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Ruth King

Forcing Transgender Ideology on Kindergartens Folly in the Golden State By Alexandra DeSanctis

Parental rights are under fire once again, this time at a Sacramento-area charter school. A kindergarten teacher at Rocklin Academy Gateway recently staged a “transition ceremony” for a gender-dysphoric student in her class, introducing him to other students as a boy before he changed into a dress and announced his new, female name.

Students were instructed to use that new name going forward. The teacher also gave a lesson about transgenderism to the entire class, using two books not included in the school’s curriculum — I Am Jazz and Red: A Crayon’s Story, both children’s books meant to affirm the idea that transgender identities should be accepted as reality.

And it didn’t stop there — Fox News reports that a first-grader at Rocklin Academy was subsequently sent to the principal’s office for “misgendering” a different classmate, calling him by his given name because she didn’t know that he now identifies as a girl. According to Karen England of Capitol Resource Institute, the school investigated to determine whether the student had bullied her classmate.

The kindergarten teacher did not notify parents of the lesson and ceremony in advance; they found out only after their children came home and told them. Many of the students reported being “deeply emotionally bothered and traumatized,” according to Jonathan Keller of California Family Council, a group that has been counseling the families about their rights.

In response to backlash from parents, the school principal sent a letter calling the books “age appropriate” and arguing that the school’s non-discrimination policy “protects all students, including on the basis of gender, gender identity, and gender expression.”

But this isn’t a question of whether the books were “age appropriate” or whether the school should “protect” its students. The question is whether parents have the right to reserve discussion of sensitive topics about sexuality with their own children to the time and the manner they believe is best for their children and their family.

This Rocklin Academy teacher blatantly ignored those parental rights, effectively proclaiming that she knows better and that her own judgment takes precedence over that of parents. Even aside from the substance of this issue, schools should never assert their judgment over that of parents or keep parents in the dark about what their children are being taught.

Especially with regard to a topic as complicated as gender dysphoria, schools must remember that parents are the primary educators of their children and, at the very least, have the right to know about class discussions in advance so they can decide to keep their children home if they believe that’s best.

Trump Haters, Supporters, Neither, and Both Partisan conflict is not new, nor is GOP internal dissent. What’s new is in-fighting among the elites. By Victor Davis Hanson

The Left-Wing Trump Haters

About a third of the Democratic party (15–20 percent perhaps of the electorate?) loathes Trump, from reasons of the trivial to the fundamental.

The hard-leftist hatred is visceral; it is multidimensional; and it is unalterable.

Trump is rich, crass, showy, a white male, and 70. As the anti-Obama, he punches every progressive button in existence. A candidate like Trump was not supposed to exist any longer in the 21st-Century Age of Obama, much less should he have ruined the anticipated progressive Obama-Clinton 16-year regnum. Trump’s accent is outer-borough and seems to exemplify for Trump haters the gaucheness of the golden trump name stamped all over New York. The Europeans have utter contempt for Trump, and that embarrasses leftists especially.

Unlike some Republican politicians who wished to be admired by cultural progressives, Trump prefers baiting the Left and its media appendages, as if to remind them that he prefers to overturn the entire progressive project of the last eight years — if not on ideological grounds (Trump not so long ago voiced a number of centrist and liberal views), at least out of tit-for-tat animosity. Unlike a restrained presidential Bush or a sober Romney, the president answers in kind — and trumps — the boilerplate leftist charge of “fascist!” and “Nazi!” leveled against him.

The Trump haters dominate our media and the universities, the entertainment industries, Silicon Valley, the billionaire green classes, the foundations and the brigades of professional foot-soldier activists, identity-politics operatives, and the Bernie Sanders shock troops. They are frenzied because they think their 1,000 cuts have finally hit arteries — only to see Trump revive in Nietzschean fashion, emerging stronger for the wounds. To come so close to ending this nightmare only to realize they are at the alpha and not the omega of their efforts intensifies their hatred.

Ritually cutting off Trump’s head, blowing him up, stabbing him to death, hanging him, beating him to a pulp — these all are the rhetorical bookends of the Left’s efforts to subvert the Electoral College, the Russian-collusion mythologies, the impeachment and 25th Amendments psychodramas, and Trump’s hoped-for physical collapse under the stress of pure hatred. The calls for Trump’s assassination or maiming, if, mutatis mutandis, aimed at Obama would have earned long jail time for dozens; now assassination porn becomes an object of emulation.

Yet Trump hatred only solidifies the Trump base. It also reminds independents and wavering centrist Republicans that in a Manichean fight (and the Trump haters seem to envision the current landscape as just that), one inevitably chooses sides. If the choice is reduced to a crude rant at a public Trump rally or the rioters at Claremont, Berkeley, and Middlebury, a screaming Madonna, the “pigs in blanket” chanters of Black Lives Matter, and the masked marauders of Antifa, the Trump haters probably lose.

The Loyal Opposition, Sort Of

Mainstream Democrats in politics are bewildered as much as repelled by Trump. They find him scary because their party that professes contempt for wacky Trump supporters somehow finds conservatives in control of all the traditional levers of political power, from the local to the state to the national level. There is no more Blue Wall, and Democrats know why.

Trumpism is insidiously predatory and picks off Democratic working constituencies like wolves do wandering sheep from the herd — with nocturnal howls to fair trade, reenergized industrialization, energy production, immigration enforcement, realism aboard, and infrastructure investment.

Likewise, savvy Democrats fear Trump because they had long preached that “demography is destiny” only to learn that lots of minority bloc voting in solidly red or blue states was not as electorally potent as a riled working white class in key swing states. The knowledge that the outsider and supposed fool Trump grasped that truth while both his Republican primary rivals and Hillary Clinton did not proves especially irritating. Hillary is now reduced to daydreaming about what a tougher Hillary might have said to Trump during the debate, incoherently bragging she was not intimidated as she proves that in fact she was.

Somali Muslim Refugee Who Attacked Ex With Machete Wants English Language Lessons Daniel Greenfield

This tale of Islamoprivilege comes to us from sunny Australia.

Justice Roslyn Atkinson had asked for information on prison conditions during the sentencing Muhumed Samow Ali, a Somali-born man accused of trying to kill his partner with a machete in 2015.

More accurately, he was convicted of it.

He drove his car head-on into his former partner’s vehicle near a train station and struck her in the head with a machete as she tried to flee.

Here’s how bad the attack really was.

Crown prosecutor Sarah Farnden showed the jury a photograph of the woman’s cut to the back of her head.

“It was 6 centimetres in length, it went through a head covering that she was wearing, a hijab, it went to the bone,” Ms Farnden said.

The court heard how after 7:30am on September 10, 2015, the woman was driving home from the train station when the accused drove head on into her car.

He then got out and grabbed the machete from his car, while the woman ran down the street screaming for help.

The prosecutor said the woman recalled being struck on the back of the head and the shoulder and fell to the ground.

Ms Farnden said the attack ended with the “intervention of a number of neighbours who threw items at him” and used “wheelie bins to push him away”.

“It relates to an attack on a completely vulnerable women, it relates to an attack where she is struck on the head and she is struck repeatedly on the back while she lay face down, defenceless on the ground,” Mr Power said.

Members of the Somali community were also in court, supporting the accused, who has an interpreter.

Of course they were. They always do. And he blamed PTSD.

Prior to his sentencing the court has been told Ali suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder related to horrific experiences in Somalia before he came to Australia as a refugee.

Don’t they all. They’re just poor traumatized refugees. With a bad habit of grabbing a machete and hacking away at people.

On the safe side, let’s avoid bringing in anyone from Somalia with traumatic experiences. They might be suffering from PTSD.

But the Somali Muslim refugee has found a sympathetic judge.

His lawyer, Ben Power, said he also had problems observing his religion in jail.

“The situation is there are also very few Muslims in jail; he has real problems with the food in the jail … Ramadan is very difficult because they don’t make allowances for fasting so he has to store up his food in order to eat it after dusk or dawn in order to observe Ramadan,” Mr Power said.

“He says he is often taunted during his required prayers.”

Taunted? That’s almost as bad as taking a machete to your ex-girlfriend’s head while she’s lying on the ground until it reaches the bone.

She said English lessons should also be investigated for Ali “so he is not so isolated”.

We wouldn’t want the psychotic monster to feel isolated. And in ten years, when he’s allowed to rejoin society, he should be able to speak English. How else is he supposed to buy his next machete?

Those Who Don’t Fight Evil Fight Statues Why the Left’s enemies list does not include any real evils. Dennis Prager

All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don’t fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils.

This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left. During the Cold War, many liberals and nearly all conservatives fought communism, but the left fought anti-communism. The left opposed American military buildups and regarded the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. They loathed Presidents Nixon and Reagan, not Communist Party Secretary-General Brezhnev.

They regarded Reagan’s labeling of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” with contempt. Typical was the reaction of one of America’s best-known intellectuals, Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at the Amherst College. He said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.”

With regard to fighting communism — which, aside from Nazism, has been the greatest evil in the modern world (it killed and enslaved far more people than Nazism) — the left was an obstacle, not an ally. The left in the West and elsewhere did far more to enable communist evil than to stop it.

The same holds true with regard to the greatest evil in the world at this time: totalitarian Islam, or Islamism. The left is doing precisely what it did during the war against communism: It’s fighting the anti-Islamists, not the Islamists. Just as it labeled anti-communists “cold warriors” and other derisive epithets, the left labels those fighting Islamism as “Islamophobes” and, of course, “racists.” In the moral order as perceived by the left, it is the anti-Islamists who are the enemy of the good.

In this battle, the left fights American conservatives — and Israel, the country in the front line against Islamism. In a nutshell, rather than fighting evil, the left fights those who fight evil.

Therefore, if you have moral clarity, you are not on the left. If you have moral clarity, you can be a liberal, a conservative, a centrist, an atheist, a believer, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a black, a white, a Latino, an Asian, a Native American, a gay, a straight or a bisexual. But you cannot be a leftist.

The problem, however, is that people want to feel morally good about themselves, and no one wants this more than the left. It has written the proverbial book on moral self-esteem. Therefore, it does not merely believe that it is morally superior to all others; it knows it is. Leftists know they are more compassionate, more enlightened, more intellectual and more intelligent than conservatives. And they know that they care more about the “downtrodden,” the “marginalized” and the “disenfranchised” than conservatives.

But to feel good about yourself, you have to fight against something bad. Since the left doesn’t fight real evil (that would take moral courage in addition to moral clarity), it has to fight lesser evils or made-up evils.

ACORN Sues California To Allow More Illegals To Vote Bill Clinton’s Motor-Voter law has made massive voter fraud possible. Matthew Vadum

An ACORN offshoot and other left-wing pressure groups are suing California in federal court because the state hasn’t made it easy enough for Democrats to flood voter rolls with illegal aliens and foreign nationals who aren’t legally eligible to vote.

Throughout the years Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins, and celebrities living and dead were registered to vote because now-defunct ACORN and its allied groups were allowed to pollute the voter rolls.

The ACORN successor group known as ACCE Institute, League of Women Voters of California, California Common Cause, and the National Council of La Raza want to compel the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to incorporate voter registration material into the forms needed to apply for or renew a driver’s license or state identification card, or submit a change of address. They claim the DMV is violating the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), popularly called “Motor-Voter,” by asking the more than a million California residents who renew by mail every year to fill out a separate voter registration form.

Other election fraud-promoting state policies already exist in the Golden State, which is a haven for illegal aliens and illegal voting.

In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a law to register all eligible holders of driver’s licenses as voters unless they “opt out.” The Los Angeles Times reports that law “was on hold until state elections officials completed testing of a statewide voter database. That process ended last year, and the automated process for registering voters is expected to be used before next year’s elections.”

But that still doesn’t provide enough opportunities for non-citizens to vote in California to satisfy whiny so-called voting rights advocates in the already solidly Democrat state.

“Since we first alerted DMV to these problems, multiple local, state, and federal elections have passed, including the 2016 presidential election,” said ACCE Executive Director Christina Livingston. “Enough is enough. It’s time for California to make registration easier for every voter as the law requires and to get it done before another election passes us by.”

In court papers, ACCE Institute claims ACCE has 14,000 members, as well as offices in Los Angeles, Contra Costa, Oakland, San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Diego. The group claims in 2016 that ACCE ran five programs that registered almost 10,000 Californians to vote. ACCE Institute describes itself as “a non-profit community organization that helps California citizens organize and take action to promote change that benefits social, economic, and racial justice.”

Because the state supposedly hasn’t been following federal law, ACCE claims it “has been forced to and continues to expend resources to promote voter registration in California that ACCE would otherwise have used to further other organizational goals.”

What might those “other organizational goals” be? The California branch of ACORN was adept at dumping garbage in the lobbies of banks, surrounding the homes of corporate executives and frightening their families, and providing rent-a-mobs for wealthy benefactors such as banking tycoons Herb and Marion Sandler.

The plaintiff groups are being represented by the ACLU of Northern California, Demos, and the law firm of Morrison and Foerster. ACORN-affiliated Project Vote had also been providing legal representation but it recently closed its doors.

Michael Galak Fear’s Missionaries

So many are afraid to state the obvious, to proclaim that we do not wish to change our laws and the way we live in order to accommodate a separatist minority whose very garments proclaim a refusal to integrate and assimilate.

After the La Rambla atrocity I hoped, although not with much conviction, that the Spanish might do more than engage in yet another resolute clenching of the collective jaw we have seen so often across Europe. I was right, sort of, because Spanish police did a very efficient job of first shooting dead the Islamists, but then it was back to the Continental norm – flowers piled on the site of the latest massacre, candles lit, cuddly toys for the dubious comfort of the dead. Oh, and resolute words, always those vows and pledges never to “let the terrorists win”, as countless politicians have said while the cameras roll. Quite likely they will have grabbed the nearest tame imam to stand beside them for the obligatory photo op. Perhaps someone is playing Imagine in the background.

And after that? To be blunt, nothing. The boatloads of illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East keep coming, with nary the hint of consensus that a slow-motion invasion needs to be stopped, let alone how this might be achieved. Indeed, the exact opposite. When Poland and other nations swear they will not have their cultures overrun, they are denounced as Islamophobes and bigots. With few exceptions, that’s the pathetic extent of fearful Europe’s resolve in the face of terror.

Nobody seems to notice that terrorists could not care less about the immediate reactions of the societies they are changing and squeezing every day, the societies whose liberties and freedoms are being constricted in the name of security. It is a sure bet they are not intimidated in the least by Teddy bears and wreaths on blood-stained pavements. What future victims do immediately after the body parts and dead children are scraped off the streets does not matter to future killers. What does matter is that their targets are afraid, softened up for future submission.

Fear is the weapon of Islamic Terror International. It does not have color or texture, one cannot touch it or see it. One can smell it, though, the sickly, hopeless, constant whiff of unarmed helplessness. Cattle in the abattoir’s holding pen must catch the same scent. This fear is all-pervasive, shaped and crafted by the human bombs and van attackers to percolate through the interstices of our lives, our thoughts, our behavior. It works, too. How many AFL fans heading for the MCG will be thinking the shuffling lines outside the ground make perfect targets — queues waiting for the bag checks, wandings and pat-downs that Islam’s shock troops have made ubiquitous.

This fear pervades our public discourse, just as intended, clouding our responses, our plans and actions — and it is an incredibly cost-effective weapon against our freedoms. This fear is easy to introduce, debilitating in the extreme, insidiously corrosive and easy to pump up to saturation point. It distorts perceptions and inverts logic. Aggressive, intolerant Islam is the reason our malls and public spaces are dotted with bollards, why we are now asked to arrive at the airport a full and inconvenient two hours before flights. Yet what do our leaders tell us? Why, that the greater problem is Islamophobia! We’ve heard it all so often: “exclusion”, “marginalisation”, “disempowerment”, fear of “the other”.

That fear, it has many faces. So many are afraid to state the obvious loud and clear, to proclaim that we do not wish to change our laws and the way we live in order to accommodate a separatist minority whose very garments proclaim a refusal to integrate and assimilate.

The recent massacres in the UK, France and Spain confirm that terror has become simple and cheap. Rather than the immense planning that must go into hijacking aeroplanes and flying them into tall buildings, knives and motor vehicles are the latest keys to martyrdom, paradise and the eternal orgasm with those 72 virgins.

This change in terror’s tools and tactics creates additional difficulties for law enforcement agencies by its unpredictability and lethal simplicity. Any Tom, Dick or Harry (or rather, Mohammad, Mahamad or Mohamet) with a cheap kitchen knife or a rented minivan can become a champion of Islam’s glory. In their personal fight against the infidel rest of us — the Dar al-Harb, the House of War by Islamist designation — the killing of kafirs is a sanctified pastime. Allah’s warriors make no distinction between Jews, Christians or Hindus, men or women, children or the aged, and it is working for them. It took just one man and six pistol shots to ignite Europe’s tinder box and start World War One. A sustained terror campaign ultimately led to the October Revolution. Arab hijackers and the Munich murderers of Israeli athletes were stepping stones on the path to a Palestinian state. Terror is effective because it infests entire societies with existential fear, thus destabilizing them. Even those terror campaigns which failed to achieve their political goals because they were vigorously opposed – here I think of the IRA and Tamil Tigers – achieved measures of success by imposing enormous costs on the societies they targeted.

I often compare Islamist tactics with those of the Communist USSR. While differing ideologically, both are similar in their aims and ways of achieving them. Both are messianic in their outlooks, convinced against all the evidence that their way of life and belief is superior to any other and, as such, will inevitably by adopted by all mankind, willingly or not.

In this context, the changes Muslim immigration and associated terror brought to the West deserve to be examined. The low-skilled and poorly educated migrants came from failed or barely functional, poverty stricken societies often torn by religious conflicts and further complicated by their endemic corruption. Many were traumatized by their experiences of living in what amount to semi-feudal states. The backgrounds of these immigrants have virtually nothing in common with the Judeo-Christian culture of the West, especially in their rejection of religious tolerance. If pervasive, open and vicious anti-Semitism is not enough, an aggressive and often violent Sunni/Shia schism will always be alive and well.

As an aside, I find it grimly amusing to see Muslim clerics from countries with no histories of religious tolerance become sudden and ardent advocates of interfaith dialogue and universal brotherhood as soon as they arrive in Australia. When invited to Kirribilli to break the taxpayer’s bread with a prime minister hot for a multiculti photo-op, subsequent revelations that among his feted guests were would-be executioners of homosexuals and sexually active unmarried women are seemingly of no importance. Apparently it is only native Australians who can be hateful bigots. Sit tight and Waleed Aly will soon produce a column lamenting the racism and intolerance of those who baulk at “cultural differences”.

Heal Thyself? A federal panel on serious mental illness gets bad advice. DJ Jaffe

In a recent op-ed in Politico, law professor Elyn Saks argued for “expand[ing] the definition of competence” of seriously mentally ill people so more can refuse to consent to treatment. “Instead of designing new ways to force medication on patients,” she writes, “we need to put our efforts into finding new ways to help people want treatment so we don’t have to use force.” Those are not mutually exclusive choices. Both are needed. This proposal—to make it harder to designate incompetence—is dangerous both to society and to the mentally ill themselves.

Our laws to treat the seriously mentally ill have life-or-death consequences. Persons with untreated serious mental illness sometimes attack police, who often must use force to subdue them. The public has grown inured to headlines about such rampages. One problem is that individuals with serious mental illness usually cannot be committed against their will until after they become a “danger to self or others.” Laws should prevent dangerous behavior, not require it: think of seatbelts, or ignition-lock systems for habitual drunk drivers. Under our current system, even after the seriously ill have been deemed dangerous to themselves or others, they still cannot be medicated over their objections. Doctors have to make a second determination, often including a return to court, to determine if the patient has the competency to make his or her own decisions.

Saks wants to toughen the standard for making this second determination, thereby ensuring that a larger number of dangerous patients won’t be treated. According to the American Psychiatric Nurses Association, virtually all nurses working in acute psychiatric units have been assaulted during their careers. Faced with dangerous mentally ill patients whom they cannot treat, nurses arrange to discharge these patients, or call the police to take them away; either way, patients will usually wind up as prisoners. Saks’s proposal would turbocharge this hospital-to-jail pipeline.

Saks points to her own ten-year refusal to stay on medications, which only came to an end when her therapist threatened to stop treating her. But Saks is fortunate that she didn’t wind up in jail; 400,000 seriously mentally ill individuals who decided not to take their medications did find themselves incarcerated, often as a result of their untreated illness.

Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) is one solution. It allows judges to require treatment-refusers who have already accumulated multiple incarcerations or hospitalizations to stay in treatment for six months as a condition of living in the community. AOT lowers the odds of arrest by nearly two-thirds. And while the threat of being forced into treatment may have inhibited Saks’s recovery, research shows that it helps most others. At least 75 percent of those in AOT reported that it helped them gain control over their lives; 81 percent said that it helped them get and stay well, and 90 percent said that it made them more likely to keep appointments and take medications.

Elyn Saks’s opinion carries great weight. HHS secretary Tom Price appointed her a public member of the Interagency Serious Mental Illness Coordinating Committee (ISMICC), which is charged with advising government on how to improve services for the seriously ill. It meets for the first time on August 31 but is already off to a bad start. Not only are committee members reading her op-ed, they are also studying briefing materials prepared by Paolo del Vecchio, director of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS). As I documented in Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, CMHS has no medical doctors on board and is so engulfed in political correctness that it refuses to focus on the seriously mentally ill. The organization’s briefing materials start off with a discussion of mental “health”—not mental “illness”—and note that the most important metrics for assessing mental health are “successful performance of mental functions, resulting in productive activities, fulfilling relationships with other people, and the ability to adapt to change and to cope with adversity.” Those are reasonable goals for most of the population, but for the seriously mentally ill, the indicators that matter are rates of homelessness, arrest, incarceration, hospitalization, victimization, and suicide. That means focusing on the lack of hospital beds, increased rates of violence, problems with civil-commitment laws, the refusal of many mental health programs to treat the most seriously ill—and the lack of focus on all this at CMHS.

Following Anthem Protest Last Week, All Browns Players Stood This Week By Rick Moran

Former Cleveland Brown legend Jim Brown told the team, ” I’m an American. I don’t desecrate my flag and my national anthem”

Last week before a Cleveland Browns exhibition football game, twelve players took a knee in support of Colin Kaepernick and his protest of the national anthem.

The team issued a neutral statement:

“As an organization, we have a profound respect for our country’s national anthem, flag and the servicemen and servicewomen in the United States and abroad. We feel it’s important for our team to join in this great tradition and special moment of recognition. At the same time we also respect the great liberties afforded by our country including the freedom of personal expression.”

But the anthem protest didn’t sit well with someone who many believe is the greatest pro football player in history. Former Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, who made his mark not only in Hollywood but on the front lines of the civil rights struggle, spoke about the anthem protest to The Post Game:

Colin has to make up his mind whether he’s truly an activist or whether he’s a football player. Football is commercial. You have owners. You have fans. And you want to honor that if you’re making that kind of money. … I’m going to give you the real deal: I’m an American. I don’t desecrate my flag and my national anthem. I’m not gonna do anything against the flag and the national anthem. I’m going to work within those situations. But this is my country, and I’ll work out the problems, but I’ll do it in an intelligent manner.

The result?

According to Cleveland.com’s Mary Kay Cabot, a large group of players stood arm in arm, but added that Browns legend Jim Brown spoke to the team prior to the anthem and that may have played a part in the players’ decision to stand together.

Jim Brown’s Lesson for the NFL By Pamela Lange

About five years ago, Rush Limbaugh predicted the end of the National Football League. Drawing on the rash of stories about professional football players prone to concussion, the radio talk giant saw clearly that the Left would use a serious and very real problem to try to bring down yet another time-honored American institution. The NFL’s method of handling the bad publicity was to pour money into studies and agree to a $1 billion class-action settlement for retired players and their families. No one believes the NFL should not address an important health issue and it appears, in the wake of that public relations counterpunch, most Americans have come to grips with the inherent risk of playing a violent game and the fact that no one is forced to play. Choice won out. https://amgreatness.com/2017/08/28/jim-browns-lesson-nfl/

But as Michael Walsh is always warning, the Left never stops, never sleeps, and never quits. There’s always another arrow in their quiver and if the concussions story missed the target, perhaps the Colin Kaepernick campaign to kneel in protest during the national anthem would be a surer bet.
The Kaepernick story even had the promise of being a bullseye in its potential to undermine both football and American patriotism in one clean shot. The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback started the trend of refusing to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner” last year at the start of a preseason game, later explaining, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” Some other players in football and other professional sports followed suit. For the most part, however, the protest has generated more scorn than applause.

One reason for that is the strong suspicion that Kaepernick was just an opportunist looking to grab some headlines as his football skills were waning. Another is the scuttlebutt that Colin’s new squeeze is a radical activist who encouraged him to protest in an overt (and self-destructive) way. Whatever the reason, the move doesn’t seem to have worked in his favor. Now a free agent, Kaepernick remains unsigned. The stunt hasn’t exactly endeared other Leftists to the public, either.

Last week, before a preseason game, the Cleveland Browns decided they were going to try and “win” something (a concept otherwise lost on them for a long many years) by becoming the team with the largest number of anthem kneelers.

For a brief moment, the protest seemed to pay off. Weak-kneed coaches, wishy-washy owners, and moronic PR flacks made excuses for the antics of these wealthy man-children who thought they were accomplishing something important by insulting a large swathe of their fan base. Nobody in the NFL seemed capable of expressing anything other than fear—and why not? In the media world surrounding professional sports, political correctness is a powerful force. And on the other side, the specter of boycotts loomed large if these protests spread. Uttering the wrong word about them could cost the league millions of dollars in lost advertising, but the ongoing controversy could cost them in ticket sales. Playing it safe down the middle, if not the smart move (because, ultimately, impossible), was at least an understandable instinct. They were set to catch it on both ends.

And then came Jim Brown.

For Clevelanders and football fans alike, Jim Brown is more than just a legend in this city. He is a demigod. He was the Cleveland Browns during their glory days and before the Super Bowl became the sine qua non defining football greatness. He held the NFL rushing record of 12,312 yards until it was broken by the Chicago Bulls’ Walter Payton in 1984. Brown is still the Cleveland Browns all-time leading rusher.

Sadly, Brown left the team and the NFL suddenly, prior to the start of the 1966 season. He had bigger goals—the most important being a dedication to racial justice. His activism upset some, encouraged others, and inspired many. He wasn’t the easiest person to talk to or to reason with, but no matter what he said or what he did, the respect he earned was always warranted. His image has been a formidable presence in a city short on championships. He has been a symbol of pride for Cleveland even during the darkest days of burning rivers, blown saves in game seven, and last minute fumbles. It was fitting that Brown played a big role in Cleveland’s first championship parade in decades when the Cavaliers finally ended our city’s sports drought in 2016.

Jim Brown is not someone the Left can credibly challenge. His social justice bona fides set him apart. No liberal could successfully denigrate his position when it comes to standing for the national anthem. It was natural for reporters to make tracks to get his take on the Browns controversy, however, and it’s likely they were surprised at his reaction and some were certainly disappointed.

Newsletter Distributed on College Campus Calls for Banning Veterans By Tom Knighton

A newsletter distributed at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs says veterans shouldn’t be in college:

The newsletter reads as follows:

“A four-year, traditional university is supposed to be a place of learning, of understanding, of safety and security. However, there is an element among us who may be frustrating those goals: Veterans.

UCCS is known for its number of veterans who are full and part-time students. But these veterans of much of the school prides themselves on may be hurting the university.

First off, many veterans openly mock the ideas of diversity and safe spaces for vulnerable members of society. This is directly in contradiction to the mission of UCCS. Many veterans utter the mantra that they, “do not see color”. But the problem lies in their socialization into the military culture that is that of a white supremacist organization. They have been permanently tainted, and are no long fit for a four-year university.

Second, many students are frightened by the presence of veterans in their classrooms. Veterans usually have an overwhelming presence in the classroom, which can distract other students. This is usually true for vulnerable individual such as LGBTQQI2SAA, who have been known to be the butt of insensitive jokes made by veterans.

Finally, veterans usually are associated with extremists right-wing groups such as the tea party and the NRA. In order to provide a safe place for all students, extremist right-wing groups must be suppressed on campus. This would include their followers: veterans.

That is not to say that veterans should not be allowed an education. Veterans should be allowed to attend trade schools, or maybe even community college. But, in order to protect our academic institutions we must ban veterans from four-year universities.”

Oh, there is so much awful here.

Yes, veterans mock safe spaces. Especially the current batch of veterans who spent time being shot at in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re not sympathetic to the idea that people might need a place to hide for fear of being looked at wrong.

Veterans aren’t mocking diversity in and of itself: after all, the military integrated prior to the rest of the nation, and it’s one of the most diverse bodies in the country. What veterans mock is the idea that diversity matters more than anything else. Something we all learn in the military is that competence matters more than skin color. Everything does. Just treat people as individuals.