they are. Some days, when I’m writing or working on dinner, I’ll break off for a few minutes, and step out on the back deck. The boys might be throwing a football, or fishing off our dock. They might just be sitting around laughing at one another’s dumb jokes. Who could witness that, and feel sorry? Life doesn’t get much richer.
I regret nothing, but I do fear. Young men as a group are struggling mightily in our day and age. Silverman’s tasteless joke has a frighteningly clear underlying logic. Parents who want their kids to make them proud—and who doesn’t?—are statistically better off having daughters. A daughter is likelier to become her school’s valedictorian. A son is likelier to drop out of school or get arrested. She is likelier to get into and through a good college, to find decent employment, and to live a stable life. He’s likelier to become addicted to drugs or alcohol, and six times likelier to commit suicide. I feel indignant when I read how adoption agencies are struggling to place boys, even in infancy. But I understand it. Boys may break your heart. And I have five.
This is why I read the “boy books”: literature discussing the struggles of boys. I need to understand this as fully as possible. I have a lot of “boy lit” on my shelf, but here I will discuss five significant figures in this conversation: Warren Farrell, Leonard Sax, Anthony Esolen, Jordan Peterson, and Brad Miner. Among these, only Peterson has not written an entire book specifically on the subject of manhood. I will mention him nevertheless, because his influence with young men is particularly noteworthy.
I disagree with all of these writers at certain points, and in some cases the disagreements are serious. Nevertheless, I look on them all with a certain gratitude. They care. To me, they all feel like allies in what has become my primary life’s work: the task of raising boys into good men.
Farrell and Sax Raise the Alarm
For a quick read on the boy problem, Warren Farrell and Leonard Sax make a great pairing. Sax is a psychologist and family physician, who has written three books on gender and youth development. Boys Adrift is his latest. Farrell is harder to classify. In broad terms, it may be most helpful to describe him as a true-believing second-wave feminist (once deeply involved with the National Organization for Women) who ended up developing a masculinist counterpart to his 1970s feminism. He isn’t any sort of traditionalist; indeed, he clearly wants to dismantle traditional masculine ideals in at least some key ways. Still, he has been thinking about boys and men for several decades now, and I find his arguments helpfully challenging, even when I think he’s wrong. The Boy Crisis applies some of his long-developed thoughts on manhood to developmental issues for boys.
Sax and Farrell are interesting both for their similarities and for their differences. As social scientists, they both present a lot of data, giving rise to shared concern about boys’ mediocre performances in school. Worldwide, boys are falling behind girls, especially in reading. Their test scores are lower, and they are less likely to enroll in universities. The structure of modern schools seems uncongenial to boys’ developmental needs.
Sax and Farrell agree as well that fatherlessness is a huge problem in our time, in general, but especially for boys.The statistics on this subject are harrowing. Fatherless boys fare worse in virtually every measurable way. Of course, when that cycle of family breakdown is perpetuated, that means another generation of at-risk kids, as well as stressed-out single moms, and lower social productivity.
Finally, both Sax and Farrell have many interesting things to say about the masculine loss of purpose. They understand that many men today are suffering from a kind of existential crisis. Men aren’t sure what role they are meant to play within society at large. Once, able-bodied men were genuinely necessary to keep their families and communities alive. Today, robots do much of our heavy lifting, and our meat mostly comes from factories, not forests. We do still need strong men to do a number of jobs, some of which are desperately seeking eligible workers. If a man wants employment, it’s still very possible to leverage bulging biceps, in more ways than one. Physical strength is no longer essential to the family’s survival though, nor does it command tremendous earning power. In market terms, manly muscle has lost its edge.
From here, Sax and Farrell diverge. Sax focuses on cultural phenomena that undermine discipline for boys: video games, pornography, and over-indulgent parenting. His book feels like the adolescent prequel to Nicolas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work, and recommends, stricter rules, fewer indulgences, and less coddling. Farrell’s focus is quite different. In broad terms, he thinks that boys’ social and emotional development has been stunted by maladaptive masculine norms, which send boys charging off on quixotic manhood quests while the girls are becoming prudent, socially savvy, and self-aware. Farrell is deeply suspicious of cultural messaging that teaches boys to aspire to heroic self-sacrifice. In his view, this understanding of manhood makes it hard for boys to navigate the complexities of interpersonal relationships, and the nuances of our complex workforce. They are incentivized to do dangerous and self-destructive things, instead of developing the workaday healthy habits that so often make the difference between success and failure in modern life. Farrell’s book is full of “conversation starters” for parents; he wants us to plumb the depths of our sons’ social and emotional lives. His larger goal is to give men the same range of options and possibilities in life that feminists have (in his view, rightly) demanded for women, moving them towards self-actualization and a comfortable life.
It can be hard for parents to make sense of seemingly contradictory advice, but in fact both men make some good points. Sax is certainly right to call our attention to distractions and cultural trends that undermine discipline, although I myself haven’t always had success with the authoritarian disciplinary approaches that Sax recommends. Sometimes a fruitful conversation is worth a thousand rules. Here, Farrell’s insights can actually be genuinely helpful, especially because we do live in a world in which social polish, emotional self-awareness, and prudent life skills are critically important for adults. If a young man is too socially inept to be presentable in a job interview, or too emotionally closed to cultivate intimacy with a wife, then he may end up bankrupt and alone.
Having said that, I think Farrell underestimates the extent to which boys are naturally attracted to heroism, honorable self-sacrifice, and the stiff upper lip. I don’t think it’s wise to jettison these chivalric impulses. If young men are indeed suffering from a loss of purpose, financial planners and radio shrinks may not be the ministers they need.
Anthony Esolen Waxes Nostalgic
Anthony Esolen would agree with this point. His newest book, No Apologies: How Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men seeks “to return to men a sense of their worth as men, and to give to boys the noble aim of manliness, which is their due by right.”
Esolen wants to return men to their traditional role, as society’s protectors, providers, and citizens. He doesn’t see technology, market forces, or women’s education as significant factors in men’s changing social roles. Rather, he thinks men have been sabotaged by resentful feminists and equality-obsessed social planners.
Esolen proposes two remedies. First, we should renew our appreciation of men’s unique potentialities. Second, we should embrace the natural complementarity between men and women. The first will keep the lights on in society at large; the second will keep romance sweet and domestic life stable.
Esolen’s ode to manhood is stirring, and at times quite beautiful. Is it credible, though? An economist would have some quibbles, and the historical narratives are a bit rose-tinted at points. But the biggest problem with No Apologies is its dependence on a false and degraded view of womanhood. Esolen loves the idea that men and women complement one another, but in his division of the sexes, virtue is mainly for the vir.
He obviously anticipates objections on this point, because he warns readers in his introduction that even if he appears to be disparaging women, in reality he is “doing nothing of the sort.” “Every strength in one respect,” he tells us, “is a shortcoming in another respect.”
I want my sons to be man enough to handle real womanly excellences as they find them, with grace and gratitude. I would like them to aspire as well to friendship with women, and especially their future wives.
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This is not conventional warfare but it is war all the same.
This treasonous movement must be defeated and destroyed.
Woke California school board members call for people to BOYCOTT Fourth of July because ‘there is no reason to celebrate’
AnaMarie Avila Farias, a member of Contra Costa County Board of Education, shared a fading image of the US flag along with the caption: ‘BOYCOTT 4TH OF JULY’
‘I haven’t celebrated 4th of July since 2016 and I don’t think it’s a holiday to celebrate’ she wrote on a Facebook post. ‘What do you think?’
The local school board member later confessed to not ‘feeling particularly patriotic’ thanks to abortion rights being overturned last week
In response to a comment on her post suggesting she ‘maybe have a funeral and bury the Constitution and the Flag,’ Farias wrote: ‘Please invite me!’
A woke California school board member is calling for people to boycott the Fourth of July, claiming ‘there is no reason to celebrate’ America’s Independence Day.
AnaMarie Avila Farias, a third-generation Contra Costa County resident and member of the county’s board of education, shared a fading blue and white image of the United States flag on June 28, along with the words ‘BOYCOTT 4TH OF JULY,’ on Facebook.
‘I haven’t celebrated 4th of July since 2016 and I don’t think it’s a holiday to celebrate’ Farias wrote in a Facebook post. ‘What do you think?’
The elected official’s stance on the federal holiday prompted a mixed bag of reactions from people on her private page, some agreeing with her while others were critical.
‘Why boycott the 4th of July? Without what our forefathers did we as Americans would not have the freedoms that we have today,’ one user wrote.
Another agreed him with him, only to ask: ‘Why? The holiday celebrates declaring independence from Britain’s tyrant King George III. You wish we were still subjects of Britain?’
AnaMarie Avila Farias, a school board member of the Contra Costa County Board of Education, said on her Facebook page that she didn’t think the Fourth of July was a ‘holiday to celebrate.’ She shared a picture of a fading American flag with the words: ‘BOYCOTT 4TH OF JULY’
Avila Farias responded to a few comments under the controversial post, on one replying: ‘I am not feeling particularly patriotic.’ She later added: ‘Lastly, last Friday women’s reproductive rights were taken away. We are not in a place of progress or celebration when human rights are being taken away.’
Avila Farias responded to a few comments under the controversial post, on one replying: ‘I am not feeling particularly patriotic.’ She later added: ‘Lastly, last Friday women’s reproductive rights were taken away. We are not in a place of progress or celebration when human rights are being taken away.’
‘I am not feeling particularly patriotic,’ Avila Farias replied.
‘I am especially not interested in celebrating a holiday centered around freedom from oppressive government when that freedom is not a reality for so many people in this country. Lastly, last Friday women’s reproductive rights were taken away. We are not in a place of progress or celebration when human rights are being taken away,’ she said.
The woke school board member didn’t stop expressing her opinion there.
Under another comment that suggested she ‘maybe have a funeral and bury the Constitution and the Flag?’ Avila Farias replied: ‘Please invite me!’
The mother-of-two, who is also a member of the Democratic Party of Contra Costa County (DPCCC), also shared a blog post from the online-publishing platform, ‘Medium,’ written by Dana P. Saxon – founder of Ancestors Unknown, a ‘curriculum and special programming for schools and youth orgs.’
Her blog post is titled: ‘9 Reasons Why I Don’t Celebrate the 4th of July.’ In it she writes: ‘After 1776, it took nearly another 100 years before my ancestors technically gained their freedom in 1865. And a whole heap of pain, trauma, and oppression maintained during those years when only white Americans were liberated from someone else’s rule.’
She then went on to cite the three-fifths compromise, the 1787 fugitive slave clause and Frederick Douglass’ 1852 famous speech: ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ as reasons not to celebrate the federal holiday.
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I’ll admit that I often look at national holidays as simply being an opportunity to spend more time with my family and forget to reflect on the reasons for the day off. With the American experiment frequently feeling like it is on the verge of collapse, we should spend some time between the 4th of July fireworks and the now way-too-expensive hotdogs to reflect on why our republic was designed the way it is and how it was supposed to function.
Though individually flawed and with many faults (as is true of all humans), the founders of this great republic collectively designed and implemented a truly brilliant form of government with separations of powers and checks and balances that strived to protect individuals from suffering under a distant despotic government.
What makes us Americans is not our race, religion, or a single defining culture but instead a shared belief in the cry for freedom put to pen 246 years ago and the resulting republican form of government secured by our constitution.
Of course, even before the dawn of our country on this continent, there have been truly horrific abuses of power and injustices born by individuals at the hands of those placed in positions of power. The most egregious stain on our country being slavery. Though some see these collective failings as reasons to blow up the institutions of our republic, they should instead serve as examples of why additional safeguards are needed to help fulfill the promise of the American experiment.
Some may believe that political expediency should guide our decisions using an ‘ends justify the means’ matrix, but the process of policy development and adherence to transparent and accountable governance is more important if we want policies to be lasting with strong public support and engagement.
It has probably been years since we read the documents that formed the basis of our governance. Though you probably don’t want homework during your 4th of July holiday, I encourage you to take some time to review these truly brilliant documents:
Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
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Governments, corporations, and elites have always been fearful of the power of a free press, because it is capable of exposing their lies, destroying their carefully crafted images, and undermining their authority. In recent years, alternative journalism has been growing and more people are relying on social media platforms as sources of news and information. In response, the corporate state, digital conglomerates, and the mainstream media have been increasingly supportive of the silencing and censoring of alternative media outlets and voices that challenge the official narrative on most issues.
At the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, “Australian eSafety commissioner” Julie Inman Grant stated that “freedom of speech is not the same thing as a free for all,” and that “we are going to need a recalibration of a whole range of human rights that are playing out online—from freedom of speech … to be free from online violence.” Meanwhile, the Canadian government is seeking to restrict independent media and the freedom of expression via the implementation of Bill C-11, which would allow it to regulate all online audiovisual platforms on the internet, including content on Spotify, Tik Tok, YouTube, and podcast clients.
Similarly, the UK is seeking to introduce an Online Safety Bill, the US “paused” the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board following backlash, and the European Union approved its own Digital Services Act, all of which aim to limit the freedom of speech. Attempts by elites and politicians to silence dissenters and critical thinkers is not something new. In fact, history is full of examples of “the persecution of men of science, the burning of scientific books, and the systematic eradication of the intelligentsia of the subjected people.”
However, these current efforts to curtail freedom of speech and press by supposedly liberal governments are still somewhat ironic, given that even “the most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint, admits, and listens patiently to, a ‘devil’s advocate.’ The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honors, until all that the devil could say against him is known and weighed.”
The corporate state, digital conglomerates, and the mainstream media want to ensure that they have the exclusive authority to dictate people’s opinions, wants, and choices through their sophisticated propaganda techniques. To do so, they have even resorted to transforming falsehoods into truth. In fact, the word truth has already had its original meaning altered, as those who speak the truth on certain subjects are now regularly accused of spreading hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation.
Presently, truth is no “longer something to be found, with the individual conscience as the sole arbiter of whether in any particular instance the evidence (or the standing of those proclaiming it) warrants a belief; it becomes something to be laid down by authority, something which has to be believed in the interest of the unity of the organized effort, and which may have to be altered as the exigencies of this organized effort require it.”
However, modifying the definition of truth comes with the potential for great peril, as truth-seeking often contributes to human progress in that it leads to discoveries that ultimately benefit society at large. It should be noted that truth is by no means the only word whose meaning has been changed recently in order for it to serve as an instrument of propaganda; others include freedom, justice, law, right, equality, diversity, woman, pandemic, vaccine, etc. This is highly concerning, because such attempts at the “perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals” of the ruling class are expressed is a consistent feature of totalitarian regimes.
As a number of liberal-democratic governments increasingly move toward totalitarianism, they want people to forget that there is “the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation.” According to them, “public criticism or even expressions of doubt must be suppressed because they tend to weaken public support.”
In fact, they believe that all views and opinions that might cast doubt or create hesitation need to be restricted in all disciplines and on all platforms. This is because “the disinterested search for truth cannot be allowed” when “the vindication of the official views becomes the sole object” of the ruling class. In other words, the control of information is practiced and the uniformity of views is enforced in all fields under totalitarian rule.
The suppression of freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought means that current and future generations will be “deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” They are also at risk of becoming ignorant of the fact that the only way in which a person can know “the whole of a subject” is by “hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.” That is to say, current and future generations will be unaware that “the steady habit of correcting and completing” one’s own “opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it.”
At present, it is likely that the masses do not regard freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought as being particularly important, because “the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another.” Nevertheless, no one should have the power and authority to “select those to whom” freedom of thought, enlightenment and expression is to be “reserved.”
In fact, John Stuart Mill went so far as to claim that “if all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” He further added that silencing the expression of an opinion is essentially an act of “robbing the human race,” which applies to both current and future generations. Even though the suppressors can deny the truth to people at a particular point in time, “history shows that every age having held many opinions which subsequent ages have deemed not only false but absurd; and it is as certain that many opinions, now general, will be rejected by future ages, as it is that many, once general, are rejected by the present.”
If current efforts to suppress freedom of the press, speech, expression, and thought to succeed, then the search for truth will eventually be abandoned and totalitarian authorities will decide what “doctrines ought to be taught and published.” There will be no limits to who can be silenced, as the control of opinions will be extended to all people in all fields. Accordingly, contemporary authoritarian policymakers need to be reminded about the crucial importance of freedom of speech, expression, and thought, which the US Supreme Court recognized in the 1957 case Sweezy v. New Hampshire when it ruled that
to impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made…. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die…. Our form of government is built on the premise that every citizen shall have the right to engage in political expression and association. This right was enshrined in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. Exercise of these basic freedoms in America has traditionally been through the media of political associations…. History has amply proved the virtue of political activity by minority, dissident groups, who innumerable times have been in the vanguard of democratic thought and whose programs were ultimately accepted. Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness in our society.
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COVID-19 triggered lockdowns around the world never before seen. It isn’t the worst pandemic the world has seen, so why were government interventions so swift? There are really two reasons. One, broadband and laptops. Had there not been ways to continue working for the governments and remote learning to bridge education, we’d have not seen lockdowns beyond May 2020.
The second reason, tied to the first reason, is the media. The majority of the media coverage shamed any lockdown dissent and even drove it. Those that stood up to that, select states and even countries faced immense pressure from national and global media.
Within the United States, the role of the media within government policy is to critically analyze, to keep them honest. With COVID-19, open debate about risks and government interventions was shut down. For the first sixteen months of the pandemic, not only was the origination of COVID-19 not up for debate, it was suppressed and censored by major platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
As of June 2022 it’s considered more likely than not to have originated from the Wuhan lab, something even the WHO is now investigating. Reopen schools in 2020? The media put so much pressure to keep them closed that few politicians thought critically and acted to keep them open. Even with that, remote options were available and employed, fracturing education for a year and a half. In some states schools were closed for seventeen months.
A string of recent examples involve Dr. Deborah Birx. Along with Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx architected and drove the lockdowns in 2020. In 2022 Dr. Birx was on her book promotion media tour and repeatedly said we lost hundreds of thousands of lives due to poor federal actions (of which she was a part). How many interviewers pressed her for the math behind that? Zero.
After 24 months into the pandemic, fifteen months of that with vaccines and 14/24 months under President Biden, the daily COVID-19 death counts were materially identical between both administrations.
Below is an excerpt from the book COVID-19:The Science vs. The Lockdowns on how the media drove the lockdowns, gaining plenty of voter support to where politicians faced better polling by continuing lockdowns rather than opening up.
Social media has become the primary news source for more Americans than any other medium. Imagine if COVID-19 struck in the 1980s before cable television. Primary news sources were 1) network news, 2) major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post and 3) local newspapers.
Those mediums covered COVID-19 in 2020 as if it were a category five pandemic and drove opinion that schools and restaurants should be closed and everyone should be masked, perhaps even at home and in the car. They constantly reported that hospitals were lined up over capacity with sick, dying patients. However, we’d be looking around our communities not seeing much activity. We’d know it was out there, but we’d see hospitals were empty and few we knew were getting sick.
Remember, other than the four to six weeks when a community got hit, you wouldn’t know COVID-19 was a pandemic. Outside those surge periods, doctors would have assumed it was a weird or strong flu or something. The symptoms were similar to the flu, just worse if you were vulnerable enough to be hospitalized. If COVID-19 struck communities it was like a few-week hurricane, and it left a vacuum of emptiness in hospitals.
In my home town of Dallas, some well-intentioned college kids visited Parkland Hospital downtown to take care packages to frontline workers when we were in tight lockdown in April 2020. The nurse at receiving thanked them and laughed. She told them that they had no COVID-19 activity and with non-COVID-19 patients kept away, it was empty [Parkland did get a large wave in late 2020]. She walked them down darkened halls free of patients, nurses and doctors. Their voices echoed as they talked in the silence.
Nearly all major media outlets were absent any COVID-19 information suggesting the risk didn’t support the lockdowns. Fox News’ primetime shows often reported on it. Newsmax and One America News did too, but their viewership was relatively low, less than a half million viewers combined. That left 99% of America without a view from the mainstream media that maybe the lockdowns were not the best path.
Nearly all data to counter lockdowns originated with Twitter users. It largely began with Alex Berenson’s constant pouring of data to counter the models that triggered the lockdowns. Berenson began appearing on Fox News weekly in April 2020. Other Twitter users like The Ethical Skeptic (don’t laugh, he stays anonymous but the guy is a genius) and contributors to Rational Ground provided nearly all hardcore data.
If Twitter did not exist, it’s hard to imagine where data to support stopping lockdowns would have come from. Hold your thoughts on the mention of Fox News if you’re not a conservative. We need open thought and debate on something as huge as worldwide lockdowns. It was a sad state of journalism that Fox News was the only major media company to offer this, though by summer 2020 the Wall Street Journal did some quality analysis on the lockdowns. Most media outlets were very selective on their reporting on the lockdowns.
Where We Get The News
ABC’s World News Tonight leads network news with about nine million viewers nightly, followed by NBC Nightly News’s seven million viewers and CBS Evening News’s five million. Fox News typically gets about three million viewers, followed by MSNBC’s 1.5 million and CNN’s one million viewers. It’s very fair to say that—and there may be some overlap—23 million television news watchers were getting pro-lockdown, closed school, and face mask support from all programming except Fox News primetime. Online news and media sites touch hundreds of millions viewers. Below is Statista’s breakdown of the most frequented online news sources based on unique monthly visitors:
News Source
Monthly Visitors
Yahoo News
175 million
Google News
150 million
Huffington Post
110 million
CNN
95 million
The New York Times
70 million
Fox News
65 million
NBC News
63 million
The Washington Post
47 million
The Guardian
42 million
The Wall Street Journal
40 million
ABC News
36 million
USA Today
34 million
LA Times
33 million
The Atlantic self-reported that they received ninety million unique online visitors in March 2020.
There is obvious overlap of the same unique visitors to many of these news outlets. Within this breakdown, for a solid year into the pandemic, the only major news sources that were offering coverage against the lockdowns were Fox News and the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. The Guardian ran a few pieces on lockdown damage, mostly harm from school closings, as did the New York Times. While the Times pushed many lockdown measures, they did some excellent reporting on school closings. In general, there’s a ratio of 845 million to 105 million, or better than 88% coverage driving continued lockdowns, school closings, and face mask mandates.
Social Media
An enormous and growing source of news Americans receive is through Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Pew Research identified that 36% of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook; ninety million people of the 170 million Facebook users. About sixty million adults get news from YouTube and fifty million from Twitter. Now, most of the news on these social media platforms often originates from the news sources above. However, just like large news organizations demonstrated bias in what they reported, the social media platforms demonstrated bias in what they allowed to circulate.
Facebook
Facebook has become a primary news resource for hundreds of millions of Americans and others worldwide. They did some good too. Facebook created a vaccine finder tool used by millions to help them secure vaccines more efficiently. They also became the arbiter of COVID-19 news and what they called misinformation. Facebook removed sixteen million pieces of information that they deemed inappropriate even if they did not violate their rules, like comments and articles discouraging wearing masks or getting vaccines. They removed the Great Barrington Declaration page. Do a quick search and find the GBD and read through it – it’s short. It condemns the one-size-fits-all lockdown measures like closing schools and businesses, and rather stresses the importance of those measurably at risk to be protected, whether in a long-term care facility or at home.
Are those crazy concepts that should not be open for discussion? Kang-Xing Jin was a college friend of Mark Zuckerberg and took the lead on COVID-19 information and misinformation for Facebook. KX has no medical background, but then neither do I; that’s no showstopper to analyze data, risk, and consequence. The stickiness comes in when the giant tech companies that shape our lives can’t draw the line between misinformation and healthy debate and discussion.
Facebook pages, messages, and posted articles that promoted that kids had zero COVID-19 risk, that discouraged masks, and argued that no requirement should be made to wear masks were all at risk of censorship. They banned “misinformation” related to theories ranging from saying SARS-CoV-2 was man made to posting that it’s safer to get the disease rather than the vaccine.
As for the latter, based on VAERS (vaccine adverse event reporting system), that may have been true for those under thirty years old and was definitely true for kids eighteen and under. At a minimum, debating the risk and benefit of an emergency use authorization vaccine is legitimate. Another banned opinion is that COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu. As discussed, for those older it was markedly more dangerous. For babies, to at least college age it wasn’t more dangerous than the flu.
Facebook also banned anything stating that the vaccines kill or harm people. Based on the VAERS reporting, Facebook was flat-out wrong. Vaccines did, in very small but measurable cases, cause death. They caused more side effects than all other vaccines over the past couple of decades combined. They absolutely made millions sick. The J&J vaccine I took made me very sick for two days. Having said that, if you were fifty or over or at risk, taking it could make sense. For kids, the encouragement when they were at no risk was also a no-brainer; the vaccines should not have been pushed in 2021 or today. The data doesn’t support the vaccines for healthy kids under five, as the FDA is recommending approval.
YouTube
Very early on, YouTube took down videos that were critical of lockdowns or face mask mandates. YouTube took down a video interview with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in the spring of 2020, as well as many others that discussed overcounting of COVID-19 deaths or lockdown harms. In March 2021 Florida Governor Ron DeSantis hosted a roundtable discussion with Dr. Scott Atlas and the Great Barrington Declaration doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. The triggering comment made was their condemnation of masking children. YouTube took down the video. Bhattacharya, who really is a gentleman, kindly made a comment that he’d love to debate the 24-year-old YouTube employee making that decision. YouTube responded to taking down the roundtable discussion with the following statement:
“We removed this video because it included content that contradicts the consensus of local and global health authorities regarding the efficacy of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We allow videos that otherwise violate our policies to remain on the platform if they contain sufficient educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic context. Our policies apply to everyone, and focus on content regardless of the speaker or channel.”
The problem was the consensus of local and global health authorities were not following the science. These were not public health officials, they were zero-COVID-19 officials.
Twitter
Nearly all original content and data in challenging school closings, hospital capacity, face mask efficacy, closed restaurants and the rest of lockdown measures can be traced back to Twitter. Organized media, a good 90% of it, was driving fear through on-screen graphics and reporting. Very rarely did media outlets contextualize that: 1) the models were wrong, 2) kids were at ~0 risk, 3) mask efficacy was very iffy based on pre-COVID-19 science and the data in the U.S., 4) closing businesses didn’t do anything measurable and 5) not fully reopening schools in the fall of 2020 was insane. The data and critical thinking on these topics originated on Twitter.
Twitter began censoring like crazy after the November 2020 election. Thousands of accounts were blocked, as were millions of tweets questioning mask efficacy, vaccine safety, and anything else not aligned with the CDC. Here’s what this means. The CDC director could tweet out something like “Hospitals are overflowing in California. Please do not leave your house except when necessary.” Someone could reply with “Hospitals are not overflowing; ICUs are only at capacity at 30% of hospitals and half the hospitals don’t have 20% COVID-19 occupancy.” Bam! That tweet could be flagged or cause an account to be suspended.
Let’s suppose you think the social media companies should have suppressed lockdown criticisms. Go back to 2003. After the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan, the U.S. decided to invade Iraq. The two justifications were an affiliation to al-Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction residing in Iraq. There was a near-unanimous consensus within Washington D.C. that it was the right move. “Experts” said it was the right move.
In that moment my dad and I sat around watching the news and shaking our heads. At his salty near-80 years of age and a veteran of Korea, he said, “Those bastards are going to send these kids to war and they’ll get killed and for what? Iraq is no threat to America and there’s no proof they were involved in 9-11.” He never again considered himself a Republican and never looked back.
The Iraq War was a huge event in American history. Nearly every politician supported it and there was universal media support. Sound a little like the lockdowns? A huge public policy based on sketchy risk and consequence data. Now imagine if media companies banned criticism of the war – eliminating any healthy debate on something history proved to be a disaster. History will not remember the lockdowns as a proportionate response. This isn’t about freedom of speech. It’s about healthy debate on policies that have enormous consequences.
Puzzle Pieces Connected
This is why the media bias supporting mask mandates, school closings, closed restaurants and the rest of the interventions was so devastating.
COVID-19 was unlike other controversial political issues like gun control or climate change. Everyone had the same starting point, and information was on a level playing field. In this one instance more than any other, we saw how enormous the power of the media is in influencing people’s opinions and the effect that had on policy. Media coverage out of the gate condemned any thinking that closed schools were a bad idea, that open schools were not a risk. The idea that face masks did not work was condemned, and even things like criticizing the closing of indoor dining. There was no open debate.
Media Coverage
It’s still hard to understand why most media outlets were so motivated to drive panic. Many said it was over the November 2020 election. If they could convince voters President Trump did a poor job handling the pandemic, they might vote for a change. There was something to that and it probably worked, but it continued far beyond the election. Two months after the election the CDC was promoting double masking. The first media break in the dike was a shift in February toward opening schools, and in-person learning did go up significantly in the spring of 2021, too little too late for the school year.
While Yahoo News and Google News were the largest online media sources, they were not material originators of content. You can trace media influences to the large outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and to a lesser degree the Atlantic, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Guardian, and others. Their content then cascaded to larger mediums on Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter.
The New York Times
The Times’ writers published thousands of articles on COVID-19 beginning in early 2020. The Times, and The Washington Post, set the narrative for news. They are foundational media sources because their writings cascade into other analyses from other writers, podcasts, and of course posts on Twitter. The Times drove enormous panic porn in 2020, energizing lockdown policies. Below are some examples.
Tom Friedman
Tom Friedman is a writer for the New York Times; he’s an A-lister. In 1989, Friedman wrote a very comprehensive and terrific book called From Beirut to Jerusalem. I read it as a college student and loved it, you should check it out even now. Friedman had nothing but disdain for President Trump.
As an opinion writer, it’s fine, healthy, and fair to offer his point of view. During the discussions of reopening the country, he made some reckless commentary about the president and the associated risks of reopening. In an April 18, 2020 column in the New York Times, the headline read “Trump Is Asking Us to Play Russian Roulette With Our Lives.”
In the piece, Friedman wrote:
‘LIBERATE MINNESOTA!’ ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ ‘LIBERATE VIRGINIA.’ With these three short tweets last week, President Trump attempted to kick off the post-lockdown phase of America’s coronavirus crisis. It should be called: ‘American Russian roulette: The Covid-19 version.’’ What Trump was saying with those tweets was: Everybody just go back to work. From now on, each of us individually, and our society collectively, is going to play Russian roulette. We’re going to bet that we can spin through our daily lives — work, shopping, school, travel — without the coronavirus landing on us. And if it does, we’ll also bet that it won’t kill us.
The flaws in Friedman’s argument are numerous. Russian roulette, strictly speaking, is when you load one bullet in a revolver, spin the chamber and pull the trigger, with a fully equal one in six chance of dying. There is a haunting scene depicting this in the classic film The Deer Hunter. Russian roulette gives everyone an equal probability of dying.
COVID-19 did not give everyone an equal probability of getting sick, much less dying. With the economy on fire, hospitalizations and deaths declining and knowing who was at risk, requiring vast testing and tracing was not a reasonable requirement for opening up the country. Washington Governor Jay Inslee required just that (on May 18, 2020) to open up Washington. Apoorva Mandavilli is a medical and science journalist for the New York Times. She was one of two primary writers for the Times on the pandemic. Mandavilli wrote hundreds of articles and opinion pieces for the Times and participated in many interviews on COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021. Her reporting erred on the side of pandemic pessimism and maintaining lockdowns throughout. Headlines of articles she wrote included:
“Six Months of Coronavirus: Here’s Some of What We’ve Learned” on June 18, 2020. In this commentary, Mandavilli asserted two things that science and data wasn’t showing: that masks work and that natural infection does not result in achieving herd immunity. Herd immunity became a toxic thing to talk about in 2020, never mind that it is exactly how every historic pandemic ended. In June she also wrote that airborne transmission (versus through large droplets) isn’t a significant thing, something common sense showed couldn’t possibly be true knowing what we knew a few months into the pandemic.
“Older Children Spread the Coronavirus Just as Much as Adults, Large Study Finds; The study of nearly 65,000 people in South Korea suggests that school reopenings will trigger more outbreaks” on July 18, 2020. Headlines like this drove media, politicians and parents alike to resist reopening schools. The assertion was patently false. By the time this was written, data showed older kids were not equal spreaders, and very few had become seriously ill from COVID-19. Summer camp data showed this as discussed earlier.
“Children may carry high levels of the coronavirus, up to 100 times as much as adults, new Lurie Children’s Hospital study finds” on July 31, 2020. Not even sure what to say about this one, other than this was never happening.
“C.D.C. Calls on Schools to Reopen, Downplaying Health Risks” on July 24, 2020 with Mandavilli contributing. The analysis suggested CDC Director Robert Redfield should not have said schools should reopen fully in the fall. The writers criticized President Trump for driving home that schools should reopen and said this line of thinking was putting kids and teachers at risk. That was false; data in the moment made this obvious.
“A Parent’s Toughest Call: In-Person Schooling or Not?” on September 1, 2020. The takeaway was to not send kids back to school without elaborate precautions and interventions. The focus was on cases rather than illnesses to kids and teachers that could be at-risk. Illnesses would have been statistically zero for kids and over half the teachers.
“The Price for Not Wearing Masks: Perhaps 130,000 Lives. The pandemic death toll could be lowered by next spring if more Americans wear masks, a new analysis finds” on October 23, 2020. The journalist took a shot at Dr. Scott Atlas, as well as the president, for saying masks don’t work. You saw earlier the data comparing heavily masked areas and less masked areas. That data was obvious by summer, and suggesting masks could have such an impact was taking the lead from “experts” without any independent analysis. The data showed otherwise.
There were many more articles like these that Mandavilli wrote. There were also many articles that she wrote that were fair to the data at hand with a balanced outlook. With a trickle of panic-inducing articles resisting herd immunity and keeping kids masked and out of school, it rippled into other media and policy makers. Mandavilli displayed many times on Twitter that she preferred the lockdown culture.
Why on earth so many politicians and media figures in influential roles feel the need to vent on Twitter is a bigger mystery than COVID-19 ever was. On Saturday, March 20, 2021, Madavilli, who lives in Brooklyn, tweeted this: “We were out of house today for six hours, probably half of them in the car, and I am utterly spent. Reentry is going to be brutal.” Perhaps there’s a different perspective of what “utterly spent” means to someone that lost their job and had to bridge a learning gap with their kids that were cratering behind. Elites that kept their jobs, had resources and got to work from home embraced the lockdowns.
Jeffrey Tucker leads the Brownstone Institute and wrote Liberty or Lockdown in the summer of 2020. He observed the media playbook that was true for over a year:
Attribute economic fallout not to the lockdowns but to the virus
Deliberately confuse readers about the difference between tests, cases and deaths
Never focus on the incredibly obvious demographics of COVID-19 deaths
Dismiss any alternative to lockdown as crazy, unscientific or cruel, while acting as if Dr. Fauci speaks for the entire scientific community
Above all, promote panic over calm
The Atlantic
The Atlantic is a left-leaning print and online publication that has been around since 1857. The online COVID Tracking Project (CTP) was run by the Atlantic and provided excellent data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It became the single best resource to get state-by-state data, and much of the data cited here is from there. The CTP did some excellent work. It would be easy to cite anti-lockdown reporting by the Hill or the Blaze, but we’re looking at what was impacting the thoughts of a wider group of Americans and politicians. The Atlantic did their share of reporting that supported lockdown mentality, but they also published some quality commentary on the damage of the lockdowns. If you’re a centrist or right-leaning and can get past the often-political commentaries, the Atlantic often produces some thoughtful work.
The Bad
The Atlantic published pieces with high politicization, such as “How Trump Closed the Schools,” suggesting the president’s mishandling resulted in the pandemic getting out of control, thus rendering schools unsafe to reopen. It was a major hit piece blasting the president when so many countries did worse than the U.S. with huge societal damage. Another one was “Why Republicans are Ignoring the Coronavirus.” Were they ignoring it or balancing risk and consequence policy? You can decide, but Republican-led states were less restricted, kept more kids in class and did no worse than Democrat-led states. That’s not as much fun to write about if you’re left-leaning though.
“Teachers Know Schools Aren’t Safe to Reopen” came out in August 2020. Maybe teachers all over the rest of the world were clueless compared to American teachers, but they fared no worse than those staying at home.
The Good
In August 2020 the dike broke and this strong opinion piece came out written by Chavi Karkowsky, a doctor and mom from New York, called “What We’ve Stolen From Our Kids. School provides so much more than an education.” It was a powerful and needed insight into the cost of closed schools. Seeing a major publication offer up a point of view like this felt like a real step forward. That same month the Atlantic published “We Flattened the Curve. Our Kids Belong in School.” The curve was destined to spike up seasonally in the fall, but they were right on kids belonging in school.
Other similar articles were sprinkled in throughout the rest of 2020. In January 2021 they published “The Truth About Kids, School and COVID-19.” Where the Atlantic gets some credit is that for being left-leaning, where for some reason liberals were mostly against reopening schools, the Atlantic not only demonstrated some actual journalism, they also influenced other liberal media.
Emily Oster is an economist and professor at Brown University. She is also a writer and contributor of several op-eds to the Atlantic. She wrote ““Schools aren’t Super-Spreaders: Fears from the summer appear to have been overblown,” “Parents Can’t Wait Around Forever, “The ‘Just Stay Home’ Message Will Backfire,” and the big controversial one: “Yes, You Can Vacation With Your Unvaccinated Kids.” Oster is not a conservative, embraced face masks, ran a school/COVID-19 database and is pretty darn level-headed. Check out some interviews with her on YouTube.
Her point was that unvaccinated kids are at about the same risk of getting sick or spreading COVID-19 as vaccinated adults, and that parents should get their kids out and normalize. She was right. Then she got blasted by people who knew much less than she does about the science and data. Good for her for moving us forward, and for the Atlantic for publishing good content in support of open schools that went against the liberal dogma.
The Great
Finally, the Atlantic published a very powerful piece that should be required reading for every person still embracing lockdowns and closed schools in 2021. Emma Green wrote “The Liberals Who Can’t Quit Lockdown. Progressive communities have been home to some of the fiercest battles over COVID-19 policies, and some liberal policy makers have left scientific evidence behind.” This was one of the strongest analyses in the first half of 2021, because it came from a left-leaning publication. Opinions that deviate from a traditional ideology carry more weight. Highlights from Green’s masterpiece:
“For many progressives, extreme vigilance was in part about opposing Donald Trump. Some of this reaction was born of deeply felt frustration with how he handled the pandemic. It could also be knee-jerk. “If he said, ‘Keep schools open,’ then, well, we’re going to do everything in our power to keep schools closed,” Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me.”
“Even as scientific knowledge of COVID-19 has increased, some progressives have continued to embrace policies and behaviors that aren’t supported by evidence, such as banning access to playgrounds, closing beaches, and refusing to reopen schools for in-person learning.”
“In Somerville [MA], a local leader appeared to describe parents who wanted a faster return to in-person instruction as “white parents” in a virtual public meeting; a community member accused the group of mothers advocating for schools to reopen of being motivated by white supremacy. “I spent four years fighting Trump because he was so anti-science,” Daniele Lantagne, a Somerville mom and engineering professor. “I spent the last year fighting people who I normally would agree with … desperately trying to inject science into school reopening, and completely failed.” [might be worth mentioning as a percentage, the kids of “white parents” were less affected by closed schools than those of black or Hispanic kids]
To support Green’s observation, even after the CDC stopped recommending face masks for those vaccinated on May 13, 2021, A-list media figures could not let go. MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said, “If you want to follow the science,” you should follow my lead and “still wear the mask” despite being vaccinated when you’re around possibly unvaccinated people. It’s not clear what science she was referencing.
Rachel Maddow is MSNBC’s highest-rated anchor and was reluctant to embrace the CDC recommendation. Her initial comment to CDC Director Walensky was “How sure are you because this was a really big change?” No such comment came from Maddow when kids were prevented from going to school in 2020. Maddow then shared, “I feel like I’m going to have to rewire myself so that when I see someone out in the world who’s not wearing a mask, I don’t instantly think, ‘You are a threat, or you are selfish or you are a COVID denier and you definitely haven’t been vaccinated. I mean, we’re going to have to rewire the way that we look at each other.”
The View host Whoopi Goldberg said on air, “What is it going to take you think for people to get comfortable following not just the science, but their [the CDC] own science, what is comfortable for them?” CNN’s chief political correspondent Dana Bash called the decision “very scary.” Time magazine said it was a “baffling, whiplash-inducing decision.” Politico called it “a bitter disappointment to unions and other safety advocates.” Newsweek warned of “deadly new variants” under the cover headline of “WINTER IS COMING.” CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, criticized the recommendation as well, saying the CDC “made a critical error here in surprising basically everyone with a very significant change. [Masking] is so effective and it’s not that hard to do in most situations — just to put a mask on.”
The COVID-19 Media in Summary
Were many of the pieces above cherry-picked? Was there actual balanced coverage by the networks? Did I selectively choose to pick on the Times, Post, Atlantic, Twitter, and Facebook? And you may wonder why it matters, that the press has the freedom to write whatever they choose. They do have that freedom, and that should always be supported. Most people lack critical thinking, either in natural ability or laziness preventing exploration of thought and ideas. The media knows this and catered to it. It’s no different than advertising. If you advertise something enough, you will reach critical mass awareness and eventually adoption.
Why the media so unanimously covered the pandemic like Dirty Laundry is still a mystery. Much of it was political, to keep viewers and readers addicted to [fear] porn, and because the media knew so little about what was actually happening they reported what everyone else reported. In March 2020, Bruce Sacerdote, Ranjan Sehgal and Molly Cook authored “Why Is All COVID-19 News Bad News?” Sacerdote is an economics professor at Dartmouth College, and Sehgal (Dartmouth) and Cook (Brown University) are students. What a great experience for these two students to participate in such a groundbreaking study. They uncovered what we all knew anecdotally: media coverage in COVID-19 was heavily biased promoting depression, fear and polling that resulted in maintaining lockdown measures much longer than needed.
At a time when the data showed kids were at practically no risk from COVID-19 and school reopenings were no riskier to kids and teachers than remote learning and circulating in their off time, 86% of the American media reported negative news on school reopening. 54% of the media in other English-speaking countries reported negatively on schools reopening. When looking at all COVID-19 stories since the pandemic broke, the fifteen major media players were 25% more likely than their international counterparts to disseminate negative information. This shows the majority of the media worldwide did not understand what was going on, or chose to ignore it, though much worse in the United States.
The researchers analyzed 43,000 articles associated with “vaccines, increases and decreases in case counts, and reopenings (of businesses, schools, parks, restaurants, government facilities, etc.).” Below are trends they uncovered:
“Among the U.S. major media, 15,000 stories mention increases in caseloads while only 2,500 mention decreases, or a 6 to 1 ratio. During the period when caseloads were falling nationally (April 24-June 27, 2020), this ratio remained a relatively high 5.3 to 1.” [the period of analysis for their study was 2020; anecdotally their findings certainly continued through May 2021]
No bias or negative-outlook correlation between traditional “conservative” or “liberal” media.
U.S. media was 3-8 times more likely to promote social distancing or wearing face masks than their international counterparts.
U.S. counties that relied less on national news were more likely to reopen schools in 2020. This follows some logic because higher in-person learning occurred in less urban communities.
They concluded “that there is little evidence that the negativity of the national news media causes a reduction in school reopenings.” That seems hard to believe logically. If the media were pounding on 1) the psychological impact and learning deficiency associated with remote learning, and 2) the data from what we’ve previously reviewed on kids and COVID-19 risk, polling would have driven more reopening support, politicians would have yielded to the polls and teachers unions would’ve buckled.
“The U.S. Federal Communication Commission eliminated its fairness doctrine regulation in 1987. This regulation required broadcasters to provide adequate coverage of public issues and to fairly represent opposing views. In contrast, the U.K. and Canada still maintain such regulations. On the surface, the fairness doctrine would appear most relevant to partisan bias as opposed to negativity. It may be that profit-maximizing U.S. news providers realized that they should provide not only partisan news to serve their consumers’ tastes but also negative news which is in high demand.” That’s probably true. It’s definitely a sad state of journalism.
For the context of the media serving Dirty Laundry, consider this. There were a total of 2.6 million articles scrubbed. Of those, look at the weighting of some of the reporting in the first seven months of 2020:
88,659 articles included a comment about “Trump and Masks,” “Trump and Hydroxychloroquine” or “Hydroxychloroquine”
87,550 articles mentioned “Decreases” for the whole study period
33,000 articles mentioned “Decreases” between April 24 – June 27, 2020
325,550 articles mentioned “Increases” for the whole study period
More media articles chose to comment on President Trump and his COVID-19 comments versus the very positive news when COVID-19 cases/hospitalizations/deaths were decreasing. Four times more articles were written about COVID-19 activity increasing versus decreasing.
Within their study period, between March 15 and July 31, 2020, there were 138 days of measurable pandemic case and hospitalization data. Of those 138 days, 61 had decreasing hospitalization days. Four times more articles citing increases over decreases were published while 44% of the days had a decrease. Case and death trend data was far too loose to include in this daily breakdown for two reasons. One, cases were in large part a product of testing, particularly with rapidly growing seroprevalence in the country. Two, deaths began to include probables and up to half the deaths reported any given day were backdated. By the second quarter of 2021 well over half of the reported deaths were backdated as far as summer 2020.
The Polls
Politicians are driven by three things: their party; their ideology; polls. What people think is largely driven by their experiences, their beliefs and the knowledge they acquire. It’s not likely a plethora of articles for or against abortion will change a lot of minds; they’re much more likely to reinforce beliefs. If there were 300,000 articles in a given year for gun control, it’s still very unlikely that gun owners and Second Amendment supporters would change their minds. The issues have been too ingrained for too long. COVID-19 was very different. Everyone in the world started off on the same block in 2020. In this one instance more than any other for anyone alive during the pandemic, the media had the power to shape thought. Before the pandemic, Americans’ trust in the media was only 41%. That was lower than President Trump’s approval rating. In March 2020, this was the approval rating for several stakeholders during the pandemic:
Stakeholders
Approve
Disapprove
Your hospital
88%
10%
Your state government
82%
17%
Government Health Agencies
80%
17%
President Trump
60%
38%
Congress
59%
37%
The Media
44%
55%
In the summer of 2020, 1,000 citizens from several countries were polled on the pandemic. Below is the mean percentage that the sampling showed people thought the COVID-19 death tallies were after three months of the pandemic:
Country
Population Percent that died from COVID-19
That Absolute Population Number
Actual Number of COVID-19 deaths at the time
United States
9%
29,700,000
132,000
United Kingdom
7%
4,830,000
48,000
Sweden
6%
600,000
6,000
France
5%
3,300,000
33,000
Denmark
3%
174,000
580
Now, do an online search with date parameters of July 20 – August 30, 2020 and see how many news articles featured this polling result. It’s fewer than the number of your fingers. Mean percentages of respondents thought that 9% of Americans had died of COVID-19 in three months. That’s equivalent to everyone in Texas. Isn’t that alarming? Even if the polling result was 1%, that’s over three million COVID-19 deaths, about the number of people that die in the United States each year from all causes. That’s also 50% more pandemic lives lost than the Spanish Flu caused, adjusted for population.
If we had a virus that killed 9% (or even ½ %) of the population in three months, the lockdowns would not be like what we saw. Everyone would embrace the quarantining we saw in the movies Outbreak or Contagion. This type of general understanding of the pandemic, or lack of, is why we did not see protests throughout 2020 and 2021. One, liberals are more likely to protest than conservatives and liberals were generally much more supportive of lockdowns than conservatives. Two, most people regardless of politics don’t study data beyond headlines and don’t understand the context of the COVID-19 risk.
Franklin Templeton Poll
In July 2020, Franklin Templeton published polling that showed the sad and disastrous perception Americans had of COVID-19 risk. As you view the following charts, consider there was very little coverage in the media from the CDC, and from state health agencies to level-set understanding of the pandemic. Ask yourself: if the media was giving a proper explanation of what was happening, if the CDC communicated factually what was happening, how could results like this occur?
Respondents clearly did not know the extent how age-stratified COVID-19 deaths were skewed to the elderly. They surely would not have known that a third of all excess deaths were not caused by COVID-19 but rather the lockdowns.
This poll result closely connects to what we saw earlier: the highest stress was associated with younger age groups. They were about as stressed with ~0 risk as older Americans that were at very measurable risk. Franklin Templeton commented on their findings, calling it “stunning.” Americans believed that people over 55 were about half the death victims, while it was actually 92%. They thought people under 45 years old were almost 30% of all deaths; they were less than 3%. They overestimated the risk to those under 24 by a factor of fifty.
It’s not far off from the earlier poll where respondents on average thought 9% of Americans had died from COVID-19 after three months. Poll results like this should have driven Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and Dr. Redfield and the CDC to shout from the rooftops to educate Americans on what was happening. It should have caused responsible journalists to do special fact-based segments on COVID-19 risk and the data we had. What we heard was the sound of silence.
Gallup Polls
Gallup conducted weekly polls on sentiment around the pandemic from the beginning in March 2020 well into 2021. Never fewer than 65% of respondents felt staying home was the appropriate thing to do from the beginning and for thirteen straight months.
Dates
Better to Stay Home
Live Normal Life
What Was Happening
Mar 23-29, 2020
91%
9%
COVID-19 first hit, Imperial College projection of 2.2 million lives lost
Jun 1-7, 2020
65%
35%
Southern states were reopening, cases were decreasing
Jul 13-19, 2020
73%
27%
Sunbelt states were peaking in COVID-19 activity
Sep 14-27, 2020
64%
36%
Summer swell was over, low COVID-19 activity, most schools still closed
Dec 15, 2020 – Jan 3, 2021
69%
31%
Peak COVID-19 hospitalizations; vaccines were rolling ou
Apr 19-25, 2021
55%
45%
COVID-19 cases/hospitalizations/deaths had all hit one-year lows; vaccine supply outpaced demand
A majority of Americans did not support returning to normal life at any time since the pandemic began and into the spring of 2021. Polling after the CDC lifted indoor mask recommendations on May 14, 2021, for those vaccinated finally began to tilt the scale. COVID-19 hospitalizations began cratering in January 2021, and the pandemic by definition as we knew it was over by February. Had the media reported that, Americans would have felt more comfortable getting back to normal.
There was a potentially great segment on MSNBC in March 2021 where Chuck Todd was asking “experts” why Florida, with very few restrictions, had near-identical results to strictly locked down California. It was going great until they introduced an analysis by the LA Times that said had Florida locked down hard they would have saved 3,000 lives, and had California relaxed its restrictions they would have had 6,000 more deaths. The analysis was practically made up with no reasonable science and data behind it. Reporting like this was why America was not yet ready to move on.
On April 25,2021, with the pandemic virtually over, the respondents were asked, “How long do you think the level of disruption occurring to travel, school, work and public events in the U.S. will continue?” 95% answered with either “a few more months,” “through 2021,” or “longer than that.” That did drop from 98% in February 2021. In April 2021 a majority of remote workers and a plurality of the rest of the workers said their preference was to work remotely, not because of fear of COVID-19 but because of preference. Read: many loved lockdowns if they had a job.
MIT Student Studies
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is one of the premier math, science and engineering universities in the world. In 2021 they released two studies around social media and “COVID-19 Skeptics.” Students from MIT and Wellesley College reported on many people I know and followed. How they viewed analytical points of view that condemned strict lockdowns were emblematic of how the media failed to report balanced context and why Americans were reluctant to return to normal life.
The first study was called “Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online” (January 2021), and the second was “The Data Visualizations Behind COVID-19 Skepticism” (March 1, 2021). The first study looked at a half million tweets that used visualization of data to support removing nonpharmaceutical interventions governments around the world had instituted for over a year.
The students enveloped people on Twitter that they perceived as viewing the pandemic as exaggerated and believed schools should be reopened (which the CDC maintained as far back as August 2020) as “anti-maskers.” You should really check out the study from undoubtedly very bright students from one of the most elite universities in the world. The lack of impartial thought, the lack of a quest to learn and be open-minded, and mostly, the inability to analyze data without predisposition is disappointing. It’s indicative of prevailing college thought all over the country, but this one hit home.
As the study classified those using charts to illustrate their cases, they broke out the following categories:
American politics and media
American politics and right-wing media
British news media
Anti-mask network of Twitter users
New York Times centric network
WHO and health-related news organizations
The two classes of media are “media” and “right-wing media.” Does that mean there’s “impartial journalistic media” and then “conspiratorial right-wing media?” The bias is that there is normal media and crazy right-wing media and then anti-maskers tweeting about the harm of lockdown interventions. This is how over 80% of the media, the CDC, and most state health agencies portrayed the environment, which made it an Everest-climb to reach an open debate.
The Twitter anti-mask network was led by Alex Berenson, the Ethical Skeptic, and Rational Ground founder Justin Hart. This is consistent with my premise that nearly all original thought condemning lockdowns as an unscientific approach were sourced on Twitter. They asserted that “anti-maskers value unmediated access to information and privilege personal research and direct reading over ‘expert’ interpretations.”
Everyone should support unmediated access to information even if they disagree with “anti-maskers” on this one. You never know when you’ll be on the other side (see Iraq War).
They grouped the anti-maskers as representing that COVID-19 was no worse than the flu. Knowing most of the high-profile Twitter users mentioned, that is flat-out false. There is a gulf between thinking COVID-19 was no worse than the flu (it was much worse for those over 50 years old) and believing lockdowns didn’t work and were unscientific. It may be that students at elite universities and those in the elite media were too detached from middle to lower class Americans and were out of touch with the consequences of the lockdowns. It may also be that they saw it as a power grab. It may mean they just weren’t that bright.
Critics of “anti-maskers” feel that processing data around excess deaths was conspiratorial. Many excess deaths were from the lockdowns. They then batched the anti-maskers as politically conservative. The face of lockdown criticism was Alex Berenson, and Berenson spent more of his life left-leaning than right-leaning. David Zweig, who wrote dozens of pieces supporting open schools, is no right-winger.
The students then wrote that “anti-maskers” argued there was an outsized emphasis on deaths rather than cases. It was quite the opposite. Everyone following this knew that the case data was fantastically overreported, that there were many times more cases, as well as hundreds of thousands of false positives, and backdated dumping. In short, the margin of error of cases on any given day had a solid 50% margin of error, though it was directionally useful. Deaths too were unreliable for reasons discussed. The “anti-maskers” usually found COVID-19 hospitalizations as the best data point to measure what was happening, and that was the most reliable metric, not cases or deaths.
The Best Ad Campaign in History
The prolific critics of the lockdowns were apolitical before COVID-19. They were as critical of Republican leaders as Democrat leaders if they supported closed schools, closed restaurants or masks outdoors (probably masks indoors too). You have to give it to the media though. They ran the most effective advertising campaign in history. They accomplished something extraordinary and it should be studied in every advertising class forever.
The media was able to convince over 50% of the people under thirty that they were at serious risk of getting sick or dying from COVID-19.
They were able to trigger more anxiety in young people than any other age group.
They were able to convince people that putting face masks on two-year old’s made sense.
They convinced parents that keeping their kids out of school for a year and a half was a good thing.
They convinced people they should wear a face mask when alone in their car, walking their dog, or hiking up a mountain.
They convinced enough of the world that they could control the spread of the virus like a dam.
If you’re sick, you should listen to your doctor. If you climb a mountain you should listen to your guide. If you need to defend your country, you listen to your generals. But if a policy is suggested that has a balance of risk and consequence, something that happens consequentially by following one direction, stop and give it thought and research.
It’s healthy to question the media, politicians, healthcare experts, or military experts. They are people like you and me, no smarter. In some cases, more informed on their specialty, but that breeds myopia. Sometimes they can get so close to something that they can’t see it clearly. Sometimes they can see it but don’t want to.
Sometimes they have an agenda. History needs to remember the lockdowns as the most harmful, ineffective public policy America and the world had ever seen. Study the data for yourself next time and reconcile any one opinion you hear with another that gives an opposing view. And anytime we get passionate about a policy, we all need to be open-minded to the consequences of a policy, as if it may be a zero-sum game.
Michael Betrus is the author of COVID-19: Lockdowns on Trial and the upcoming COVID-19: The Science vs. The Lockdowns.
TAKE ACTION
Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00ThePricklyPear.orghttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngThePricklyPear.org2022-07-02 04:00:002022-07-02 04:00:00Weekend Read: How the Media Fueled the Lockdowns
“Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman stated in 2003. “We are far from that ultimate result. If we had that, a system of free choice, we would also have a system of competition, innovation, which would change the character of education.”
Last week, Arizona lawmakers moved us much closer to that ultimate result. Legislators in that state, which already had some of the most robust school choice policies in the US, passed the country’s first universal education savings account bill, extending education choice to all K-12 students.
The education savings accounts, or Empowerment Scholarship Accounts as they are known in Arizona, had previously been available to certain Arizona students who met specific criteria, including special needs students and children in active-duty military families. This new bill, which the Governor Doug Ducey is expected to sign, extends education choice to all school-age children throughout Arizona.
Every family will now have access to 90 percent of the state-allocated per pupil education dollars, or about $7,000 per student, to use toward approved education-related resources, including private school tuition, tutors, curriculum materials, online learning programs, and more.
“Arizona is now the gold standard for school choice,” Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, told me this week. “Every other state should follow Arizona’s lead and fund students instead of systems. Education funding is meant for educating children, not for protecting a particular institution. School choice is the only way to truly secure parental rights in education.”
Several states have introduced or expanded school choice policies over the past couple of years, enabling taxpayer funding of education to go directly to students rather than bureaucratic school systems. In this week’s LiberatED podcast episode, I spoke with one education entrepreneur, Michelle McCartney, whose homeschool resource center is an approved vendor for New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Accounts, an education savings account program for income-eligible students that was implemented last year.
While McCartney sees a fully private, free market in education as the ideal circumstance, she recognizes that education choice policies are an important first step toward expanding education options for more families, and reducing government involvement in the education sector.
“If it was up to me we wouldn’t pay any money to the government and school would be entirely privatized,” said McCartney. “That’s how I believe it should be, but it’s not. So I think we can all sit here and have discussions about what would be the ideal circumstance, but I think sometimes we’ve got to roll with what we have, and if we can get any of that money back to the families I think that’s an important first step.”
Indeed, Milton Friedman also saw school choice policies such as vouchers as a first step in education reform, not a final one. Friedman popularized the idea of school choice policies, specifically universal school vouchers, in his 1955 paper, “The Role of Government in Education,” and elaborated on his views over the following decades up until his death in 2006 at the age of 94.
Friedman and his economist wife Rose wrote in their influential book, Free To Choose: “We regard the voucher plan as a partial solution because it affects neither the financing of schooling nor the compulsory attendance laws. We favor going much farther.”
While Arizona’s new legislation now makes it the forerunner in education choice policies across the country, West Virginia is close behind and begins to address compulsory attendance. Lawmakers there recently passed legislation that loosens state compulsory school attendance laws for participants in learning pods and microschools, two emerging, decentralized K-12 learning models that are gaining popularity across the country. West Virginia also passed an education savings account program last year, known as the Hope Scholarship, that extends education choice to nearly all K-12 students.
The education disruption over the past two years has re-energized parents and taxpayers alike. They are demanding more options beyond an assigned district school, embracing innovative learning models, and loosening the government grip on education. As Friedman envisioned, a choice-based system of education weakens the government monopoly on schooling and sparks innovation and competition to ultimately “change the character of education.”
We are seeing that change occur right before our eyes.
Listen to the weekly LiberatED Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, and Stitcher, and sign up for Kerry’s weekly LiberatED email newsletter to stay up-to-date on educational news and trends from a free-market perspective.
Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019), an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly newsletter on parenting and education here.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-07-01 17:51:242022-07-01 17:51:24Arizona’s New School Choice Bill Moves Us Closer to Milton Friedman’s Vision
“This session, let’s expand school choice any way we can,” declared Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey in his State of the State address on Jan. 10, “Let’s think big and find more ways to get kids into the school of their parent’s choice. Send me the bills, and I’ll sign them.”
Once signed into law, Arizona will reclaim its title as the state with the “most expansive ESA” policy in the nation.
Empowerment Scholarship Accounts empower families with the freedom and flexibility to customize their child’s education. Arizona families can currently use ESAs to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, homeschool curriculums, online courses, educational therapy, and more.
The ESAs are funded with 90% of the state portion of Arizona’s per-pupil funding, including the additional funds for students with special needs.
Currently, about a quarter of elementary and secondary students in Arizona are eligible for an ESA, including students with special needs, students assigned to low-performing district schools, the children of active-duty military personnel, and a few other categories of students.
The Arizona Senate passed HB 2853 on Friday night on a vote of 16 to 10. Earlier in the week, the Arizona House of Representatives passed it by a margin of 31 to 26.
In 2011, Arizona became the first state to enact an ESA policy. Originally, the ESAs were limited only to students with special needs, but state lawmakers have repeatedly expanded the policy over the past decade.
There are now more than 10,000 students benefiting from the ESA policy in Arizona and about 31,000 ESA students in 10 states nationwide.
Last year, West Virginia wrested the “most expansive ESA” title away from Arizona with the enactment of its Hope Scholarship policy, which provides ESAs to all students either switching out of a public school or entering kindergarten.
Once Ducey, a Republican, signs the ESA expansion into law, Arizona will regain its “most expansive ESA” distinction, because the accounts will be available to all students, regardless of what type of school they had been attending.
As a Goldwater Institute report demonstrated, the ESA policy especially benefits students from low-income families. The typical (non-special education) award of about $6,600 covers the median elementary private school tuition and about two-thirds of the median private high school tuition.
Although Arizona does not collect data about the income levels of participating families, the Goldwater Institute looked at data on the geographic distribution of participants and found that “ESA students come from school districts with above-average and below-average poverty rates at broadly equal rates and in virtually identical proportions as traditional public school students overall.”
Additionally, the report found that “the highest concentrations of ESA usage actually occur in the most severely economically disadvantaged communities in Arizona.” Eight out of the 10 districts with the highest share of ESA students statewide have higher-than-average rates of child poverty, and the top three have child poverty rates that are more than double the state average.
The ESAs are extremely popular. According to a Morning Consult survey, 66% of Arizonans and 75% of Arizona parents of K-12 students support the ESA policy.
Nevertheless, opponents of education choice claim that, recent polls notwithstanding, the voters revealed their opposition to a universal ESA policy when they voted by an almost two-to-one margin in 2018 against Prop 305, which also would have expanded Arizona’s ESAs to all students.
However, divining the will of the voters is not so simple. Unlike the current proposal, Prop 305 had a cap on the number of students who could participate. Since the state’s Voter Protection Act requires a supermajority of at least three-fourths of the legislature to make changes to a law passed by the voters on the ballot, even ESA proponents such as the American Federation for Children opposed the measure, as it would have rendered the current program—participation caps and all—essentially set in stone.
Other critics of the program have raised concerns about the quality of education that ESA children receive. “We will not know if students are using our tax dollars … to learn anything,” fretted Democratic state Rep. Kelli Butler.
Proponents of education choice counter that the accountability under the ESA policy is even higher than in traditional district schools. “Parents are the ultimate accountability, not government,” said House Majority Leader Ben Toma, a Republican, the sponsor of the ESA expansion bill. “They know what’s best for their children, and we should trust them to do the right thing.’’
Arizona lawmakers are right to trust families. Arizona has long been a pioneer in education choice—enacting nation’s first tax-credit scholarship policy in 1997, in addition to the first ESA—and the investment in education choice is paying off.
Despite doomsday predictions about the effects that education choice would have on student performance, Arizona has led the nation in gains on the National Assessment of Education Progress over the past two decades.
When families are empowered to choose the learning environment that works best for their children and that aligns with their values, everyone benefits.
Once again, Arizona is setting an example that other states should emulate.
Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
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Think tanks and universities are taking millions in foreign donations, and Biden has no interest in imposing transparency.
The University of Pennsylvania received more than $15 million in anonymous donations from China in 2018, the same year it announced the founding of its Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. This is just one high-profile example of a question that has been bubbling behind the scenes in think tanks and universities for several years: How has new, massive, unreported foreign funding flowing into America’s intellectual infrastructure shaped the country’s approach to governing, national security, and even cultural affairs?
Following on the heels of a 2020 Trump administration report excoriating universities—including Harvard and Stanford—for failing to report $6.5 billion in foreign funding, two new pieces of legislation have been introduced since Biden’s election that would address the influence of foreign spending in the academic, nonprofit, and think tank sectors.
Welcome to an age of heightened concerns over foreign money flowing into America’s institutions, both private and nonprofit. It has led to debates over donor transparency, intellectual and academic theft, lobbying and election integrity, and the proper role of charity in American civic and political life.
Conservatives tend to like the idea of donor privacy, especially in this era of cancel culture. But the calculus changes a bit when you consider how foreign entities might be using U.S. nonprofits to influence public policy, notes Michael E. Hartmann, a senior fellow of the Capital Research Center and co-editor of The Giving Review.
“The legal structure of American tax-exempt nonprofitdom has always wrestled with how to manage what are often the competing desires for transparency and donor privacy,” Hartmann says. “Historically, there hasn’t seemed to have been as much tension between transparency and foreign funding of nonprofits—that is, non-American funding of American nonprofits—[but] the whole set of underlying considerations with which to wrestle…is just so appreciably different than the regular old domestic ones.”
Republican legislators seem to agree that the question of transparency becomes a bit more fraught when foreign interests are involved and national security concerns are raised. Particularly if the disclosure rules are being outright flouted, as was the case with the 12 universities mentioned in the 2020 Trump administration report.
On the Senate side, one attempt to address the problem is to strengthen the Higher Education Act of 1965, specifically Section 117 dealing with disclosure requirements of foreign gifts and contracts. Republican Senators Tom Cotton, Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, and Tim Scott are all attached to the legislation they are calling the “Foreign Funding Accountability Act,” which, according to a joint release, will attempt to “combat malign foreign influence in American colleges and universities.”
Senator Cotton, who in 2021 released a report on “decoupling” from China, said the reason for the legislation is simple: If China wants to win a new economic Cold War, they will need to harness the “traditionally open research” on U.S. college campuses to give them a “competitive advantage in all innovative fields,” including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum research.
“The CCP has patiently cultivated its de facto allies on college campuses across the country, offering prestigious fellowships, in-kind gifts, and donations to lure professors and universities into sharing information,” Cotton said.
“Just like every other member of the ‘China Lobby,’ from multinational corporations and Hollywood executives to NBA stars and large banks, colleges and universities have lined their pockets with Chinese cash for years and don’t want to stop any time soon,” he explained. “The China Lobby opposes anything that might hurt their bottom line. And they know that transparency about their Chinese cash binge will bring tough questions from Congress and a real effort to stop the inflow of Chinese money.”
Cotton said he doubts universities are in the dark about what these foreign gifts are intended to inspire.
“I find it hard to believe that they’re ignorant of what the CCP wants from them,” he said. “For example, MIT, Princeton, [and] Yale have all accepted millions from a Chinese tech billionaire, Ma Huateng, the founder of Tencent. His company actively censors the internet in China and is at the forefront of China’s efforts to dominate A.I. It doesn’t take a college education to suspect something is up.”
As a solution, Cotton’s legislation attempts to impose reporting requirements, which the Trump administration had established for a short period following their 2020 report. But, as Cotton noted, the American Council on Education wrote a letter to President Biden begging them to halt the reporting requirement on foreign gifts.
“And of course, the Biden administration has caved to this,” Cotton said.
Over on the House side, Republicans are also proposing a disclosure system for nonprofit think tanks (often attached to academic institutions) similar to the ones universities had before Biden caved.
Rep. Lance Gooden of Texas introduced the “Think Tank and Nonprofit Foreign Influence Disclosure Act” in March, which he said is an important first step in getting a handle on the “undeniably rampant corruption in the non-profit sector that must be addressed.”
“Americans and Congress deserve to know if the radical climate groups advocating to shut down the Keystone pipeline are funded by Russia or Russian-backed entities,” Gooden said. “Russia has clearly benefited from the Biden administration crippling the U.S. energy sector, and we must know if the climate groups pushing for this have been doing Russia’s bidding.”
“Foreign nations will no longer be able to hide their agenda behind the non-profits they fund,” Gooden continued. “Both our adversaries and our allies will have to be transparent about the groups they support and will have to explain why they support those groups’ agenda.”
Gooden’s bill would require the U.S. Treasury Department to make “publicly available in a searchable database information relating to such gifts and contributions received from foreign governments and political parties.” This would mimic the database created in June 2020 by the Department of Education to record gifts of $250,000 or more (Cotton’s Senate bill would lower this threshold to $25,000 or more).
Gooden’s bill would also require disclosure of think tank or similar nonprofit funding of over $50,000 a year from “foreign governments, foreign political parties or foreign military entities.” Gooden is particularly concerned about the foreign funding alleged to be flowing into the environmental sector, which the Capital Research Center has calculated, based on a report from The Center for International Policy, is part of over $174 million in foreign funding to major U.S. think tanks.
More transparency of foreign funding in the energy and environmental sector might almost put some environmental activist groups out of business, Gooden predicts.
“If the flow of foreign funding is cut off to radical environmental groups, they will no longer have the resources to advocate for economy-crippling green energy and Green New Deal priorities,” Gooden said.
The question of what to do about foreign funding of public policy is not reserved for the right side of the political aisle. While Republicans focus on the nonprofit sector and universities, Democrats have also begun to train a powerful eye on the corporate sector, with a focus on election interference rather than public policy.
In 2021, Democrats reintroduced a bill called “Get Foreign Money Out of U.S. Elections,” which would “block foreign-owned corporations from spending company funds to influence U.S. elections.”
The bill would “extend the federal ban on political donations from foreign nationals to multinational companies that are at least partially owned by foreign nationals,” the Hill reported in December.
While these legislative proposals are ongoing, conservatives have not forgotten the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
In early 2020, the Department of Justice issued an advisory opinion that clarified the rules regarding when a U.S. nonprofit that receives foreign government funding must register as a foreign agent. This led more than a dozen of the nation’s most well-known advocacy groups to warn that FARA registration was a potential threat to free speech and could threaten their mission.
“Being labeled as a foreign agent under FARA would put our neutrality and independence in jeopardy,” the International Foundation for Electoral Systems said in comment.
Given the problem of potentially malign influence outlined above, and the obvious truth that both sides of the political aisle recognize the potential for foreign interests to be in conflict with domestic policy, FARA reform may be the easiest—and quickest—path to change.
“Congress could certainly try to clarify that which is necessary for a foreign-funded nonprofit to have to register under FARA, as I know some are strongly urging,” Hartmann said. “It’s hard to imagine that there’d be a serious objection from donor-privacy advocates to something like this, much less that any such objection would carry the day among policymakers.”
Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
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I told you about the War on Parents being waged in the schools. It’s being waged on other fronts, as well.
Some summer camps are assigning kids to cabins based on gender identity, not biological sex, forcing children with parents dumb enough to send them to those camps to sleep and undress next to the opposite sex.
A Florida church jumped into LGBT advocacy with a Pride celebration and drag show for students as young as 12.
Disney is back at it with a same-sex kiss in ‘Lightyear’ which is banned in 14 countries. Disney introduced a bisexual character in the Disney+ series Loki. Disney sold rainbow-spangly shirts, backpacks, and other merchandise for Pride Month, leaving homosexuals everywhere to ask, ‘where’s my cut?’
Medical professionals are also hustling for dough. A new book published by the American Academy of Pediatrics brainwashes kids into believing it’s perfectly fine for Olivia now to be Oliver who should be undressing in the boys locker room. Assigning sex at birth is so unfair, and ‘have we got drugs and surgery to fix that – for a modest fee, of course.’ That’s the best advertising campaign for grooming new customers I’ve heard since Edward Bernays got women to smoke cigarettes so they could be independent from men. The Transgender-Industrial Complex is lighting new ‘Torches of Freedom’ that are even more dangerous.
Your federal government, meanwhile, is all in. The Secretary of Education is pushing to add ‘nonbinary’ as a sex characteristic in public schools, supports biological males in girls’ sports, and won’t say it’s bad for schools to keep student gender transitioning hidden from parents. The Department of Education is now demanding schools collect student gender identity data. This will take an estimated two million hours of effort and is being done set up lawsuits by the feds against school districts that fail to provide “equity” for students who identify or – get this – are perceived to be – nonbinary. Perceived? By who? To what degree? What a mess in the courts that’s going to be.
Attorney General Merrick Garland told Congress the Justice Department wasn’t using antiterrorism tools against parents who protest school board actions, but it turns out the FBI is.
Joe Biden’s new parents and families council has members from such far-left groups supporting critical race theory and transgender ideology as LULAC which has called for suppressing speech online, the National School Boards Association that kicked off the whole targeting of parents thing, and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. The latter specializes in shaking down corporations for big donations.
Kinda makes you want to vote Democrat in November, doesn’t it?
That’s all the news from Camp Biden. Oh, please don’t make me stay another day.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-06-30 17:52:012022-06-30 17:52:01War on Parents: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I Am At Camp Gender-Change-You-Oughta
For the rest of the week, I return to the War on Parents which is in full swing. Make no mistake – the radical Left is coming for your children.
The news this month is startling. We begin with reports of teachers or others working around children being arrested for child sex abuse or possession of child pornography. I submit to you it is no accident these people, who have inserted themselves into positions of trust, have personal sexual agendas as well as public sexual agendas that involve your children.
A high school teacher in Hawaii was arrested on charges of child pornography, including a video of himself having sex with a 13-year-old boy. He ranted on Twitter about those awful right-wingers accusing teachers of promoting pornography in schools. Pretty warped, huh? A Disney actor got two years in prison for attempting to have sex with a minor. A Disney bus driver was arrested in a child predator sting in Florida. A high school teacher in New York was charged for groping and sexting students. That’s a lot for one month, don’t you think? In all, 135 teachers and teachers’ aides have been arrested for child sex-related crimes so far this year. The weird thing is some Democrats think all this is perfectly fine and resist efforts to prevent child sex abuse from happening.
Just as dangerous as the sexual agendas below the belt are the ones above the neck. All of a sudden, the drag queens are out of the closet and in your face, shoved there by Leftist politicians pushing the sexual revolution to destroy society so they can take total power. Openly lesbian Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said “drag queens make everything better” and there should be one in every school. New York City Mayor Eric Adams endorsed drag queen story hour for kids in libraries and schools. He said they express the “core” of what New York City stands for. That they will do, if the Left wins the War on Parents. The Satanic Temple, which is getting into after-school programs, promotes ‘drag dance parties’ with ‘unbaptisms’ – the better to undo society with. Such an event in Idaho was co-sponsored by the public library, the police, the ACLU, a gun control group, and an ecumenical church. That’s what they call ‘intersectionality’ on the Left – a united front of various issue groups and Leftist-controlled or -influenced institutions joining forces to attack the prevailing order. In Dallas, parents took their children to a gay bar to see a drag show where the children were invited on-stage to participate. I love a good drag show, but I’m an adult. What were these parents thinking?
In any event, you are watching the Gay Gestapo and its friends and allies in action. I should note there are plenty of gay people who are politically conservative and appalled by the subject being hijacked by the political Left for its own revolutionary purposes. A drag queen who belongs to the #WalkAway movement warned parents to keep their kids away from drag shows because the early sexualization of children is not a good thing.
The Gay Gestapo is on the march in schools, as well. The offensive it is waging is wide and deep. A teacher in North Carolina was caught pushing the LGBT agenda on preschoolers through flash cards. Lessons on transgender ideology are becoming more widespread and are now required in seven states. Sex education in a school district in New York has gone X-rated with the use of such graphic terms as ‘face-f***ing’. A middle school librarian in Virginia justified having a book promoting prostitution in the collection because, in her view, lots of 11- to 13-year-old students do sex work and the school needs to affirm their lifestyle. Huh? The National Science Teachers Association is training teachers how to ‘queer their classrooms’ and “affirm and represent queer indentities.” Philadelphia schools encouraged teachers to attend a transgender conference on kinky stuff, sado-masochism, and “banging beyond binaries”. Finally, there are fresh reports of more school districts hiding student gender transitions from parents and training teachers how to deceive parents who ask questions about their own children.
The War on Parents is nationwide and fierce. It is being waged by individual teachers and at the institutional level. I’ve commented previously on why all this is happening. Sexualizing children is a communist technique consciously being employed in America today to destroy society and usher in a socialist revolution to put a tiny Leftist elite in control of everything. This may sound strange to people hearing it for the first time, but people who’ve heard my previous commentaries know I’ve got the goods. If anyone from the intersectional Left cares to challenge me, I will demolish you with the facts, your own history, and your own words. Bring it on. Show parents everywhere you have good reasons for shoving your sexual agendas and your body parts down kids’ throats.
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As a climate and energy realist, in my heart of hearts, I dream of the day when the public recognizes climate change will not bring on an end to the world as we know it, or even a long-term net decline for human civilization. That’s what the data and the best science show, despite the claims of corporate media, alarmist activists, heads of corporations, and politicians who profit in terms of money and power by spinning the climate change end-of-the-world fairy tale. Sadly, the public rarely gets to hear this truth.
A few notable instances of the very unalarming facts about climate change getting through on a large scale in the past few years are the release of several bestselling books by prominent liberals advocating what they consider to be reasonable climate policies: Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never, Steven Koonin’s Unsettled, and Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm. Sticking strictly to climate science, not policy, Heartland’s own Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students has also sold well on Amazon. However, despite the success of these publications among the literati and the reading public, I’d be surprised if these books combined sold more than a million copies in the United States, which has a population of more than 330 million people, or a few million copies among the eight billion people worldwide. Sadly, I suspect more people are exposed to false climate alarm stories in the mainstream media every day in the United States than have been reached by all these books in the past two years since the first one’s release.
Still, hope springs eternal and climate realists keep on plugging away, trying to breach the nearly impregnable wall of climate change disinformation erected by powerful corporate, media, and political elites. Every so often, the realists score a direct hit, making the climate/energy realist case so powerfully that even the mainstream media and elite journals take notice. This occurred recently when TheNew York Times Magazine (NYTM) published an interview with eminent scientist Vaclav Smil, Ph.D., discussing his book How the World Really Works: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We’re Going.” (You can’t get more mainstream and yet elitist than the NYTM.) Another direct-realist hit on the edifice of climate alarm came with the publication of the article “Russia’s War Is the End of Climate Policy as We Know It,” in the journal Foreign Affairs, by Ted Nordhaus.
Both Smil and Nordhaus have far more confidence than I that human activities are causing potentially dangerous climate change. Although I disagree to some extent with their assessment of the dangers of climate change, their “realpolitik” analyses of the infeasibility of the net-zero energy transition in the 2030-2050 timeline are powerful and accurate.
Despite continual cajoling by the NYTM interviewer, who basically framed the same question again and again and again, pleading for Smil to concede climate change is such an imminent disaster world leaders must forcibly decarbonize our energy systems nearly immediately, Smil refused to rise to the bait. His consistent answer, based on his assessment of the world’s energy needs and the material requirements necessary to meet net-zero in the short term, was that this goal is physically and politically impossible. Smil also made clear that the threat posed by climate change does not justify such a dramatic forced transition.
For Smil, the four pillars of modern civilization are cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia, each of which requires huge amounts of fossil fuels to produce. Therefore, he concludes, those calling for rapid decarbonization to combat global warming are dangerously foolish. “I’m looking at the world as it is,” Smil, told the NTYM interviewer, continuing,
The most important thing to understand is the scale. … [A]ccording to COP26, we should reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 as compared with 2010 levels. This is undoable because there are just eight years left, and emissions are still rising. People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic. …
What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.
I’m all for goals but for strict realism in setting them.
For Smil, radical actions to cut carbon dioxide emissions steeply and immediately are neither justified by the problem—because other problems are at least as dire as climate change, and they require fossil fuels to solve—nor are they possible, even if they were justified. It’s a matter of both physics and realpolitik, the latter meaning an honest assessment of the fact that people around the world do and will continue to want to better their lives by their own understanding of what constitutes a better life.
Smil’s assessment coincides with that of Ted Nordhaus, the cofounder (with the above-mentioned Michael Shellenberger) and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute, and a co-author of An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Nordhaus’s article in Foreign Policy is a realist shot across the bow explaining how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is opening eyes to the basic energy truth that fossil fuels are still vital to the world:
[T]he headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe.
In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Two decades of worrying about carbon-fueled catastrophes—and trillions of dollars spent globally on transitioning to renewable power—haven’t changed that basic existential fact. …
Given the scant effect international climate efforts have had on emissions over the past three decades, a turn back toward energy realpolitik—and away from the utopian schemes that have come to define climate advocacy and policymaking worldwide—could actually accelerate the shift to a lower-carbon global economy in the coming decades. …
The capacity to adapt to rising temperatures and extreme weather events rose significantly … as evidenced by the continued decline in weather-related deaths. But this was not due to any U.N.-led efforts to fund climate adaptation, which never materialized. What made people all over the world more resilient to climate extremes was better infrastructure and safer housing—the product of economic growth powered by cheap fossil fuels.
The geopolitical, technological, and economic competition that characterized the Cold War had more success in reducing the carbon intensity of the global economy than climate policy efforts have had since.
Nordhaus goes on to explain:
The world’s renewable energy economy is deeply entangled with geopolitically problematic supply chains. Huge parts of the world’s supplies of silicon, lithium, and rare-earth minerals rely on China, where solar panels are produced by Uyghur slave labor in concentration camps. The idea that the crisis might be resolved by choosing Western dependence on Chinese solar panels and batteries over Western dependence on Russian oil and gas reveals just how unserious the environmental movement’s pretensions to justice, human rights, and democracy really are.
For Nordhaus and Smil alike, the appropriate response to climate change is to acknowledge the reality of the importance of fossil fuels to continued economic prosperity for the present, while delivering better options through the market—which responds to price signals through efficiency gains and technological innovation—far faster and more effectively than government-mandated energy shifts. Smil states,
at the same time we are constantly transitioning and innovating. We went from coal to oil to natural gas, and then as we were moving into natural gas we moved into nuclear electricity, and we started building lots of large hydro, and they do not emit any carbon dioxide directly. So we’ve been transitioning to lower-carbon sources or noncarbon sources for decades. Moreover, we’ve been making our burning of carbon much more efficient. We are constantly transitioning to more efficient, more effective and less environmentally harmful things.
Nordhaus notes the Russian war is increasingly making it clear to countries that climate change is not “the main event,” energy security is, and the latter can be achieved while improving economic conditions in the poorest countries and respecting human rights:
But climate and energy policies, especially in the West, may shift significantly from subsidizing demand (for things like solar panels and electric vehicles) to deregulating supply (of things like nuclear power plants and high-voltage transmission lines). A shift of this sort—away from subsidizing specific green technologies favored by activists and lobbyists and toward enabling the broader technological, regulatory, and infrastructural basis for the energy transition—would put clean energy policies on much firmer economic footing. And it would better align climate objectives with energy security imperatives.
People around the world face many problems. Climate change is only one among many, and as Nordhaus and Smil point out, it is probably not the most pressing.
Nordhaus and Smil provide clear-eyed assessments of the physical, economic, and political limits of the energy transition demanded by climate alarmists on the timetable they have laid out. These analysts’ acknowledgments of the benefits fossil fuels have delivered, and the inequities and harms that would result from an attempt to go net-zero by 2030 or even 2050, are a refreshing appraisal from scholars whom alarmists cannot in any way smear as “climate deniers.”
In my heart of hearts (foolish though it may be), I still hold out hope this truth can get through the daily background noise of climate alarm.
Are you concerned about election integrity? What informed United States citizen isn’t? Did the 2020 national election raise many questions about election integrity? Are you concerned about the current cycle of primaries and then the general election in November? No doubt the answer for The Prickly Pear readers is YES.
Click below for a message from Tony Sanchez, the RNC Arizona Election Integrity Director to sign up for the opportunity to become an official Poll Observer for the 8/2 AZ Primary and the 11/8 General Election in your county of residence. We need many, many good citizens to do this – get involved now and help make the difference for clean and honest elections.
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