“With the spread of critical race theory and general wokeness in schools, parents have noticed that there’s barely any time for math, science or history. It’s not just a typical right-left battle, either. A Rasmussen poll out Thursday found 76 percent of American adults are concerned that public schools may be promoting “controversial beliefs and attitudes,” including 58 percent who say they are “very concerned.”…Parents have realized that so many of our shared values are being tossed aside at ever more radical schools. Parents didn’t choose the culture war; the culture war chose them, and they’re ready to fight back.”
https://nypost.com/2021/10/31/theres-nothing-fake-about-parents-outrage-in-americas-culture-war/
========================
“If the odd combination of Covid and critical race theory has turned education into a wedge issue for voters, Republicans should welcome the development. Public education is owned and operated by Democrats and the teachers unions that finance their political campaigns. The unions give next to nothing to conservative candidates or causes, so the GOP has zero to lose in declaring war on the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the liberal politicians who carry water for them, even when the union agenda undermines learning.”
====================
“On the contrary, what happened that afternoon, and what happened afterwards, is only intelligible when seen as a chapter in the long-running effort to discredit and, ultimately, to dispose of Donald Trump—as well as what Hillary Clinton might call the “deplorable” populist sentiment that brought Trump to power. ….The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected president without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the bipartisan oligarchy that governs us. That was his unforgivable offense. Trump was the greatest threat in history to the credentialed class and the globalist administrative state upon which they feed. Representatives of that oligarchy tried for four years to destroy Trump. Remember that the first mention of impeachment came 19 minutes after his inauguration, an event that was met not only by a widespread Democratic boycott and hysterical claims by Nancy Pelosi and others that the election had been hijacked, but also by riots in Washington, D.C. that saw at least six policemen injured, numerous cars torched, and other property destroyed.
“You will search in vain for media or other ruling class denunciations of that violence, or for bulletins from corporate America advising their customers of their solidarity with the newly installed Trump administration. As the commentator Howie Carr noted, some riots are more equal than others. Some get you the approval of people like Nancy Pelosi and at least the grudging acceptance of oligarchs of the other party. Others get the FBI sweeping the country for “domestic terrorists” and the lords of Big Tech canceling people who defend the protesters’ cause.”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/10/31/the_january_6_insurrection_hoax_146663.html?fbclid=IwAR1CzVm44m3r4bY8hqsvmmeQJsuPouHJta1bh2AFUNHXDHUrqMtYYJ3wHYM
====================
““Parents for Youngkin” signs abound in the front yards of family homes, and Youngkin’s most effective ads have hit McAuliffe for his claim that parents shouldn’t have a say in what their kids are taught in school. This approach challenged the “wisdom” of the Republican establishment, which scoffed when Trump fought culture wars and accused him of distracting from “real” issues. Youngkin has proven that there is electoral merit in unapologetically pushing back on the left’s cultural creep, especially when it is coupled with policies and focused on capturing key suburban voters.
“Youngkin’s campaign shows that Republican candidates can still be successful outside of hitching their wagons to Trump. More importantly, it shows that conservatism can still be attractive to non-base voters without capitulating to the left. This should be welcome news for the GOP as it tries to reestablish its identity ahead of the 2022 midterms.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/youngkin-reveals-path-forward-gop/
====================
“The next American university—but stop right there. Maybe there shouldn’t be a next American university. … Why not just break up Big U? Why not apply the logic of antitrust to the bloated, wasteful nonprofit academic sector? Let corporations do their own vocational training, like McDonald’s with Hamburger University, or contract with free-standing trade and professional schools. Let research be done by independent science and engineering institutes, with apprenticeships for young scientists and engineers. Let gender and ethnic studies departments be left-wing nonprofits; there will be plenty of liberal and leftist donor money for them. Let the former college sports teams go professional and let their professional players unionize.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ending-tenure-michael-lind?fbclid=IwAR3cv5V4qo-If1lHA0PzSkDh7yxNHEs5XLGJ_56aPx_wvL2N7jJZMDV98sE
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"Take away our ability to tell apart the SS from the Smolletts, and you are putting us in danger. Which is precisely what the low-level Democratic operatives did last week in their desperation to keep from losing a very tight race…among those you’d expect to be most engaged, there was silence. The Anti-Defamation League, which took great care to remind you to please refrain from cultural appropriation or perpetuating gender norms when selecting a Halloween costume, had nothing to say about this far more troubling instance of appropriation..."
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jewish-jussie-smolletts-virginia-election
====================
"The latest effort to censor information damaging to Democrats and the oligarchs they serve masquerades as concern for teenage girls...[b]ut what really anger[s] prestige media organizations was that at the same time Facebook [] destroyed their business models and made their products nearly superfluous, it helped boost the popularity of right-wing sites"
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/facebook-fake-whistleblower-lee-smith
====================
“Reid’s parting gift to the republic (he retired after the following year’s election) was to lay down for his fellow Democrats what has ever since been their guiding principle: that progressives’ winning, by any means necessary, is the only thing that matters—not honesty or honor, fairness or justice, nor the truth itself when any of these things conflict with the will to win. Being, as they suppose, “on the right side of history,” they have a positive duty to win over the forces of reaction (guess who), and old-fashioned ideas of truth, right, or law independent of party loyalty are no longer useful. Truth is what they say it is, because they say it is.”
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/11/deliberate-falsehoods
====================
As Byron York of the Washington Examiner has noted, Donald Trump’s opponents gloried in the F-word, such that without it some of them would have been rendered practically mute. When Robert De Niro introduced Bruce Springsteen at the 2018 Tony Awards, he used the opportunity to declare, “I’m gonna say one thing. F— Trump.” Cue the standing ovation.
A Los Angeles art gallery had a “F— Trump” art exhibit, the rapper Eminem led a “F— Trump” call-and-response at a concert in England and so on.
If lobbing this particular vulgarity is now completely out of bounds, the new progressive rule is “F— you” for me but not for thee.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/01/sorry-media-lets-go-brandon-isnt-a-new-low-in-us-politics/
====================
“People on the left oscillate between saying firstly that this is all overblown Republican propaganda and then that these parents just need to get with the program—as though there’s no contradiction between those two things…So which is it?
“Anyone who has been around long enough to see progressives applaud themselves for accomplishments they previously claimed weren’t happening knows the truth: progressives never tire of progress. But sometimes the voters do.”
====================
“Democrats know they’re facing strong headwinds ahead of 2022, but they cannot be honest with themselves about why. Democrats convinced themselves that the mandate Biden won in 2020 for moderation and a return to the pre-Trump status quo was a mandate to rewrite the American social compact. Republicans don’t have to be anything more than be against that.”
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“Why has it been so hard for Democrats to find a way to tax the rich? Because those rich people live in the blue states. Republicans have wanted to get rid of SALT for a long time, as it benefits the wealthy in blue states the most. These are the states where state and local taxes are the highest. As political maneuvering it’s brilliant, because it forces Democrats into a position of deciding between their principles of taxing the rich and their political wishes to protect their constituents.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/02/hard-tax-rich-518383
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“One key constant in rock culture has been its spirit of youthful rebellion…So the next time a forgotten Y2K-era rocker reinvents himself as a conservative warrior, don’t be surprised — he’s simply carrying out the rock tradition of rebellion, in the manner most befitting his own bubble….The softboys, too, will be eclipsed, and whoever inevitably rises up to displace them is likely to be a little bit more hard-edged.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/24/soft-boy-pop-culture-harry-styles-gender-politics-music-514168
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“The reality is that, while many anti-poverty programs help strengthen the social fabric of communities by supporting vulnerable people during times of need, no one knows what would happen if we really did transform into a society where the vast majority of people lived off “universal basic income” instead of work. Some say the future will require high-tech billionaires to pony up the cash to support all the workers who’ve been replaced by machines. That might be part of the solution. But it would also make Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg too big to fail. Countries where citizens live off money distributed by the government — Saudi Arabia, for instance, which doles out oil revenues — tend not to be democracies.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/19/farah-stockman-jobs-build-back-better-book-excerpt-516057
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"There are some who want to divide us and we must not let that happen. They would like us to believe we are back in 1963 when my father came. In case you haven’t noticed, I am black, and I have been black all my life."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/03/politics/winsome-sears-virginia-lieutenant-governor-race/index.html
====================
Joe Biden’s approval rating has been historically bad for several weeks now. Other polls have shown that a majority of voters are extremely concerned about inflation and hold the president responsible for it; that the public trusts Republicans over Democrats on “the economy” by an 18-point margin; and that only a quarter of the public thinks the Build Back Better agenda is going to help “people like them.”
In a world where all these things were true, you would expect GOP candidates to win elections they ordinarily would lose. On Tuesday night in Old Dominion, Glenn Youngkin did just that. One year ago, Virginia backed Joe Biden by 10 points. Today, it is the kind of state a Republican can win a governor’s race in by a comfortable margin.
Of course, drawing safe conclusions isn’t much fun. After all, such conclusions rarely, unambiguously prove that anyone’s long-held opinions are now more right than ever before. And we in the punditry business prefer to conduct election analysis as though it were a kind of competitive Rorschach test, in which contestants spar over whose ideologically-flattering projections reveal the blot’s true essence. So, Terry McAuliffe lost Virginia because House progressives delayed a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill; or because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema sabotaged the Build Back Better agenda; or because McAuliffe ran an anti-Trump campaign instead of focusing on real issues; or because the woke left wants to teach white kindergarteners that they are the subhuman spawn of Yakub.
We live in a country with a two-party system, an unusually conservative political culture, and a vast rightwing infotainment complex. In this context, Republicans’ public support can’t fall that far. When Democrats are in power, the GOP will remain the only vessel for nonpartisan voters to register their discontent. Meanwhile, in a country with our racial history and urban-rural divisions, grounds for culture war will never be hard to find, and the market for rightwing revanchism will always be sizable. The political universe is not a just one. Karma is no protection against the GOP. And neither are demographics. There is no alternative to ordinary politics.
If the Democratic Party were not already staring down massive, structural disadvantages, then Youngkin’s win Tuesday would not be all that ominous. Economic and public health conditions are likely to improve between now and the 2022 midterms. It’s normal for the in-power party to suffer some embarrassing defeats in off-year elections. And it’s normal for solidly blue states to elect Republican governors.
But Democrats need for things to be not normal. And, contrary to the party’s Trump-era mantra, America’s electoral dynamics still are.
https://apple.news/Ac-bOaZbPRyilRmXdp55QWw
====================
“…in the aftermath of Tuesday’s results, the pressure to pass any kind of infrastructure and social spending plans will intensify, as Democrats fear a repeat blowout in the midterms next year. The resulting drift of the party is not likely to go to the left, but to the two centrist senators in the middle of those negotiations. As one strategist put it in a text message late Tuesday, “Tonight really empowers Manchin and Sinema.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/03/election-night-takeaways-518914
====================
Bretz said if a political party tried to make this happen it would have never passed the smell test. “It has to come from the ground up.” Adding that he dislikes the “F–k Joe Biden” chants, he said, “this is a funny way for people to not just take a jab at the president without being vulgar, but also the reporter, and the press by default, for clearly not repeating what that crowd was saying.”
Youngstown State University political science professor Paul Sracic, an expert on political movements and populism, agrees. “‘Let’s Go Brandon’ isn’t just about Biden,” Sracic said. “This is people also criticizing the press, a sub-tweet if you will, because ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ was done by a reporter rephrasing what was actually being said by the crowd.”
“So they’re also making fun of the mainstream media on this and their inaccuracy and spin that they’re putting on things. ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ is sort of a double message; they don’t like Biden, but they also don’t like the media,” he said.
Meanwhile, the national media overreacts to movements like “Let’s Go Brandon” — or simply underestimates them — because reporters don’t understand conservatives or their ideology.
“It is not their world. Let’s face it, most of the media comes from the same place or lives in the same part of the country, goes to the same in schools, goes through the same journalism programs, hangs out with the same people,” Sracic said. “So, of course, this doesn’t make any sense to them. It’s not within their frame or their worldview.”
And because the media doesn’t understand these small movements, they also miss the bigger signs pointing to a huge political shift — like when a billionaire from Queens wins a presidential race in a historic upset. And, very likely, a midterm election next year that could be very surprising.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/02/how-lets-go-brandon-became-a-swipe-at-joe-biden-and-national-media/
====================
SB8’s success does not depend on people winning anti-abortion lawsuits or even filing them. The mere threat of expensive, unending litigation has been enough to dramatically curtail abortion access in Texas, where the number of abortions performed in September was down 50 percent from the same month in 2020.
That reality explains why the Firearms Policy Coalition, which has no particular interest in defending abortion rights, filed a Supreme Court brief in support of allowing pre-enforcement challenges to SB8. “Laws that deter or chill the exercise of constitutional rights violate those rights,” it said, warning that state legislators could use similar laws to undermine Second Amendment rights, religious liberty and freedom of speech.
That fear was echoed by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who are hardly fans of Roe v. Wade. If anyone who “sells an AR-15” or “declines to provide a good or service for use in a same-sex marriage” were “liable for a million dollars to any citizen,” Kavanaugh wondered, would federal courts still be powerless to intervene before such lawsuits make their way through state courts?
Stone conceded that his argument against blocking enforcement of SB8 did not hinge on the nature of the constitutional right or the size of the bounty. Although he gets points for consistency, this invitation to privatized oppression should give pause to all Americans, no matter how they feel about abortion.
====================
“[Th]e left — which used to represent the interests of the outsiders, the disadvantaged — is in almost total control of the institutions of the establishment...like masters through most of history — from tribal chiefs to Roman patricians, absolutist monarchs and totalitarian tyrants — their superiority is such that the rules they make don’t apply to them. They apply only to you, the unenlightened. When they lecture on the need for sacrifice to fight COVID or climate change, don’t think they’re talking about themselves. In the newspeak of progressive sanctimony, pronouns are different. . . . ‘We’ means you.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/privileged-progressives-climate-change-glasgow-cop26-racism-woke-esg-energy-crisis-11635775857?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
====================
“In 2015, while still employed by Fox, Kristen Powers had written a book called “The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.” But in the intervening years, she repented. “I was too dismissive of real concerns by traumatized people and groups who feel marginalized and ignored,” she wrote in a mea culpa in her USA Today column.
Newly reformed, Powers was able to take to CNN and join a panel to discuss how racist every white person in America is, especially anyone who voted for Trump (there was a bit of slippage between those two contradictory positions). …
“When people hear ‘privilege,’ they think that means I’m, like, a Richie Rich, and I’m living a rich life. That’s not what it means,” Powers patiently explained later in [a] CNN segment, without any apparent irony. “It just means you have a privilege that people of color don’t have.””
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/how-journalism-abandoned-the-working
====================
“If the voting public is going to reward they party in power, voters need to feel secure, respected, and satisfied that their prospects for success and prosperity are not artificially circumscribed by government. When they don’t feel that way, they will punish the party that’s responsible. That is the lesson of 2021. It’s not hard to comprehend. Whether Democrats will get the message, however, remains to be seen.”
https://www.commentary.org/noah-rothman/this-isnt-hard-to-understand/
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“Kinda looks like Joe Biden and pals hate ordinary Americans. This week the country is saying, “Right back at ya, gramps.””
https://nypost.com/2021/11/03/voters-chant-lets-go-brandon-in-biden-snubbing-election/
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"Keep on lying. See how real the things get at the ballot box."
https://nypost.com/2021/11/03/gaslighting-media-only-dig-democrats-deeper/
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“Thursday, Manchin angered the Twitterati when he said in a CNN interview with CNN that “this is not a center-left or a left country. We are a center — if anything — center-right country.” He will again take arrows for issuing a mostly true statement that the far-left flank of his party doesn’t want to believe — they can’t see the reality he describes on Instagram or at the Met Gala, so it must not be real.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-manchin-kyrsten-sinema-cassandras-senate/
====================
“So for those keeping track at home, we’ve gone from “critical race theory should be taught in schools” to “critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools” to “critical race theory isn’t real.” Not only is Wallace’s comment patently false, it was contradicted by none other than Terry McAuliffe himself. Back when he was governor, his Virginia Department of Education website declared that teachers should “embrace Critical Race Theory” in order to “re-engineer attitudes and belief systems.””
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/im-racist-youre-racist-msnbc-youngkin/
====================
Crucially, Mayor-elect Eric Adams has given every sign he’ll veto the move, rightly saying the answer is more G&T, not less. Yet the DOE is moving ahead with its version of “outreach,” which consists of Zoom meetings where parents can’t get a word in as ideologues simply lecture.
In at least one “meeting,” pro-G&T parents found they literally couldn’t speak, as the DOE disabled their chat function.
Lecturing parents under the pretext of listening to them so you can push a disastrous progressive “reform” that isn’t going to happen is an insulting waste of everyone’s time and money: What a perfect parting reminder of everything New York has come to despise about this mayor.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/bill-de-blasios-parting-orwellian-insult-to-nyc-parents/
====================
“Jamal Khashoggi lived a compartmentalized life that surfaced after his death. At the time of his killing, he was romantically involved with two women, neither of whom was aware of the other.
“The journalist had gone to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get a document declaring he was divorced as required by Turkish law since he planned to marry a Turkish citizen, scholar Hatice Cengiz. Cengiz, 38, has been a prominent and effective spokeswoman for the murdered journalist. She is well-known on Capitol Hill, where she has urged lawmakers to pressure Saudi Arabia to free its political prisoners and respect human rights.
“While Cengiz was invited to the 2020 State of the Union address by Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) and thanked publicly in televised meetings with the leaders of The Washington Post and others, Elatr has been forced to keep a low profile both for her own safety and because her claims of marriage are viewed skeptically by some of Khashoggi’s associates, who had never heard of her.”
====================
“Google and Wikipedia in the past were far more accurate about these terms and their Marxist roots — back before the terms became hyper-politicized and intrepid progressives started redefining them in a way to vilify conservatives and protect their own ideologues…[now,] if you search the words “Marx” or “Marxism” in the text of the Wikipedia entry for critical race theory, they do not appear even once. They’ve been scrubbed.
“You will find, however, a crucial reference at the very bottom of the page in the box on “Origins.” There, it states succinctly: “Critical Theory: Origins: Frankfurt School, Freudo-Marxism.”
“That’s it, precisely. Those are the foundational roots of critical race theory. Critical race theory, as one must cobble together from the Wikipedia page, “is grounded in critical theory,” and critical theory’s origins are the Frankfurt School and its infamous Freudian-Marxism.
“Case closed. That’s what you need to know. It should be in the lead paragraph, but the scrubbers scrubbed it, though they evidently missed the box at the end.
“Get a screenshot of the box, before some hyperventilating liberal deletes it.”
https://spectator.org/marxism-and-critical-race-theory/
====================
“It’s a scandal that not a single person at MSNBC, where hundreds of segments are dedicated to “educating” viewers on racist dog whistles and other problematic rhetoric, has the backbone to say publicly that Reid's programming is way out of line. No one at MSNBC, which is all-too-eager to accuse everyone else of racism, can spare a word for the insane woman down the hall who has been caught lying and keeps promoting racist demagoguery on her prime-time show…You want to talk about cowardice, Chris Hayes? Maybe look no further than your own break room.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/when-will-chris-hayes-confront-msnbcs-vile-racism-toward-winsome-sears
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“Going along with transgender ideology is the “nice” thing to do. It’s “unkind” to insist that biological sex matters. And yet, strangely, hounding a very capable and liberally minded professor out of her university workplace just because she has a different view is somehow perfectly acceptable.”
https://twitter.com/BBCWomansHour/status/1455838464801394688?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1455838464801394688%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nationalreview.com%2Fcorner%2Ftrans-activists-dont-play-nice%2F
====================
