RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/polarizing-the-jan-6-justice-system-judge-tanya-chutkan-capitol-11633639202?mod=opinion_major_pos2

Federal judges have significant discretion in handing down sentences, but in politically charged cases it’s important that they don’t give the impression that criminal defendants are being treated differently because of their politics.

Deliberately or not, that’s what federal Judge Tanya Chutkan did this week in a sentencing hearing for a defendant who pleaded guilty to “parading, demonstrating, or picketing” in the Capitol without authorization during the Jan. 6 riot.

The prosecutor recommended that Matthew Mazzocco serve three months of home confinement for the misdemeanor charge. Judge Chutkan imposed a 45-day jail sentence. Judges have the authority to depart upward from prosecutors’ recommendations and occasionally do—the charge Mr. Mazzocco pleaded guilty to can carry up to six months in jail.

Yet Judge Chutkan’s commentary during sentencing suggested that her decision was influenced by the politics of Jan. 6 lawbreakers. She gratuitously invoked the summer Black Lives Matter protests and riots, favorably comparing them to the events of Jan. 6: “People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man—some of those protests became violent,” the judge said at the sentencing hearing, according to ABC News.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vast-majority-of-incidents-cited-by-school-board-group-to-justify-federal-intervention-didnt-involve-threats/

In a memorandum issued this week, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to collaborate with state U.S. attorneys and federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies to probe and potentially prosecute violent threats against teachers and administrators in school districts nationwide.

The notice comes after the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the Biden administration, asking it to investigate and determine whether the increasing number of confrontations between angry parents and school boards qualify as domestic terrorism under the Patriot Act.

“Threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent — during public school board meetings, via documented threats transmitted through the U.S. Postal Service, through social media and other online platforms, and around personal properties,” the organization claims, citing what it considers egregious episodes in 23 school districts over the last several months.

However, the vast majority of incidents referenced by the NSBA don’t qualify as threats of physical violence, according to local news reports cited in the group’s letter — nor is it obvious what the federal government’s role would be in responding to them.

Out of 24 incidents cited by the NSBA, 16 consisted of tense verbal exchanges between parents and school-board members that did not escalate to threats of physical violence. In many of these cases, the aggravated parents disrupted school-board meetings by angrily objecting to their districts’ mandatory masking policies and/or embrace of critical-race-theory curricula.

In other cases, parents picketed outside school-board meetings, wielding signs and chanting politically charged slogans. In some instances, the angry parents shouted over school-board members or exceeded their allotted speaking time during the meeting’s public-comment period. In some of these incidents, the police intervened to eject parents who refused to wear masks or were being otherwise unruly. In none of these cases was a threat of physical violence issued.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/08/high_schoolers_say_they_are_afraid_to_speak_up_in_class__110645.html

Whether it’s climate change, criminal justice, immigration, the global pandemic, or government reform, there is often little agreement on how to manage the most pressing issues of our time. Though differences on these issues are often intense, we can create positive civic change only by discussing and debating them across multiple perspectives.

Unfortunately, this kind of broad-ranging dialogue too rarely happens in our high school classrooms. Viewpoint diversity is not alive and well, and students often lack the ability to speak openly and question freely without worrying about repercussions. Politically correct speech codes have had a chilling effect on open discourse in many high schools, public and private, in New York City, where the two of us live and work. 

As educators, we are very concerned about young people’s development and identities being stunted by the suppression of their ability to express ideas outside a narrow orthodoxy. While one of us identifies as liberal and the other as more conservative, we agree that narrowing of speech is harmful to everyone.

It was from this concern that Balaban worked with high school students to create Next Generation Politics (Next Gen Politics) in the spring of 2017, in the wake of a divisive presidential election and in recognition of the need for dialogue across political, socioeconomic, and cultural divides to strengthen a fraying social fabric. Next Gen focuses on high school, a time of peak identity formation when it is of vital importance to be exposed to the broadest possible range of ideas.

If we don’t want to replicate the polarization playing out among older adults today, putting teens in dialogue with peers whose points of view they might not otherwise share – and enabling them to listen to, argue with, and learn from one another – is of vital importance to creating the increase in civility we deeply need. 

As such, Next Gen Politics brings diverse high school youth together to grapple with complex civic issues and current events to help them become informed, engaged citizens. Participants focus on perspective-taking, critical thinking, and civil discourse, striving to build a cross-partisan movement of young people committed to building bridges through deliberative dialogue. 

https://johnkassnews.com/the-federal-hammer-parents-and-critical-race-theory/

Wasn’t it just yesterday that the corporate, legacy media was busy gaslighting parents about racist Critical Race Theory being taught in taxpayer funded government (public) schools?

Angry parents were told they were fools for objecting, that CRT was just a fever dream of the right. And, if CRT did exist, it was just some obscure, dusty stuff locked away in a few law schools and college graduate courses.

But this week President Joe Biden picked up that federal hammer of his named Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Garland’s  job? To use reports of threats at angry school board meetings as a means to silence those dissenting parents into silence. The parents were likened to domestic terrorists.

Parents had opened the rotten Trojan Horse in their children’s schools during the pandemic, when they looked inside the classrooms, at those laptop screens on the kitchen table, when their kids were engaged in at-home remote learning. They could see what was burrowing into young minds in schools they paid for.

Those who objected to their kids’ wearing those flimsy masks that don’t work, or to children being separated by race into groups of oppressors and oppressed,  brought their grievances to meetings of elected local school boards. They brought passion, because the minds of their children, and the nation, were at stake.

Naturally, given the stakes, some school board meetings became quite heated. For decades educators have been asking parents to become more involved.  So, they involved themselves on CRT and masks.

Parents who dared object publicly to their children being treated differently based on race or who dared complain about kids in masks—even those special needs children who, like all kids need to see faces to learn—now have a public response from the Biden White House:

They see their own federal agencies weaponized against them. To the White House, objecting parents are likened to violent actors, perhaps even Isis Terrorists, and as such, they are to be threatened into silence before the 2022 mid-term Congressional elections.

https://www.newsweek.com/biden-regime-uses-domestic-extremism-impose-its-rule-opinion-1636417

Threatening to sic the Federal Bureau of Investigations on parents who dare to oppose dubious mask mandates, or reject the indoctrination of their children in critical race theory (CRT)—racial Marxism—in the schools we pay for, is the logical act of a ruling regime that has given up even the slightest pretense of representative government.

Legitimating the National School Board Association’s (NSBA) call to pursue such parents as domestic terrorists betrays the ruling regime’s thuggish, totalitarian core.

Totalitarian regimes classify dissent as domestic extremism and, under the guise of public health and/or public safety, hunt the dissenters with the full power of the national security apparatus.

The national security apparatus acts as a defender of the ruling regime, rather than as a defender of the people from whom, in a free society, the law derives its just authority.

This is the way it works in Communist China. The “People’s Liberation Army” is the Chinese Communist Party’s military, not the military of the people.

This is increasingly the way it works in America under President Joe Biden, Ruling Class avatar. The Biden administration has turned the national security apparatus against citizens who question everything from draconian coronavirus policies to election integrity to, now, CRT. It increasingly exists to protect the Biden administration, not our liberty and justice.

Critics are treated as a threat to “our democracy,” a euphemism for the regime that it invokes to justify its own rule. By a threat to democracy, the regime means a threat to its control over virtually every aspect of society under the guise of a pandemic; to its control over the voting system; to its control over what your children learn in school. Critics therefore must be intimidated into silence.

The Ruling Class has resorted to using force over persuasion because it suffered something in its collective conscience approximating a near-death experience. Tens of millions of Americans demonstrated that they rejected the Ruling Class’s orthodoxy, and questioned its legitimacy, by voting for Donald Trump—twice.