RUTHFULLY YOURS

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://amgreatness.com/2021/10/07/man-accused-in-sicknick-case-weve-all-been-destroyed/

George Tanios’ fiancée encouraged him to go to Washington on January 6 to hear President Trump’s speech. “You’re gonna regret it if you don’t go,” she said, hoping he could take a break from working 100-hours-a-week to run his popular sandwich shop in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Tanios and I both laughed after he told me that during a two-hour interview this week. (I was in contact with his fiancée, Amanda, as she cared for their three young children while he was incarcerated for five months.)

But there is nothing funny about how Joe Biden’s Justice Department is trying to ruin Tanios’ life to maintain the myth that Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died at the hands of Trump supporters on January 6. 

Tanios, 40, was arrested in front of his five-year-old son at home on Sunday, March 14 around 9 p.m. “I was about to get in the shower and had my robe on when I heard crazy banging on my front door,” he said. “Then I heard ‘put your fucking hands up!’” 

About 15 FBI agents and the acting head of the U.S. Capitol Police raided his home, interrogated Amanda, and took Tanios into custody.

“I had no idea what I was being arrested for,” Tanios said. “No one would answer me. Some of the agents seemed to feel bad about it. One [agent] said they had been arresting people all over but they had never arrested anyone without a criminal record like this.”

Tanios was held in jail for four days before his attorney arrived and informed him of the charges related to Sicknick, including one count of conspiracy to injure an officer and three counts of assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon—chemical spray.

“I almost had a heart attack,” Tanios said. “I begged them to take the handcuffs off me because my heart dropped. ‘I am not a cop killer,’ I said.” Tanios had heard an officer had been killed on January 6, but that’s all he knew.

What Tanios also did not know at the time was he and his friend, Julian Khater, would become the scapegoats for one of the biggest lies about the Capitol protest; the claim that Trump cultists killed a cop in cold blood on January 6.

Reports of Sicknick’s death in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol protest served two purposes: to bury the news that a Capitol Police officer had killed an unarmed female Trump supporter in the building on January 6, and to fuel more public outrage about a “deadly insurrection.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/10/07/leftism-is-the-true-pandemic-n1522282

We have suffered through a year and a half of a viral pandemic, which has become for a majority of us the Alpha and Omega of everyday life. We think of little else and organize our lives around media-inflamed anxiety, ever-changing medical reports, and government ordinances. We wear masks. We put distance between ourselves and our fellows. We isolate. We line up for what seems like a never-ending succession of jabs. We devour the News as if it were the truth. We are victims of what is called “fear appeal,” defined as “a persuasive message that attempts to arouse fear in order to divert behavior through the threat of impending danger or harm.”

Yet, in our addiction to the doctrine and apparatus of the COVID industry, far too many of us have missed the big picture. “Maybe there is something darker and more nefarious at work,” remarks Jeffrey Tucker in Liberty or Lockdown. For there is indeed a pandemic that has spread its pathogens across the world and afflicted the West with a disease from which it may not recover, a kind of viral contagion from which there may be no immediate or even long-term escape. We are confronting a curve that may not be flattened in the foreseeable future.

It is a political disease for which we have many names—progressivism, Wokeism, Agenda 2030, the Great Reset, etc.—but they are all subsumed under the aegis of the Left, which approaches in stages or “waves.” We recall Israel’s official virologist Salman Zarka informing us that “[t]his is our life from now on, in waves.” We might say that the Welfare State is the first wave; “Democratic Socialism” is the second wave; full, undisguised socialism is the third; and the absolute tyranny of Communism is the fourth. 

Admittedly, the analogy with the COVID regime partially breaks down since, in the transposition I’m proposing, the disease itself is the object and booster shots cannot be regarded as preventative. (Many will argue that this is the case with the medical pandemic as well, but the question is moot.) In the correlate scenario, however, the “boosters” should be thought of as social and cultural “injections” whose ulterior purpose is to prolong the virulence of the political pandemic. For example, “health and safety” mandates—that is, official rhetoric—are designed to convince the people that they are being cared for, thus rendering them obedient and docile; or “vaccine passports”—that is, identity papers—are intended to fracture social unity by creating a compliant class of propagandized citizens and an outcast class subject to harsh measures of repression and exclusion. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/kazakhstan-lenin-lloyd-billingsley/

Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. Treasury Department is Saule Omarova, a native of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and graduate of Moscow State University, which she attended on a “Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.” In a May 9, 2020 interview with Chris Hayes of NBC, Omarova explained how she arrived in America.

“I was an undergraduate student at Moscow State University and there was at the very end of the Gorbachev era an exchange program between Moscow State and University of Wisconsin Madison. I got lucky against all odds, and I came for that one semester in 1991 to Madison, Wisconsin. While I was there in December of 1991, the Soviet Union fell apart. So there I was, a student without anywhere to go back. I was very worried about what was going to happen. So I stayed to do my Ph.D. in political science, but frankly, I’m just, to this day, I feel guilty for having left the country at such a momentous time, because obviously they couldn’t hold it together without me.”

“Your departure and it all falls apart,” Hayes said. “That’s amazing timing.” As it turned out, unlike many other émigrés, Omarova remained a fan of the USSR.

In 2019, nearly 30 years after the USSR collapsed, Omarova was on record that “say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best.’” In the old USSR, the all-male Dictatorship of the Proletariat always knew best, but Hayes didn’t get into that.

As F.A. Hayek outlined in The Road to Serfdom way back in 1944, economic knowledge is fragmented and dispersed, so no group of people, is able to plan an economy that will thrive for the benefit of all. That’s why Omarova’s beloved “old USSR” was an economic basket case.

Countries barren of liberties are also barren of groceries. The biggest country in the world, with abundant energy and natural resources, could not even feed itself. This was a matter of record, but Hayes failed to press the issue. Omarova knew that in the old USSR consumers waited in line to select, pay, and pick up the goods. That is how an economy planned by Communist Party bosses functions in practice, but there’s more to it.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/08/anyone-notice-where-covid-rates-are-climbing-these-days-hint-not-in-texas-or-florida/

So much for President Joe Biden’s attacks on Republican states such as Texas and Florida for threatening their citizens by not kowtowing to his dictates on mask and vaccine mandates.

As we noted weeks ago, and the mainstream press has only now begun to acknowledge, new cases of COVID peaked at the beginning of September, and have been on a downtrend ever since. Cases are falling in Texas, in Florida, and other states that dared put their residents’ freedoms above Biden’s dictates.

But while the national trend is downward, COVID cases are rising in a handful of states. And what the mainstream press definitely won’t tell you is what these states have in common: Almost every one of them is run by Democrats and has high vaccination rates.

The Johns Hopkins COVID tracker displays each state in shades of either green or red, with green indicating a downward trend and red an upswing. The darker the shade the bigger the change in either direction.

Well, take a look at the current display, shown above. The 13 states that are showing increases right now are California, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nebraska, Maine, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Except for a few, these are reliably Democratic states.

There’s something else worth noting. Nine of these 13 states have vaccination rates higher – and in some cases, much higher – than the national average of 56%.

In Washington, 62% are fully vaccinated, in California 59% are. In Colorado, it’s 60%, in New Mexico, 64%. The numbers are 58% in Minnesota and 57% in Wisconsin. In Rhode Island and Maine, 69% are vaccinated, and in New Hampshire, it’s 62%.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/10/the-west-faces-a-big-human-rights-test-with-the-taliban/

The West faces a key test of its commitment to human rights as the Taliban cements its rigid rule in Kabul.

At the moment, Western nations and the global financial institutions over which they hold considerable sway are demanding that the Taliban respect human rights as a condition of receiving the economic aid that Afghanistan so urgently needs – rather than return to the harsh conditions that defined its original time in power, from 1996 to 2001. Global institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as foreign governments, have suspended aid and access to cash and credit.

The next big test for the world’s major powers may come at the G-20 summit in Rome, which will take place on October 30th and 31st. There, French President Emmanuel Macron has said, the world’s big powers “must have a very clear message that we will set conditions for recognition of the Taliban” – conditions that include “the dignity of Afghan women, equality between men and women.”

Other Western leaders are voicing similar sentiments. While British officials have met with Taliban leaders, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has insisted that neither his nor any other country should “recognize any new regime in Kabul prematurely or bilaterally.” Instead, countries “should work towards common conditions about the conduct of the new regime before deciding, together, whether to recognize it and on what terms.”

So far, the Taliban seems unmoved, with evidence mounting that it’s re-imposing its rigid reign of years ago. Rather than agree to the conditions of donors, Taliban officials seem to resent them.

“Putting pressure on us is not the right approach…,” Taliban spokesman Inamullah Samangani recently told the Washington Post. “We are ready to engage, but the international community should avoid setting preconditions.“

Presuming the Taliban remain unmoved, the question is whether foreign donors will hang tough in the defense of human rights, especially as the Afghan people suffer more poverty, hunger, and human rights abuse.

https://www.thepostemail.com/2021/10/07/who-is-really-running-the-destroy-america-biden-regime/

“Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country.” Bill Ayers, Weather Underground founder

“The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.” George Soros, hedge-fund billionaire.

In today’s chaotic political landscape, it is obvious that the Democrat Party in power is comprised largely of far-left radicals, many of them shockingly anti-American and predictably anti-Semitic  (as are all deranged leftists).

After all, with Barack Obama, they thought they were significantly closer to their 100-year goal of a socialist-cum-communist America, and believed that “President” Hillary would fulfill their cherished fantasy.

And then along came President Trump to smash that fantasy to smithereens.

When everything the Democrats tried to sabotage President Trump failed––the Russian hoax, the Ukraine hoax, the Stormy Daniels hoax, the impeachment fiascos, on and on––they pulled out the Wuhan lab surprise, effectively creating a pandemic.

The result was the entire world isolated in their homes, worldwide economies destroyed, and the unprecedented phenomenon of mail-in ballots, which essentially insured that the voter fraud Democrats are so famous for––ACORN, anyone?, and the Dominion voting machines used in “elections” in Venezuela and other banana republics to insure the desired outcomes––would succeed as it had in the past.

And it did. Today, however, with audits being conducted in every significant state, that colossal voter fraud is being proven…stay tuned! And with the arrest of Hillary’s lawyer, Democrats are also looking at the coming arrests of all those higher-ups who colluded in the criminal anti-Trump effort, including Ms. Hillary herself!     

THE FIRST EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE FRAUDULENT ELECTION

In less time than a normal human pregnancy, putative president Biden managed to accomplish the following:

Crashed our booming economy,
Destroyed our energy independence,
Opened our southern border to hundreds of thousands of illegals––many of them diseased, drug- and sex-traffickers, career criminals, jihadists, et al,
Accelerated Iran’s production of nukes,
Promised the disaster of hyperinflation,
Expressed “great confidence in” the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, after the General––prodded by his dominatrix, Nancy Pelosi?, as the NY Post’s Miranda Devine suggested––conspired with China against President Trump and told military officials not to take orders from him.
Orchestrated the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan––another Milley debacle––leaving behind, to this day, hundreds of stranded Americans and Afghan allies, billions of dollars of U.S. armaments and Black Hawk helicopters and airplanes, massive troves of the rare-earth mineral lithium (“the new oil,” as Dave Hodges reports), as well as Taliban-Isis-Al Qaeda terrorists in charge, and 13 heroic but dead U.S. service members.

And that’s the short list!