“Masking is now little more than an appealing delusion. It arms us with a visible symbol that communicates our commitment to minimizing the pandemic’s damage. When the history books are written, we will not look wise or kind for insisting that kids and toddlers wear masks for hours on end, year after year, without ever testing this policy with controlled trials. We will look ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly. We might even look worse than our primitive ancestors who, when faced with great plagues, engaged in all sorts of bizarre, superstitious behavior—but which rarely included making kids suffer most.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/cult-masked-schoolchildren
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“… in today's climate, identity politics has mashed together real victims like Floyd with what many call microaggressions, or even perceived slights that are more subjective in nature, and much of the activism is focused on that end of the spectrum….Unlike those who speak on behalf of people like Floyd, the civil rights leaders of the past intentionally refused to be victims. Their status was defined by their work, not by those around them who refused to acknowledge it. Today, activism does the opposite: It comes in the form of leveraging victimhood… it's clear that the motives and goal of the modern civil rights movement is different than Dr. King’s.”
https://www.newsweek.com/what-biden-got-right-about-dr-king-george-floyd-opinion-1671781
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“…the ACLU [] has always argued for government transparency in all arenas, including in schools. In arguing against transparency in the public school system, the ACLU is departing from its traditional mission…the ACLU is increasingly becoming more of an activist progressive organization. Among activist progressives, sensitivities about race and gender have often brought them to take positions that are in tension with classical liberal values like freedom of speech, transparency, and equal treatment under the law. Those same sensitivities appear to be trouncing the ACLU’s longstanding principles ...”
https://www.inquiremore.com/p/the-aclu-suddenly-reverse
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“…we’ve had more than 862,000 deaths from Covid, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s count. It’s somehow been declared out of bounds to point out that the disease came, even if accidentally, from Communist China…Declarations by both the Trump and Biden administrations that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in a genocide against Uighur Muslims do not seem to have appreciably changed American policy or public opinion….a propaganda campaign around the 2020 election involving China-linked social media accounts [w]as “a significant attempt to influence the trajectory of U.S. politics.” Plenty of Americans were quite upset over Russia’s reported attempt to meddle in the 2016 election. China’s meddling in 2020 has attracted less attention.”
https://www.nysun.com/foreign/what-might-awaken-americans-to-the-war-with/91965/
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“The Arizona-based Goldwater Institute issued a policy brief in January 2020 calling for curriculum transparency laws at the state level. It noted that several states already guarantee parents a right to review their children’s curriculums but that they must ask for them and that they lack recourse if schools make it difficult or refuse to comply. … teachers could fulfill the institute’s transparency proposal by simply posting links to public Google docs and update them if they add new resources at the last minute. … the idea wasn’t biased toward conservatives — … liberals would have an interest in seeing whether their local schools rely on textbooks with overtly right-wing beliefs. And he said more transparency would reduce the workload for teachers, because they could get ideas from colleagues at other schools.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-curriculum-transparency-rcna12809
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“Many governments have demonstrated in the past three years that they can summarily impose decisions on free people without their consent, and can even whitewash their actions if they backfire. A balancing force is needed in a well-informed democracy to promote thoughtful discussion and the adoption of cautious and moderate policies, rather than conflicted agendas based on the proclamations of manipulated mobs. Intolerance and humiliation may seem like expedients, but tolerance and scientific humility may achieve even more.”
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“Howard Stern, by any measure, is one of the great radio hosts of all time,” he said. “He has made a huge amount of money for doing what he does, but there’s a reason for it. He is incredibly brave. Vulgar, yes, but truly talented. But above all, courageous. Defended free speech, was fired for it repeatedly, used his platform to fight government censorship, gave the finger to the man. There are a lot of things impressive about Howard Stern. That briefly allowed him to be creative, but not anymore. Maybe it was the coronavirus that broke him, hormonal changes in middle age. He is now a coward. His broadcast is about cowardice, amplifying his fears about corona over the air. Attacking, more precisely, attacking anybody else who has decided to live life as a free person. The guy was always a narcissist, obviously; the show was about himself. But again, he had a spirit. He had bravery. But he has declined into this kind of quivering mass of neuroses and hatred — hatred that has so overtaken him, he has decided anyone who doesn’t follow his commands should just go die.”
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“So much fail in so little time. The Democrats’ “Biden is FDR and not just a desiccated, pervy old weirdo” dreams have died. Their dreams of five trillion in handouts to bums and donors have died. Their dreams of enshrining their ability to cheat in elections have died. The Democrats can’t even shatter norms, like the filibuster, competently. The Latinx community – which the Dems put all their faith in as part of an unstoppable future majority, is rejecting them, in large part because Democrats are the kind of people who use the word “Latinx” unironically. Some foreigners, seeing the Democrats’ weakness and stupidity – it’s not just Commander-in-Chief Crusty who is the problem – are chomping at the bit to chomp off pieces of other countries because they know that the Dems put the “feck” in “feckless.” The rest are invading our country through what used to be a border. Inflation is up, the market is down, and November 2022 is approaching just over the horizon like a Tongan tsunami.”
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“The painful reality for the Latinx set is that Hispanics are, as Ruy Teixeira recently wrote, “a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working-class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns.” Which means they have more in common with working-class Americans of all races than they do with Democratic Party elites. Anti-Americanism, violent riots, and pathological obsessions with racial and gender categorization cut no ice with them. They didn’t vote for Trump in surprisingly large numbers because they’re misinformed. They did it because Trump said wild shit, pissed off the prim and proper, only cared about the economy and jobs, spoke of his love for America, and had a hot wife. The Trumpian ethos, for all its stupid bullshit, is more relatable for many Hispanics (and non-Hispanics!) than the soulless progressive alternative.
If Democrats don’t want to lose any more Hispanics, they’re going to have to stop worrying and learn to love the Miami flotilla boys, with their fade haircuts and souped-up Honda Civics, more than the fourth-generation, non-Spanish-speaking dweebs who majored in Latinx studies at Oberlin.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/spanish-language-radio-threat-democracy
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“None of this is to say that CRT bans are bad. They’re just insufficient. To rebut CRT and the umbrella philosophy of critical theory requires that we not only patch up leaks as they appear but replace the hull. It necessitates a reconsideration of policies from teacher licensure to school accreditation, institution building, school choice, standardized testing, and ending the ideological influence that unions and universities have on public education. It will require a monumental overhaul of predominant philosophies of education akin to the federalist movement in our nation’s courts. Let CRT bills be the beginning, not the end, in the conservative effort to save America’s schools.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/ban-critical-race-theory-schools-not-enough/
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“In terms of how they will rule on the bench, it may not matter much whom Biden nominates. Conventional, institutionalist liberals tend to be every bit as results-oriented and lockstep-loyal on the bench as hair-on-fire progressives. Conservatives get nervous about every Republican nominee; Democrats have not sent a genuinely heterodox justice to the Court since Byron White was appointed by John F. Kennedy. [Breyer] was sold as a moderate …but on the Court, [h]e was a reliable and invariable vote for abortion, same-sex marriage, and other liberal and progressive social causes. In recent years, he became progressively more shrill on matters relating to the Covid pandemic. So let us have another national argument about whether the Supreme Court should follow the written Constitution or not. There is no reason to shy away from the fight.”
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"Once a champion of Zionism, the ADL now hires a Jewish outreach director who demands that her “community” give a proper hearing to those who defend the targeting of Jewish civilians through suicide bombing. “Here’s the thing,” tweeted Smith, “Jews *have* to be ok with Palestinians *explaining* why some turn to terrorism. The whole problem with the ‘it was 18 years ago, she was in college’ line is that it denies her right to even opine on the Palestinian experience.” Smith made this comment when defending then–president-elect Joe Biden’s pick for deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, Reema Dodin, who said in the wake of the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing that killed 15 civilians (including seven children and a pregnant American woman) that such bombings were “the last resort of a desperate people.”"
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“This isn’t the first time Harvard has deployed this sort of argument to keep a minority’s numbers down. A century before Asian Americans became too smart for the Ivy League, Jews found themselves a similar position. A minute fraction of the American population, they had become overrepresented among the academic elite, and for reasons similar to those that propel Asian Americans upward. An immigrant community that valued learning and education was prepared to work hard and sacrifice to ensure that their children had the best educational opportunities…Jewish and Asian Americans are inconvenient minorities. Their academic success disproves the claim that the United States is systemically racist, or that obstacles such as cultural difference, lack of generational wealth or simple racism are insurmountable. Unlike Jewish Americans, however, Asian Americans cannot check a different racial box or dodge the “Asian penalty” by discreetly passing as white. Harvard knows what Asians look like, and they don’t look like the people Harvard wants.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/harvards-diversity-disgrace-harvard/
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““England is now the freest and most open place in Europe. It imposes no vaccine passports, no curfews, and no mandatory tests,” reports Dan Hannan at The Washington Examiner. Even “self-isolation for those who test positive” may be gone soon. And it’s all thanks to Brexit, which let Prime Minister Boris Johnson order vaccines without EU interference. And BoJo “twice disregarded calls for a lockdown, and both times was proved completely right.” But that raises the question: “Should he have done the same in March of 2020?” Voters are furious over a different scandal, but “what I suspect is driving their rage is a sneaking sense that many of the privations and sacrifices of the past 22 months were needless.””
https://nypost.com/2022/01/26/covid-success-may-doom-boris-johnson-and-other-commentary/
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“No doubt, the Biden State Department is set to keep on talking until Tehran announces it’s gone nuclear — rather than risk annoying Iran’s leaders by actually playing tough. Biden is so unwilling to consider alternatives to the (ruinous) deal that he’s willing to ignore the fact that the Iranians are only playing for time. In short: You cannot only expect this evil regime to go nuclear on Joe Biden’s watch, you can bet all America’s other enemies recognize that US diplomacy is toothless. Instead of “peace through strength,” this administration has embraced weakness that’s all too likely to encourage war.”
https://nypost.com/2022/01/25/a-clear-sign-that-biden-is-going-to-let-iran-go-nuclear/
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“I just sat at dinner with a female whose dress was cut so low I had to look under the table to see what she was wearing.”
https://nypost.com/2022/01/24/new-book-dishes-on-audrey-hepburns-relationship-with-william-holden/
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“Durham’s office has not described the specific basis for its disagreement. But the Crossfire Hurricane advocates’ defense has a big problem: copious countervailing evidence in the public record – including in Horowitz's own report. A considerable paper trail points to Steele’s political opposition research playing a greater role in the probe than the FBI has acknowledged…”
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“Do recent concessions to Iran by the Biden administration signal that America will side with the Taliban over the September 11 families in their court dispute over Afghanistan’s billions? The Justice Department is due to tell a federal court by Friday its view whether the money, on deposit at the Fed, should go to the victims of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, or to the Islamic regime that helped launch that bloodshed.”
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/what-price-comity-will-the-biden-administration/91987/
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“We the People” challenges rock-music orthodoxy, specifically the authoritarian stances taken by famous, established rock stars such as Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, and the Rolling Stones, who no longer behave like the counterculture figures they once seemed. In this sudden ideological skirmish, Kid Rock wants to reclaim populism and protest against Young’s imperious assertion of authority and limited expression.”
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“The state of exception must end; it is deranging the body politic at the cellular level. Normal self-government has been ruled out. So go ahead, give me another pamphlet with crazy theories about the vaccines. I don’t care if it says Prince Charles is collaborating with Bill Gates to depopulate the Earth of humans in favor of the Patagonian toothfish. If I can’t learn anything from it, I can at least ball it up and throw it at the quiet, successful people who sit in seats of authority but have no power just yet to do what is right.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/what-i-saw-at-the-school-board-meeting/#slide-1
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“Maher listed some moves from the left that he suggested were easy to criticize, including Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) calling for rent and mortgage to be canceled, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) demanding an end to policing and incarceration and Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) declaring that "capitalism is slavery." He continued, "canceling Lincoln and Dr. Seuss, teaching children they're oppressors and math is racist, making Mr. Potato Head gender-neutral and now an emoji for pregnant men."
“"It's not my fault that the party of FDR and JFK is turning into the party of LOL and WTF.””
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