Won’t Know Much About History

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The old song said, “Don’t Know Much About History.” But if Joe Biden gets his way, we could revise the title to “Won’t Know Much About History.”
One of the last things outgoing-President Trump did was to sign an executive order on the 1776 Commission. It is geared toward teaching American school children about America’s true source of greatness.
Yet one of the first things incoming-President Biden did was to sign an executive order nullifying Trump’s 1776 initiative.
After Biden’s action—on his first day in office, as if this were a high priority—the 1776 Commission responded with a joint statement from its chairman, Dr. Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, prominent conservative African-American scholar Dr. Carol Swain, retired professor of Vanderbilt Law School, and Dr. Matthew Spalding, the vice president and dean of the school of government of Hillsdale’s D.C. campus.
They wrote, “The 1776 Report calls for a return to the unifying ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence. It quotes the greatest Americans, black and white, men and women, in devotion to these ideals. The Commission may be abolished, but these principles and our history cannot be. We will all continue to work together to teach and to defend them.”
The 1776 Report the commission released observes:

“The declared purpose of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission is to ‘enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.’ This requires a restoration of American education, which can only be grounded on a history of those principles that is ‘accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.’”

Meanwhile, a group of historians condemns the 1776 Commission as being simplistic and misleading: “The report actually consists of two main themes. One is an homage to the Founding Fathers, a simplistic interpretation that relies on falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements. The other is a screed against a half-century of historical scholarship, presented largely as a series of caricatures, using single examples (most notably the ‘1619 Project’) to represent broader historiographical trends.”
I asked the aforementioned Dr. Carol Swain about this critique of the 1776 Commission. She told me, “They misunderstood the purpose of the Commission. We were not writing for academic scholars. It was never meant to be a comprehensive history report. We did want to address that part of today’s public debate as exemplified by the 1619 Project.”
The 1619 Project of the New York Times postulates that America’s real birth date was 1619 when the first African slaves came to these shores. Sadly, the 1619 Project is now being disseminated in many of our schools, thus, leading more young Americans to disparage our nation’s history.
But slavery was not unique to America—700,000 men dying in a national conflict that ended slavery is unique.
There is indeed a battle over American history. This is not just a battle over dry historical dates and names. It’s a battle over who we were, what we are, and what we will be.
What is America? In its essence, it is self-governance under God. Our Constitution is predicated on the Declaration of Independence, which mentions God four times. In effect, our founders declared their independence from England and their dependence upon God. As JFK put it, our founders declared, “The rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.”
Jarrett Stepman of the Heritage Foundation wrote an entire book on the conflict over teaching the past, entitled, The War On History. He told me, “I think there’s been a long-term push, especially in education, not just the K-12 level but certainly from higher education, to basically turn around Americans and make them think that, ‘Well not only is our past unexceptional, it’s exceptionally bad.’ And I think that that narrative is so big in society now.”
He added, “We’re not a perfect country, as human beings are certainly not perfect. But this country has done a lot of great things….I think there are, unfortunately, a very powerful group of activists in this country, a lot of people in academia and higher education, who want to change that, who want to make Americans feel like their country is built on something terrible.”
I am of the persuasion that God did something unique in politics and world governance in the creation of the United States. Yes, slavery and mistreatment of the Native-Americans were there almost from the beginning. But these were in violation of the promise of America. They happened despite the promise of America, not because of it. And it was that promise that leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King appealed to in abolishing those injustices. History matters a great deal.
©Jerry Newcomb. All rights reserved.

‘Canceling’ Student Debt is Unfair to Graduates Like Me Who Sacrificed to Pay Off Our Loans

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I gave up a lot to accomplish what I did, but debt ‘forgiveness’ would punish taxpayers like me for our hard work and frugality.

A year after graduating from college, I was able to pay off my student loans in full. Now, President Biden wants me to pay for my peers who have yet to do the same.
Biden’s platform includes “student loan forgiveness” of at least $10,000 per person. Meanwhile, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have proposed $50,000 in debt forgiveness per individual. On its surface, this sounds generous. American student loan debt is nearing $1.6 trillion, and the cost of college is higher than ever. But what does this “forgiveness” entail on a moral level?
Loans are not “forgiven” or magically disappeared. They are paid off by taxpayers. Whether it is through higher taxes, printing more money, or contributing directly from the national debt, you and I will end up being the ones that pay for it. The United States is already over $27 trillion in debt and $125 trillion deep in unfunded liabilities.
Essentially, the debt burden is shifted off of the shoulders of those who signed the loans and on to everyone who pays federal taxes. If you’re like me, that’s fundamentally unfair.
Paying off my student loans was a concerted effort that took sacrifice. I started working after graduating from SUNY Albany in 2018. Following Dave Ramsey’s financial plan, I cut my living expenses, took on a side gig, and threw all that I could at my $27,000 in student loans.
I cooked my own meals and bought the most affordable groceries. Although I could afford an apartment, I chose to live in subsidized company housing one-and-a-half hours away from my workplace. Commuting for 15 hours a week was part of the price I paid to square my debt sooner.
I packed lunch most days, even when I had to wake up early to do so. It saved money at the cost of the convenience of eating out. Some nights after work I stayed up late to do freelance translation work instead of enjoying leisure time. I gave up a lot to accomplish what I did, but debt “forgiveness” would punish taxpayers like me for our hard work and frugality—just so others don’t have to take responsibility for their own choices.
Rather than stopping at saying that student loan forgiveness is unfair (it is), or that we can’t afford it (we can’t), we should take a deeper look at the root of the debate surrounding student loans. The student loan forgiveness camp is operating from the assumption that people are entitled to a college education and other peoples’ hard work. It codifies in policy the idea that adults are not responsible for their own actions (i.e. taking on debt). In a free society, I am not entitled to a college education and neither is anyone else.
Taking out a loan is a choice, and personal responsibility shouldn’t be supplanted by taxpayer bailouts. “Canceling” student loans means penalizing people like me for honoring my word and repaying the debt I chose to accept.
COLUMN BY

Matthew Noyes

Mathew Noyes graduated from SUNY Albany summa cum laude with majors in Political Science and Japanese Language. He is a columnist at Lone Conservative.
EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Flashback: Atlanta Grandfather Viciously Beaten, Left for Dead by Gang of Biden Voters

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Taught by the political party they favor to hate white people, attackers left victim unconscious with multiple facial fractures.

When it first opened in 1969, Underground Atlanta was one of the most popular tourist and entertainment districts in the Southeast. My wife and I went there regularly with friends.
By 1972, Underground’s attendance topped 3.5 million. In 1973, there were 65 businesses employing hundreds of workers. At its peak, there were more than 80 restaurants, bars, boutiques, and shops in the Underground complex. Like the rest of the city back then, Underground Atlanta was clean, vibrant and safe.
But like the city itself, the attraction soon fell on hard times.
During a period that coincided almost perfectly with the Democratic Party’s adoption of its racially-divisive identity politics election strategy, Underground Atlanta became a dangerous place to visit, especially after dark. As violent crimes in the surrounding parking lots became commonplace, my wife and I stopped going to Underground, as did most Atlantans.
Over the years, persistent crime continued to plague the development. Despite a major renovation in the late 1980s, Underground Atlanta has faced a constant struggle to recover its initial glory.
Underground’s GM pays steep price for doing his job
Craig Waters is general manager of Underground Atlanta. Last June, after a night of race riots over the alleged police murder of George Floyd, the 66-year-old grandfather was the target of a vicious unprovoked attack by multiple black suspects while inspecting broken windows and other damage done to Underground property. Waters was beaten unconscious, suffering multiple facial fractures, including a broken eye socket. See shocking photographs of his injuries in this local TV report.
Would Waters have been beaten and left for dead if he wasn’t white? Probably not. Black-on-white racial hatred is inevitable when a political party spends a half-century telling inner city voters that white people are responsible for the wretched lives they lead.
Those who attacked Waters must be held accountable. What they did was evil, but I do not believe they are inherently evil people. The odds are off the charts that they were set on a troubled path earlier in life by virtue of the woefully substandard education meted out by Atlanta’s incompetent public schools. And, they were indoctrinated at every turn with the poisonous critical race narrative that white people are hostile to their interests. With two strikes like those against them, it’s hardly surprising that they lashed out in violence when an opportunity to vent their frustrations arose.
For the last half-century, Atlanta City Schools have been under the ironclad control of Democrats. While Atlanta’s most disadvantaged citizens live in rundown neighborhoods marred by rampant crime, generational poverty and chronic despair, the city’s lavishly-paid mayor, school superintendent and other high ranking officials drive new cars, live in new homes, dine at gourmet restaurants and vacation at 5-star resorts.
The inexcusable failure of Democrats to adequately educate the most disadvantaged children in our society is further described in the article below.

Battle for a Good Education | The Daily Signal

Big-City Schools: Where America’s Most Vulnerable Kids Languish

Democrats and Republicans alike say they’re fully committed to seeing that every child receives a quality education.  Bipartisan agreement notwithstanding, school children in urban America have gotten the short end of the learning stick for a long, long time.  How can anyone defend the following statistics?

  • In 2010-2011, public schools in the nation’s capitol spent $29,345 per pupil — nearly $600,000 per each classroom of 20 students —  yet the District’s 8th graders finished dead last in a nationwide proficiency test in math and reading.
  • According to a 2015 report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 96 percent of 8th graders in Detroit’s public schools tested not proficient in math, and 93 percent tested not proficient in reading.
  • According to a 2017 investigation by Project Baltimore, 13 of the city’s 39 public high schools had zero students who tested proficient in math.  Zero!  Of the 3,841 students in the remaining 26 high schools, only 14 tested at or above proficiency in math, less than one-third of one percent.

For a half-century running, Democrat-run urban schools have robbed minority children of a realistic chance for a decent education.  In addition to earning an F-minus in their assigned duty to adequately educate students under their care, the three school districts named above have something else in common: they all are run by highly-paid Democrat administrators whose foremost priority is catering to the demands of teachers unions, one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies.
In school systems with teachers unions exist, Democrats look the other way as the interests of teachers take precedence over the interests of children.  And no wonder. The overwhelming share of union dues paid by teachers is money-laundering study, nearly 99% of teachers union political donations in 2012 went to Democrats.  In 2016, teachers unions gave $43 million to Democrats, $260,000 to Republicans.
Teachers First, Children Second
Once sub-standard teachers have tenure, a Herculean effort is required to get rid of them.  The teachers-first, children-second pecking order in the school systems cited below exists in virtually every urban school district in America, where a king’s ransom of precious educational funding is frittered away to protect bad teachers.

  • New York City public schoolsoperate16 reassignment centers, also known as “rubber rooms.”  Rubber rooms are off-campus facilities where teachers accused of incompetence or gross misconduct are warehoused, as their glacial, union-mandated appeals process drones on, often for years.  While receiving full pay and benefits, teachers in rubber room limbo spend each six-hour day napping, reading magazines, playing cards or other leisure activities.  Despite constant complaints that it would do a better job of educating minority children if only it’s given more money, the city’s bloated and incompetent public school system squanders $150 million a year paying hundreds of unionized teachers to do little more than kill time while waiting to find out if they’ll be fired.  Wasting $150 million would be one thing if the city’s public schools did even a minimally acceptable job of educating disadvantaged minority children, but New York City has some of the sorriest public schools in America.
  • Getting rid of bad teachers is so difficult in Democrat-run school districts that Milwaukee’s public schools cameup with a mitigation plan called The Dance of the Lemons.  Because teachers union contracts protect all teachers, including those deemed unfit to teach, school principals in Milwaukee found it virtually impossible to fire bad teachers.  To cope with the problem, principals hold a meeting at the end of the school year, where one principal swaps his or her worst teachers in exchange for another principal’s worst teachers, with both principals hoping the lemons they get won’t be as bad as the lemons they swapped.  How are the interests of students served when unfit teachers are shuffled around from one school to another in an endless game of musical chairs where every bad teacher gets a seat?
  • New York City and Milwaukee aren’t the only places where unionized, Democrat-run schools fail miserably at adequately educating minority children.  A 2010 investigation by L.A. Weekly found that the Los Angeles Unified School District spent $3.5 million trying to fire seven teachers for poor classroom performance.  Only four of the seven were eventually fired at the end of their union-mandated appeals process, which dragged on for an average of five years at an average cost of $875,000 per fired teacher.  Despite blowing through enormous sums of education funding, Los Angeles public schools graduated just 44% of its high school students in 2006, making it one of the worst-performing school districts in America.  Graduation rates in Los Angeles have since improved, but only after the Democrat-controlled California Department of Education changed its formula for determining graduation requirements.

Inexcusably sorry public schools in Democrat-run cities are nothing new.   They’ve existed continually for the last half-century, with millions of minority students left unprepared to succeed in later life.
The High Cost (to Students) of Bad Teachers
Just as it’s true that good teachers can have an extraordinarily positive impact on the future lives of their students, it’s also true that bad teachers can cause lasting harm to the futures of their students.
According to a study cited by Eric A. Hanushek, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, “a high-value-added teacher in grades 4-8 has a noticeable impact on subsequent long-term outcomes, including college attendance, earnings and family creation.”  How can young adults who were stuck with sub-standard teachers in the public schools they attended possibly do well in later life?  To be fair, socio-economics also plays a role in poor outcomes, but which party is responsible for the welfare-for-votes policies that inevitably lead to broken homes, generational poverty and chronic despair?
School Choice to the Rescue
How can our society help urban students get out of rotten public schools, and into the same kind of safe, high-performing private academies attended by children of affluent families?  The surest way is through federally-funded school choice vouchers.
Unfortunately, the mutually back-scratching alliance between Democrats and teachers unions blocks school choice at every turn.  In doing so, their unholy confederation wreaks unmitigated havoc on inner city communities by robbing generations of urban children of a realistic shot at a decent education.
Although Democrats and teachers unions know better, they say private schools aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.  Anyone who thinks that should ask the two brothers in the video below.  Their story should be the story of every disadvantaged child in America.
©

New York Teacher Couldn’t Teach In-Person, Could Molest Girl In-Person

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New York City’s teachers’ union, like its counterparts around the country, has been doing everything possible to fight against the need to reopen schools.
New York finally reopened elementary schools, but the United Federation of Teachers has been fighting against reopening middle schools and high schools. The so-called solidarity caucus of 4,000 UFT teachers wants to close schools entirely. Other lefty elements in the UFT have been shrieking that making them do their jobs will kill them. This didn’t stop them from trekking off to Sharpton’s 50,000 bigot march in D.C. or from protesting in person against teaching in person.

In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers, which is affiliated with the AFT, marched with cardboard coffins and fake body bags. Some union teachers wore skeleton t-shirts.
A Halloween skeleton attached to a garbage bag held a cardboard sickle and a message written next to dripping blood, “Welcome Back to School”. “I can’t teach from a cemetery,” one sign claimed. Another declared, “We Won’t Die for the Department of Education.”
Despite their claim that they feared for their lives, the march had little social distancing.

Meanwhile Annie Tan is keeping up her shtick of being the poster girl for the UFT’s “Making Us Teach Kids Will Kill Us” movement. If you want a sample, her current Twitter handle is, “Annie Tan is no martyr for DOE”.
“I think in particular “I have a right not to meet others’ unreasonable expectations of me” is the truest and most life-affirming thing I can read during this pandemic. My and our community health and well-being are way more important than our value and productivity to capitalism,” she tweeted.
Meanwhile, one middle school teacher found the time to do things in person.

The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s says a New York City teacher was arrested after he met up with a Florida minor he met online.
According to the sheriff, on Saturday, January 23, around 1:30 a.m., Zeshaan Naqvi, 31, picked up a minor at their Tampa residence and brought them back to his hotel room.
The sheriff’s office said Naqvi was arrested at the hotel and admitted to officials he knew the victim was underage.
“It never ceases to amaze us the lengths predators will go to, to get what they want,” said Sheriff Chad Chronister. “In this case, a middle school history teacher booked a ticket, boarded a plane, and traveled across the country to meet with a minor who he had been chatting with for about three months. This behavior is deeply disturbing and serves as a grim warning to parents to monitor their child’s online activity.”

Zeshaan Naqvi appears to be a teacher at The Young Women’s Leadership School of Queens which is a middle school. Naqvi appears to live in Queens which is home to a large Muslim community.
The situation obviously reminds people of the Muslim sex grooming scandals in the UK.
Either way, if UFT teachers can molest students in person, they can teach in person.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Conservative Path Forward in the Biden-Harris Era

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There is plenty to lament right now. But conservatives’ time and energy would be better spent thinking ahead and plotting a future—one that, in all likelihood, can still be salvaged.

The presidency of Joseph R. Biden Jr., a thoroughly mediocre and gaffe-prone career politician in the throes of debilitating senescence, has commenced. It has done so with disingenuous paeans to unity, thinly veiled swipes at his “deplorable” political foes and an immediate executive action-driven assault on his predecessor’s legacy—from the environment to immigration to religious liberty—that is simply breathtaking in its scope.

Worse, the Biden-Harris regime has taken power as America’s myriad corporate bastions, led by Big Tech, dutifully promise to punish dissenters to the regime’s enforced monolithic orthodoxy.

For conservatives, it could get ugly out there as we spend our near-term future in political exile. And this is before even considering the possibility that the U.S. Senate, now under de facto Democratic leadership, may well ditch the legislative filibuster, opening up a Pandora’s box of power-grab possibilities that could irrevocably transform the republic—chiefly, “packing” the Supreme Court and lower courts, and statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

At first blush, it is difficult to sugarcoat such a would-be dystopia. There is, it seems, no limit to what a Democratic-controlled House-Senate-White House trifecta might be able to accomplish. But the reality, once we step back and soberly assess our predicament, is more nuanced; there is a path forward for a conservative revival by the time of either the 2022 midterm elections or the 2024 presidential election.

In terms of the federal government, conservatives still nominally control the Supreme Court and, post-Trump, the majority of the crucial circuit courts of appeals. Democrats may try to “pack” these courts if they nuke the filibuster, but unless and until they do so, the judiciary—however unreliable Republican-nominated judges often are—will still often redound to conservatives’ interests and forestall much of the Biden Administration’s worst impulses. It is thus incumbent upon well-positioned bastions of conservative legal clout, centered around Texas’s Office of the Solicitor General, to aggressively litigate and seek recourse in the courts.

In terms of state governments, Republicans still retain a majority (30) of unified state legislatures. Indeed, nearly half of all states (23) have both a Republican governor and a unified Republican state legislature. These red states can and ought to serve as hubs for conservatives’ own quasi-“resistance” over the next four years.

Conservatives must do the hard work of actually building up the digital and corporate infrastructure to push back in earnest against Big Tech, “woke” capital, and the broader “cancel culture” threat to the American way of life…..

*****

Continue reading at American Greatness. This article was originally published on January 21, 2021.

Josh Hammer is the opinion editor of Newsweek. A popular conservative commentator, he is of counsel at First Liberty Institute and a syndicated columnist through Creators. A frequent pundit on political, legal and cultural issues, Hammer is a constitutional attorney by training. He is a former John Marshall Fellow of the Claremont Institute and was a law clerk for Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah).

Feminists: Biden Gender Identity Order ‘Unprecedented Attack on Women’s Rights and Liberty for Everybody’

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Then why did you vote for him? Because you thought he would govern from the center? This is what the anti-Trump feminists get for voting for Joe Biden. The ruination of women’s athletics. This dreadful executive order will make it impossible for female athletes to compete on a fair basis. Male-to-female transgenders are obviously built much differently than women.
Does President Biden even understand how damaging these executive orders are? Does he even know what he is signing? Or is he just doing what the Left tells him to do? It’s so sad.
Related – Biden executive orders the ‘wishlist of the far left,’ Rubio says 

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Feminists: Biden Gender Identity Order ‘Unprecedented Attack on Women’s Rights and Liberty for Everybody
By Breitbart, January 22, 2021
Feminists from the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) are condemning President Joe Biden’s executive order that removes any legal recognition of the two sexes and eliminates crucial protections for women in the federal government and beyond.

In a post at WoLF’s website Thursday, the feminist group called Biden’s executive order “an unprecedented attack on women’s rights and liberty for everybody,” noting Biden has circumvented the role of Congress to achieve what many consider to be the most contentious elements of the Equality Act:
With this action, Biden is bypassing the legislative process to implement the most controversial provisions of the Equality Act—changing the definition of sex in federal anti-discrimination regulations so that female people are no longer a discrete class with protected status under the law. As we predicted, the new administration is relying on the Bostock decision to do so.
The group cites the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Bostock v. Clayton Count, which, it states, “was clear … the ruling was only meant to be applied to hiring and firing discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.”
“While we strongly support protections from discrimination based on sexual orientation,” the feminists assert, “The Biden administration has grossly expanded the application of the decision with far-reaching implications for women’s rights in nearly every aspect of public life, including Title IX.”

Biden’s executive order, released on the first day of his presidency, embraces transgender ideology:
It is the policy of my Administration to prevent and combat discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation, and to fully enforce Title VII and other laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.
“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” Biden said, promoting the pro-transgender policies of allowing boys in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms and admitting young men to compete against women in athletics.
WoLF said, as a consequence of Biden’s action, “female federal employees no longer have right to privacy, forced into compelled speech that ‘validates’ men’s identities.”
The feminists explained:
In addition to protecting people who identify as transgender against hiring and firing discrimination, this will also give male employees the right to self-declare themselves to be female and be treated as female for the purpose of sex-segregated facilities. This means that in federal buildings and in workplaces run by federal contractors, the four million women who work for the federal government will be forced to share bathrooms and gym locker rooms with men who say they identify as women.
“Federal employees will likely also be forced to use ‘preferred pronouns’ (inaccurate pronouns) for men who identify as women,” WoLF continued. “This should be seen as a major threat to freedom of speech and is part of a growing pattern of government bodies compelling speech from employees.”
On the first day of Biden’s presidency, the White House contact form was changed to include the visitor’s “pronouns.”

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

Glossary of Racial Euphemisms

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Below are ubiquitous words parroted by the media, academia, industry, and government that doesn’t mean what you might think they mean.  Following each word is its true meaning.

Race:  A social construct that has no basis in genetics but has been used historically to divide people for political purposes and is used today for the same purposes under the guise of diversity and social justice.

Diversity:  The force-fitting of hundreds of ethnicities, religions, cultures, and nationalities into a handful of catchall racial categories, such as White, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific-Islander, and Native-American, thus erasing their individuality and uniqueness in the name of diversity.

Minorities:  All Americans except for those in the White category, because when the hundred or so ethnic minorities in the White category are lumped together, they magically become a numeric majority, even if they have little in common—as, for example, the virtually nonexistent commonality between my poor, Catholic grandparents and such uber-wealthy WASPs as Scotsman Andrew Carnegie, Baptist John D. Rockefeller, Dutchman Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Episcopalian J.P. Morgan, whose blue-blooded descendants, in turn, have virtually nothing in common with me, either socially, politically, or financially.

Inclusion:  The exclusion of whites from diversity initiatives, except for whites with Spanish surnames.

Social Justice:  Because WASPs held political and economic power for centuries and discriminated against Blacks, Mexicans, Indians, the Chinese, Mormons, Jews, Catholics, and Southern Europeans, non-WASP whites should pay for the sins of WASPs while leaving the descendants of WASPs in power in government, media, industry, and the Ivy League, where they engage in virtue-signaling about social justice and laugh at the gullibility of the masses beneath them.

Racism:  Believing that a given race is genetically inferior in some way, which, it is said, is how all whites see other races because all whites are genetically evil.

Racist:  1) An apt description of all white people because whites are the only people in 200,000 years of human history to have engaged in genocide, slavery, discrimination, and other forms of racism; 2) a word that can be used to silence those with different opinions.

Disadvantaged:  The socioeconomic status of all non-whites, including wealthy, well-educated immigrants from India’s upper caste, as well as wealthy Hispanics who come from the Spanish aristocracy of Latin America.

Advantaged:  The socioeconomic status of all whites, including descendants of sharecroppers, impoverished Appalachians, the homeless with drug and mental problems, and the residents of decrepit double-wides in deindustrialized towns.

Privileged:  See “Advantaged” above.

Humanism, Capitalism and the Enlightenment:  Moral and economic philosophies used by whites to subjugate non-whites.

Marxism:  A completely fair and just economic and political system that is an antidote to the above.

Two-Parent Families:  A bourgeois social construct formerly employed by whites to achieve socioeconomic advantages and now selfishly adopted by certain Asian groups to rise above all the other groups in household income and education.

Multiculturalism:  A belief that all cultures are superior to the white culture, including cultures that stone gays to death, treat women as property, and decapitate heretics.

Wokes:  1) Those who have been taught in college to parrot euphemisms and cliches instead of being taught history; 2) those who hate themselves for being white; and 3) those who engage in meaningless virtue-signaling.

 

The Empirical Case for a Mask Mandate Lacks Scientific Grounding

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Last fall, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics Evaluation (IHME) published a headline-grabbing study with a politically appealing claim: if Americans would simply mask up when they ventured out into public, over 120,000 lives could be saved by the beginning of next year. As Joe Biden takes office later this week, he is widely expected to use executive orders to enact a 100-day long national mask mandate.

Biden’s action is directly premised on the claims of the IHME study, which he has repeatedly alluded to in his public commentary. But is the science behind this claim sound?

As I documented last fall, the IHME’s projections rested upon a simple data error. The IHME model begins from the assumption that only 49% of Americans were currently wearing masks in public. Increase the mask adoption rate to between 85% and 95%, it stands to reason, and you’ll save over a hundred thousand lives by reducing the spread of Covid-19. A national mask mandate, the authors implied, would do the trick.

The IHME’s projections had a crucial problem however. The IHME took its 49% adoption figure from a months-old outdated survey at the beginning of the pandemic. As of late September when they made their projections, US mask adoption hovered at 80% nationwide. Instead of nearly doubling mask use rates, a national mask mandate would only increase compliance by about 5 to 15 percentage points. The number of lives that the mandate would save, it turned out, had been vastly exaggerated in the published report.

The IHME’s director took exception to my criticism, though notably he did not dispute any of my math. “[Magness] is correct that our estimate of mask-wearing rates has increased” since the study’s publication, explained Christopher J.L. Murray in a letter to the Wall Street Journal. New data from the summer and early fall confirmed an increase in public mask adoption rates. Yet Murray continued: “[h]e is incorrect to suggest that this weakens the case for public policies that require masks.”

In the roughly two months since this public exchange, the IHME’s mask model has undergone a curious transformation. Murray and his team quietly updated their figures to reflect the higher and more realistic mask-adoption rates. Furthermore, they extended these corrections retroactively to their model’s projections from the summer months.

The chart below shows how the IHME mask model has shifted over time. The blue line depicts the actual US mask adoption rate, as tracked by the YouGov survey. It shows that US mask adoption rapidly increased in the spring until hitting about 80% in mid-July. From July until the present, it has held stable at the 80% level (parallel surveys by the CDC, Pew Charitable Trust, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Kaiser Family Foundation confirm these findings).

The orange line shows the IHME’s mask model and forecast on September 21, which is the version it published in the journal Nature-Medicine. The yellow line shows the IHME’s subsequent upward revisions as of January 2021, which are now finally starting to converge with reality. Their estimates still fall slightly short of what the aforementioned surveys show, but as of January 18th the IHME model assumes that 76% of Americans wear masks in public – just shy of the 80% level.

While the IHME team is to be commended for correcting their model to better reflect reality, these adjustments also mean that comparatively few additional gains remain to be had from bumping the mask-adoption rate upward to 85 or 95%. The most recent of the independent surveys – a study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in December – even reports that 89% of Americans always or almost always wear masks in public, suggesting we are already at or near the targeted “universal adoption” threshold of the IHME model.

The ongoing corrections to the IHME model have severely dampened the promised benefits of a national mask mandate. The figure below shows the IHME’s “lives saved” forecast under universal mask adoption with 95% compliance, as projected for 4 months out from its release date.

Back in September, the IHME model projected over 120,000 lives would be saved by January under a mask mandate. Now it projects a much smaller 31,000 lives saved by the end of April.

When reading these ever-shrinking projections, keep in mind that US mask adoption patterns have not meaningfully changed since the mid-summer of 2020, before the IHME even released its first “lives saved” estimate. It has stayed constant at roughly 80% throughout this entire time. The only apparent changes are the input data for the IHME model, which they updated in the wake of my critique to better approximate reality. The effect is to reduce the IHME’s “lives saved” projection at the 4-month mark to only one quarter of its headline-grabbing claim from back in the fall.

These changes do not mean that masks lack effectiveness at the margins. They remain a precautionary hygienic response – particularly in certain indoor venues and around vulnerable people. Rather, the IHME’s model adjustments confirm what several of us have been pointing out since the mask mandate movement began in earnest last year. The main gains from masking have already been reaped. Americans rapidly adopted them last summer and have continued to use them at consistently high rates ever since. Adding a new national mask mandate on top of this practice will bring little if any additional benefit to what voluntary adoption already achieved, though it may foster a false hope in the exaggerated claims of an obsolete and erroneous model.

*****

This article first appeared on January 19, 2021 and is reproduced by permission from AIER, The American Institute for Economic Research.

The Fight to Keep Schools Closed Has Proven Thomas Sowell Correct About Teachers’ Unions

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Their willingness to put children last and fight to keep schools closed has proven once and for all that teachers’ unions do not, in fact, have kids’ best interests at heart.

One of the first things we learned about the coronavirus is that it has a near-zero death rate for kids. We also soon found that children are far less likely to transmit the virus than adults.

Considering these facts, one might reasonably expect that schools would be some of the first institutions to reopen amid government-mandated pandemic lockdowns and stay-at-home restrictions. Because there are very few public health risks—and because education and childcare are among the most essential functions of our society—allowing schools to reopen should have been the easy choice.

Why have our elected officials chosen to shut down schools despite all the evidence? Contrary to what you may think, it is not primarily because of scientific recommendations made by experts, but rather largely due to deals cut between politicians and teachers’ unions.

This, however, is not what has happened. Many schools across the country have remained closed since March, and even those which opened have done so with tremendous unpredictability and usually within a limited framework. Some schools have opened this fall only to be ordered to close once again when a second wave of COVID-19 cases emerged.

Why have our elected officials chosen to shut down schools despite all the evidence?

Contrary to what you may think, it is not primarily because of scientific recommendations made by experts, but rather largely due to deals cut between politicians and teachers’ unions. This is evidenced by a working paper authored by two political science professors that looked at over 10,000 school districts across the country. It found that regardless of the virus’s actual prevalence in local communities, districts with stronger teachers’ unions were less likely to reopen schools for in-person learning.

In New York City, for example, the United Federation of Teachers struck a deal with Mayor Bill de Blasio. They agreed that teachers would only return to the classroom if the mayor promised to re-close schools if the city’s COVID-19 positivity rate—the percentage of tests coming back positive—hit 3 percent. The positivity rate inevitably rose above that low 3 percent bar, and the schools were promptly closed down again.

If science had actually been paramount to this decision, it would be important to note that while the city-wide positivity rate was 3 percent, the positivity rate within schools themselves was only 0.15 percent. There was no actual scientific reason to close schools down again. But far more influential than scientific considerations were raw politics—raw politics at the expense of children’s education.

Unfortunately, these decisions to keep schools closed have had far-reaching consequences, such as increased mental-health challenges, decreased educational quality, and added stress on families that may have no stay-at-home parents. This, however, is evidently of no concern to the leaders of teachers’ unions because it is not their job to represent children, but rather only their dues-paying members.

“Union leaders say the narrative that they’re acting as obstructionists and pushing to keep schools closed is unfair,” EducationWeek reports. “They say they’re only asking for reopening’s to be done safely.”

This excuse doesn’t cut it. Studies have consistently shown that school reopening’s are not a major contributor to outbreaks of COVID-19. So, if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we never should have underestimated the sheer power of teachers’ unions.

Earlier this year, economist Thomas Sowell released a book titled Charter Schools and Their Enemies. In it, he issues a stunning indictment of the traditional public school system, teachers’ unions, and the politicians who will face political consequences if they defy incumbent powers. He masterfully analyzes the educational outcomes of low-income students who go to charter schools compared to their similarly situated peers in traditional public schools. By the end of the book, the reader is left outraged at the injustice done to ordinary students by those in power.

Sowell points out that while only 10 percent of the traditional public schools he studied had a majority of students passing at the “proficient” level on the mathematics exam, 68 percent of charter schools achieved that level. When it comes to the English test, the numbers are 14 percent and 65 percent respectively.

The reason charter schools are consistently more successful than comparable traditional public schools is simple: they operate under different incentives and constraints.

This is regrettable, because students who are not provided a quality education when they are young may never gain the marketable skills necessary to compete for a well-paying job later in life. Foundational skills in math and English are of crucial importance and the stakes here are high.

The reason charter schools are consistently more successful than comparable traditional public schools is simple: they operate under different incentives and constraints. Charter schools can only remain operational if they are providing a service that is desirable enough to attract students. Traditional public schools, on the other hand, operate as a monopoly where students are given no other choice than to attend that school.

Another key difference is the extent to which teachers are held accountable for the educational outcomes in their classrooms. In New York City, it takes an average of 830 days and $313,000 to fire a single incompetent teacher, largely due to policy negotiated by teachers’ unions. In charter schools, teachers are generally not unionized, and they can be fired for incompetence much more easily.

So, despite its widespread success, teachers’ unions and their political allies consistently fight to block and limit the charter school system. Why, Sowell ponders, is there such hostility toward such a successful system?

“There are millions of reasons,” he writes. “Namely, millions of dollars.”

This points to a fundamental truth: The interests of teachers’ unions seldom align with those of children. This was true prior to the pandemic, and it has only been underscored in recent months.

Of course, that’s not to say that teachers’ unions are inherently evil, but rather that their job is to advance the interests of teachers—not students. The issue arises when the interests of teachers sharply diverge from those of students.

While it is in the best interest of many children to learn in-person, teachers’ unions will advocate for online learning in order to look out for the health and comfort of their members—no matter how low the actual risk may be. While it is in the best interest of children to go to successful charter schools, it is in the interest of teachers to be protected by their union irrespective of performance.

It is because of these political pressures, Sowell explains, that 50,000 kids remain on waitlists to get into charter schools in New York City despite their proven success.

While these were all issues before the pandemic, COVID-19 has solidified the case against the traditional public school monopolies and the immense power of teachers’ unions. Their willingness to put children last and fight to keep schools closed has proven once and for all that teachers’ unions do not, in fact, have kids’ best interests at heart.

Fighting for teachers at the expense of the children they are teaching is the exact opposite of noble. For this reason, we must fight to reign in the influence of teachers’ unions and embrace the emergence of charter schools, private school choice programs, and homeschooling around the country.

*****

The article was originally published on December 30, 2020 and  produced with permission by FEE, Foundation for Economic Education.

Imprimis: Orwell’s 1984 and Today

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The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College reception in Rogers, Arkansas, on November 17, 2020. The content is from the December 2020 edition of Hillsdale College’s Imprimis.

On September 17, Constitution Day, I chaired a panel organized by the White House. It was an extraordinary thing. The panel’s purpose was to identify what has gone wrong in the teaching of American history and to lay forth a plan for recovering the truth. It took place in the National Archives—we were sitting in front of the originals of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—a very beautiful place. When we were done, President Trump came and gave a speech about the beauty of the American Founding and the importance of teaching American history to the preservation of freedom.

This remarkable event reminded me of an essay by a teacher of mine, Harry Jaffa, called “On the Necessity of a Scholarship of the Politics of Freedom.” Its point was that a certain kind of scholarship is needed to support the principles of a nation such as ours. America is the most deliberate nation in history—it was built for reasons that are stated in the legal documents that form its founding. The reasons are given in abstract and universal terms, and without good scholarship they can be turned astray. I was reminded of that essay because this event was the greatest exhibition in my experience of the combination of the scholarship and the politics of freedom.

The panel was part of an initiative of President Trump, mostly ignored by the media, to counter the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The 1619 Project promotes the teaching that slavery, not freedom, is the defining fact of American history. President Trump’s 1776 Commission aims to restore truth and honesty to the teaching of American history. It is an initiative we must work tirelessly to carry on, regardless of whether we have a president in the White House who is on our side in the fight.

We must carry on the fight because our country is at stake. Indeed, in a larger sense, civilization itself is at stake, because the forces arrayed against the scholarship and the politics of freedom today have more radical aims than just destroying America.

I taught a course this fall semester on totalitarian novels. We read four of them: George Orwell’s 1984, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength.

The totalitarian novel is a relatively new genre. In fact, the word “totalitarian” did not exist before the 20th century. The older word for the worst possible form of government is “tyranny”—a word Aristotle defined as the rule of one person, or of a small group of people, in their own interests and according to their will. Totalitarianism was unknown to Aristotle, because it is a form of government that only became possible after the emergence of modern science and technology.

The old word “science” comes from a Latin word meaning “to know.” The new word “technology” comes from a Greek word meaning “to make.” The transition from traditional to modern science means that we are not so much seeking to know when we study nature as seeking to make things—and ultimately, to remake nature itself. That spirit of remaking nature—including human nature—greatly emboldens both human beings and governments. Imbued with that spirit, and employing the tools of modern science, totalitarianism is a form of government that reaches farther than tyranny and attempts to control the totality of things.

In the beginning of his history of the Persian War, Herodotus recounts that in Persia it was considered illegal even to think about something that was illegal to do—in other words, the law sought to control people’s thoughts. Herodotus makes plain that the Persians were not able to do this. We today are able to get closer through the use of modern technology. In Orwell’s 1984, there are telescreens everywhere, as well as hidden cameras and microphones. Nearly everything you do is watched and heard. It even emerges that the watchers have become expert at reading people’s faces. The organization that oversees all this is called the Thought Police.

If it sounds far-fetched, look at China today: there are cameras everywhere watching the people, and everything they do on the Internet is monitored. Algorithms are run and experiments are underway to assign each individual a social score. If you don’t act or think in the politically correct way, things happen to you—you lose the ability to travel, for instance, or you lose your job. It’s a very comprehensive system. And by the way, you can also look at how big tech companies here in the U.S. are tracking people’s movements and activities to the extent that they are often able to know in advance what people will be doing. Even more alarming, these companies are increasingly able and willing to use the information they compile to manipulate people’s thoughts and decisions…..

Continue reading at Imprimis: Orwell’s 1984 and Today

*****

Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. From 1977 to 1980, he also studied at the London School of Economics and at Worcester College, Oxford University, where he served as director of research for Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. From 1985 until his appointment as president of Hillsdale College in 2000, he was president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. He is the author of Liberty and Learning: The Evolution of American Education; The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution; and Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government.

ILLINOIS: School Board Denounces Member for ‘Islamophobia’ for Responding to Muslim Colleague’s Smear

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Dima Ali called Dan Moroney a “white supremacist.” Moroney’s friend Matt Baron responded by likening Dima Ali to a terrorist. Baron has now been condemned for “Islamophobia,” why isn’t the District 200 school board apologizing for Moroney for Ali’s defamation of him? Because “white supremacist” is the acceptable smear that can be leveled at anyone and everyone who dissents from the Leftist agenda. No apology is necessary.

“D200 board denounces member’s ‘Islamophobia,’” by Michael Romain, OakPark.com, January 6, 2021:

During a special board meeting held Dec. 22, members of the District 200 school board apologized to Oak Park resident Dima Ali and formally denounced comments made by D200 board member Matt Baron that many community members said caused harm to Ali and other Muslim and non-white Oak Parkers.
The controversy dates to a comment written by Ali in November under a Wednesday Journal news article about Oak Park Trustee Dan Moroney, which was posted to Facebook. In her comment, Ali called Moroney a white supremacist.
Baron, who knows Moroney, contacted Wednesday Journal and urged the paper to remove the Facebook comment before submitting an opinion piece to the paper in which he compared Ali’s comment to someone leaving duffle bags in public places — code for terrorism. Ali is Muslim, a fact that Baron subsequently said he did not know at the time he wrote the piece.
Baron issued a written apology roughly a week later, calling his analogy “far too intense” and “needlessly over-the-top as I sought to stir people in this community to push back on unfair character attacks.”
During brief comments made at a Dec. 3 Committee of the Whole meeting, Baron said his metaphor was “intended to provoke bystanders like those who click like or love in response to the white supremacist label,” before doubling down on what he called his “key point — let’s stop the racial identity politics.”
In her remarks made during the Dec. 22 special meeting, Ali said she was disappointed by the board’s delayed response to Baron’s comments and called for his resignation.
“An Islamophobic board member should not be sitting right now like this,” she said, adding that she felt the board failed its marginalized students and community members by not condemning Baron’s remarks more swiftly.
“We’re not terrorists,” said Ali, who is also an Oak Park and River Forest High School parent. “We are your neighbors. … We’re your friends. In this community, we don’t drop suspicious duffel bags, we drop off bags full of donations. We drop off food, soup to any sick friend and community member.”
After Ali’s remarks, D200 board President Sara Dixon Spivy read a statement on behalf of the board majority that “formally denounced” Baron’s opinion piece, adding that Baron also “failed to recognize the impact and harm” of his opinion piece in his subsequent board comments.
The board said Baron’s “racist and Islamophobic remarks directly conflict with this board’s belief in racial equity and inclusion,” adding that they have also “undermined ongoing efforts” made by the district to advance its mission of improving equity and inclusion, and creating a “culture of warmth” for all OPRF students and community members….

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

6 Key Takeaways Every Student Should Receive from Econ 101

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A more widespread understanding of Econ 101 would reduce the likelihood of destructive government policies winning public support.

In a 2015 podcast conversation with American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, Vox’s Ezra Klein declared that “there’s nothing more dangerous than somebody who’s just taken their first economics class.” Often expressing a similar contempt for Econ 101 is University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak.
This expressed skepticism of Econ 101 comes across as wise and sophisticated—even hip—to many people who don’t grasp Econ 101. And it gives the mistaken impression that those who warn of the alleged folly of taking Econ 101 too seriously are experts not only in elementary economics but also in advanced economics.
Yet this contemptuous dismissal of the relevance of Econ 101 is foolish. Those who express it either really don’t know any economics whatsoever or mistakenly presume that the theoretical curiosities explored in Econ 999 are more relevant than is the reality revealed by Econ 101. But the truth is that Econ 101 taught well supplies ample, important, and timeless insights into the way the world works.
These insights, sadly, are far too rare among those who are unexposed to elementary economics.

No one denies that a deeper understanding of economic reality is supplied by training in sound, advanced economics. If, for example, we’re interested in understanding and predicting many of the details of how people react to changes in particular government policies—and in tracing out some specific consequences of these likely reactions—knowledge of economics beyond that which is conveyed in an intro-econ course is useful.
Similarly, if we want to better understand many observed commercial practices—practices such as corporate stock buybacks or automobile dealerships’ penchant for clustering near each other—then knowledge beyond principles of economics is often necessary.  No one can doubt the usefulness of more advanced economic training.
But it doesn’t follow from these observations that knowledge merely of economic principles is “dangerous.” The young person who absorbs Econ 101 but who takes no further courses in economics will nevertheless, and for the rest of his or her life, possess a genuine understanding of reality that is distressingly rare among politicians, pundits, preachers, and the general public. Far from being a danger to society, this person—inoculated against the worst and most virulent strands of economic ignorance—will serve as a beneficial check on the spread of ideas that are dodgy and sometimes perilous.
The true danger is not knowledge of “only” Econ 101. The true danger is ignorance even of Econ 101.
The typical protectionist opposes free trade not because he aced an advanced econ course and learned that, under just the right circumstances, optimally imposed tariffs can be justified on economic grounds. No. The typical protectionist opposes free trade because he doesn’t understand the first thing about economics. He doesn’t understand that the purpose of trade is to enrich people as consumers and not to guarantee the incomes of existing producers. The typical protectionist doesn’t understand that exports are costs and that imports are benefits. (He thinks it’s the other way ’round.) Failing to understand that the act of importing not only destroys but also creates particular jobs in the domestic economy, the protectionist mistakenly concludes that the more we import the fewer are the number of jobs in our economy.
The typical protectionist, in short, doesn’t understand the first thing about economics. Yet had he taken a well-taught Econ 101 course, he’d not swallow and repeat these and other myths about trade.
Likewise, the typical politician doesn’t support minimum wages because she has concluded after careful study that employers of low-skilled workers possess a sufficient quantum of monopsony power in the labor market, in addition to monopoly power in the output market, to nullify the prediction of basic supply-and-demand analysis that minimum wages shrink low-skilled workers’ employment options. No.
She supports minimum wages because she naively supposes that wages are set arbitrarily by employers and that higher wages come out of either employers’ profits or consumers’ wallets without prompting any changes in employers’ or consumers’ behavior.
And most of this politician’s constituents share her economic ignorance. They miss the reality revealed by Econ 101—namely, that wages are not set arbitrarily by employers and, therefore, that when the cost of employing workers is raised by minimum wages, employers respond in part by employing fewer workers.
In both of the above examples (and these are only two examples of many), more widespread understanding of Econ 101 would reduce the likelihood of these destructive policies winning public support.

They’re called economic principles for a good reason: What is taught in a solid economic-principles course are the principles of the operation of a competitive economy guided by market prices. They describe the logic of markets and, accordingly, in most cases offer a trustworthy guide for understanding the economy—and an understanding of the consequences of government interventions into the economy.
It’s true that reality sometimes serves up circumstances that render knowledge only of economic principles inadequate. But if economic principles did not on most occasions give reliable and useful insights into how real-world economies actually operate, they would be anti-principles. They ought not be taught, and students should demand tuition refunds along with compensation for being defrauded by their colleges.
But in fact, again, enormously important insights are conveyed in a good Econ 101 course. Here’s just a partial list of what an attentive Econ 101 student learns:

  1. Our world is one of unavoidable scarcity, and so to use more resources to produce guns is to have fewer resources available to produce butter. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, a free gun, or a free anything else.
  2. Wealth is goods and services; wealth is not money. And so to create more money without creating more goods and services is to create not more wealth but only more inflation—along with the distortions and uncertainties that inflation unleashes.
  3. When the cost that a person incurs to take some action rises, the attractiveness to that person of taking that action falls. This fact is why higher taxes on carbon emissions reduce carbon emissions and why higher taxes on income-earning activities reduce income-earning activities.
  4. Profits are entrepreneurs’ reward for successfully satisfying consumers’ wants; profits are neither stolen from consumers nor extracted from workers. Therefore, the greater the good performed in the market by entrepreneurs, the higher the entrepreneurs’ profits.
  5. Prices and wages aren’t arbitrary. They’re set in markets by consumers competing against each other to purchase goods and services and by sellers competing against each other to sell goods and services. Sellers in competitive markets no more control prices than do buyers.
  6. Because of the principle of comparative advantage, it’s literally impossible for one country to monopolize the production of all goods and services.

I submit that these and other lessons taught in Econ 101 are vitally significant and need not await being polished and conditioned by the lessons of higher-level economics courses before becoming immensely useful. Far from being dangerous, these and other Econ 101 lessons are beautiful and essential.
This article was reprinted from the American Institute for Economic Research.
COLUMN BY

Donald J. Boudreaux

Donald J. Boudreaux is a senior fellow with the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Mercatus Center Board Member, and a professor of economics and former economics-department chair at George Mason University.
EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

A Woke Student is a Safe Student

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Prescott Unified School District Superintendent Joe Howard: “We can’t keep heaping society’s issues on schools. It can’t all be the school’s job….”

In November 2020 the Arizona Department of Education released its report School Safety Task Force Final Report. Shortly afterwards, Prescott’s The Daily Courier carried an editorial on the report’s release entitled Schools Were Never Meant to Raise Our Kids.

My interest piqued, I read the report.

It turns out the report is not some pragmatic, measurable, implementable School Safety Task Force report/plan. Instead, it is a “woke” suggestion to create a plan, a grab-bag of vague ideas for mental health and cultural indoctrination. It equates to a recommendation for social engineering within Arizona’s schools. In this plan safety is another word for “woke”. “A Woke Child is a Safe Child” could be the subtitle of the report.

The ultimate and UNSTATED vision of the document is a Social Justice utopia causing safe schools to blossom in Arizona. On its journey to this hidden vision, the report manages to miss all of its stated goals.

The missed goals include:
1. Identify a unifying, research-based approach to school safety.
2. Create a model school safety plan for use by schools and districts.
3. Develop a clearinghouse of resources.
4. Research the value and impact of a tip line and additional evidence-based, best practices for the state.
5. Create an outline of recommended legislative changes.

Following the logic of this “plan”, parent teacher conferences would center on the quality of muffins at breakfast, education would focus on how to put condoms on bananas at puberty, details of the abortion schedule in high school, how to dress for class with a fluid gender, and the best mental health counseling and drugs to facilitate “transition therapy”, all making Arizona schools safer. What about learning and test scores? Reading? Writing? Math? Critical Thinking? And what about boys and girls showering in their respective locker rooms – that’s all so capitalist, so cis-gendered, so racist!

A vague statement of the intent of the project is found in the second line of the Executive Summary: “This report, therefore, may be different from what many expect. It is less focused on threat assessment, physical safety and crisis intervention. It is more focused on school climate, prevention, mental health and relationship building”. In other words, our children will not be able to read or write or add 2 plus 2 to get the correct answer (is there a correct answer in this proposed culture?) but will have pleasant relationships with others, a nice, gender fluid wardrobe, tasty condoms and live comfortably in a world without consequences for their behavior or expectations for higher performances.

Want a clue to the report’s content? The report is written by a gaggle of social justice warriors, including Maya Zukerburg, the political director (read this again, the POLITICAL DIRECTOR) of “March for our Lives AZ”, which is closely aligned with the Puente Youth Movement, a “youth empowerment hub that centers the development of young people through culture, politics and leadership and community organizing development for the purpose of long-term political change”. Their activities focus on “Cops outta campus”, “History of our people’s resistance (the history not usually taught in school)” and “workshop activities around social justice issues”.

In the authors’ world view school safety is achieved when all our children spout woke platitudes, see mental health counselors rather than reading or math tutors, all school police are removed from all campuses and they have broken the ‘school to prison pipeline’.

In reality, this report is a derivative of the “Defund the Police” movement, which itself appears to have evolved from the Restorative Justice programs in schools over the past decade. This writer became aware of the Restorative Justice movement as a member of the NAACP several years ago when the movement began in California. Beginning in predominately black school districts such as Oakland, this orthodoxy spread across California like wildfire and saw the then Governor of California, Jerry Brown sign legislation banning “willful belligerence” as a reason to remove a student from a classroom or be suspended or expelled from school.

The result has been, not a rise in achievement or the closing of the “achievement gap” between students of color verses white and Asian students, but a decline in classroom behavior, a rise in school violence affecting all students and teachers and the acceleration of a teacher shortage throughout the California as teachers throw in the towel when they feel threatened and unable to teach.

The Arizona School Safety Task Force report is right about one thing: it is time to re-evaluate what our schools are responsible for achieving. Prescott Unified School District Superintendent Joe Howard is quoted in the Courier article, saying, “We can’t keep heaping society’s issues on schools. There is a lot of finger pointing about school responsibility. It can’t all be the school’s job. We could use some support…. We could use some resources”.

Let’s not turn Arizona schools from places of learning into the underperforming societal quagmires of California. The L.A. Unified School District, for example, is renowned, not for its educational prowess, but for being the largest food service operation in the state, if not the country, serving 688,000 meals PER DAY. The district also provides preschool, day care, and after school services and is busy upgrading school nurses into full scale health clinics with doctors, dentists, nurses, and mental health care. Meanwhile, it is in the bottom of academic performance in the country.

One last thought. My wife taught elementary school in a Northern California district where one elementary school, whose children tested at 9% proficient (at grade level), attempted to fix the low performance by hiring a yoga/meditation instructor so everyone, teachers and students, could relax and not worry about the results.

Not in Arizona.

CFACT “Green New Wheel” teaches facts at TPUSA conference

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America’s high school and college students are continually battered with misinformation from celebrities, “news” organizations, and social media.
Amid the COVID lockdowns and election controversies, this Left-wing indoctrination is at an all-time high.
That’s why CFACT cosponsored Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit (SAS) in West Palm Beach, FL, this past week – to reach young people directly with facts, not hysteria.
CFACT debuted the “Green New Wheel” table game; an actual, spin-able wheel that CFACT developed to engage the public on the folly behind the Green New Deal.
It “spun up” quite the buzz among hundreds of students, the media, and even a celebrity or two, all while operating under the COVID restrictions put in place by county officials for the conference.
Kirk Cameron, the Christian actor and movie star, and Alex Clark, host of TPUSA’s “POPlitics” show, both took a spin. Unfortunately for Ms. Clark, she landed on Joe Biden and the Green New Deal, which meant she lost. Mr. Cameron, however, landed on free market energy, which gave him the chance at a prize.
Chandler Wysocki, a freshman at the Ohio State University, was very enthusiastic about CFACT’s message after spinning the Green New Wheel. “I love the message, and I am really looking forward to getting plugged in to the CFACT chapter on campus,” Chandler said. “There are tons of events I think we can do. A hike and litter clean up would be great to show that we as conservatives care about the environment, despite what the Left says about us.”
CFACT’s mission also attracted the attention of national media. Both CFACT’s Houser and Bob Knee, CFACT’s National Field Coordinator, were interviewed by America’s Voice TV about their mission on college campuses. Additionally, Bob sat down with Cindy Drukier, host of The Nation Speaks, a news program with NTD.com, to discuss the growing threat of China to freedom. Bob explained how China is using environmental issues as a political chess piece to gain influence and power on the world stage.
“With the Paris Climate Accord specifically, the Chinese Communist Party is using that agreement to gain a serious edge economically,” Knee explained. “In that deal the West has to slash emissions, but China gets to keep building as many coal plants as they want. It’s ridiculous.
In addition to CFACT’s presence, there were many big-name speakers who took the stage at the Summit, including Tucker Carlson, Governor Kristi Noem, Dinesh D’Souza, Jude Jeanine Pirro, and more.
“These students were fired up. They love freedom, and they understand that it is capitalism, not socialism that brings prosperity and helps the environment,” Houser said. “Look for big things from these new CFACT activists next semester and beyond.”
EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Book Criticizing Cancel Culture Gets Canceled Because Author Criticized Islam

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You may have thought the public discourse couldn’t get any more absurd. Think again. Apparently oblivious to the titanic dimensions of the irony, the publisher Little, Brown just canceled a new book, Welcome to the Woke Trials: How #Identity Killed Progressive Politics by British journalist Julie Burchill because of an “Islamophobic” twitter exchange Burchill had with Muslim writer Ash Sarkar. So you see, it’s fine to stand up for freedom of speech, but some lines must not be crossed. And what was Burchill’s crime? Did she use racial slurs? Did she call for genocide or violence against innocent Muslims? No, apparently all she did was note the readily demonstrable fact that according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad married a child. But telling the truth is a dangerous enterprise these days.
According to The National, the Hachette group, which owns Little, Brown, announced that Burchill’s book “has been scrapped by her publisher for what it said were Islamophobic comments.”
The book, according to the report, “was promoted as a ‘characteristically irreverent and entertaining’ indictment of the ‘outrage mob.’” But the outrage mob was not outraged by anything in the book itself. It was evidently outraged because Burchill asked Sarkar, “Can you please remind me of the age of the Prophet Mohammad’s first wife?”
Burchill is clearly speaking about Muhammad’s child bride Aisha, not his first wife, Khadija, who was fifteen years older than he was. But that’s just a detail. Commenters raked Burchill over the coals for her supposed hypocrisy for ignoring child marriage in British history and claiming that Mary was a child when she married Joseph. Yet none of that was on point. No one would care about Muhammad’s child marriage were his behavior not normative for Islamic law and imitated by all too many Muslims even today. So what Burchill said, aside from mixing up the order of Muhammad’s wives, was entirely based on fact.
Now, there is a possibility that Burchill’s child marriage remarks were not the “Islamophobic comments” in question. It may be that there were other exchanges between Burchill and Sarkar that Twitter has deleted. The National fastidiously refrains from telling us what egregious thing Burchill is supposed to have said. But it is bitterly ironic that Burchill’s book on cancel culture has now been canceled for whatever it is she said. That rather proves her point, doesn’t it?
Sarkar egged on the outrage mob, writing: Ms. Sarkar tweeted: “Julie Burchill, who once I suppose was a well-regarded journalist, has quite openly subjected me to Islamophobia on here. I’m a big girl – it’s not going to upset me – but I do find it strange that none of her colleagues or friends in the industry seems to have a problem with it.”
“Her colleagues and friends in the industry” accordingly jumped to show how broad-minded and non-Islamophobic they were, and quickly threw Burchill under the bus. Little, Brown’s statement is a repugnant stew of self-contradiction, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy: “We will no longer be publishing Julie Burchill’s book. This is not a decision we have taken lightly. We believe passionately in freedom of speech at Little, Brown and we have always published authors with controversial or challenging perspectives – and we will continue to do so.”
No, Little, Brown, you don’t believe in the freedom of speech. Clearly there are controversial or challenging perspectives you don’t dare publish. Claiming to believe in the freedom of speech while canceling a controversial book is like claiming to be a little bit pregnant. You either believe in the freedom of speech or you don’t. And you don’t.
Little, Brown continued: “While there is no legal definition of hate speech in the UK, we believe that Julie’s comments on Islam are not defensible from a moral or intellectual standpoint, that they crossed a line with regard to race and religion, and that her book has now become inextricably linked with those views.”
What race is Islam again? I keep forgetting. The charge of “hate speech” is a tool of the powerful to silence the powerless. This ugly incident shows vividly how it is used to stifle dissent. Burchill’s question should have sparked a debate about child marriage, and about Sharia and its relationship to British law. Instead, Burchill’s book is canceled, signaling that such discussions are not to be tolerated. Little, Brown’s action shows how much the West has already accepted and internalized the Sharia prohibition of criticism of Islam. Britain’s protracted demise as a free society continues apace.
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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS ALERT: University of Michigan ‘Words Matter Task Force’ says “picnic” is offensive

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United States Constitution Amendment I.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The United States Constitution, Amendment I forbids the abridging of the freedom of speech. One of the departments of the University of Michigan seems to disagree.
The University of Michigan (UM) has issued an updated report on December 8, 2020 from its Information Technology Services (ITS) department titled “Words Matter Task Force Recommendations.” It seems that the UM ITS department wants to abridge their students, employees, vendors and faculty’s freedom of speech.
The Executive Summary of Words Matter Task Force Recommendations states:

Given the importance of communication and the ITS core value of inclusivity, the Words Matter Task Force was formed and charged with identifying terms used within ITS that are, or can be construed to be, racist, sexist, or non-inclusive.

What Words Are Now Considered Racist, Sexist or Non-Inclusive at UM?

Note in the table below that that the words man, men, picnic, he, she, grandfathered, and phrases like long time no see are now considered offensive. See the chart below of words and phrases that are now banned at UM.
The purpose of the is to impact language globally. According to the report:

The University of Michigan has the opportunity to influence change with vendors, suppliers, and associations. ITS can share with strategic partners the business case for using inclusive language, and prepare them on new terms they may hear ITS staff members use. There are a few scenarios that offer opportunities for communication and relationship building, including proactively reaching out to vendors to make them aware of changes they may experience when interacting with ITS; requesting a change from vendors toward inclusive language; and starting a conversation with other university partners to increase adoption. An email template example was developed that Service Owners can use to inform and prepare external partners. See Appendix D.

This is political correctness gone wild at a premier American university.
Mario Goveia in an email wrote:

As an alumnus of the University of Michigan during an era when knowledge and understanding were prized and robust differences of opinion were encouraged as a learning tool, I’m now being asked to think twice before I speak or write, in case I offend someone.
I just learned that the University’s “Information and Technology Services Department” has a “Words Matter Task Force”, which has decided that the word “PICNIC” is OFFENSIVE along with a whole list of other words deemed offensive.
This kind of thinking may explain how Biden-Harris got elected with their objective of turning us into a nanny state.  The Biden-voters in the task force suggested the use of “gatherings” instead of “picnic” without explaining why!
If you disagree you’re obviously a racist!
The US is being transformed from a “glass is always at least half full” country into a “glass is always less than half empty” country.

Inclusive Language
This list is not exhaustive and will continue to grow. 

Term Alternative Term
-men-, -man- -people, -person, or a wholly different word.
(e.g., “man-hours” can become “person-hours”)
blacklist/whitelist allowed/prohibited, include/exclude, allowlist/deny list
black-and-white thinking binary thinking, all-or-nothing thinking
brown bag lunch and learn
crack the whip manage the effort closely
crazy, insane outrageous, unthinkable, nonsensical, incomprehensible, ridiculous, egregious, irrational
crippled weakened, deteriorated
disabled when referring to a system: deactivated, broken
dummy placeholder, sample
gender-neutral he or she gender-neutral they, referring by name
grandfathered (in) legacy status, legacies in, exempted, excused
gypped/jipped defrauded, swindled, cheated, ripped off
handicapped restricted
girl/gal, boy/guy person, or use the person’s name
guys/gals (e.g., Hi guys!) everyone, folks (e.g., Hi everyone!)
honey, sweetheart, sweetie use the person’s name
long time, no see “It’s been a while,” “I haven’t seen you in ages!”
low man on the totem pole last in the pecking order, the bottom of the heap
master/slave leader/follower, primary/replica, primary/standby
native built-in, innate
off the reservation outside the norms, rogue, break with the group, off on your own
picnic gathering
preferred pronouns pronouns
privileged account elevated account
sanity check quick check, confidence check, coherence check
sold down the river betrayed, thrown under the bus
straw-man proposed conceptual design
uppity arrogant, conceited

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.
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School Choice Reduces Teen Suicide, New Study Finds

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When students who face bullying at their public school can go elsewhere, it literally saves lives.

Elijah Robinson attempted suicide as a teenager. Why? Well, as a queer and mixed-race student, he faced vicious bullying in his public school.
Thanks to a Florida program, he was able to switch schools and attend a private Christian school where he did not face bullying or discrimination. Students at private schools are statistically less likely to have bullying problems. Robinson later concluded, “If I had stayed at my previous school … I honestly think I would have lost my life.”
A new study confirms that Robinson’s experience is not an outlier. It shows that alongside reopening schools, which science shows are not sources of significant coronavirus transmission, school choice policies can help heal the mental health crisis plaguing youth.
This is of crucial importance because adolescent suicide and mental health problems were already major issues before the coronavirus pandemic. Suicides among those aged 10 to 24 spiked 56% from 2007 to 2017, becoming the second-highest cause of death among teenagers and young adults.
Now, with lockdowns and school closures sapping away their social bonds and quality of life, we have witnessed a disturbing rise in suicide and mental health issues among young people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 1 in 4 young people contemplated suicide during a one-month period over the summer amid the first pandemic peak and harsh lockdowns.
School choice programs can help alleviate this pain and suffering by allowing more young people the educational opportunities that best fit their needs. These policies include the expansion of charter schools and tuition voucher programs that provide low-income families with money to attend private schools.
With those options, families don’t have to remain trapped into sending their child to the local public school by default. So, for students who face bullying or are not at schools that suit their needs, they can go elsewhere. Families who like their public schools and students who are succeeding there are, of course, free to choose to stay put.
The new study shows the benefit that choice brings to those who need it. Authored by the Reason Foundation’s Corey DeAngelis and economist Angela Dills, it provides empirical backing to the intuitive conclusion that school choice can reduce suicide among teenagers.
It concludes that “the estimated effect of a charter school law translates to about a 10% decrease in the suicide rate among 15 to 19-year-olds.” It also finds that 30-year-old adults who had attended private school were 2% less likely to report having a mental health condition.
Why?
“It’s likely that private schools face stronger competitive pressures to provide a safer school environment and improve mental health if they want to remain open,” Dills explained. “Public schools, on the other hand, are more likely to be burdened with government regulations that make it difficult for them to control discipline policy and create strong school cultures.”
These results only supplement the evidence showing that school choice improves test scores and family satisfaction.
The lesson here goes beyond how school choice improves youth mental health, as important as that may be. This study offers yet another demonstration that public policies that embrace competition and choice will always outperform those that force one-size-fits-all solutions.
This article has been republished with permission from the Washington Examiner.
COLUMN BY

Brad Polumbo

Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Opinion Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education.
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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Report: Saudi authorities remove antisemitic, anti-Zionist content from textbooks

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Made possible by the greatest POTUS in history. It is just a matter of time before Israel and Saudi Arabia establish full diplomatic relations. What President Trump has accomplished in the Middle East is a miracle.

Report: Saudi authorities remove anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist content from textbooks

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education finds attitudes in the kingdom towards Israel are becoming “more balanced and tolerant.”
By JNS, December 20th, 2020
Saudi authorities have been removing anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist content from the country’s textbooks for the coming school year, a report by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education has found.
The report came amid growing speculation of a potential rapprochement between the Jewish state and the Arab Gulf power. Saudi Arabia’s neighbors, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, normalized ties with Israel in September in a deal brokered by the United States. Washington has made it no secret that it would like to see Riyadh join the Abraham Accords before U.S. President Donald Trump’s term in office ends next month.
The monitoring group said that while it “did not find that new tolerant material had been injected into the curriculum, a substantial amount of offensive material had been removed.”
The report said that many of the books no longer include the prediction of a religious war in which Muslims would annihilate all Jews. Furthermore, the classic anti-Semitic trope saying that “Zionist forces” use nefarious methods to control the world has been dropped.
“Examining the trendline of our 2002, 2008 and even 2019 reports of the Saudi curriculum, it is clear that these new 2020 textbooks represent an institutional effort to modernize the Kingdom’s curriculum,” said IMPACT-se CEO, Marcus Sheff. “The Saudi authorities have begun a process of rooting out anti-Jewish hate.”
Attitudes towards Israel are becoming “more balanced and tolerant,” the institute said, giving as an example the removal of an entire chapter that was titled “the Zionist danger,” which delegitimized Israel’s right to exist.
More generally, the majority of references to jihad have been removed, whereas a decade ago the focus of the curriculum was to prepare students for martyrdom, the group found.
“This being said, anti-Israel content does still remain in the curriculum,” IMPACT-se noted. Hatred of Jews is still present, including “a decontextualized and ambiguous” story about Jewish “wrongdoers,” who are described as monkeys.

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

Trump Nominates Charlie Kirk, Several Others, To New Commission That Counters 1619 Project

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President Donald Trump announced 18 individuals who he intends to appoint Friday as two-year members of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission.
Trump first announced the initiative in September and slammed The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which pushes slavery to the center of America’s founding. The 1776 Commission “will work to improve understanding of the history and the principles of the founding of the United States among our Nation’s rising generations,” according to a previous press release.
Some people took to Twitter to point out one of Trump’s picks in particular: Turning Point USA President Charlie Kirk.

It’s not immediately clear how the president picked the incoming members or what qualifications were needed.

Other notable choices include Acting Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council Brooke Rollins and Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson, according to a Friday press release.
https://twitter.com/AndrewSolender/status/1339966442842828800?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1339966442842828800%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdailycaller.com%2F2020%2F12%2F18%2Fdonald-trump-nominates-charlie-kirk-1776-commission-advisory%2F
The president previously called the “1619 Project” a “crusade against American history.” It has been implemented in schools across the country and criticized by some historians. The president also accused the project of being “toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together” and “destroy our country.”
While the executive order Trump signed in early November doesn’t directly name the NYT’s project, it includes similar language that the president has previously used in denouncing the initiative.
“Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains,” according to the executive order. “This radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured.”
COLUMN BY

Shelby Talcott

Media Reporter. Retired college and professional athlete, big fan of dogs and mimosas without the OJ, sarcastic New Yorker at heart.
RELATED ARTICLE: Why Some Members Of The American Right Are Pushing Back Against Trump’s 1776 Commission
EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

School Teachers vs. Restaurant Workers

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Two groups that have been spoken about often during the 2020 pandemic have been school teachers and restaurant workers. Though both groups have a large number currently not working, the two groups are dramatically different in how they have been treated by our governments. Let’s take a look at the difference and compare/contrast their realities.

School teachers are largely public employees and they principally belong to public employee unions. It is estimated there are more than four million teachers in our country. They are principally represented by two unions – National Education Association (NEA) with 2.2 million members and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) with 1.7 million members. In the well-known ruling (Janus), the Supreme Court made it illegal for these unions to command membership. The unions (in cahoots with state governments and local school districts) have placed significant obstacles in front of anyone wanting to opt out. Teachers have their money taken out of their paychecks beginning the very first day on the job. Those funds are used to buy political influence at the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Some say the teachers’ unions are the largest contributors to Democrats with only meager amounts going to Republicans.

The teacher’s unions have largely stated their members will not work during the pandemic. Initially the California division of the unions stated not only would they stay home but wanted certain public policies to be changed before returning to the classroom. They demanded single-payer, government-provided healthcare; full funding for housing California’s homeless; a shutdown to publicly funded, privately operated charter schools; and a new set of programs to address systemic racism. To pay for all this, they want a 1% wealth tax, a 3% income surtax on millionaires, and increased property taxes on businesses. They also want $250 million from the federal government unions. At least the people of California voted down the property tax increases.

The remainder of policies are in the hands of their hand-picked California legislature and the federal government. At the federal level they have possibly the biggest political harlot in American history, Speaker Pelosi, on their side. She has told the world that it is dangerous for teachers to return to the classroom. She knows that is a lie, but she stands in front of a mic and states it anyway because she is owned by the national unions.

We now have the science that it is harmful for the kids staying home. They have little chance of exposing their teachers to COVID and their teachers have little chance of getting the disease from the kids. Once again the party of science uses it when it is convenient.

The teachers still refuse to return for a couple reasons. The unions are socialist organizations. They insist on treating every teacher the same in compensation despite the variance in their skills. STEM teachers are paid the same as others despite the higher demand and specialized knowledge. The thing that is honored by the unions is seniority. Thus, they refuse to return to the classroom because the teachers who are over 50 years old have a higher level of risk from the disease even though the risk is still extremely low until you reach the age of 70. There are few, if any, teachers at that age because they have retired to receive their government funded pension and rich health care plans.

The second reason they have not returned to the classrooms is the teachers are receiving full pay, health insurance and pension while on this prolonged self-imposed vacation. Some are trying to teach remotely, but that has proven to be an abject failure. The “mask” of the teachers caring about the students has been fully ripped off for everyone to see. They belong to a union that is racist and cares only about its members.

The Los Angeles School system has now been closed down without any science behind it.

Then there are the restaurant workers. There are an estimated 13.5 million of them. The life of many of these workers since March has been go home, stay home, hope your employer gets a PPP loan, wait for a call back, get a call back, shut down again, wait for a call back, try to look for another job, can’t find another job, get a call back, feel fortunate you are one of the few, have to work outside where the seats are far away from the kitchen, customers complain their food is cold because you had to bring it from the kitchen a long distance away, sweat to death because it is 100 degrees outside and you are walking back and forth, then the weather turns and you are delivering the food in 45 degrees. Then you are shut down again. You ask why. Your employer asks why. You get nothing but orders from the health department. You cannot understand. Your employer and you have taken every precaution, but you are sitting at home again hoping to get unemployment benefits that take forever to arrive. Then you find out your restaurant has closed for good. It could not survive the constant turmoil brought on by government edicts and excessive costs to comply.

Small business in America has extremely high favorability rating ranging to near 90%. Despite that elected officials crap on them all the time. A lot of them mouth platitudes about small business during their campaigns then do everything to stall them, harm them and put them out of business.

Two national health officials validated what we knew already — There is no science that outdoor dining is a risk for COVID contraction. Yet California and officials of other states shut down restaurants and their workers.

There were 660,700 restaurants in America in 2018. The National Restaurant Association has estimated that 110,000 restaurants have closed permanently. It has been estimated that 50% of full service restaurants will permanently close. Drive down the street and see the “for sale” and “for lease” signs on restaurant after restaurant. Another shutdown, with no science behind it, will kill off an even greater number as body blow after body blow cannot be endured. They will cause the permanent loss of millions of jobs and people scrambling to figure out how they will support themselves. The workers will not be receiving paychecks nor will they be receiving health insurance and pension contributions like the public-school teachers.

Though people love small businesses and the workers at their restaurants and similar businesses, they keep electing these politicians who make it challenging on a normal day to start and run their businesses and have done so much during the pandemic to harm them. Hundreds of people can walk around a Costco while restaurants cannot even have 25% capacity with significant safeguards for customers and workers. Why is that? Simply a function of money lining elected officials’ pockets.

Public school teachers’ unions have been a blight upon our society for years. In previous columns, we have delineated how racist these unions have become. The problem is largely generated because parents like their kid’s teacher while not acknowledging they enable these racists unions to exist. The parents think their kid’s teacher cares when it has become quite clear they only care about themselves. If you belong to these despotic unions, you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Stop coddling them. They are not your friend nor your kid’s friend.

Instead, start giving your local busser, server, cook, chef, restaurant owner the love they deserve and demand that your elected officials do as well. If anything, this pandemic has shown they are the people who are there for you, care about you and take the personal risks to make your life better.

*****

Bruce Bialosky is a nationally  known columnist. He was appointed by President Bush to the U.S. Holocaust Commission and is the Founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition of California. This article first appeared 11/13/20 in Flash Report  and is reproduced herein by the permission of the author. Comments can be directed to Bruce@Bialosky.biz.

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