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We’re Really Doing This Again

December 29, 2021/in Featured, Healthcare, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Emile Doak

Editors’ Note: This article was published just before Christmas. We are approaching New Year’s Eve and the content below is as or more relevant to the authoritarianism infecting America today from our governing elites.

COVID hysteria marches on.

We’re really doing this again, it seems. Just in time for Christmas, we’ve got a renewed round of COVID hysteria. This time, though, we’ve ramped up the vilification of “The Unvaxxed.” Take a look at this White House press briefing on its latest efforts to eradicate disease:

It’s hard to imagine a more divisive statement coming from a presidential administration—let alone one that famously pledged unity. It’s also just incredibly counter-productive if your goal is to convince fellow citizens to get vaccinated. This sort of rhetoric certainly doesn’t portend to convince any unvaccinated Americans to finally take the jab—which makes one think that that may not be the ultimate goal of all this, after all.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the imperial capital, mask mandates are back, just one month after the mandate was lifted. And the DC government’s vaccine mandate gets stricter, with no test-out option:

At this point, the irrational nature of these efforts to “Do Something” whenever we get a spike in COVID cases really needs no pointing out. We have an Omicron spike despite widespread masking and high vaccination rates. And why just the one booster for government employees? Pfizer’s PR team is already working overtime to make the case for a fourth jab.

DC’s Football Team, more commonly known as the Washington Redskins, is also feeling the effects of Omicron hysteria, as the team is preparing for a rare Tuesday night game:

The NFL, beset by a sharp rise in coronavirus cases this week among players leaguewide, made its first scheduling changes of this season Friday, postponing three games that had been set for this weekend.

90% of Redskins players are vaccinated. More importantly, as professional athletes in peak fitness, they are also at nearly zero risk of serious illness or death from COVID. But nevertheless, the NFL has bought into the COVID narrative, and as a result, six teams whose Week 15 games were postponed due to positive tests will next play on a short week:

Due to the postponements, all six teams will be playing their Week 16 contests in a short week. The Browns travel to Green Bay to take on the Packers on Christmas, while the Raiders, Washington, Eagles, Seahawks, and Rams would all have two fewer days than expected between games.

Football is a brutal game. The NFL has been dogged with player safety concerns in recent years; just last week, it was announced that the late Vincent Jackson, the former Chargers and Buccaneers wide receiver who was found dead in February, had stage 2 chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). There’s a reason the NFL season is the shortest of any professional sports league, at just 17 regular-season games. One wonders what is more of a threat to player safety: playing a professional football game on short rest, or playing with players who may have an asymptomatic illness that is largely innocuous to professional athletes?

I said it in August, and apparently, it bears repeating: COVID-19 (and its ever-increasing variants) is here to stay, joining the countless other maladies that affect our fallen human condition. The loss of life at the hands of this deadly disease is tragic. Far more tragic would be a society in which living is lost, in which we are unable to pursue that which makes life worthwhile.

Enough. It’s FAR past time for this insanity to end.

*****

This article was published on December 20, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

Zombie Marxism

December 29, 2021/in Education, Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Mike Gonzalez

This December we celebrate the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the communist superpower Ronald Reagan rightly named the “Evil Empire.” Yet everywhere today, Marxism still stalks humanity. Indeed, today we can paraphrase Karl Marx and write that its specter haunts not just Europe, but the entire world.

We must understand this as a global threat. Since its birth in the 1848 Communist Manifesto by Marx and Friedrich Engels, communism has been a call to arms that knows no borders. But we must also understand—as the Kremlin in its time certainly did—that the big fight is over the United States. Once Marxists seize that most elusive jewel in the crown, they have the world. That’s why this essay will focus mostly on the U.S.

Before we catalog the dangerous state of play with communism, we should remember the good news. Marxism may be resurgent, but it is being vigorously confronted by the same force that defeated the Soviet Union: the American people. They have joined what some may dismiss as “culture wars,” but is really a consequential battle of ideas. Surveys show Americans, writ large, reject these ideas, and are starting to discern the stakes.

We need discernment because Marxism’s breakthroughs today are the result of different strategies and tactics. Gone are frontal military threats, such as along the Fulda Gap in Germany, or in the actual wars in the fields of Central America in the 1980s. Just as we face constant mutations of the Coronavirus, today we face a different, mutant form of Marxism.

Yes, today’s ascendant American Marxists have their supporters in the halls of power in Beijing and Caracas. But it would be a mistake to see them as Chinese or Venezuelan agents, as some of their predecessors were Soviet stooges in the 20th century. The leaders of Black Lives Matter groups, the creators of the 1619 Project, and the architects of Critical Race Theory may be internationalists who believe in the Manifesto’s call for world revolution. But they are a very American phenomenon. We must understand and confront them in those terms.

Much is different today from the last time America faced a concerted communist threat. Communists now realize that domestic revolutions to overthrow the bourgeoisie are not viable in every place, if they are possible in any place. Today, revolution comes at the end, not the beginning. It must be preceded, or replaced, by the arduous work of 1) organizing people, 2) indoctrinating them, and 3) convincing them to become domestic agents of cultural replacement. That’s the mutation we confront.

The current efforts to besmirch the American story—indeed to change its origin story itself, as we see with the New York Times’ 1619 Project—amount to a campaign to transform America’s societal structure that has been underway for at least three decades. It rapidly accelerated after BLM was founded in 2013, and then it exploded into society after the George Floyd riots of 2020. The result? The Critical Race Theory indoctrination that has so angered parents.

The architects of the 1619 Project and the academics who created CRT are equally part of the effort to replace America’s narrative. (The term “white supremacy,” which is meant to replace such ideas as “Land of the Free,” appears no fewer than 38 times in the foundational text of CRT). It was BLM, however, that created the propitious environment to replace America’s narrative, and it is on these organizations that we must focus.

Once we do, we discover that the founders of the Black Lives Matter organizations are at the center of the destructive unrest that led to the hacking of our cultural software. They are not just “trained Marxists,” as BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors labeled herself and another co-founder, Alicia Garza (in a video that has now disappeared from public view). But they were recruited and trained by Marxists steeped in this new view of how to build revolutionary consciousness through recruitment, organizing, and indoctrination.

The Gramscian Moment

Today’s Marxism can be tailor-made to each circumstance. This adaptability has replaced the rigid ideas expressed in the Communist Manifesto. Today’s successful Marxists understand that, no, the economy does not determine all of man’s actions, as Marx once wrote, and, no, the internal contradictions of capitalism will not constantly produce revolutions.

These are Marxists who have boned up on the lessons of the 1920s Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, or the theoretical works of his German contemporaries at the so-called Frankfurt School, which produced Critical Theory (of which Critical Race Theory is an American offshoot). It was these Europeans who incubated the mutant strains.

Gramsci’s basic theory was simple, even if the ramifications were complex. Writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, after the failure by Italy’s workers to set up a communist state in 1918, Gramsci said the proletariat was consenting to his own enslavement. How so? He buys into the cultural trappings of his bourgeois oppressor—the church, the family, the nation-state, etc. As a result, in countries with rich civil societies, such as those in Western Europe and the United States, communists needed to undertake a “war of position.” This involved a long-term effort to organize the masses and indoctrinate them into Marxist ideas.

The German Critical Theorists, for similar reasons, came up with a similar explanation: the worker had bought into a consumerist conceptual superstructure and was unaware of his own crushing oppression. Both concluded that intellectuals had to give the workers revolutionary consciousness.

Gramsci and the Critical Theorists did not repudiate Marx and Lenin so much as expanded on their beliefs. Marx may have written that revolutions would inevitably come when “the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” But to Gramsci, “‘popular beliefs and similar ideas are themselves material forces.”

Applied Gramsci

According to Harmony Goldberg, a Gramscian cultural anthropologist, Gramsci merely made “several important innovations” on the ideas of Marx and Lenin. As Goldberg put it in her 2015 “brief introduction” to Gramsci’s ideas:

Gramsci upheld the assertion that a successful revolution would ultimately require the overthrow of the bourgeois state…However, because the capitalist hegemony does not function through state violence alone but that it also mobilizes civil society in order to promote oppressed peoples consent to and participation in the system, a successful revolutionary movement would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent.

Goldberg is not just any Gramscian anthropologist. In 1996 she founded the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL). This is the same place where, seven years later, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, then 22, began her Marxist training.

To Goldberg, the efforts to undermine the American worker’s endorsement of the American way of life today “must go beyond participation in trade union struggles reform; revolutionaries must root their struggles in all arenas of social life and—centrally—must engage in the battle for ideas.” The ruling bourgeois will always be trying to convince workers that they have a stake in preserving capitalism. This is why “Revolutionaries would themselves have to engage in the long-term battle of ideas in order to clarify the need for revolutionary transformation.” All-out ideological war is needed. A crisis can be used to overthrow a society, but the long-term subversion of a culture must come first.

A multi-class alliance, which Gramsci called a “historic bloc,” would be needed, in Goldberg’s words, “to move history forward” by indoctrinating society into the new “national-popular collective will”—the cultural counter-hegemony. But it is important to bear in mind that “in every historic bloc there is a single class that plays a leading role and serves as a cohering force,” according to Goldberg’s interpretation of Gramsci. The job of the cohering force was to organize other classes and instruct them on the need to replace the existing order with a socialist one.

Garza learned these lessons a full decade before a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013—the event that supposedly launched Black Lives Matter. It was at SOUL, Garza has said, that she first learned that “social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people.”

As SFWeekly wrote in a long profile, “Garza’s summer with SOUL wasn’t just about getting a political education in a leftist ‘analysis around capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity,’ as she describes it, but a crash course in grassroots community organizing.” Garza found an early opportunity to turn minds when she began “organizing low-income tenants in East and West Oakland” against gentrification. “I spent my summer getting my ass kicked, knocking on doors 10 hours a day. It was really good training. Really, really, really good training.”

Garza thus learned from master theoreticians how to apply the Gramscian rules. We can also now fully grasp what Garza meant when she told Maine liberals in 2019, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country….I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society, which creates inequities for everyone, even white people.” What she was trained to seek was a total transformation. The ultimate object, of course, is getting rid of capitalism, since Garza says that “it’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism.”

Garza’s connections to Goldberg’s creations have endured. Today Garza is on SOUL’s board. In 2012, a year before Garza co-founded BLM, Goldberg was publishing Garza on the web platform she founded, Organizing Upgrade, as we can see with Garza’s reporting on Brazil’s Marxist landless movement. The two have also crossed paths over the past two decades in such Marxist groups as the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance. That group sent Garza to Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, after the killing by police of Michael Brown. There, she helped create the nationwide coalition of the hard left that has been key to BLM’s success. The two also work with LeftRoots, whose activists “challenge capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy.” All these groups provide access to different constituencies whom they can first organize and then indoctrinate.

A grand strategy to confront the new Marxist threat would need to understand the mutation.

Patrisse Cullors is at least as important as Garza in building the main organization, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. She underwent similar training at the hands of a similarly committed communist visionary. In her case, the ideological mentor was Eric Mann. He is a former member of the Weather Underground who founded the Labor-Community Strategy Center in LA (which Mann jokingly calls “the University of Caracas Revolutionary Graduate School”).

Mann devotes detailed attention to the hard work of creating a multi-class alliance. This will instill Marxist revolutionary consciousness into the population, to overthrow what he calls the “imperialist, settler” state that is America. He narrows Gramsci’s cultural focus to racial issues. Within the cultural sphere, it’s race-related matters that Mann sees as “the material forces” that create the fault line to be exploited.

In a 1996 essay that was later revised, he wrote:

Given the social formation of the U.S. as a settler state based on virulent white supremacy, the racialization of all aspects of political life operates as a material force in itself—shaping and infecting every aspect of the political process. Thus, any effective Left movement must confront the major fault lines of the society…In a racist, imperialist society, the only viable strategy for the left is to build a movement against racism and imperialism.

His version of the historic bloc is black and Latin American. But he calls for “an agreed-upon Black priority” with African Americans as the “cohering force” in the struggle against capitalism. In the key area of fighting law and order measures—so central to his, and BLM GNF’s, revolutionary strategy—“the leadership clearly came out of the black community,” he notes. Blacks, to people like Mann and Goldberg, will be the revolutionary agents, and the struggle to make the U.S. a socialist state will be fought in the name of black justice.

Early on, Mann settled on Los Angeles bus riders as more easily organizable and indoctrinated than factory workers. They were more destitute, more black, Latino, and Asian, and more female, than the average worker. “At a time when many workplaces have 25 to 50 employees, an overcrowded bus has 43 people sitting and from 25 to 43 people standing,” he wrote. “Ten organizers on ten different buses can reach 1,000 or more people in a single afternoon,” That’s why his Center pioneered the creation of a Bus Riders Union.

It was precisely at the BRU that Cullors was trained after Mann’s Strategy Center recruited her, and where she combined organizing training with ideological instruction. “I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx, and Lenin to my knowledge of [bell] hooks, [Audre] Lorde and [Rebecca] Walker,” she wrote in her 2017 memoir When They Call You a Terrorist. The organizers were trained, according to Mann, to “go beyond narrow ‘trade union’ or ‘bus’ consciousness to build a movement based on a more transformative, internationalist consciousness” and create a “united front against U.S. imperialism—rooted in the strategic alliance of the multi-racial, multi-national working class.” This is what he called “the explosive combination of deep ideological framing and grassroots organizing.”

In his 2011 “organizing manifesto,” Playbook for Progressives—written two years before Cullors reached fame by helping to found BLM—Mann already identifies her as “gifted.” In 2006, Cullors helped found the Center’s Summer Youth Organizing Academy “to recruit and train a new generation of high school youth.” At the time of the book’s writing, adds Mann, Cullors “teaches classes on political theory and organizing.” She was at the Center for over a decade, as other sources have confirmed.

To be sure, a much bigger revolutionary payoff for all training by Mann would come when Cullors founded first BLM, and then BLM GNF, and began in earnest the work of dismantling the American cultural narrative (or hegemony in their language) by getting many Americans, especially the young, to believe that they should destroy their country and culture because it is white supremacist at its core. Not for nothing does Cullors tell us herself that she is a “trained Marxist” and that the only reason she does not use the term communist is that it’s gotten a bad rap.

Other important battles in the war to dismantle America have been won because of Mann’s training of BLM leaders. For instance, Black Lives Matter succeeded in pressuring the Los Angeles School Board to cut the LA Schools Police Department’s $70 million budget by 35 percent on June 30, 2020, after a full month of riots and destruction following Floyd’s death. Afterwards, Mann took a victory lap. Writing on August 21, 2020, Mann cast the victory in Gramscian terms:

We know of no other Defund the Police campaign in a major U.S. City that has made such a major political and material breakthrough…Our campaign was also a major ideological victory. It delegitimized the very existence of police in the public schools and affirmed the experience and demands of the most militant and conscious Black students.…Dozens of angry, articulate, and organized Black students—many from Students Deserve—testified that the very presence of police in the schools was a racist and anti-Black attack on their racial identity, self-worth, self-confidence, and academic performance. Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-chair of Black Lives Matter L.A., testified that all three of her children suffered police abuse in the schools while her son’s first experience of anti-Black police brutality was at the age of six. She described in painful detail how every aspect of a Black child’s life is criminalized and why the demand for No Police in the Schools was a life and death issue for the Black community. (Italics in the original)

That this Marxist-inspired effort to reduce police forces, which followed the determined indoctrination of people, has succeeded to such an extent is bad enough. Without law enforcement, a future crisis like the one precipitated by the killing of Floyd could lead to even greater violence and destruction than we experienced in 2020. Even with police, it was the costliest civil unrest in U.S. history, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and we experienced a 30 percent spike in homicides in 2020, according to the FBI.

“A successful revolutionary movement,” Goldberg explained, “would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent” Americans have given to their system. And this campaign to present the counter-narrative to America’s story began very quickly after BLM was launched by Garza, Cullors, Abdullah, and others. This is what BLM and the 1619 Project do today through the curricula they send to the nation’s 14,000 school districts. It’s also what CRT “anti-racism” trainers do in all aspects of our lives.

Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate at Georgia State, detailed in the Tablet in August 2020 how much the media began to sell after the BLM GNF narrative following Zimmerman’s acquittal in July 2013. Prior to 2013, the terms “white,” ”racial privilege(s),” ”of color,” and ”racial equity,” were hardly ever used, wrote Goldberg. Things began to radically change that year, however.

By 2019, on the eve of the George Floyd riots, the frequency with which The New York Times and The Washington Post used these terms had exploded. More importantly, the terms that deprecate America and its founding principles became generalized. “From 1970 until 2014, the combined usage frequency of the three ‘macro-level’ racism terms—systemic racism, structural racism, institutional racism—never exceeded 0.00006% of all words in any of the four newspapers,” Goldberg writes. “By 2014, however, this ceiling was shattered, particularly in the Times and Post. In the final year of the series (2019), the Times (0.0004% of all words) and Post (0.00056%) were using these terms roughly 10 times more frequently than they were in 2013 (0.00004%, 0.00005%).” The media, in other words, had taken an active hand in inculcating the counter-hegemony, whose acceptance is needed before communists can topple a country.

The Need for a New Grand Strategy

Why expose all this? My hope is to make it plain why schools are teaching children these new ideologies, and why workers are being subjected to what can only be described as Gramscian, consciousness-raising struggle sessions at their places of work, and why even the military and the churches are following suit. Revolutionary theoreticians recruited and trained the founders of the BLM organizations. After eight years of existence, they have brought America to the brink of societal change. Once we understand this, we can start to envision a grand strategy that will defeat their efforts.

What that strategy will look like is the subject of an entirely different essay—or hopefully many essays. The purpose of this one is to say, on this 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Evil Empire, that we have a new problem.

A grand strategy to confront the new Marxist threat would need to understand the mutation. It would need to grasp the fact that the new threat relies on organizing people in different environments and then indoctrinating them. It takes place on buses, domestic work, schools, or neighborhoods about to be gentrified. A grand strategy must grasp what is at stake. It’s nothing less than the replacement of the key American idea that “All Men Are Created Equal” with the lie of white supremacy. Such a strategy would have to reckon with what is happening in our schools. It would need to understand that violence will remain central to Marxist success. Dismantling police forces, the prisons, and the court system itself (which Patrisse Cullors calls for in this video) is part of an effort to leave society defenseless. Once enough people are converted, then the revolutionaries need only wait for a moment of crisis.

We will need to understand what people like Goldberg have in store:

In societies that have a vibrant civil society, revolutionary strategy cannot be based on a pre-given Marxist formula in which a moment of crisis makes the oppressive nature of the capitalist system clear and sparks an insurrectionary struggle that smashes the capitalist state and establishes socialism. Gramsci argued that crises are important, but that they do not ensure that oppressed people will believe in the need for a new economy or that they will have the power to wage a successful revolutionary struggle. To Gramsci, an insurrectionary moment will only succeed if it follows a long-term effort to win oppressed people over to a transformative vision and if it builds working class power over time.

Many Americans have begun to grasp all of this intuitively and have begun to rise up and oppose CRT. To succeed, however, they will need our support.

*****

This article was published on December 16, 2021, and is reproduced with the permission of Law & Liberty.

Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.

DEI Initiatives Create Environment Where ‘inclusion does not apply to Jewish students on campus’

December 29, 2021/in Education, Featured, Liberty, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Alexa Schwerha

A study published by Heritage Foundation showed a spike of anti-Semitic incidents occurring on college campuses at the same time DEI faculty continue being hostile to supporters of Israel.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs have become popular on campus to expand student comfort and inclusivity on college campuses. These centers serve as a space for students to connect and feel appreciated among their fellow peers, guided by experts and academics at the highest level.

But what happens when a specific group of students is left out of the mix?

It is not a question that college campuses and universities are not always the safe space for academic freedom and self-expression that they claim to be. Repeatedly, students with a specific point of view are criticized and intimidated to maintain a quiet disposition during their four-year journey through higher education.

Who are these students? Those that are Jewish or are supporters of Israel.

DEI programs cannot fix the prejudices embedded in the swamp that is higher education; in some cases, these initiatives actually compound the discrimination already present.

244 anti-Semitic incidents were reported during the 2020-2021 school year, according to the Heritage Foundation’s report this month.

That number represents a 34.8% increase from the previous academic year.

But how – or perhaps why – did that dramatic rise occur during a school year largely shunted to virtual attendance during COVID-19?

As Campus Reform has reported, Jewish students and supporters of Israel face intimidation and discrimination whether online or on campus. Incidents this year such as the chancellor at Rutgers University issuing an apology for condemning a “resurgence of anti-Semitism” does not help matters.

One University of Michigan student told Campus Reform in July that “[i]t is scary to be a Jew in America right now.”

In August, a person at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville desecrated the Star of David by eating a sticker depicting the Jewish symbol to protest the state of Israel.

Heritage Foundation’s December 2021 report, “Inclusion Delusion: The Antisemitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities,” strongly suggests that DEI staff’s pretense to inclusivity actually makes campuses less tolerant environments for Jewish students and non-Jewish supporters of Israel.

“What we found in our most recent paper is that higher education diversity bureaucrats—who are paid to promote inclusion—have a strange way of showing it on Twitter. DEI staffers tweet so inordinately and hyperbolically about Israel, relative to China, that they cross the line into antisemitism,” James Paul, a doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas and the report’s co-author, told Campus Reform.

“Apparently ‘inclusion’ does not apply to Jewish students on campus,” Paul added.

Heritage analyzed the Twitter feeds of 741 DEI faculty representing 65 universities to determine any favorability when it came to discussions surrounding Israel. The same analysis was conducted for China, in comparison.

Of the tweets, 96% expressed criticism of Israel, while a stark 62% were expressed positive opinions about China.

“The overwhelming pattern is that DEI staff at universities pay a disproportionately high amount of attention to Israel and nearly always attack Israel,” the report states.

At the average university, Heritage finds that there is an average of 45 DEI staff tasked with the responsibility of creating an inclusive environment. The industry has become extremely profitable for these staffers, as well, and at the expense of the college community.

Ohio State University, for example, pays $10,097,051 to employ 131 diversity administrators.

Thirty of those employees earn more than $100,000 per year, and of the 99 salaried employees, the average salary calculates to $89,168.

Statements made about Israel included accusations of “genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes,” according to Heritage.

These phrases were non-existent in the language used to refer to China, spare for the favorable use of the word “colonialism.”

Though the Heritage study did find minimal criticism of China for its human rights violations against Uighur Muslims and African residents, it also found that such critiques were less severely worded than language reserved for anti-Israel posts.

“It would be impossible to review the inordinate attention that DEI staff pay to Israel relative to China, the nearly universal attacks on Israel and China without concluding that DEI staff have an obsessive and irrational animus toward the Jewish state,” the study states.

Paul told Campus Reform that the findings only support the claim that DEI staffers are not committed to fostering a true inclusive environment.

Jay P. Greene, a senior research fellow at Heritage and the report’s lead author, agreed with Paul’s assessment.

“After publishing three reports on DEI bureaucracy in K-12 and higher education, we find little evidence that DEI promotes inclusive environments or closes achievement gaps,” Greene told Campus Reform.

The bottom line is that students have a right to feel safe and secure on the campus of their choosing. They should not be subjected to pressure to hide or conform their worldviews to meet the standards of those claiming to provide an inclusive experience.

The prevalence of DEI staff and facilities on American campuses cannot and should not be a vehicle for the woke, liberal mob to continue their suppression of viewpoint diversity under the false banner of inclusivity.

The tweets featured throughout the study bear witness to the biased discrimination being waged on college campuses, and it is hindering students’ abilities to pursue an education in a truly free academic space.

*****

This article was published on December 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Campus Reform.

Lethal Injection Mandates: RIP Carlos Tejada & Camilla Canepa — Death by Vax

December 28, 2021/in Courts & Law, DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Politics, Science /by DrRichSwier.com

By Dr. Rich Swier

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” – attributed to Joseph Stalin by The Washington Post on 20 January 1947

”It’s not the government’s job to protect my health. It’s the government’s job to protect my rights.” – Anonymous

Robert Walker in an article titled “New York Times Editor Who Won Pulitzer For COVID-19 Coverage Dead Of Heart Attack One Day After Booster Shot” reported:

Carlos Tejada, a foreign editor for the New York Times has died at the age of 49, one day after receiving his COVID-19 booster shot and daring omicron to come for him. Tejada.

“Carlos Tejada, the deputy Asia editor of The New York Times, who helped shape coverage of the global Covid-19 crisis in 2021 that won a Pulitzer Prize, died on Friday at a hospital in Seoul,” the New York Times reported.

Tejada’s wife broke the news to the world on the editor’s Twitter page, “This is Carlos’s wife, Nora. It’s with deepest sorrow that I have to share with you that Carlos passed away last night of a heart attack. I’ve lost my best friend and our kids lost a truly great dad. I will be off social media for awhile.”

Read the full article.

The European Parliament in an article titled “Post-COVID vaccine deaths” reported:

Three young people recently lost their lives after receiving their second dose of the COVID vaccine(1). These cases are the latest to be added to the growing list of sudden deaths to occur during the vaccine rollout.

The recent autopsy report for Camilla Canepa(2), who also died following vaccination, stated that the cause of death could be ‘reasonably attributed to an adverse effect from administration of the COVID vaccine’.

A German study(3) examining the autopsies of people who died shortly after vaccination suggests that 50% of these deaths were caused by the vaccine, which is also believed to be behind an unprecedented accumulation of lymphocytes found in the hearts, kidneys, livers and spleens of the deceased.

In the light of the above:

1. Does the Commission intend to reanalyse the costs and benefits of vaccinating young people, given the absolute risk of serious – or even fatal – adverse effects?

2. Will it withdraw the emergency use authorisation for the vaccines – at least for the under-50s, for whom the serious risks associated with vaccination appear to outweigh the limited benefits?

There is a growing concern that getting vaxxed or jabbed is much more dangerous than reported by governments and the media. Here is a statement by Fuaci about the vaccines.

How many minutes before this gets taken down? pic.twitter.com/vjFAxPxbLx

— Phil (@ForTheGreater13) December 28, 2021

As this concern grows we now see Biden saying that the federal government cannot control Covid. Biden stated, “There is no federal solution. This gets solved at a state level.”

Watch:

If there’s no federal Covid solution, why is there a federal vaccine mandate? https://t.co/NtrtwmqUt1

— Rep. Darrell Issa (@repdarrellissa) December 28, 2021

QUESTION: Is Biden now shifting blame away from his administration and Democrats in Congress to the states ahead of the 2022 midterm elections?

It seems that the political rhetoric has been overtaken by the reality that government is never the answer when it comes to healthcare.

pic.twitter.com/OeMtBUZtwl

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) December 27, 2021

Biden and Harris are the problem, not the solution to dealing with what ails America. History teaches us that only the individual can deal with any pandemic.

Kelleigh Nelson linked getting jabbed with eugenics when he wrote:

Investigation reveals both the Gates family and their foundation have documented ties to reinvented eugenics movements of the modern age. The work carried out by this organization shows an array of ulterior motives that are contrary to saving lives.

The Gates Family, Eugenics and Covid-19.

America is killing humanity and shaking hands with the devil…brought to us by the United States government via their stakeholders: The Gates Foundation, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the World Health Organization (WHO), Big Pharma and our democrat-controlled propaganda media and their favorite mouthpiece, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Media are promoting an evil injection which is causing countless worldwide deaths and disastrous side effects. They have made a commitment to promote mass vaccination for the Covid virus. We may well be witnessing the largest number of unnecessary vaccine-induced deaths in American history, despite a 99.75% overall recovery from the virus.

Read the full column.

Elon Musk got it right when he tweeted:

traceroute woke_mind_virus

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2021

We are dealing with a global “woke culture war” that wants to empower government and enslave the individual. We know that this always leads to anarchy and always fails.

RELATED TWEET:

Protestors in NYC are arrested for entering Burger King without showing proof of vaccination pic.twitter.com/XmwMHBcJi6

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Nuclear Power Is Green Energy

December 28, 2021/in Environment, Featured, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Charlotte Whelan

The Washington Post recently published an article, “Is nuclear energy green? France and Germany lead opposing camps.” where they discuss the different approaches by the two nations to nuclear power. There’s renewed attention on the issue as France re-embraces nuclear power in response to the European energy crisis.

The article notes that Germany’s opposition to nuclear power is largely based on safety concerns. But nuclear power has proven to be incredibly safe and is a reliable, cheap source of carbon-free power.

Most striking is the difference in carbon emissions between the two countries:

Germany emits about twice as much carbon dioxide per capita as France does. When it phases out its last nuclear power plants next year, it will be forced to rely on coal and other polluting energy sources to fill much of the gap for years — which helps explain why the country continues to raze villages to make way for coal mines.

A chart from the article provides a striking comparison between the two countries:

Being anti-nuclear power is an inconsistent stance for anyone working to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change. Nuclear power is a proven source of energy that will help us reduce carbon emissions and must be a large part of any clean energy plans both in the U.S. and abroad.

*****

This article was published on December 20, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Independent Women’s Forum.

ZEV Subsidies Fail Equity, Economics, and Environmental Tests

December 28, 2021/in Environment, Featured, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Duggan Flanakin

Many have been saying for years that subsidies for zero-emissions (electric) vehicles [ZEV] pose unfair burdens on working Americans. Subsidizing (and mandating) an unwanted switch away from internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) while imposing diktats that have brought higher gasoline prices and record inflation also seems out of kilter with the widely championed tenet of equity.

But the lack of equity is not even the chief reason for ending EV subsidies, according to a new Manhattan Institute report from economist Jonathan A. Lesser, president of Continental Economics. “There is no economic basis for the billions of dollars spent subsidizing [the newest zero-emission vehicles].”

Lesser says that new ICVs today emit very little pollution, thanks to stringent emission standards and low-sulfur gasoline, and they will emit even less in the future. Moreover, ZEVs charged with the forecast mix of electric generation will emit more criteria air pollutants – sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulates – than new ICVs.

As for the dreaded (but vital) carbon dioxide, ZEVs do emit less than ICVs, but the projected reduction in CO2 emissions – less than 1 percent of total U.S. CO2 emissions – will have no measurable impact on climate, and hence no economic or environmental value.

Lesser is not the only one with data that ought to dim the ZEV subsidy lightbulb. Danish climate expert Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus think tank, has long argued that the hype and mythologizing over ZEVs afflicts policy-making and leads to costly subsidies that produce little environmental benefit. Even in ZEV-happy Norway, the typical virtue-signaling ZEV owner drives the family ICV many more miles annually.

Swedish automaker Volvo compared its gasoline-powered XC40 with its fully electric C40, taking into account the extraction and processing of raw materials. Volvo found that manufacturing the C40 results in 70 percent more emissions than manufacturing the XC40 in the same factory on the same assembly line. The electric battery is the chief culprit.

If, Inside EVs suggests, the data presented by Volvo are any indication, it is quite likely that the manufacture of new ICVs is notably greener than that of all new ZEVs. The only apparent rationale for the subsidies is to favor subservient manufacturers or, perhaps, certain producers and exporters of ZEV components.

So why is President Biden, who claims to be a champion of the working class, pushing so hard for gazillions in new subsidies for ZEVs and ZEV charging stations? Subsidies, in general, have many downsides, notably that, by forcing the market in the “preferred” direction, they crowd out better ideas that might not yet be known to, or even thought of, by bureaucrats.

Admittedly, when Elon Musk rails against subsidies for electric vehicles, he is staring directly into the Biden Administration’s plan to provide tax incentives of up to $12,500 for union-built EVs that purchasers of his non-union vehicles would not receive. Tesla sales 2 years ago reached 200,000-vehicle threshold below which Tesla buyers could receive the current $7,500 federal credit, yet the company says it is prospering.

Musk now argues that the government should act more like a sports referee than a player on the field. Thus, he also opposes Biden’s huge layout for subsidized EV charging stations. But there may be yet another reason to deep-six yet another subsidy for wealthier EV owners, one that Musk himself once considered but that bureaucrats have not planned for.

Back in 2013, Musk unveiled a battery swap station designed about Tesla’s Model S, but few paid attention. The process proved to be complex and slow, and Musk switched its strategy to build out his Supercharger network. Other firms followed suit.

Others, notably Chinese automaker Nio, opted to develop the battery swap. Nio has completed more than 2 million battery swaps in China and is now building swapping stations in Europe. In the U.S., the battery swapping company Ample has until recently operated in “stealth” mode while raising $280 million in investment capital.

Ample founder Khaled Hassounah envisions placing battery swapping stations, each about the size of two parking spaces, at gasoline stations, grocery stores, and highway rest stops. A robotic arm will execute a “Lego-style” swap, replacing the spent battery with a freshly charged one in about 10 minutes. Ample uses small, lighter weight battery modules that can be added together to fit a wide range of vehicles.

Hassounah’s chief focus is on fleet vehicles. Not only does the battery swap system cut recharging time significantly, but fleet managers who opt in can avoid the cost of charging stations. Vehicles driven beyond the typical ZEV’s battery life may save significant sums via leasing. They also get the benefit of having the newest battery technology in their vehicles.

There are, of course, downsides. Many current and planned EV designs make the battery pack an integral part of the chassis. EV manufacturers may be disinclined to warrant vehicles with aftermarket batteries installed. And, of course, drivers can only swap out batteries where there are swapping stations. Pumping gas is still easier, quicker, and not subject to robot malfunction.

Moreover, swapping stations are not part of the Biden subsidy scheme – government rarely has any idea what the market is developing.

But isn’t that what Musk is belatedly joining in arguing? That government has no business being a player in trying to direct the evolution of American business. That means no subsidies – and no mandates, either.

*****

This article was published on December 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow

Selective News and Selective Enforcement

December 27, 2021/in Featured, Liberty, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Neland Nobel

One of the problems with the mainstream corporate media is that they lie. Sometimes, they lie directly, but more often, it is just their choice of what stories to emphasize. It often is a lie of omission rather than a lie of commission.

Typically, they pick those stories that correspond to the current narrative being promoted by the Democratic Party. For example, CNN and MSNBC were largely silent with the coverage of the recent Jussie Smollett trial. They hardly ever run a story important to those of us in Arizona, such as the literal invasion of the state by illegal aliens.

However, they give breathless nonstop coverage to the January 6^th Capitol riot, while ignoring the hundreds of riots perpetrated by Black Lives Matter. And it is true of local media as well. Seen any stories of late of what was the final disposition of those arrested for the riots in Scottsdale about a year ago?

Likewise, if any number of Asian women are pummeled by both black men and women, it’s a non-story. However, if a black is assaulted by a white, especially a police officer, you will never hear the end to it.

It is not clear if this kind of bias is just built into media or not. Clearly, Fox News has stories they prefer to run with as well so you could argue that it is. But since the dominant media (TV networks, all but one of the cable networks, the sports networks, popular magazines, metropolitan newspapers, women’s magazines) are mostly Progressive in outlook, likely it is simply built in to the Progressive mind. They see what they want to see, and without balance in the media, there is no one to tell them they are narrow-minded. Further, they want to see what advances their ideas for political change.

However, no one wants to talk about one of the obvious spin-offs of the Progressive Democrat plan to open our borders to a mass invasion. Not only are they selective about stories, but they are also selective as to what laws they will enforce.

The laws presently on the books prohibit what we are seeing. There is a legal process that you are supposed to go through to enter this country. Yet the Administration just chooses to ignore enforcing the law, and the mainstream corporate media is just fine in ignoring the problem. It is selective law enforcement coupled with selective non-coverage of a major news story.

Selective enforcement of the law IS a big story. A very big story. It means the law is no longer being equally enforced. But the law is the cement that holds civilization together. It means politicians, rather than changing the law in a democratic and open process, can effectively change the law by themselves, simply but not enforcing laws they don’t like. It is hard to imagine anything more destructive to the rule of law and the democratic process than selective enforcement.

Then just to put on the finishing touch, the Progressive wants those that came illegally into the country to get the right to vote. This effectively cancels out the votes of citizens that have helped build the country, raised children, served in the military, and paid hefty taxes. If they cancel out your vote, what is the difference in the outcome than preventing you from voting?

Since illegals from other countries are now able to vote in New York City, and borders are invisible, why not let foreigners that live in other countries vote in our elections as well? It seems logical that once you allow illegals to vote, there is no self-limiting principle available.

And since New York City has a lot of population, New York state is pivotal in national elections. That means illegals could influence a national election. What goes down in New York City does not stay in New York City.

But let’s bring the problem of illegal immigration closer to home, back to Arizona. Just one of the problems involved in mass illegal immigration is turning the Sonoran Desert into a garbage dump. I can’t recall any national or even local environmental group mentioning this as a problem. Nor has Mark Kelly or Krysten Sinema said anything. Or the mayor of Tucson?

Both Tucson and Bisbee in recent years had ordinances against the single-use plastic bag, and it took an act of the Arizona legislature to get them to back off. You would think the sensitive people in Southern Arizona would be more concerned about what is happening around the border, insofar as environmental degradation. An occasional plastic bag is a threat to the desert but the wholesale trashing of the desert by thousands of illegal aliens is just fine with them. That is just a tad selective, is it not?

Now, in the scale of what is important, this likely does not rank with the destruction of the rule of law. On the other hand, it is something one can actually see.

This recently came to mind when a friend in Southern Arizona sent me some photos of the beautiful Sonoran Desert near Tucson. Whether he took them or retrieved them from the internet, doesn’t matter. What it shows is what matters.

We are often told how sensitive the desert is. With the lack of rain, things grow very slowly. There is plenty of outrage if a developer were to defile the desert. Heaven forbid if one were able to permit a copper mine in less than 10 years. There is even outrage from environmentalists if one departs from an approved hiking trail. To do so is to “bust the crust”, which is a sinful act that is disturbing micro-organisms.

Look at the photo above. How does “busting the crust” compare with this? Mark Kelly, are you there?

As mentioned before, this kind of destruction of the desert while important is not as important as the destruction heaped on the law by selective enforcement. However, it does present a powerful visual of what selective enforcement and selective news coverage look like.

Hostage Crisis Ends On Day 73—American Patients Now Have Access to One Antiviral Pill

December 27, 2021/in Featured, Healthcare, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Jeffrey A. Singer

Earlier this week I wrote about foot-dragging by the Food and Drug Administration regarding approval of two highly effective antiviral pills. With the omicron variant of COVID-19 rapidly spreading throughout the population, infecting both vaccinated and unvaccinated, these pills become even more important.

Merck applied to the FDA for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of its antiviral molnupiravir on October 11, 2021—73 days ago. The drug was approved for emergency use in the U.K. on November 4. It is 30 percent effective in preventing COVID infections (including the omicron variant) from progressing to hospitalization, and no patient receiving molnupiravir died from infection. On November 30 an FDA advisory committee recommended its approval. As of this writing the FDA has not acted on the advice of the committee.

On November 16 Pfizer sought an EUA for its drug Paxlovid. The drug is 89 percent effective in stopping infections from progressing to hospitalization. Nobody receiving Paxlovid in clinical trials died from COVID. As of yesterday, the FDA had not even called a meeting of its advisory committee to look at the trial data.

Today the FDA finally acted. It granted Emergency Use Authorization to Pfizer’s Paxlovid without even waiting for an opinion from its advisory committee. The FDA director of its Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, MD, stated:

This authorization provides a new tool to combat COVID-19 at a crucial time in the pandemic as new variants emerge and promises to make antiviral treatment more accessible to patients who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19.

Still no word from the FDA on molnupiravir. But at least American patients now have access to one lifesaving pill. It took 73 days for that to happen. During those 73 days 87,569 Americans have died—1,811 died yesterday (source: worldometer).

As Michael Cannon and I write in Drug Reformation: End Government’s Power To Require Prescriptions, one intermediate reform that would partly mitigate the government’s infringement on our right to self-medicate would be for Congress to allow adult consumers to purchase drugs and devices that may not be FDA‐approved but are approved by a list of designated countries’ drug approval agencies. Drugs approved by FDA‐equivalent agencies in the European Union, U.K., Switzerland, Israel, and Japan immediately come to mind. Labels would inform consumers that the drugs or devices are not FDA‐approved but are approved by a particular country’s agency. If such a law were in effect today, many Americans would have had access to Merck’s molnupiravir since early November. How many lives might have been saved?

Such a proposal, called drug approval “reciprocity” by some, was introduced in the U.S. Senate in imperfect form in 2015. Unfortunately, it did not advance to a vote. A modified version that limits reciprocity to public health emergencies was introduced on March 2020.

Hopefully, as America’s patients and doctors grow increasingly impatient with sclerotic regulatory agencies impeding a quick response to our public health emergency, reciprocal approval will get renewed attention.

*****

This article was published on December 22, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Cato Institute.

What Americans will be Faced with in 2022 – Our 22 Predictions for the New Year

December 26, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Healthcare, Politics, Science /by DrRichSwier.com

By Dr. Rich Swier

We here at DrRichSwier.com have collectively, no pun intended, decided to make our predictions for the Year of Our Lord 2022 AD.

While we wouldn’t want our readers to bet money on these predictions, but we do ask that you take them for what they are worth. If you have other predictions please add them in the comments section below.

Here we go.

22 PREDICTIONS FOR 2022

Biden will still be the president and Democrats will continue to control both Houses of Congress, unless West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin switches parties. However, all bets are off until the results of the mid-term election are finally tabulated.
The Democrat Party will continue its cultural war against anyone and everyone who does not obey their mandates.
Covid will continue to mutate and with it Democrats will continue to use it as an excuse to control your healthcare, lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness. The get jabbed or else policies will continue unabated.
As Biden’s foreign policies continue our enemies will be emboldened and our allies will start to question, and even abandon, the U.S. especially when it comes to the continued existence of the state of Israel.
Inflation will continue unabated and be joined by a new enemy stagflation. A double edged sword created by the Biden Build Back Worse agenda. The Biden administration will blame anyone but themselves for an economy on life support.
Iran will announce that it has deployed a nuclear capability leading to another war in the Middle East.
Russia will invade the Ukraine, thereby destabilizing Europe and NATO won’t stop the RED tide.
The Green New Deal zealots will continue their war against fossil fuels, leading to ever higher gasoline, diesel, natural gas and coal prices.
The Democrat Party will work to keep our borders wide open, thereby importing more and more illegals who will then become registered voters. This juggernaut can impact the results of the 2022 mid-term elections (see #1 above).
Biden, in league with the Democrat majority in the Congress, will continue to push legislation that rewards the few at the expense of the many. Government largesse will reward supporters of the Democrat Party, while taxes will punish their enemies, like Elon Musk.
Government and the power of the bureaucrats will continue to grow as individual liberties fade away. Think of a bureaucrat’s boot stomping on the face of every American, for ever.
Biden’s handlers will continue to push myths like: climate change, Islam is peaceful, Trump is controlled by Russia, getting vaccinated is mandatory to protect the vaccinated, etc.
People will continue to become ill, hospitalized and even die from the Covid virus, its mutations and perhaps other new viruses.
People will continue to die from taking the experimental Covid vaccines and perhaps the new Covid pill.
America will continue to have supply chain issues that will severely impact every type of business from manufacturing, to medical, to farming, to energy, to wholesale, to retail, to service. Shortages will become the new normal.
Politicians from both political parties will continue to empower themselves and profit off of their positions to the chagrin of their constituents.
Once elected politicians will immediately ignore their campaign promises and do what benefits them, and their party, and not we the people.
Myths will continue to drive the political narrative. Myths like: the world will end if we don’t do something about the climate.
Working class Americans will become more and more frustrated with their elected leadership and will begin to take to the streets to save their jobs, families and culture.
The radicals in the Democrat Party will become even more radical as they see their agenda to fundamentally transform America failing.
There will be an American Revolution 2.0.
If we patriots stand should-to-should we can stop this madness and then get on with our lives once again. We will live free or die.

We hope you enjoyed our predictions for this coming year. Again, please feel free to add to our list in the comments section.

Remember, freedom is not free.

12 Times Joe Biden Completely Made Up Stories, Lied, Or Said Something Crazy

December 26, 2021/in Featured, National Security, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Jordan Boyd

While touting the passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in Minnesota, Biden repeated the debunked claim that he previously drove a tractor-trailer.

“I used to drive a tractor-trailer,” the president said during an event at Dakota County Technical College.

The statement from Biden is one of several instances of the president falsely claiming that he drove such a vehicle. While speaking at an event in Pennsylvania over the summer, the president proclaimed he had previously driven “an 18-wheeler.” When pressed by Fox News for evidence of such an instance occurring, a White House official pointed to a “December 1973 article from the Wilmington Evening Journal that showed Biden rode in an 18-wheeler on a 536-mile haul to Ohio.”

8. Biden Made Up Story About 1967 Visit To Israel

At the Dec. 1 White House menorah lighting in celebration of Hanukkah, Biden made up a story about a 1967 visit to Israel during the Six-Day War.

“I have known every — every prime minister well since Golda Meir, including Golda Meir,” Biden said in the East Room. “And during the Six-Day War, I had an opportunity to — she invited me to come over because I was going to be the liaison between, she and the Egyptians about the Suez, and so on and so forth.”

Yet Meir was not elected prime minister until 1969, two years after the Six-Day War. The Israeli prime minister in 1967 was Levi Eshkol, who served between 1963-1969.

9. Biden Couldn’t Remember His Secretary of Defense

Biden appeared to forget who his secretary of defense was during a White House event promoting two female generals on International Women’s Day, March 8.

“I want to thank the former general. I keep calling him general, but my… the guy who runs that outfit over there,” Biden said.

10. Joe Biden Confused Titles Of World Leaders

Biden confused the titles of South Korean President Moon Jae-in on May 21, 2021, a day after the U.S. president referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “President Netanyahu.”

Biden called the South Korean president “prime minister” while presenting a Medal of Honor to a 94-year-old Korean War veteran.

“The people in the Republic of Korea haven’t forgotten, as evidenced by the fact that the prime minister of Korea is here for this ceremony,” Biden said, according to the New York Post.

Biden confused Netanyahu’s title the day before in remarks celebrating the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

11. Biden Mistakes Libya For Syria At G7 Summit

Biden mixed up Syria for Libya three times at the G7 Summit in England during June 13 remarks on Russian aggression in the Middle East.

“In Libya, we should be opening up the passes to be able to go through and provide, provide food assistance and economic assist— I mean, vital assistance to a population that’s in real trouble,” Biden said, going on to charge Russia with violations of international norms in Syria, and then again wrongly referencing Libya.

“As long as they’re there without the ability to bring about some order in the region, you can’t do that very well without providing for the basic economic needs of people,” Biden said. “So I’m hopeful that we can find an accommodation where we can save the lives of people in, for example, in Libya.”

12. Biden Gets Corrected At G7 Summit After Insisting On Introduction Of South Africa President

Biden was corrected by U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the G7 Summit in England on June 13 when Biden interrupted the host leader to demand he introduce the president of South Africa, who had just been introduced.

“And the president of South Africa,” Biden cut into Johnson’s roundtable remarks.

“And the president of South Africa, as I said earlier on,” Johnson dismissed.

“Oh, you did,” a frail Biden said at the table while others laughed.

“I did, I certainly did,” Johnson finished.

What Is The Chance of Dying From Drug Overdose? 1 in 50!

December 26, 2021/in Featured, Healthcare, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Neland Nobel

In a world where everyone seems concerned about “safety”, and the government is issuing draconian edicts in a failing effort to stop the spread of a virus, it seems like a reasonable question to ask. Recent data suggests drug overdose is the main cause of death of people in their middle years of life.

This development has followed in the wake of “progressive policies” reducing or eliminating penalties for using or dealing drugs, the legalization of marijuana, and a very lax view of “homelessness”, which itself is largely a drug dependency-linked problem. Is rising drug usage, and rising drug deaths, caused by these policy changes, or are other factors at work?

Whatever the cause, it certainly deserves reexamination of the issue. Just say NO seems to have been replaced by just say YES.

Further, it is hard to explain the selectivity of Federal and local health authorities. If relatively few children die of Covid, the government goes into high gear with propaganda about vaccines and in some jurisdictions, requires children to be vaccinated to participate in schools or even to eat out at a restaurant. Yet if young people die of drug overdoses, there appears very little concern.

Perhaps this is because in “progressive” jurisdictions, solving the problem would entail dealing with their open borders policy, the role of Mexican drug cartels, the malevolent role China plays in drug production and distribution, lax policies that produce drug usage, and new cultural norms formed by celebrities and popular culture that encourage the use of drugs.

We understand that treating drug users as criminals may not be optimal. But what about those that profit from the long-term misery of others? Should they not pay a penalty? And if criminalization is not the answer, what is?

What would an anti-drug culture look like? What would be its attributes? What stops some people from using drugs at all, while others get addicted? Are their genetic predispositions in play or is this more a matter of will and character? If it is more a question of character and will, how does one change society and popular culture that has glorified drug usage since the 1960s?

According to JUSTFACTSDAILY.COM, the answer to the question posed is an astounding chance of 1 in 50! That is far higher than the chance of dying from Covid 19.

In addition, this figure does not truly capture the lengthy misery drug dependence can cause the individual or the collateral damage drug addiction inflicts on parents, siblings, friends, and employers.

As bad as Covid has been (the author has had it), for most of us it is a bad flu that lasts about a week, with weakness that may linger for up to a month. But it does not ruin our lives and does not wreck families and careers like a drug addiction. Yet it seems the entire concentrated force of government is focused on this one health issue while ignoring the numerous deaths and societal destruction brought on by drug addiction.

According to JUSTFACTSDAILY: “If drug overdose deaths continue at their current pace, one in every 44 people currently alive in the U.S. will die of a drug overdose. Contrary to claims that providing more drug treatment through laws like Obamacare and legalizing marijuana would reduce such deaths, drug overdose death rates have skyrocketed since 2000, and more than 100,000 people per year are now being killed by them.”

Documentation:

Drug Overdose Deaths

Lifetime Risk (Excel)

Drug Overdose Trends

Drug Treatment Increases

Legalizing Marijuana

*****

Information for this article was abstracted from JustFactsDaily produced by James Agresti.

Kentucky Fried Jihad

December 26, 2021/in Courts & Law, DrRichSwier.com, Featured, National Security, Politics, Religion /by DrRichSwier.com

By Judicial Watch

My latest in PJ Media:

Everybody knows that “white supremacists” are the biggest terror threat America faces today: Old Joe Biden has told us so, along with Gestapo chief Merrick Garland and the Department of Homeland Security, among others. They wouldn’t lie to us, now, would they? But back in the real world, a threat that the Left has downplayed and denied from the beginning, the global jihad, is still very much with us, even in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Mirsad Hariz Adem Ramic, a good ol’ boy from down there in Bowling Green, was indicted Monday on charges of providing material support to the Islamic State (ISIS). Ramic, who is a dual citizen of the United States and Bosnia, is also charged, according to the Justice Department, “with conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and receiving military type training from ISIS.”

Ramic flew from Bowling Green to Istanbul in 2014, along with two other would-be jihadis; once there, the trio bought tickets to Gaziantep, Turkey, a city near Turkey’s border with Syria. They crossed the border to enter the Islamic State’s domains in Syria. Ramic was to all appearances a convinced, dedicated jihadi: he “attended an ISIS training camp where he received weapons and physical training and fired an AK-47.” He appears to have been deeply involved in the Islamic State’s aggressive activities: “The FBI obtained photographs of Ramic in ISIS territory that depict him wearing camouflage clothing and standing in front of a pickup truck outfitted with an anti-aircraft gun and the ISIS flag. A second photograph of Ramic depicts him holding a rifle.”

Ramic kept in touch with the two friends with whom he had made his journey to ISIS, and would clue them in on his activities. They “discussed, among other things, Ramic’s presence in Raqqa, Syria,” which served as the capital of the Islamic State in the heyday of the short-lived ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria. He also told his friends about “his use of an anti-aircraft weapon to shoot at planes.”

At the same time, Ramic demonstrated a keen interest in the theoretical side of his activities with the Islamic State. He and his talked about “jihad, martyrdom and fighting for ISIS.” Secure in the ISIS domains, one of Ramic’s friends got cocky: “sent two e-mails to Western Kentucky University, stating that he had traveled to Syria to join ISIS and expressing his desire that ISIS conquer the United States.”

Since the fall of the ISIS caliphate, Ramic has been in prison in Turkey, but was deported back to the United States, where he is looking at fifty years in prison and a $750,000 fine if he is convicted.

The Justice Department press release about Ramic’s indictment is laconic. It gives no indication of how a young man (Ramic is 31) in Bowling Green, Kentucky, could have come to believe that it would be a great idea to join an internationally feared and despised jihad terror group. This is the question that remains unanswered whenever a Muslim living in the United States decides to join a jihad group or even plot a jihad massacre on American soil.

There is more. Read the rest here.

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Hundreds of Flights Canceled for Christmas Eve in Biden’s America

December 25, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By The Geller Report

All because of a common cold called Omni-con.

Hundreds of flights canceled for Christmas Eve as Omicron wreaks havoc

Hundreds of flights have been canceled between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day – with one airline blaming Omicron’s toll on staffing.

By Kenneth Garger and C.J. Sullivan, NY Post, December 23, 2021 :

United Airlines canceled 168 flights Friday and another 47 on Saturday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.

“The nationwide spike in Omicron cases this week has had a direct impact on our flight crews and the people who run our operation,” a United Airlines spokesperson told The Post.

The company said they are reaching out to customers affected by the cancellations before they head to the airport.

Delta Air Lines is also facing cancellations on the same two days.

As of about 8:30 p.m., the airline has scrapped 115 flights on Christmas Eve — accounting for five percent of the day’s total trips, according to FlightAware.

On Christmas Day, Delta canceled 52 flights — or two percent of the trips that day, the site said.

Weather is also factoring into the Delta cancellations, with winter storms impacting the Seattle and Salt Lake City area.

“Delta teams have exhausted all options and resources — including rerouting and substitutions of aircraft and crews to cover scheduled flying — before canceling around 90 flights for Friday,” a spokesperson told The Post.

“We apologize to our customers for the delay in their holiday travel plans. Delta people are working hard to get them to where they need to be as quickly and as safely as possible on the next available flight,” the spokesperson said.

Leaders of the airline industry have been pushing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue updated guidance cutting the length of time for self-isolation for those infected with COVID-19, according to USA Today.

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POLL: 40% Of Democrats Say ‘Biden Deserves to Be Impeached’

December 24, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By The Geller Report

Only 40%? Can so many Americans be that cracked?

Biden Gets Devastating Impeachment News from Democrats: Poll

By Western Journal, December 23, 2021:

Do you think President Joe Biden deserves to be impeached for his failure in Afghanistan? A whopping 60 percent of voters do — including 40 percent of Democrats. The startling numbers come from a new Rasmussen poll that indicates Biden’s popularity is slipping not only overall but also among a key demographic, the very one that propelled him to the White House: the members of his own party. By Taylor Penley, The Western Journal, September 3, 2021:The majority of several demographics agreed that Biden deserves to be impeached, including 56 percent of black voters, 61 percent of other non-whites and 58 percent of those with no party affiliation.All told, a full 60 percent of voters think Biden needs to go.

Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

The poll was conducted on Monday and Tuesday among 1,000 likely voters with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

It’s glaringly obvious: Biden can’t escape his stunning failure in Afghanistan, nor should he be allowed to.

Yet as his approval rating wanes and he sits at the point of no return, he doubles down on his decision to execute the withdrawal as he did, blames anyone and everyone for the consequences, and continues his run of disregard and disrespect.

It’s no wonder even Democrats can’t defend this.

We’ve also heard calls for Biden’s impeachment from another shocking source: his longtime friend Sen. Lindsey Graham.

“[Biden] deserves a lot of accountability for this. And I’m sure it will be coming,” he told CBS on Sunday, according to The Guardian.

12 Days of Inflation: Here’s How Much the Gifts from the Popular Christmas Tune Would Cost in Biden’s America

“I think it’s dereliction of duty to leave hundreds of Americans behind enemy lines, turn them into hostages, to abandon thousands of Afghans who fought honorably along our side, to create conditions for another 9/11 that are now through the roof,” he added.

Of course, Graham isn’t the only GOP lawmaker who wants Biden to be removed from office. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has already introduced articles of impeachment against him.

Across the pond, the British Parliament help Biden in contempt over the disaster in Afghanistan, with one member even questioning his fitness for the presidency.

“If this does destroy Biden’s presidency, you have to question his fitness for the role,” MP Bob Seely said. “You have got to address Biden’s intellectual fitness and health fitness for the role.”

“I’m sorry, he is just gaga … he doesn’t have a grip. How many slip-ups before people think, yep, he can’t do the job.”

The discontent was inevitable, and the effects of Biden’s botched withdrawal will linger for years — including, no doubt, at the polls.

If 40 percent of Democrats have withdrawn their support from the leader of their party, 2022 and ’24 are bound to be interesting.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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The Meaning of Christmas

December 24, 2021/in Featured, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By James Rousseau

Christmas is a season that for many is a festivity focused on exchanging gifts or going to parties. Sadly, many Americans have taken Christ out of Christmas but for those of us who are believing Christians, it is a very joyous and solemn time to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Why is Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ 2,000 years ago, such a momentous and sacred occasion for Christians? He was born of the humblest circumstances in a manger, likely a cave, in Bethlehem. He was born of a virgin, his mother Mary. Through His exceptional human life, He was devoid of earthly wealth but we believe a life that infinitely and eternally transcended the worldly wealth we too often exclusively focus our lives on, i.e., our many false gods, then and especially now. We accept and follow Christ as God, as both human and divine. We recognize Him as the eternal King transcending in might and power over any king in our earthly history.

For those of us who follow Him, we are offered both temporal and eternal treasure. The temporal wealth He offers us is Himself and the values he demonstrated unceasingly in His earthly life drawing us to love Him. These beautiful values are His unconditional love for us despite our flawed natures, His forgiveness of our sins, His kindness, and the peace we realize living in genuine faith and belief in Him. In turn we in faith are expected to forgive those who ’trespass against us’ with humility, selflessness, patience, and compassion. This is the path to peace and love of others as He demonstrated always in His earthly life. These are all celebrated on the great Christian day of Christmas.

Even more magnificently and enduring, He offers us eternal life with Himself by being in faith with Him. The gospel of John (John 3:16) was unequivocal: ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life in him.’ We refer to Jesus Christ as the Son of Man – Jesus Christ is the Son of God (‘Our Father’) and came to earth as a man, thus the Son ‘of Man’. He was the only man (human) ever with the credentials to truly ‘pay’ for our sins. His resurrection on Easter Sunday demonstrated eternal life to all of us believers – it is the basis of our faith and the center of our lives. This is the gift we celebrate on the great feast of Christmas – our Savior’s birth, prophesized repeatedly, accurately, and many, many times throughout the Old Testament.

Jesus came to earth as a man and yet fully God to pay for our sins shedding His precious blood by an unjust and brutally cruel crucifixion where He made the ultimate payment for our sin. He offers us eternal life with one caveat. We each must choose Him as our Savior and live accordingly as best we can. So, what will it be for you? Do you want life, now and beyond our fragile and short mortal existence?

Each of us can decide. America was founded and advanced as a Christian nation from the beginning. In an America that has increasingly turned to darkness over the past century, many of us are saddened, fearful, and gravely concerned for our children and grandchildren as we see the dark clouds of a growing godless socialism and totalitarian state coming to control us. Our Founders gave us the profound freedom to believe without limit in His grace and mercy and live accordingly in peace and fellowship. During the time of Nero, Christians were fed to wild beasts or were covered with pitch and set on fire, and were crucified rather than ‘repent’ of their belief in Jesus Christ. For the Christian, scripture tells us that “God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). This is the eternal gift brought here by God the Father 2,000 years ago and why we, as Christians, see the real meaning of the birth of Christ celebrated on the 25th of each December as the central and most important part of our lives. We usually say “Merry” Christmas, but we believe it is really a ‘Blessed’ Christmas each year as we celebrate the grace and mercy brought to us this magnificent day 2,000 years ago by the birth of Jesus Christ.

Microschooling’s Growth In Arizona Is No Surprise

December 24, 2021/in Education, Featured, Liberty, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Michael McShane

The Roman philosopher Seneca is quoted as saying that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” When the coronavirus hit Arizona and parents were looking for options outside of their closed traditional public schools, they were lucky to find a proliferating network of microschools. But that lucky moment was years, if not decades, in the making.

In a new paper for the Manhattan Institute, I examine the phenomenon of microschooling in Arizona. After hearing from several parents who found microschools to be a godsend after they grew frustrated watching their school boards and administrators dither and prevaricate on COVID policies, I wanted to answer a basic question: Why here?

Executive Summary

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K–12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. They rose in popularity during the pandemic as families sought alternative educational options that could meet social-distancing recommendations. But what they offer in terms of personalization, community building, schedules, calendars, and the delivery of instruction will have appeal long after Covid recedes.

One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was founded in 2018 in Mesa, Arizona’s third largest city. It has experienced dramatic growth largely because of the way it attracts parents like those interviewed for this paper. It is no coincidence that Prenda’s emergence and expansion took place in Arizona, which has been a national leader in education innovation for a generation. Arizona’s cultural and policy environment foster and promote experimentation, diversification, and parental choice. The state’s thriving charter-school sector—no state has a higher percentage of students in charters—has developed an expansive, varied set of choice-based public schools. For decades, Arizona’s traditional public schools have been part of the state’s open-enrollment system, making more than a thousand district-run schools part of a choice system. And Arizona has been a national leader on private-school choice, passing the nation’s first “education savings account” program and today, via an array of state programs, enabling more than 100,000 students to access nonpublic schools.

This paper explores microschooling in the Grand Canyon State through parent interviews, a review of decades of public-policy reform and K–12 political battles, and an assessment of student performance data. A key lesson—one that reform-minded advocates in other states should consider— is that one cannot understand microschooling in Arizona without understanding Arizona.

Taking the Leap

Sophia Ortega is a mother in Buckeye, Arizona. In January 2020, her two children were enrolled in a high-performing, well-known charter school. But she was not happy with the school.

Her boys are, in her words, “energetic, rambunctious, and smart,” but too frequently, in their school, the first two characteristics were in tension with the third. A friend who had already pulled her children out of school had heard about Prenda, a small but growing network of microschools. Though Sophia was skeptical, PrendaCon, a gathering of Prenda educators and families, was taking place in two days, so she and her friend decided to check it out.

Prenda founder Kelly Smith’s opening presentation had Sophia hooked. The core values of Prenda aligned with her beliefs about parenting and education. The structure of the school day and the educational environment were what she wanted for her children. She was still hesitant— this would be a new approach to schooling—but the pandemic and the challenges that she faced as a single mother juggling full-time work and two children learning at home persuaded her to take the leap.

In September 2020, she started as a guide (Prenda’s term for a teacher) in a microschool hosted in her friend’s house. That school now enrolls seven students, six boys and one girl, ranging from kindergarten to sixth grade.

On a typical day, students arrive at 9 a.m. and play for about 15 minutes. At 9:15, Sophia starts the “Morning Standup,” where children gather in an “awareness circle” to do deep breathing and center themselves before talking about their goals for the day. Students also have an opportunity to share anything they would like with the group.

From 9:30 to 11:15, students work through “Conquer,” a personalized learning curriculum, on their Chromebooks. The microschool has a sectional sofa and blankets, and students are allowed to work wherever they find it most comfortable. Sometimes, students want some space; other times, they practically stack themselves on top of one another. When they need assistance, Sophia is available, though she is just as likely to see students asking one another for help. Conquer covers math, language arts, reading, and writing.

After a snack break at 11:15, the second part of the day begins: “Create,” in which students pursue individual art projects. Prenda offers students a bank of options, but as they age, they can develop their own projects. Students have to identify what the purpose of the project is and plan all the steps. They can present to their classmates if they wish.

The students break for lunch, 12:45–1:30, with a bit of playtime at the end, and then enter the third component of the Prenda instructional model: “Collaborate.” In this module, which runs from 1:30 to 2:20, students work on group projects, particularly in science and social studies. One example from Sophia’s microschool was a project by fourth- and fifth-graders that tracked a day in the life of a Bedouin, the Arabic-speaking nomadic peoples of the Middle Eastern deserts. As a guide, Sophia works to “get them engaged” and “get them excited about leading their own learning,” as she puts it.

When I asked why she got involved with Prenda, Sophia highlighted the key values that anchor Prenda’s work: “Start with heart,” “Figure it out,” “Dare greatly,” “Foundation of trust,” and “Learning > comfort.” “Start with heart” really spoke to her; it matched her parenting style, and she thought that it was missing from her kids’ previous schools. But she also thinks that “a lot of kids are afraid to dare greatly.” Encouraging students to take risks helps them to “stay at their learning frontier” and grow into happier, more confident young people.

Continue reading this article at Manhattan Institute.

PODCAST: A patriot mother does the impossible and wins two ‘write-in’ election campaigns

December 24, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By Martin Mawyer

I was initially shocked to learn that so few parents wanted to hear the story a determined mother who successfully flipped her 4-3 liberal school board into a 5-2 conservative majority.

I thought Patriots would be excited, emboldened and ready to duplicate her efforts to rid themselves of pompous, out-of-touch, parent-hating school board members.

I was wrong. Few have even bothered to read past the headline!

Last week, I sat down with as she told me her remarkable story of mapping out a roadmap to overturn her local school board during last November’s elections. That roadmap would require her to achieve victory using ‘write-in’ candidates only, something unheard of in America.

No one wins elections through ‘write-in’ campaigns!

So how could she possibly achieve TWO write-in victories, flipping her local school board into a dominant conservative majority?

She joined Shout Out Patriots to explain that strategy in detail.

But why don’t parents want to hear it? Duplicate it? Especially parents outraged over school face-mask mandates, Critical Race Theory, and gender-fluid indoctrination?

Then I reminded myself of this sad fact:

It’s easier to complain than do something. It’s easier to watch others than do the hard work. As Americans, we’re more accustomed to sitting in the cheering section than playing on the field.

So, though Mary Katherine Bennett has a remarkable – if not genuinely miraculous – story to tell, it’s not for everyone. But it is perfect for those who want to take back control of their child’s education – and health – and ultimately win the future of America.

Watch our podcast:

Mary Katherine Bennett’s son is autistic and she didn’t want her young child forced to wear a face mask all day at school. The liberal school board dug in their heels and demanded to see her child’s medical records. She dug in her heels and they didn’t get them. What they did get was far worse.

Martin Mawyer, president of Christian Action Network, joins Pastor Jason Binder to learn how Mrs. Bennett and her fellow Patriots took to the streets with ‘write-in’ campaigns. When the votes were counted, they turned a 4-3 liberal school board into a 5-2 conservative majority. But, wait! Write-in campaigns never work, do they? And twice during the same election? Her stunning story will leave you smiling and shouting.

Patriots. They need a voice. We give it to them!

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DC Librarian Who Made Children Reenact Holocaust Is Failed Dem Candidate, Convicted Fraudster and Animal Abuser

December 23, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Elections, Featured, Politics /by DrRichSwier.com

By The Geller Report

The Democrats elevate these scumbags to positions of influence and power. Evil, pure evil.

OUTRAGEOUS – Kimberlynn Jurkowski, the 3rd grade library aid that forced 3rd graders to act out a Holocaust scene at Watkins Elementary School in DC is a FELON!

She had her license suspended & was convicted in 2013 of defrauding the Hamilton Township school district of $24,000. pic.twitter.com/x39NVGXuNb

— StopAntisemitism.org (@StopAntisemites) December 21, 2021

DC Librarian Who Made Children Reenact Holocaust Is Failed Dem Candidate, Convicted Fraudster, and Animal Abuser

Kimberlynn Jurkowski defrauded New Jersey of $24k, abused dogs

By: Matthew Foldi • Washington Free Beacon December 21, 2021 3:25 pm

The Washington, D.C., public school librarian who made third graders reenact graphic scenes from the Holocaust is a Democrat who claims she ran for office in New Jersey, where she was convicted of defrauding the state through a tutoring scam and charged with several counts of animal abuse.

Kimberlynn Jurkowski was placed on leave this week after parents complained to Watkins Elementary School that she made students role-play the Holocaust, assigning students to be Jews and pretend to die in gas chambers and dig mass graves, according to the Washington Post. One student was assigned to be Adolf Hitler, who carried out the Holocaust, Jurkowski told the students, “because the Jews ruined Christmas.” A Washington Free Beacon investigation found that Jurkowski was hired by the D.C. public school after a scandalous tenure as a librarian in New Jersey, where she ran in 2010 for a local school board as a Democrat, according to an image posted to her Twitter account.

There is no record of Jurkowski serving on the school board for Hamilton Township in Atlantic County, where she says she ran for office. There is record, however, of New Jersey catching Jurkowski bilking taxpayers out of approximately $24,000 through a program designed to help the children of the state’s educators. The Hamilton Township district paid for Jurkowski’s two children to receive tutoring—but she continued to bill the district for reimbursements once the tutoring stopped. She was convicted of fraud and forced to forfeit her librarian job, according to court records.

Jurkowski’s legal problems continued in 2019 when she faced four charges of animal cruelty for leaving her dogs out in the cold. According to coverage at the time from Pet Rescue Report, Jurkowski left five dogs behind to survive frigid temperatures in a dilapidated environment. Body camera footage from police officers called to the site shows “the entire property was completely run down,” with “dogs in pens with sheets of plywood leaning against a fence to act as shelter.”

One of the dogs, an older Rottweiler named Poseidon, could barely walk, and was found dead and frozen solid to the ground in one of the pens. The dog’s death prompted animal rights activists to launch a #JusticeForPoseidon campaign.

The principal of Watkins Elementary School, Scott Berkowitz, did not return a request for comment on Jurkowski. D.C. Public Schools did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including about whether it was familiar with Jurkowski’s criminal record prior to hiring her.

Since working in D.C. Public Schools, Jurkowski has struck an ultra-partisan combative tone online. Her Twitter account is filled with retweets of calls to abolish the police and defend Palestinian terrorism. One Al Jazeera post she shared claims that a Palestinian terrorist named Ahmad Erekat was killed by Israeli police but fails to mention that he was shot after ramming his car into Israelis.

Watkins Elementary School is located just outside a city ward represented by a Democratic lawmaker who claimed that Jews control the weather.

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Facebook allowed photos of beheadings from ISIS and the Taliban to be tagged as ‘insightful’ and ‘engaging’

December 23, 2021/in DrRichSwier.com, Featured, Politics, Religion /by DrRichSwier.com

By Jihad Watch

Facebook was only interested in shutting down the speech of dissenters from the Leftist agenda, not Islamic jihadis.

Facebook allowed photos of beheadings and violent hate speech from ISIS and the Taliban to be tagged as ‘insightful’ and ‘engaging’ – despite claims to crack down on extremists, report reveals

by Jonathan Chadwick, MailOnline, December 21, 2021:

Facebook allowed photos of beheadings and violent hate speech from ISIS and the Taliban to be tagged as ‘insightful’ and ‘engaging’, a new report reveals.

Extremists have turned to the social media platform as a weapon ‘to promote their hate-filled agenda and rally supporters’ on hundreds of groups, according to the review of activity between April and December this year.

These groups have sprouted up across the platform over the last 18 months and vary in size from a few hundred to tens of thousands of members, the review found.

One pro-Taliban group created in spring this year and had grown to 107,000 members before it was deleted, the review, published by Politico, claims.

Overall, extremist content is ‘routinely getting through the net’, despite claims from Meta – the company that owns Facebook – that it’s cracking down on extremists.

‘We do not allow individuals or organisations involved in organised crime, including those designated by the US government as specially designated narcotics trafficking kingpins (SDNTKs); hate; or terrorism, including entities designated by the US government as foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs) or specially designated global terrorists (SDGTs), to have a presence on the platform. We also don’t allow other people to represent these entities.

‘We do not allow leaders or prominent members of these organisations to have a presence on the platform, symbols that represent them to be used on the platform or content that praises them or their acts. In addition, we remove any coordination of substantive support for these individuals and organisations.’

The groups were discovered by Moustafa Ayad, an executive director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism….

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Reasons for Optimism – America Is Waking Up

December 23, 2021/in Economy, Featured, Liberty, Politics, ThePricklyPear.org /by ThePricklyPear.org

By Neland Nobel

For an American from the Conservative or Libertarian side of the spectrum, the last few years have been a difficult period.

While the seeds were planted years ago, we saw the full blooming of “Cultural Marxism” in the US, influencing almost all of our institutions ranging from major news networks, social media corporations, city administrations, local prosecutors, our military, even The Salvation Army is tainted, and most of our local schools and universities. That is just a partial list.

The simultaneous explosion of “wokeness”, the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, transgender militancy, inflation, and Covid related tyranny, has made 2021 a particularly ugly year.

It extends so deeply into business culture today that advertisers and their ad agencies have all but eliminated white people from television ads. White people, you see, are the source of all evil and a diminished presence helps the world, even if it is demographically ridiculous.

Universities and corporations basically put out the word they would not be hiring white people, especially if they are men. Past wrongs can be righted by committing present wrongs. Reverse racism and segregation, the lowest and most despicable intellectual position, are now all the rage in institutions of “higher learning” and in human resource departments.

All of this cultural ferment, quite revolutionary in flavor, has largely taken over one of the major political parties in this country and severely influenced the opposition party as well. The result has been radical legislation that has spent vast sums of money unparalleled except in global war. This has saddled younger generations with unconscionable debt and current generations with the worst inflation in 40 years. It has created a vast regulatory state where hardly any separation of power is observed, leading to a regime of unelected bureaucrats exercising massive control over almost every aspect of society. This administrative structure showed its ability to resist democratic change with the election of Trump while at the same time shifting gears to support the radical Democrat agenda.

With the outbreak of Covid, this administrative structure and its attitude seemed to have birthed many tiny tyrants been ranging from omnipresent Dr. Fauci all the way down to Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. Besides constant hectoring, they have forced mandates on all of us, destroyed medical privacy, closed schools and parks, restricted our work and travel, all while failing to control the virus. Their response to this failure is to double down on their policies.

In cultural matters, corporations lavishly subsidize Black Lives Matter, which openly calls for the destruction of the nuclear family and hetero normative behavior. Meanwhile, virtue signaling corporations and sports leagues play out their guilt for American slavery that ended 150 years ago, while ignoring present-day slavery in China. Slavery only matters in the first country to move to abolish it. Otherwise, it is good business to trade with slavers.

With such pervasive influences operating, you might wonder what we have to be optimistic about?

In a nutshell, it is that the American people are waking up. The very boldness, tone-deafness, and extremism of the progressives may have finally awakened the American people. The polls clearly show this, with record low numbers for both President Biden and his cackling Vice President.

It is particularly interesting that Biden is losing the young vote as well as losing a significant portion of the Latino vote.

It appears the public is losing faith in Democrats in the one area they poll strongly, Covid policy. Mr. Biden said he had a plan and Trump did not. Yet Covid is more prevalent than ever and more Americans have died under Biden than under Trump. The public rightly asks if the vaccines are mostly ineffective, why would mandating their use be any more effective? Why push vaccines rapidly through the approval process while dragging your administrative feet on therapeutics? If we all, in the end, are going to get it, why the delay?

Above all, we got a good look at what government-run medicine looks like. It is top-down, one size fits all, cover your administrative ass, bureaucratic/politically centered medicine, not patient-centered medicine. You can start with your personal doctor. Next time he or she starts with “CDC guidelines say”, counter with you don’t care what distant bureaucrats think, you want to know what he or she thinks. You expect your doctor to treat you, not act like a postal employee.

People are growing weary of the restrictions and the dark and cranky manner the President addresses the virus. Most do not see the benefit of medical apartheid, dividing the unvaccinated from those that are, since the fully masked and vaccinated are both getting and transmitting the disease. Further, the contrast between Red states and Blue states is pretty clear. Blue states have worse outcomes and less freedom.

Mothers got an earful during the lockdown of what was being taught to their children and school districts revealed themselves as centers of left-wing indoctrination. Covid may turn out to be a blessing in at least this one area. Even teachers, usually highly regarded, revealed themselves as easily swayed or intimidated by the latest Marxist cultural fashion or just plain labor union thugs. As a result, homeschooling is booming, micro-schools are flourishing, and parents have become vocal opponents of school boards.

Social media has tipped its hand. Once thought a means to have a free global conversation, sort of an electronic Hyde Park where open discussion would flourish, the social media giants have been revealed as a group of censorious ideologues that directly interfere in our election process. Their actions have been so blatant, so biased, and their interferences in the elections so obvious, alternative and competing platforms are being organized. We are likely to see far more alternatives next year.

Left-wing late-night comedy is tanking and many now rightly regard progressives scolds as a threat to comedy itself. Left-wing news channels keep dropping in ratings and even the transgendered overreach is finally beginning to see counter-reaction. Women have discovered they have been defined away.

Meanwhile, well down from the intellectual and cultural plateaus, regular Americans are seeing their real wages shrink as food, gas, cars, homes, soar in price. It is not unusual to wait months to get air conditioners, household appliances, or the car you may want. Just engage in conversation the next time you lean over the meat counter with another patron and you will get the sense that Americans understand they are being screwed by their leaders. And no, most of these goods are not stuck off the Port of Long Beach in a Chinese ship. We don’t get our hamburgers from China.

However, our economic and cultural elites have been enjoying the “everything bubble”, the rapid price increases in stocks, bonds, art, gems, cryptocurrencies, real estate, that so far have protected them from inflation and tax increases.

But 2022 is increasingly looking like a “risk-off” year. The Federal Reserve, the enablers of excessive Congressional spending, has now painted itself into a policy corner. Increasingly, it looks like they either let inflation run or start to cut the money supply and raise interest rates in the face of multiple bubble-like markets. Historically speaking, such a policy conundrum does not end well.

When the donor class, the people who fund our politicians and Black Lives Matter, start to get hurt, you will hear the howls.

Thus, a flock of irritated and angry chickens will come home to roost in 2022, just in time for the mid-term Congressional elections. A total humiliation of the Democrats is the minimum we would like to see.

Hopefully, the counter-revolution will be long, loud, deep, and long-lasting. We at The Prickly Pear will do all we can to see that it is.

The American people are waking up and understanding this is beyond partisan politics. Our institutions, our corporations, our educational establishment, our culture have been compromised by left-wing lunatics. This will require more than just voting. This will require a full-frontal assault on cultural Marxism.

Defunding the Left is very important. Cut them off from tax dollars to the greatest extent possible. Getting viewpoint diversity in our universities is vital. With private universities, it may prove difficult, although even they get a flow of Federal dollars. They also have alumni that can’t be happy with what they see. But it would seem that some 23 Republican states, where the Governor and both legislative bodies are under GOP control, should prove to be a fertile area for education reform. There is no reason why a student going to a state university should be subjected to Marxist brainwashing. Private institutions will have to be reformed more through competition, loss of accreditation, and backlash from employers.

It is time for all of us to get in the fight. To all American loving people – support alternative media like this publication, boycott woke corporations, attend school board meetings, try running for public office, contribute to campaigns, support corporations that don’t buckle to groupthink, and try to avoid doing business with those that do. Work to reform education and our universities so we get teachers that are more balanced.

We are now sort of like the Marines surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir. As General Chesty Puller observed, “We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem. They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us 29:1. They can’t get away now.”

Perhaps the Conservative breakout year will be 2022.

22 PREDICTIONS FOR 2022

STAY INFORMED