A shocking new report alleges that not only is Fox News headquarters woke and radically pro trans ideology, but that producers had been warned to avoid criticism of Dylan Mulvaney.
A producer for Tucker Carlson Tonight told Daily Signal that “When trans-identifying TikTok star Mulvaney was first gaining prominence last year, producers for ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ had to fight to be able to refer to Mulvaney with male pronouns in the show’s chyrons.”
A source confirmed the directive to The Post Millennial, saying “The mandate is to ‘not be spicy.’”
Mulvaney, a trans TikToker who embarked on a public gender transition journey via short videos called “365 Days of Girlhood,” refers to women’s vaginas as “Barbie pouches,” and did an early segment on how great it is to be a “bimbo.”
The star, who also said it’s time to “normalize the bulge,” and that “some women have bulges,” referring to the bump in Mulvaney’s pleather shorts, brought Bud Light, along with the profits of parent company Anheuser-Busch, to its knees after a marketing affiliation between product and influencer went sideways.
Beyond Mulvaney, it turns out Fox is obsessed with its pro-LGBTQ score doled out by trans lobbyist not-for-profit the Human Rights Campaign, which went hard trans after the legalization of gay marriage in 2015. Fox touts that score in employee trainings, gives employees the option to use preferred pronouns and to transition at work, making others comply with the new speech requirements that come with it.
Women’s bathrooms at Fox are open to men who identify as women, as the handbook reads that employees “may access the restroom corresponding to their gender identity.” They also help employees come up with a workplace “gender transition plan,” according to a 2021 company handbook shared with The Daily Signal.
Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox, and his wildly successful show, on April 24. It was a sudden move and one that left the prime time news spot in flux. Carlson has since said he would continue his show on alternative platforms, such as Twitter.
At one time, Fox News at least aimed toward the middle. Now it seems intent on supporting as much left-wing lunacy as the other three-letter propaganda agencies.
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Fox News ratings fall off a cliff after Tucker Carlson‘s departure
Fox News’ ratings for primetime slots among key demographics of cable television viewers have declined sharply since the departure of Tucker Carlson, with the latest figures showing rival MSNBC overtaking the conservative juggernaut.
Cable news ratings show that in the two weeks since the host was fired, figures for Carlson’s former spot have dropped by around 50 percent, while the network’s audience among 25- to 54-year-olds had shrunk by two thirds.
The previously successful news presenter left the network after it settled a defamation casebrought against it by Dominion Voting Systems over claims by Trump allies that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, Fox News announced on April 24. In a statement, it said the two parties had “agreed to part ways” and thanked Carlson for “his service to the network.”
Carlson has said little about his departure as yet. According to a report by news website Axios on Sunday, his team is “preparing for war.” His lawyer, Bryan Freedman, told the outlet: “The idea that anyone is going to silence Tucker and prevent him from speaking to his audience is beyond preposterous.”
In addition to losing Tucker, it will be interesting to see how long the Christian voices on Fox remain or start to be silenced
For Monday through Friday, I don’t consume much daytime television. I work during those hours. However, as I edit drawings for use in manuals and complete other tasks not centered on writing, I do listen to the audio of Rumble and YouTube videos and podcasts. Due to that, I run across the words of Harris Faulkner, Shannon Bream, and Kayleigh McEnany. Therefore, I do know that those three (and, I think, several others) have authored Christian books and taken stands on air.
It will be interesting to see the degree to which these voices get allowed to speak from this piont on.
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At Target
Target facing boycott over Pride collection with Satan-loving designer
Target is facing a consumer boycott over its Pride Month collection which features transgender swimsuits for children, books called ‘bye bye binary’ and a handful of items made by a British designer whose slogans include ‘Satan respects pronouns.’
While there were some initial grumbles about the ‘tuck-friendly’ swimsuits in the women’s section, much of the expansive collection of clothes, books and home décor has gone unnoticed.
But attention – and outrage – has now turned to one of the designers whose works are showcased, and his apparent penchant for the satanic.
Eric Carnell is the British designer behind Abprallen, an LGBTQ brand that sells t-shirts, sweaters, bags and badges.
Target is selling two of the brand’s items – a $25 slogan sweater with the words ‘cure transphobia not trans people’ wrapped around a sword, an $18 ‘too queer for here’ tote bag, and a ‘we belong everywhere’ fanny pack that now appears to be sold out.
Eric – a transgender man – proudly shared photos of the collaboration on Instagram.
‘These have already got the transphobes infuriated with me and I feel like quite the celebrity to think that they believe this is all some big conspiracy and I have any power to brainwash anyone when I’m just some guy drawing pictures!’ he said.
A closer look at his other work reveals some more sinister material.
Badges with slogans like ‘Satan Respects Pronouns’, ‘Young, Queer and Willing’ and a lighter pin with the words ‘burn down the cis-tem’ are among other products.
To my knowledge, Target has never caved to the first boycott based on their allowing anyone who “feels like a woman” into the woman’s changing areas.
Maybe a number of Christians have been cowed into submitting to the LGBTQ+ agenda. Maybe they have not seen the need to protect children from exploitation.
If that is the case, have those Christians looked at the labels at Target?
Why is “tuck-friendly construction” needed except to hide the fact that clothes made for a boy are being worn by a girl? Why is “extra crotch area” needed except to allow a boy to wear clothes made for a girl?
Calls to boycott Target have spread on social media after the retailer released another line of LGBT clothing for kids, including for newborn children.
According to Target’s website, it recently released its so-called “Pride Collection” for 2023, including onesies for infants that feature pro-LGBT content coming in sizes of zero to three months. One onesie includes the text “Bein Proud,” while another features what appear to be LGBT rainbows and hearts along with the transgender flag colors.
The Minneapolis-based retailer is also selling child LGBT books, including “Bye-bye Binary” and “What Are Your Words,” which tells kids how to use transgender pronouns. Some products for kids also appear to feature drag queens, according to products sold on the company’s website.
Broadcaster Megyn Kelly wrote this week that “we don’t need our kids seeing this [expletive] when we walk down the aisle at Target,” while Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren added that “Target has gone full woke and it’s repugnant.”
Conservative commentator Candace Owens was more explicit in her criticism and suggested a boycott of the retailer.
“I cannot state enough how important is for people to choose not to shop at target. There has never been a company that has been more pro-transgenderism than Target,” she wrote. Meanwhile, another conservative commentator, Steven Crowder, simply wrote: “Boycott Target.”
The “Bein Proud” onsie for infants as young as 0-3 months sold via Target’s website. (Target.com screenshot via The Epoch Times)
And more controversially, Target is allegedly selling so-called “tuck-friendly” swimwear for children, according to videos posted online from inside a Target location. “Did you know @Target also sells ‘tuck-friendly’ bathing suits for children in the Pride section? Well now you do,” reads one social media post.
A spokesperson for Target told The Associated Press that the “tuck-friendly” swimsuits are only offered for adults and the children’s line of clothing doesn’t feature that label. “The ‘tuck-friendly’ swim suits are for adults only,” the spokesperson told the newswire service.
But in response to the controversy, Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh wrote that “what Target is doing is far worse than anything Bud Light did,” referring to the controversy and boycott of Bud Light after it produced a can with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s face on it. “They are selling chest binders and ‘tuck-friendly’ bathing suits for children,” he added.
Obviously, the gay-themed onsies for newborns are directed at ultra-liberal new parents who want to proclaim their allegiance to the gay agenda
Clothes for babies and toddlers with messages on those clothes are really only proclamations by the parents. Just as no one-year-old has expressed an interest in some football team or college, not one of them has debated for the queer cause.
However, when it comes to Target selling “tuck-friendly” clothing for children or “binding” for young girls, then that seems to point to an effort of grooming on the part of forces aligned with Target.
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Target to pull some LGBT-themed merchandise after customer backlash
Target said Tuesday it would remove some products related to Pride Month from stores after a backlash from customers caused employees to feel unsafe, becoming the latest company to get drawn into the U.S. culture wars.
Times that there have been offenses against the Left, the announcement has been “store shelves have been cleared overnight”
If Target really has committed to divorcing itself from this attempt to let the LGBTQ+ forces use their shelves to groom our children, then why the slow-motion removal of LGBT-themed merchandise? Is it merely a shuffling of products to stores situated in gay-friendly communities?
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After sowing the wind, Target never expected to reap the whirlwind
“Violent incidents are increasing,” Target CEO says.
Target CEO Brian Cornell offered a sobering warning to investors during the company’s post-earnings conference call on Wednesday.
“The unfortunate fact is violent incidents are increasing at our stores and across the entire retail industry,” Cornell said. “Beyond safety concerns, worsening shrink rates are putting significant pressure on our financial results.”
If you plant a row of corn seeds, you don’t wake up several weeks later with apple trees.
As Galatians 6:7-10 reminds us, we get what we put out there. If we plant lawlessness (as in ignoring condemnation of homosexuality, effemininity, and other sexual sin), then we cannot expect to gather a harvest of lawfulness (as in not having your stores experience stealing). Additionally, planting one seed usually doesn’t result in getting one seed back. If you plant a corn seed (and who just plants one?), you usually get at least five cobs of corn per plant (and each cob holds up to 200 seeds).
Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life. Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary. So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, and especially to those who are of the household of the faith. (Galatians 6:7-10 NASB)
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Target told Christians to butt out when it came to morals. Now they complain about the immoral behavior of those who frequent their stores
Target expects profits to take $1.3 billion hit from “theft and organized crime”
The New York Post outlines a case study in idiocy when it comes to picking a market to base a business upon. You see, Target chose to drive away customers with morals that prohibited cross-dressing and homosexuality. Nonetheless, Target somehow expected their remaining customers to retain morals like “do not steal.” Looks like Target missed its target.
Crime-battered retail giant Target said it expects to suffer as much as a $1.3 billion hit to its bottom line because of “theft and organized crime,” according to the company’s first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday.
The Minneapolis-based chain said its profit will be squeezed by “$500 million more than what we saw last year” – when the company lost as much as $800 million from “inventory shrink.”
“While there are many potential sources of inventory shrink, theft and organized retail crime are increasingly important drivers of the issue,” the company said. “We are making significant investments in strategies to prevent this from happening in our stores.”
Inventory shrink is an industry term that refers to fewer products being on its shelves than what’s reported in its inventory catalog.
“We are working with legislators, law enforcement and retail industry partners to advocate for public policy solutions to combat theft and organized retail crime,” a company spokesperson told The Post on Wednesday.
Despite the rampant shoplifting, Target recorded a 0.5% growth in sales — which it attributed to new locations — and a nearly 1% growth in traffic, the earnings report said.
Rather than working with lawmakers (since I think stealing is already illegal), why doesn’t Target try an alliance based on Biblical standards?
Since I am fairly sure that stealing ranks as one of the most common illegal activities (maybe just behind crossing the border illegally) and people obviously do it frequently at Target, why don’t they try another tack?
Why not completely drop the immoral clothing (and, yes, there are t-shirts with naked women and transitioning men on them)? Why not then create alliances with local churches to support traditional values like the value of mothers and fathers who direct their children?
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At Budweiser
Anheuser-Busch has lost a staggering $15.7 BILLION in value since Bud Light controversy began
Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch has seen its market value plunge $15.7billion since the disastrous campaign with transgender-influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Since April 1, the company has consistently been dropping down the rankings, with experts saying it ‘just keeps getting a little worse each week’.
But their competitors have added $3.2billion in market value to their brands in the same time.
Molson Coors, which owns Coors Lite, has seen an increase of $2.2billion market value, around 20 percent, while Heineken has a spike of $1billion – an increase of 1.7 percent.
Sales of Bud Light are down more than 23 percent as of the week ending May 6, according to JPMorgan beverage analyst Jared Dinges.
He said the bank expects a 12 to 13 percent volume decline over the course of a year in the US.
‘We believe there is a subset of American consumers who will not drink a Bud Light for the foreseeable future,’ the analysts said on Tuesday.
He added: ‘Shares have underperformed EU Beer peers by 15% since the start of April.
‘We believe this is due to U.S. uncertainty, as investor focus has shifted squarely to the potential impact from the Bud Light controversy.’
The expected decline in earnings, before interest and tax, will follow a 12 percent drop in volume and a 10 percent decline in sales.
In the company’s latest attempts to deal with the backlash, Anheuser-Busch has told wholesalers it will buy back unsold cases of Bud Light that are past their expiration date.
Obviously a portion of the beer-drinking public has tired of the liberal/progressive indoctrination that has come to the forefront of a lot of advertising
Since the Bud Light fiasco has been going on for over a month, it seems that beer-drinking America has informed Bud Light and the rest of progressive, corporate America of something: consumers in America don’t like to be the subject of un-invited preaching. If we don’t run in the trans crowd, we don’t like having it waved in our faces.
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LGBTQ group slashes Anheuser-Busch’s “perfect rating” after AB backtracks on the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light controversy
The hits keep on coming for Anheuser-Busch after the largest LGBTQ advocacy group told the Belgian beer giant on Thursday that they will be stripping the company of its former “perfect rating” after they decided to back peddle following the Bud Light controversy with Dylan Mulvaney.
USA Today reports that the Human Rights Campaign, which rates companies based on their policies towards the LGBTQ community through a Corporate Equality Index (CEI), told Anheuser-Busch that they will be losing their 100 percent perfect score, according to a leaked letter that the outlet obtained.
“Anheuser-Busch had a key moment to really stand up and demonstrate the importance of their values of diversity, equity and inclusion and their response really fell short,” Human Rights Campaign senior director Eric Bloem told the outlet.
Anheuser-Busch was previously listed on the website under “Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality” after being issued a perfect score in the categories that include protections from workplace discrimination, inclusive benefits, corporate social responsibility and responsible citizenship.
While HRC did not inform them of what their new rating will be, the group told the beer giant that they have 90 days to respond, according to the outlet.
On Friday, HRC updated its website which displays a “points deducted” notice on Anheuser-Busch’s page.
An Anheuser-Busch representative told the outlet, “Our ERGs (employee resource groups) are intended to be a safe space for those who identify with a given community and those who wish to be allies.”
Maybe, just maybe, AB might now see the problem of marketing for the 2% when you want sales from the 98%
We will see how much pull the Human Rights Campaign continues to have once the entire Bud Light episode completes. So far, we are only in the first month or so of it.
I don’t know about you, but I have never consulted the Human Rights Campaign before buying anything.
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With the Los Angeles Dodgers
Dodgers’ latest reversal on anti-Catholic group’s invite to Pride Night draws backlash
The Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday decided to invite the Sisters of Indulgence back to their Pride Night event next month after initially removing the left wing group of so-called “trans nuns” from their honoree list.
“After much thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities, honest conversations within the Los Angeles Dodgers organization and generous discussions with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the Los Angeles Dodgers would like to offer our sincerest apologies to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, members of the LGBTQ+ community and their friends and families,” the organization said.
“We have asked the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to take their place on the field at our 10th annual LGBTQ+ Pride Night on June 16th. We are pleased to share that they have agreed to receive the gratitude of our collective communities for the lifesaving work that they have done tirelessly for decades.
“In the weeks ahead, we will continue to work with our LGBTQ+ partners to better educate ourselves, find ways to strengthen the ties that bind and use our platform to support all of our fans who make up the diversity of the Dodgers family.”
The MLB team announced that it would be honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a group of “queer and trans nuns,” during a June 16 event, but quickly received backlash from religious groups for the decision given the history of anti-Catholic messaging and shocking performances.
The team said last week it would no longer be honoring the group during the upcoming LGBTQ event.
“Given the strong feelings of people who have been offended by the sisters’ inclusion in our evening, and in an effort not to distract from the great benefits that we’ve seen over the years of Pride Night, we are deciding to remove them from this year’s group of honorees,” the Dodgers said Wednesday.
The next day, LA Pride announced it would no longer be participating in the event.
The Dodgers received backlash from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and religious advocacy group CatholicVote for allowing the group to participate in its festivities.
The Dodgers’ decisions on the anti-Catholic group come amid a trend of well-known companies being called out for sponsoring individuals with controversial viewpoints and lifestyles.
(Read more at Fox News if you need a review of April-May 2023)
This is not just anti-Catholic. You cannot have someone stomp on the toe of the body of Christ and not feel it throughout.
Doctrinal differences aside: they worship Christ and depend on His sacrifice for their salvation. That makes them Christian. Therefore, to have a group denegrate my brothers and sisters like this will not go overlooked.
Bye, Major League Baseball. When you have cleaned up your association, maybe I might visit again.
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Now for the Big Guy and sniffer of little girl’s hair
First day in office, Biden lifts transgender military ban
President Joe Biden signed an executive order to repeal a Trump-era ban on most transgender Americans joining the military on Monday alongside Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.
“This is reinstating a position that the previous commanders and, as well as the secretaries, have supported. And what I’m doing is enabling all qualified Americans to serve their country in uniform,” Biden said, speaking from the Oval Office just before signing the executive order.
President Donald Trump’s ban has been rebuked by the Democrat-led House of Representatives and condemned by LGBTQ activists as discriminatory. Austin voiced his support for overturning the ban in his Senate confirmation hearing last week.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that cases in which transgender service members were discharged from the military because of their gender identity would be reexamined.
“No one will be separated or discharged from the military or denied reenlistment on the basis of gender identity, and for those transgender service members who were discharged or separated because of gender identity, their cases will be reexamined,” Psaki said during a White House briefing.
“President Biden believes gender identity should not be a bar to military service and that America’s strength is found in its diversity,” Psaki said. “America is stronger around the world when it is inclusive.”
The federal Department of Education concluded an investigation into a Georgia school district Friday, arguing that the removal of several books containing pornographic material “created a hostile environment” for LGBTQ and nonwhite authors and readers, according to a letter.
The DOE’s Office of Civil Rights launched an investigation into the Forsyth County School District after a complaint was made by an individual, whose identity has not been released, that the district had purposefully gotten rid of books about the LGBTQ community in January 2022, according to The Washington Post.
The department sent a letter to the school district’s superintendent, Dr. Jeff Bearden, on Friday that its investigation had concluded the district was attempting to remove books with “diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white.”
“Indeed, one student commented at a district school board meeting about the school environment becoming more harsh in the aftermath of the book removals and his fear about going to school, and evidence OCR (the Office of Civil Rights) reviewed to date reflects other students expressing similar views,” the letter read.
“District witnesses reported to OCR that the district has not taken steps to address with students the impact of the book removals. In light of these communications and actions, OCR is concerned a hostile environment may have arisen that the district needed to ameliorate.”
The district had removed eight books after multiple parents complained about the content matter being too pornographic for children, according to The Washington Post. One mother was initially banned from board meetings after trying to read out loud a scene from “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” by Jonathan Safran Foer, that describes how to give oral sex.
“All Boys Aren’t Blue” by George Johnson follows the story of a black boy growing up and learning about different sexual experiences. It goes on to describe several graphic sexual situations, including two boys performing oral sex on each other.
Another book removed by the district was “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, about an 11-year-old African American girl who enters puberty in the 1940s, because of its “heavy sexual content,” according to a review from Squeaky Clean Reviews.
“Sexual content includes but is not limited to incest, pedophilia, a graphic description of one married woman’s distaste for intercourse with her husband, an odd description of the same woman’s affinity for masturbating with a pet in her lap, and a graphic flashback in which Pauline recalls when intercourse with her husband was pleasurable,” the review read.
The book was one of several that President Joe Biden defended in a video announcing his reelection campaign in April, in which he called out “MAGA extremists” for banning certain books from the classroom due to pornographic material.
Newsmax, the niche conservative news channel that has long played David to Fox News’s Goliath, has seized on Tucker Carlson’s shock dismissal from its rival network and declared itself the true TV home for right-wing Americans.
So far, the strategy is showing some promise.
Viewership of Newsmax remains far below that of Fox News. But its audience at certain hours has doubled, and in some time slots tripled, in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Carlson’s exit — an abrupt spike that has turned heads in conservative circles and the cable news industry.
On Monday evening, Eric Bolling’s 8 p.m. Newsmax program drew 531,000 viewers, according to Nielsen. One week earlier, it had 146,000. On Tuesday, Mr. Bolling’s audience grew to 562,000 viewers, equal to about 80 percent of Anderson Cooper’s CNN viewership that evening. Newsmax’s other prime-time shows also experienced big jumps.
The sharp rise in viewership can be timed almost to the minute of Fox News’s announcement on Monday that it was parting ways with Mr. Carlson, in part because of private messages sent by the anchor that included offensive and crude remarks.
Executives at Newsmax quickly sensed an opportunity.
Starting on Monday, Newsmax programming has aggressively pushed a narrative that Mr. Carlson’s dismissal was a capitulation to the left by Fox News and the Murdoch family.
One pundit mused on the air that Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of the Fox Corporation, was “much more liberal” than his father, Rupert. Andrew Napolitano, a Newsmax pundit who was fired by Fox News in 2021 over a harassment allegation, said Fox News dismissing its top-rated anchor “is like the 1927 Yankees firing Babe Ruth for his table manners — I don’t get it.”
Anchors and guests harped on a recent appearance by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, in which she called for Mr. Tucker’s firing. “A.O.C. speaks, and now Fox listens,” grumbled the Newsmax anchor Chris Salcedo. “These really are end times.”
(continued)
At the time, Newsmax saw a burst in viewership, even recording higher ratings than the Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum one evening in December 2020. (Ms. MacCallum was switched to a different time slot not long afterward.) But its audience eventually shrank. And despite Mr. Trump’s complaints, Fox News continued as the undisputed ratings king of cable news, powered in part by Mr. Carlson’s increasingly provocative program.
The Tucker viewers will not go to CNN, no matter how much the Times wishes
No matter how much body english the Times applies to its words, they will not be able to bamboozle conservatives by twisting the facts. First off, any conservative reading the Times is doing it with an eye not to be fooled. They know the constant Marxist diatribe to be expected from the Times. Second, in sheer numbers, those numbers of conservatives reading the Times are small.
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Now we know how much more Tucker knows his brand than Fox
One thing is for sure: Tucker Carlson understands branding. Whether you like him or not, the conservative firebrand knows his brand and appreciates all its benefits.
His departure from the “fair and balanced” network — FNC, has prognosticators speculating on what happened, leading to the news of why he left the Fox News Channel.
Some have identified his moving on from being one of the casualties of the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit, where Fox had to pay over a half-billion dollars in damages, to speculation there were additional lawsuits that Carlson was involved in, to the simple old idea, that Rupert Murdoch didn’t like Tucker.
It is no secret that the news business is a personality industry replete with egos that can turn a career faster than a speeding bullet or, for that matter, a news cycle.
There is also the theory that Mr. Murdoch was over Carlson’s prima-donna antics. His airing of additional January 6 footage challenged the Democrat’s insurrection theory, his anti-Ukraine anti-war position, and his many other nonconventional opinions that only reinforced his brand to his countless and loyal audience.
This series of events didn’t wear well with the elder Murdoch and led to the parting of ways between these grand brands.
If Tucker understands his brand, what can be said about the Fox News Channel? It doesn’t say a lot. From a branding perspective, Fox has lost sight of its brand and appeal to its loyal audience over the years.
I do hope that Tucker enjoys greater success, at least for the short term, than Fox.
Additionally, there is the input of Victor Davis Hanson
To get the outside perspecitive of the Telegraph, here is a long-format interview of Victor Davis Hanson by the Telegraph on the firing of Tucker Carlson.
If you are ready to see the Tucker Carlson that you have missed, follow these instructions
First, pull your phone out (or whatever you use to send and receive text messages).
Text tucker to 44055. Upon sending that text, you will receive a response asking for your email address. Send that.
Once that is complete, go to TuckerCarlson.com for a link of the video of the last show broadcast on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Also available shows from 19 and 20 April 2023 and three videos labeled Tucker Carlson Originals.
Fox News Bleeding: $500M Drop in Market Cap, $77M Advertising Revenue in Jeopardy | Facts Matter
Two days ago, in a truly shocking move, Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News or, as the official statement claims, “Tucker Carlson and Fox News have agreed to part ways.”
Now, to anyone that was actually paying attention to the media landscape over the last several years, this was indeed a shocking development because Tucker’s show was far and above the most popular program over on Fox. Actually, it was one if not the most popular news progam across all of cable tv.
For instance, if you (bringing up the 24 April 2023 edition of TV Newser) look at the ratings on the very weke that Tucker was canned — well (showing Tucker with 270 as opposed to Cooper with 94 and Hayes with 133), you’ll see that in terms of viewership, he was blowing CNN and MSNBC completely out of the water. That’s (of course) not even mentioning ABC, CBS, and all of the different networks.Furthermore, financially, this is going to hurt Fox News quite a bit, because not is only the Tucker show bringing in a cool $77.5 million in advertising per year — but also, right after his departure was announced Fox‘s share price just tanked. Within a matter of hours, they lost close to a billion worth of market value. Eventually, it did bounce back a little bit, but as of this recording, it was still down about $0.5 billion.
Furthermore, you may not know this, but Fox News has a subscription platform called “Fox Nation.” And, while the number of Fox Nation subscribers isn’t publically known, what is publicly known is that (right after Tucker was gien the boot) the hashtag: #CancelFoxNation trended on Twitter.
(For the abbreviated version, read the red text below. For the “War and Peace” version, read to the next Heading 2. For the extreme intellectual masochists, comment below and maybe I can have a buddy quote some Tolstoy in Russian.)
Critical Race Theory (CRT) makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life—and do so with a degree of persistence that has helped CRT impact all of American life. CRT underpins identity politics, an ongoing effort to reimagine the United States as a nation riven by groups, each with specific claims on victimization. In entertainment, as well as the education and workforce sectors of society, CRT is well-established, driving decision-making according to skin color—not individual value and talent. As Critical Theory ideas become more familiar to the viewing public in everyday life, CRT’s intolerance becomes “normalized,” along with the idea of systemic racism for Americans, weakening public and private bonds that create trust and allow for civic engagement.
As its name should make abundantly clear, Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the child of Critical Theory (CT), or, to be more precise, its grandchild. Critical Theory is the immediate forebearer of Critical Legal Theory (CLT), and CLT begat CRT. As we discuss in this Backgrounder, however, there are strong thematic components linking CT, CLT, and CRT. Among these are:
The Marxist analysis of society made up of categories of oppressors and oppressed;
An unhealthy dollop of Nietzschean relativism, which means that language does not accord to an objective reality, but is the mere instrument of power dynamics;
The idea that the oppressed impede revolution when they adhere to the cultural beliefs of their oppressors—and must be put through re-education sessions;
The concomitant need to dismantle all societal norms through relentless criticism; and
The replacement of all systems of power and even the descriptions of those systems with a worldview that describes only oppressors and the oppressed.
Far from being merely esoteric academic exercises, these philosophies have real-life consequences.
CRT scholars likely cite CLT, not CT, as their genesis: “Critical race theory builds on the insights of two previous movements, critical legal studies and radical feminism,” wrote one of architects of CRT, Richard Delgado, with his wife, Jean Stefancic, in perhaps the most widely read primer on CRT, Critical Race Theory, An Introduction.1
Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2017), p. 5.
Angela P. Harris—also a major early figure of CRT—agrees, though she attributes co-parentage to a different source. She said:
For me, Critical Race Theory (CRT) began in July of 1989, at the First Annual Workshop of Critical Race Theory at St. Benedict’s Center, Madison, Wisconsin. CRT looked like a promise: a theory that would link the methods of Critical Legal Studies [CLS] with the political commitments of “traditional civil rights scholarship” in a way that would revitalize scholarship on race and correct the deconstructive excesses of CLS.2
Angela P. Harris, “Foreword: The Jurisprudence of Reconstruction,” California Law Review, Vol. 82, No. 4. (July 1994), p. 741, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3480931?seq=1 (accessed December 3, 2020).
This strong political commitment is at the core of CRT. Americans should defend civil rights, and we should actively work to eliminate racism in the U.S. and anywhere it exists—but as we document in this Backgrounder, these noble aims are not the stated intentions of CRT’s founders. Harvard academic Derrick A. Bell, the recognized godfather of the CRT movement, does not mince words in one of the essays laying out the radical aims of the theory: “As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins with the radical assessment of it.”3
Critical Race Theory shares these goals with both Critical Theory and Critical Legal Theory (or Critical Legal Studies).
This report offers the following:
Gives a synopsis of these three related disciplines. This includes an explanation of how CRT specifically affects Americans today and a discussion of how CRT’s ideas support the concept of identity politics and blend the ideas of victimization, group identity, and political action together, leading to a divisive civic and political culture.
Explains how the Black Lives Matter organizations built an aggressive political movement on CRT’s racially focused ideas—ideas apologists can use to justify violent riots.
Discusses ways policymakers and educators are integrating CRT into K–12 instruction.
Traces the roots of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 to a school policy dealing with student discipline that is being used by CRT advocates and researchers.
Explains that the free speech crisis on college campuses today is the application of CRT’s and CT’s core tenets.
Discusses CRT’s impact on the workplace and diversity trainings, some of which pressure employees to become activists or to discuss controversial topics in the workplace.
Offers examples of how entertainers—actors, critics, and others—are using CRT’s ideas to influence decision-making in Hollywood.
Provides policy recommendations that are aimed at restoring the concepts of judging people not by the color of their skin but by their conduct and the need to protect liberty so that everyone, regardless of ethnicity or background, has the opportunity to pursue the American Dream.
Critical Theory
The origins of Critical Theory can be traced to the 1937 manifesto of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, colloquially known as the Frankfurt School. One of the first examples of what has come to be called the Western Marxist schools of thought, the Institute modeled itself on the Moscow-based Marx-Engels Institute. Originally, the school’s official name was going to be the Institut fur Marxismus (Institute for Marxism), but, ever desirous of downplaying their Marxist roots, its founders thought it prudent to adopt a less provocative title, according to one of the best histories of the school’s work and of Critical Theory itself, The Dialectical Imagination, by Martin Jay.4
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (New York and Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1977), p. 20.
Critical Theory was, from the start, an unremitting attack on Western institutions and norms in order to tear them down. This attack was aimed only at the West. Even though the manifesto, titled Traditional and Critical Theory, was written at the height of Joseph Stalin’s purges, show trials, and famines, the school “maintained an almost complete official silence about events in the USSR,” according to Jay.5
Ibid.
The manifesto, written by the school’s second director, Max Horkheimer, claimed that traditional theory fetishized knowledge, seeing truth as empirical and universal. Critical theory, on the other hand, “held that man could not be objective and that there are no universal truths.”6
Mike Gonzalez, The Plot to Change America (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), p. 129.
This relativism was inherited from Friedrich Nietzsche and filtered through the dialectics of Georg Friedrich Hegel and his best-known disciple, Karl Marx. The Frankfurt School philosophers believed that “a true epistemology must end the fetish of knowledge as such, which as Nietzsche demonstrated, leads to abstract systematizing,” wrote Jay.7
Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 69.
As for their Marxism, three years earlier, Horkheimer had let his true feelings for the Soviet state be known in a collection of short essays known as Dammerung (in German, both “dawn” and “twilight”). “He who has eyes for the meaningless injustice of the imperialist world, which in no way is to be explained by technical impotence, will regard the events in Russia as the progressive, painful attempt to overcome this injustice,” he wrote.8
Ibid., p. 19.
Critical Theory, and the Frankfurt School in general, were thus a renaissance of Hegelian thought and of the revolutions that had taken place as a result in 1848—repackaged for a now-industrialized Germany. “To trace the origins of Critical Theory to their true source would require an extensive analysis of the intellectual ferment of the 1840s, perhaps the most extraordinary decade in 19th century German intellectual history,” wrote Jay.9
Ibid., p. 41.
He adds, “It can be argued that the Frankfurt School was returning to the concerns of the Left Hegelians of the 1840s. Like that first generation of critical theorists, its members were interested in the integration of philosophy and social analysis.”10
Ibid., p. 42.
Critical Theory and Its Early Applications
In the context of the era, Critical Theory’s demolition of Western traditions and norms was nothing less than a tool to implement the counter-hegemony called for in the Theory of Cultural Hegemony enunciated in the first decades of the 20th Century by Antonio Gramsci. Marx and Friedrich Engels had promised constant revolution by the workers of the world, but by the early 1930s, few had succeeded. The founder of the Italian Communist Party, Gramsci had come to believe that the workers were not revolting and overthrowing the bourgeoisie because they had bought into the belief system of the ruling class—family, nation-state, the capitalist system, and God. What was needed was struggle sessions in which the revolutionary vanguard would teach the workers how to think. But first the norms needed to be torn down. That is where Critical Theory—and, as we will see, all its offshoots—come in.
Horkheimer and the other Frankfurt scholars left Germany to escape the Third Reich, fleeing first to Geneva, then to New York, where Columbia University allowed them to set up camp in 1935 at Teachers’ College. In the United States they developed the same disdain for the American worker that Gramsci had felt for his Italian counterpart. “They insist unwaveringly on the ideology by which they are enslaved,” Horkheimer wrote with another Frankfurt School scholar, Theodor Adorno, about the American worker.11
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, ed., Edmund Jephcott, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 106.
After the defeat of the Nazi regime, Horkheimer, Adorno, and the others were able to return to Germany. But they left behind Horkheimer’s assistant, Herbert Marcuse, who became one of the leading spokesmen of the New Left.
A witness to the upheavals caused by the riots and violence associated with the Civil Rights era and the anti–Vietnam War Movement, Marcuse discovered in them a new agent of change: minorities, of which more categories would need to be created. “Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors,” Marcuse wrote. They would still need to be led ideologically—“their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not”—but the potential to stoke grievances among them was there in a way that did not exist with workers as a category.12
Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), pp. 256–257.
Critical Legal Theory
It is at this point that Critical Legal Theory takes over. Its scholars self-consciously acknowledge their debt to Critical Theory and other Marxist movements that came before the Frankfurt School. “Although CLS has been largely contained within the United States, it was influenced to a great extent by European philosophers, such as Karl Marx, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault,” reads the entry for CLT in the Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute.13
The Cornell entry for Critical Legal Studies explains:
Critical legal studies (CLS) is a theory which states that the law is necessarily intertwined with social issues, particularly stating that the law has inherent social biases. Proponents of CLS believe that the law supports the interests of those who create the law. As such, CLS states that the law supports a power dynamic which favors the historically privileged and disadvantages the historically underprivileged. CLS finds that the wealthy and the powerful use the law as an instrument for oppression in order to maintain their place in hierarchy.14
Ibid.
Then comes the kicker: “Many in the CLS movement want to overturn the hierarchical structures of modern society[,] and they focus on the law as a tool in achieving this goal.”
Just as with Critical Theory, Critical Legal Theory is, then, an instrument to overturn society for those who follow its tenets, this time from a legal perspective. The law, they argue, is simply the cultural hegemony codified in statutes and defended by a jurisprudence that aims to support the powerful against the claims of the marginalized. CLT proponents trace their founding to the first Conference on Critical Legal Studies, held at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1977. Among its main theorists figure Duncan Kennedy, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Robert W. Gordon.15
In a 2002 essay, Kennedy acknowledges the debt Critical Legal Theory owes to both Marxism and post-modernism (championed by a mostly Parisian set of intellectuals who preached that texts could be “deconstructed” by the reader, a complicated philosophical concept that involves reinterpreting words to replace ideas based on objective physical existence), two separate critiques of bourgeois reality that nevertheless can rub uneasily against each other. “Critical legal studies,” he writes, “operates [sic] at the uneasy juncture of two distinct, sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting enterprises, which I will call the left and the modernist/postmodernist projects.”16
“Leftism aims to transform existing social structures on the basis of a critique of their injustice, and, specifically, at the injustices of racist, capitalist patriarchy. The goal is to replace the system, piece by piece or in medium- or large-sized blocs, with a better system,” writes Kennedy.17
Ibid.
Post-modernism is a much more complex phenomenon, but it aims at the same destruction of society as the Marxist project, starting with the use of reason itself. We can gain a sense of such complexity in Kennedy’s own abstruse writing on Modernism/Postmodernism (or MPM). He explains:
[MPM] is a critique of the characteristic forms of rightness of this same culture and aims at liberation from inner and outer experiences of constraint by reason, in the name, not of justice and a new system, but of the dialectic of system and anti-system, mediated by transgressive artifacts that paradoxically reaffirm the “higher” forms of the values they seem to traduce.18
Ibid.
Just as with Critical Theory, post-modernism borrows heavily from the Nietzschean attack on objectivity. Writes Kennedy:
For the [MPM] project, the demand for agreement and commitment on the basis of representation with the pretension to objectivity is an enemy. The specific enemies have been the central ethical/theoretical concepts of bourgeois culture, including God, the autonomous individual choosing self, conventional morality, the family, manhood and womanhood, the nation state, humanity.19
Ibid.
CLT scholars also display an awareness of the rising identity groups that Marcuse identified as the new revolutionary base. Kennedy quotes approvingly his fellow university professor Cornell West as asserting the existence of an
inchoate, scattered yet gathering progressive movement that is emerging across the American landscape. This gathering now lacks both the vital moral vocabulary and the focused leadership that can constitute and sustain it. Yet it will be rooted ultimately in current activities by people of color, by labor and ecological groups, by women, by homosexuals.20
Ibid.
Kennedy adds that “in the United States, by the end of the 1970s, with the rise of identity politics, left discourse merged with liberal discourse, and the two ideas of the rights of the oppressed and the constitutional validity of their legal claims superseded all earlier versions of rightness.”21
Ibid.
Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center’s entry on Critical Legal Theory neatly teases out the link between the legal analysis of power relations with the emerging identity-based politics. It writes that CLT scholars:
focused from the start on the ways that law contributed to illegitimate social hierarchies, producing domination of women by men, nonwhites by whites, and the poor by the wealthy. They claim that apparently neutral language and institutions, operated through law, mask relationships of power and control. The emphasis on individualism within the law similarly hides patterns of power relationships while making it more difficult to summon up a sense of community and human interconnection.”22
From there it is a short step to Critical Race Theory. Unsurprisingly, given its name, CRT makes everything about race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life—and do so with a degree of persistence that has helped CRT impact all aspects of American life.
Derrick Bell, referenced above, the widely-acknowledged “godfather” of CRT, explains in the essay cited earlier that the work of CRT authors “is often disruptive because its commitment to anti-racism goes well beyond civil rights, integration, affirmative action, and other liberal measures.”23
Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” p. 899.
Bell quotes Angela P. Harris as explaining that CRT inherits from its Critical Legal Theory ancestor the commitment to dismantle all aspects of society through unremitting criticism—and at the same time eschews the wooly deconstructionist excesses of the postmodernists and adopts the practicality of the Civil Rights movement. Bell points to theorist and professor Charles Lawrence and says he “speaks for many critical race theory adherents when he disagrees with the notion that laws are or can be written from a neutral perspective.”24
Ibid.
Because the law “systematically privileges subjects who are white,” CRT calls for a “transformative resistance strategy.”25
Ibid, p. 901–902.
CRT’s Theoretical Applications. Because CRT is so intent on real-life transformation, some aspects of post-modernism and its deconstructionism had to be jettisoned, or at least sidelined. Kimberle Crenshaw, the CRT scholar who first came up with the CRT term “intersectionality,” put the need to abandon the Parisian post-modernism best when she wrote:
While the descriptive project of postmodernism of questioning the ways in which meaning is socially constructed is generally sound, this critique sometimes misreads the meaning of social construction and distorts its political relevance…. But to say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that that category has no significance in our world. On the contrary, a large and continuing project for subordinated people—and indeed, one of the projects for which postmodern theories have been very helpful in thinking about—is the way power has clustered around certain categories and is exercised against others.26/p>
In the end, the identity politics that CRT exists to implement was more important than salon revelries. Adherents can apply intersectionality, for example: Someone can claim to be oppressed in more than one way by citing association with more than one social group, or “axis.”27
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories (London: Swift Press, 2020), p. 127.
CRT writers Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge explain that with intersectionality, “people’s lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other.”28
Ibid., p. 127, and Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).
In this way, write Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, CRT results in people looking for “power imbalances, bigotry, and biases that it assumes must be present,” which reduces everything to prejudice, “as understood under the power dynamics asserted by Theory.”29
Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, p. 128.
Of the three critical schools of thought analyzed here,30
There are others, such as “Lat-Crit” for Latinos, “Critical Pedagogy” for teachers, etc.
CRT is the least intellectually ethereal and the most explicitly political. Its use of story-telling—easy to understand fictional vignettes that seek to portray in every-day life terms the “systemic racism” that CRT scholars insist exists in America—is but one of the ways that CRT scholars seek to effect change.31
We discuss the use of such narratives in the section on K–12 schools infra.
Abstraction is to be avoided because it “smuggles the privileged choice of the privileged to depersonify [sic] their claims and then pass them off as the universal authority and the universal good.”32
Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” p. 901.
It is perhaps for this reason that CRT hardly ever identifies the Frankfurt School or its Critical Theory predecessor as an influence, only acknowledging a debt to Critical Legal Theory.33
Delgado mentions only Gramsci as a source that CRT draws from, and Gramsci was not a formal member of the school.
CRT’s ceaseless assault on all American institutions and norms is pure Critical Theory, however. This assault includes the liberal order—in the classical sense, referring to Enlightenment ideas and political arrangements in which law protects individuals pursuing their own interests—something CRT scholars openly admit.
CRT and Classical Liberal Ideas
CRT’s proponents, writes Bell, “are highly suspicious of the liberal agenda, distrust its method, and want to retain what they see as a valuable strain of egalitarianism which may exist despite, and not because of, liberalism.”34
Ibid., p. 899.
This is an important departure from the original goals of the Civil Rights movement, which sought to redeem America’s promise by calling for color-blind equality. “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law,” acknowledges Delgado.35
Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, p. 3.
The radical egalitarianism obviously clashes with strong protections of property rights and any notion of equal protection under the law. These are not the only liberal rights to be thrown overboard. Freedom of speech is also in CRT’s sights. “Being committed to ‘free speech’ may seem like a neutral principle, but it is not. Thus, proclaiming that ‘I am committed equally to allowing free speech for the KKK and 2LiveCrew’ is a non-neutral value judgment, one that asserts that the freedom to say hateful things is more important than the freedom to be free from the victimization, stigma, and humiliation that free speech entails.”36
Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” p. 902.
Thus we arrive at today’s cancel culture.37
For more on this topic, see the section discussing free speech on campus infra.
Even the idea of rights itself—the very concept upon which this country was founded—is a target of CRT. “Crits are suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights,” observes Delgado, using the informal abbreviation CRT writers sometimes employ to describe themselves. The “more radical CRT scholars with roots in racial realism and an economic view of history believe that moral and legal rights are apt to do the right holder much less good than we like to think…. Think how that system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity but resists programs that assure equality of results.” Rights are “alienating. They separate people from each other—‘stay away, I’ve got my rights’—rather than encouraging to form close, respectful communities.”38
Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, pp. 28–29.
The liberal principle that we universally derive these rights from a common humanity and human faculties we all share equally comes under the gun. Classical liberalism is “overly caught up in the search for universals,” writes Delgado. What CRT proponents want is “individualized treatment—‘context’—that pays attention to minorities’ lives.”39
Ibid., p. 65.
“The concepts of rights is indeterminate, vague and disutile,” in Bell’s words.40
Bell, “Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” p. 900.
Legal and administrative neutrality, too, is an enemy because it gets in the way of uplifting such minority voices. Also—and this is a recurring theme with all critical schools, starting with Horkheimer, if not Nietzsche—neutrality is impossible to attain. On this point, Bell cites Lawrence again:
Charles Lawrence [a law professor] speaks for many critical race theory adherents when he disagrees with the notion that laws are or can be written from a neutral perspective. Lawrence asserts that such a neutral perspective does not, and cannot, exist—that we all speak from a particular point of view, from what he calls a ‘positioned perspective.’ The problem is that not all positioned perspectives are equally valued, equally heard, or equally included. From the perspective of critical race theory, some positions have historically been oppressed, distorted, ignored, silenced, destroyed, appropriated, commodified, and marginalized—and all of this, not accidentally.41
Ibid., p. 901.
CRT is purposely political and dispenses with the idea of rights because it blames all inequalities of outcome on what its adherents say is pervasive racism in the United States. “White supremacy,” a term that comes up repeatedly in CRT discourse and continues to be heavily used today by leaders of the Black Lives Matter organizations, must be smashed. White supremacy does not mean an actual belief in the superiority of white people, however. It can mean anything from classical philosophers to Enlightenment thinkers to the Industrial Revolution.
One of the most famous practitioners of CRT today, Robin DiAngelo, writes in her book, White Fragility:
White supremacy is a descriptive and useful term to capture the all-encompassing centrality and assumed superiority of people defined and perceived as white and the practices based on this assumption. White supremacy in this context does not refer to individual white people and their individual intentions or actions but to an overarching political, economic, and social system of domination. Again, racism is a structure, not an event. While hate groups that openly proclaim white superiority do exist and this term refers to them also, the popular consciousness solely associates white supremacy with these radical groups. This reductive definition obscures the reality of the larger system at work and prevents us from addressing this system.42
Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), p. 28.
“I hope to have made clear that white supremacy is something much more pervasive and subtle than the actions of explicit white nationalists. White supremacy describes the culture we live in,” DiAngelo writes.43
Ibid., pp. 28, 33.
Its use is a very successful example of the Left’s use of strategic ambiguity in the pursuit of a rather large and ambitious goal. The target is a free-market system that rewards hard work, ability, and other virtuous traits. Other CRT terms that have specific and unique meanings when used by its practitioners are “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” and “people of color.”44
See glossary infra.
CRT speakers have also developed peculiar turns of phrase that are specific to the group; supporters are said to be “in allyship” or “in relationship.” The U.S. is said to be a “carceral state.”45
See, for example, “Angela Davis and BLM Co-Founder Alicia Garza in Conversation Across Generations,” Youtube, January 23, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gqGVni8Oec (accessed December 3, 2020). The exchange on “Democracy Now” was between Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza and former Communist Party USA member Angela Davis.
How Does Critical Race Theory Affect You?
Because of their strong political commitment to transforming the United States, CRT writers make clear that they do not intend for what happens on college campuses to stay on campus. “It is our hope that scholarly resistance will lay the groundwork for wide-scale resistance. We believe that standards and institutions created by and fortifying white power ought to be resisted,” writes Bell.46
Ibid.
On that score, we must pronounce CRT to have been a resounding success. CRT has broken out of the classroom and become the philosophy of wide-scale resistance. It is useful to identify a few of the ways with which it impacts the daily lives of Americans.
Identity Politics. CRT has become the academic body of work that underpins identity politics, an ongoing effort to reimagine the United States as a nation not of individuals and local communities united under common purposes, but as one riven by groups based on sex, race, national origin, or gender—each with specific claims on victimization. These identity categories correspond to Marcuse’s new revolutionary base (“the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors”).47
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society.
The identities are often artificial ones manufactured by government itself, examples being the Hispanic and Asian-American pan-ethnicities contrived in 1977 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), or the 31 genders approved by the New York City Commission on Human Rights.48
Under identity politics, America is no longer a country where the individual is the central agent in society, who, because of his very existence possesses individual rights. Instead, membership in the official categories becomes the identity that matters when it comes to rights (mostly positive rights, not natural ones), responsibilities, and everything else. Identity politics has become the new paradigm under which many Americans now operate. Victimhood is what commands attention, respect, and entitlements, seen as compensatory justice.
CRT emerged contemporaneously with the proliferation of these identity categories in America and became the philosophical tool to implement identity politics and the attempt to transform the United States. Race, Racism and American Law by Derrick Bell includes toward the end a chapter for “Racism and Other Nonwhites,” among whom he names for the United States the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Mexicans.49
Derrick Bell, Race, Racism and American Law (Philadelphia, PA: Aspen, 1972).
It was published in 1972, two years before the Census Bureau bureaucrats, under pressure from leftist activists, opened the first national racial and ethnic advisory committee.50
Just three years later, these activists convinced the OMB to create the pan-ethnic categories.
The simultaneity was hardly coincidental: The activists who forced the bureaucracy to confect the identities also drank deeply from the well of European philosophies brought over after World War II. “The language of ‘dominant’ and ‘subservient,’ or ‘subordinate,’ groups, integral to Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School” pervaded the work of Julian Samora, the first founder of a Hispanic studies department at a major university, the first leader of La Raza [“The Race”] and a member of the Census Bureau’s first national advisory committee on race. Samora’s 1953 dissertation, titled “Minority Leadership in a Bi-Cultural Community,” quotes the German-born American social psychologist Kurt Lewin, who was associated with the Frankfurt School.51
Mike Gonzalez, The Plot to Change America (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2020), p. 29.
CRT reshaped the identitarians’ thinking in new ways still and gave them newer terms to express these thoughts. Soon CRT was spawning Critical Latin Theory and other spinoffs that were identical in their approach—save for the “marginalized” subjects to be emphasized. Identity politics is difficult to challenge because it presents itself as a just demand for formerly marginalized people to claim attention and reward, but it seeks to collectivize American society; it is divisive, flouts constitutional equal protection, and represents a direct threat to republican self-rule. In all this it has found a handmaiden in CRT.
Critical Race Theory stands as the complete opposite of Martin Luther King Junior’s dream
Whereas Martin Luther King Junior had a dream of a nation where his children would be judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, critical race theory depends solely on a person’s race to determine their worth and how laws should apply to that person.
While MLK’s dream requires the development of the better angels within people of society, while critical race theory depends on the enslaving influences of socialism.
…
If you don’t accept paying for it and having your kids force-fed it, the left will criminalize you
Tucker Carlson: The left will now use armed agents to enforce their radical ideology
Remember when political debates were the highlight of the political year, like boxing matches, everyone would watch them. It doesn’t happen anymore. The ratings for the last presidential debates were terrible, and there’s a reason for that. They’re boring. Everything is scripted. You know what they’re going to say before they say it. But if you keep watching the lower tier, the debates lower on the fight card, sometimes you see something interesting and happens invariably by accident. But it reveals a lot about the country and the people who are trying to lead it.
That just happened last month in Virginia during a governor’s debate. Terry McAuliffe was the governor of Virginia. He gravely damaged the state. He’s the career Clinton operative who you may remember from his many brushes with apparent indictment. The Washington Post is always telling you he was about to get indicted. He never was. Instead, he ran in Virginia, and he ran it into the ground, and now he wants to hurt it even more so he wants to be reelected.
And at the debate last month, Terry McAuliffe announced what just kind of welled up within him, and he told us that parents no longer have a say in their own children’s education. The one that they pay for. Instead, Terry McAuliffe informed the state of Virginia, the government is in charge of your child, period.
TERRY MCAULIFFE: I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach. I get really tired of everybody running down teachers. I love our teachers and what they’ve done through COVID, these are real heroes who deserve our respect.
He’s a hack, a liar and a demagogue, but ignore the second part of the sentence. “I don’t think parents have any right telling teachers what to teach.” Really? So parents don’t control their own kids. Do you have a right to tell the pediatrician what kind of medical treatment your kids should get? No. This is the new rule. The government makes all key decisions about your children. That’s not just true in the state of Virginia. It is now orthodoxy throughout the entire Democratic Party. And as of yesterday, this idea, unprecedented in the history of America, has the full backing of the Biden administration, in other words, of the entire federal government.
And if you disagree with that, if you’re one of those troglodytes who think you should have some say in what your children are taught in the schools that you pay for, you should know the Biden administration now views you as a domestic terrorist, and they are fully willing to used armed agents of the state to compel you to shut up. Joe Biden’s Justice Department has made that very, very clear.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, remember, the moderate, soft-spoken, one to turn out to be not moderate at all, but a wild-eyed, radical crazy person – He’s now the attorney general. He issued a memorandum yesterday calling on the FBI to crack down on parents who complain about their school board.
Now, keep in mind at this exact moment that Garland wrote that, we learned that murders in the United States since the advent of Black Lives Matter have gone up 30%. So that’s thousands more dead people. This is the attorney general, our chief law enforcement officer. He did not issue a memo about that. He issued instead a memo about people who are committing wrongthink. Garland directed, “federal, state, tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend.” This disturbing trend being parents complaining.
“In the coming days,” Garland wrote, “The department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
Criminal conduct. What does that consist of? Bombings, assaults? No, complaining. It is now criminal to disagree with your kid’s school. What have we learned from this? Well, among other things, we’ve learned the Biden administration no longer believes in the most basic precepts of liberal democracy. Among them, your freedom of speech should never be abridged, The government must convince you, not compel you almost always, and you and not the government is in charge of your children.
The AP claims that my report about the NSBA is "misinformation."
But their "fact check" is easily debunked by the NSBA letter itself, which asks the administration to classify parent protests as "a form of domestic terrorism" and recommends prosecution under the "PATRIOT Act." pic.twitter.com/W4kg71BQcB
Never mind that the left has been letting real felons onto the streets for years
Never mind that a majority of violent, career criminals in Harris County get off with deferred adjudication or low-bail or no-bail bonds offered by either Democrat District Attorney Kim Ogg or allowed by a number Democrat social justice judges.
During the misnamed “Summer of Love,” riots, looting, vandalism, and political violence was carried out by radical leftists under the (often literal) Antifa and Black Lives Matter banners. The violent leftists besieged federal property, private businesses, law enforcement, and private citizens with costly, deadly, and devastating outcomes.
Joe Biden and other Democrats turned a blind eye to the violence for political reasons in a stunning show of hypocritical double standards. In too many cases, Democrats even encouraged more leftist violence. As it turns out, the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned a blind eye to those carrying out the riots and looting too.
In a congressional hearing last week titled “Confronting Violent White Supremacy (Part VI): Examining the Biden Administration’s Counterterrorism Strategy,” FBI Assistant Director of Counterterrorism Timothy Langan said that the Bureau doesn’t consider Antifa to be an “organization,” and as such does not have specific information on the group’s activities.
In response to a question about how much violence or domestic terrorism Antifa committed in recent years from Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), Langan had nothing to offer.
“Under the anti-government category or subcategory of domestic terrorism — would that include groups like Antifa or Black Lives Matter, folks who commit violence or acts of domestic terrorism?” Mace asked.
“Well, we don’t identify groups but individuals’ actions,” Langan responded. “So if individuals are committing actions that would be in furtherance of anti-government or anarchist ideals then they would fall into that category.”
“So would you quantify Antifa as an anarchist group under then that subcategory?” Mace pressed. “I mean, it’s an anarchist group, right?”
“The director has previously described them as a ‘movement’ and there have been individuals that have associated or identified with Antifa that have conducted violent acts that we would categorize as anarchist,” was all that Langan could offer of the mere “movement” of Antifa.
Mace continued, asking “how many acts of violence or domestic terrorism has Antifa committed over the last two years?”
Again, Langan has nothing to offer. “Since we don’t categorize Antifa, nor do we calculate or collate information regarding Antifa, that movement, we don’t have that,” said the senior FBI counterterrorism official. “But we can provide you information on anarchist threats and cases in general.”
When you have a blind authoritarianism that would mandate shots (where those who refuse get fired) and then act surprised when job numbers suck, those in authority cannot see the common man
Joe Biden seems only to see the immediate effects of his last disaster. Therefore, he:
Opens the Southern border in response to pressure from Bernie bros who he ran against, resulting in a spike in COVID-19
Ignores the inflationary affects of his oil policy, unemployment policy, COVID-mandate (where this COVID policy pushes on the supply chain through the firing of trained personnel and the finding and training of qualified new personnel)
The crazy thing is that (while the press will not focus on it due to his Democrat party card) Joe seems to have manufactured each of these as a distraction from a previous failure. He opened the border only because of his incomplete campaign against Bernie and Trump. Every time a new crisis came up, he came up with a new topic to toss (which became its own crisis). This guy can’t get out of his own way.
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FBI won’t condemn cop killers, but goes after parents
The Daily Wire reports on the words of Ted Cruz as he points out the FBI will not address cop killers and firebombers of cities while condemning concerned parents speaking before teachers and school boards.
On Wednesday, Texas GOP Senator Ted Cruz grilled Deputy Attorney General Kristen Clarke over the Biden Justice Department ordering the FBI to investigate alleged “threats” against school board members and teachers, a move that comes as parents have been voicing opposition to Critical Race Theory and mask mandates. At one point, Cruz bluntly asked, “Do you believe parents objecting to the teaching of Critical Race Theory have civil rights in the democratic process?” Clarke answered, “Uh, I don’t follow the question, senator.”
Later, Cruz asked if Clarke believed parents objecting at school boards were “domestic terrorists.” He then asked if she believed Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters “who burned shops, who firebombed police cars, who murdered police officers” were domestic terrorists.
When Clarke evaded answering the question, Cruz fired, “Ms. Clarke, it is amazing that you are not willing to condemn people who are murdering police officers and firebombing cities because your politics aligns with them, but at the same time when it comes to parents at school boards, you’re perfectly comfortable with calling a mom at a PTA meeting a ‘domestic terrorist.’”
A memo issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday reads in part:
In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools. While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, the protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views. Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values. Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.
Cruz began his questioning by remarking, “Ms. Clarke, when you testified before this committee and when Attorney General Garland testified before this committee, you both promised to be non-partisan and impartial. I’m sorry to say that I think neither of you has lived up to that promise.”
After citing the Biden administration’s dismissal of a civil rights lawsuit against Yale University, Cruz continued:
Just this week, after you were there, after Merrick Garland was there, the Department of Justice issued a memorandum to the FBI instructing them to mobilize against parents across the country. Parents of school kids who have the temerity to show up at school boards and express their opposition to the teaching of Critical Race Theory, a pernicious theory that divides us on racial lines, that tells children the lie that America is fundamentally racist, that America is irredeemably racist, that all white people are racist. It spreads racial division; many parents are, understandably, quite dismayed at schools that are teaching this to their children, sometimes as young as five. And yet the Department of Justice looked at that issue and decided to label the parents objecting to this teaching as domestic terrorists. Did you participate in discussions about the memo before it was issued?
“Senator, I can’t talk about internal deliberations inside the department,” Clarke replied.
“You can’t talk about whether you participated in discussions about the memo?” Cruz asked.
“No,” Clarke answered. “But what I can tell you is that the Civil Rights Division will play a role going forward. The Attorney General has asked the Department to undertake a review and the Division will participate in that review to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute crimes.”
Then Cruz got down to brass tacks: “Do you believe parents objecting to the teaching of Critical Race Theory have civil rights in the democratic process?”
Clarke: “Uh, I don’t follow the question, senator.”
Cruz: “You don’t understand the question whether parents objecting to Critical Race Theory have civil rights?”
“The First Amendment is a core value in our democracy,” Clarke replied.
Cruz pointed out, “I didn’t say free speech; I said civil rights. School board meetings are democratic. They are petitioning your local government. Do they have civil rights that the Voting Rights gives a damn about?”
Clarke: “They have the right to express their view, to challenge the school boards, to ask —”
Cruz: “And is it beneficial for the Attorney General to label them as ‘domestic terrorists’ and direct the FBI to target them?”
Clarke: “The Attorney General’s memo deals with threats against public servants and says that threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values.”
Cruz: “Do you believe parents objecting at school boards are ‘domestic terrorists’?”
Clarke: “I don’t, senator.”
Cruz: “Do you believe Antifa are domestic terrorists?”
Clarke: “I don’t have a view about Antifa.”
Cruz: “Do you believe the Black Lives Matter protesters who burned shops, who firebombed police cars, who murdered police officers, do you believe they’re domestic terrorists?”
Clarke: “Senator, I believe we believe we live in a society where people espouse different views, but what we don’t want are threats of violence.”
Square for me the last statement by Cruz with the last statement of Clarke
If Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will not condemn Antifa or BLM for firebombing shops and courts in Seattle, then why will they have Merrick Garland charge people under the Patriot Act for getting possibly verbally abusive at school board meetings?
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Biden appoints avowed CRT supporter to Department of Education
President Biden has appointed an avowed Critical Race Theory supporter to the Department of Education.
Biden appointed Precious McKesson, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party’s Black Caucus, as a Special Assistant in the DOE’s office of Communications and Outreach.
Precious McKesson announced this week that she has accepted a position in the U.S. Department of Education. https://t.co/7tzyACLRnx
After Nebraska Board of Regents board member Jim Pillen introduced a resolution to bar CRT from the University of Nebraska education system, McKesson co-authored an August op-ed in which it stated:
Pillen and other Republicans, including Gov. Pete Ricketts, have made CRT a political boogeyman without actually knowing what it is. Simply put, CRT examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism. Students would be taught about the systemic racism that still exists today and permeates our society.
Further, CRT is a 40-year-old academic framework, so one has to wonder why the Republican Party is now trying to frame all educational experiences that discuss diversity and equity with a negative partisan lens. From our collective experiences, the only answer is to create a wedge between white communities and communities of color, making us the villain rather than having Nebraskans see us as their neighbors and co-workers.
… Ricketts and Pillen are also trying to dictate how a person can attain knowledge, information and engage in intellectual activity, which violates more than academic freedom. It is a direct assault upon the sovereignty of one’s soul, mind and body.
McKesson cast the only Biden-Harris vote out of Nebraska’s five electoral college ballots in 2020.
Why is Biden attacking our First Amendment Right for the sake of government?
According to the American form of government, our government is supposed to be limited and our speech is supposed to be free. I hate to put things at a first-grade level, but there is a reason that the First Amendment covers the freedoms of speech, journalism (if they so choose), and religion.
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Garland has conflict of interest with Facebook and critical race theory
Attorney General Merrick Garland is under scrutiny after a parents group revealed that his daughter is married to the co-founder of an education company funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that allegedly employs critical race theory in its work, according to a report.
The disclosure comes as the attorney general announced on Monday that the FBI will help investigate increasing accounts of alleged threats against teachers and school board members in response to critical race theory being taught in schools — an action that critics slammed as a “declaration of war” on parents and intimidation of political opponents.
His daughter, Rebecca Garland, is married to Xan Tanner, the co-founder of Boston-based Panorama Education, a company that collects social and emotional data from students in grades K to 12, Fox News reported on Wednesday.
Asra Nomani, the vice president of investigations and strategy of Parents Defending Education, which opposes the Justice Department’s enforcement actions, tweeted about the connection.
“Merrick Garland has declared a war on parents,” Nomani posted on Tuesday. “His daughter is married to the cofounder of @PanoramaEd which is under fire for its multimillion contracts with school boards. At @DefendingEd, parents sent us tips. We raised the alarm. Now Garland is trying to silence parents.”
“Panorama Education will profit from Garland’s outrageous silencing of parents who are challenging its data mining of K-12 students,” she wrote on the group’s website.
Nomani linked to a New York Times report from 2018 about the marriage of Garland’s daughter and Tanner.
She and her group argue that the Justice Department is likening parents who oppose such “woke” policies as critical race theory and mandatory mask wearing to “domestic terrorism.”
It also comes as a whistleblower, Frances Haugen, testified to a Senate committee on Tuesday about how Facebook routinely scoops up people’s information and then uses it to keep them engaged on platforms it owns.
If Merrick Garland had any honor, he would recuse himself from this case
What’s more, if Merrick Garland had any honor, he would recuse himself before this information became public knowledge. He should not wait to be found out. However, since he remains in place despite this conflict, obviously he has no honor or credibility.
Thank God he did not get appointed to the Supreme Court.
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Parents refuse to be intimidated by Biden’s Attorney General labeling them domestic terrorists
Local mother Stacy Langton stood before the Fairfax County School Board in a suburb of the nation’s capital two weeks ago, boldly exposing explicit examples of child porn and pedophilia in library books in area schools, available to children as young as 12 years old.
Langton’s witness ended in mayhem because the school board failed to do something very simple: listen to the stakeholders — and taxpayers — who are parents. Board members rudely interrupted Langton during her two minutes of allotted speaking time and called a hasty recess, a board member later incorrectly claiming that he faced two “exorcisms” by parents praying during the meeting.
“Shame! Shame! Shame!” shouted parents, horrified at the cowardice of the board members.
Now, however, instead of recognizing Langton for the hero that she is for protecting children, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has issued a declaration of war on America’s parents.
“I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to … [address] threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” he wrote in a memo to FBI Director Christopher Wray and the U.S. attorneys generals on Monday night.
Langton, of course, didn’t threaten anyone. But in this war, facts don’t matter.
In just five days, Garland issued that response to a September 29 letter by the National School Boards Association alleging, incredulously: “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Neither the school board association nor Garland mentioned the word “parents,” as if to acknowledge us, even in an attack, is to validate us. But we know. It’s now the United States vs. America’s parents.
George W. Bush’s Patriot Act being used against concerned parents
George W's Patriot Act being used against concerned parents. Doocy Presses Psaki On Whether Biden Considers School Board Protesters ‘Domestic Terrorists’ https://t.co/jjUsHewbDM via @dailycaller
AP Blasted for Questionable “Fact Check” of National School Boards Association’s Letter to Biden Comparing Angry Parents to “Domestic Terrorists” https://t.co/zb6Mm5FNmp
AP fact check contradicts itself, says school board assn. letter does not want parents labeled as terrorists, then quotes school board letter saying parent actions “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” https://t.co/hRckBwdymo
In an official memo, Attorney General Merrick Garland has pledged to mobilize the FBI against parents protesting critical race theory in public schools, citing unspecified “threats of violence” against school officials.
Garland’s memo follows a National School Boards Association request that the Biden administration investigate threats to school board members and classify sometimes heated parent protests as “domestic terrorism.”
The NSBA suggested that some of these parents should be prosecuted under the PATRIOT Act and federal hate crimes legislation.
But the school board association letter is riddled with falsehoods, errors, and exaggerations. It begins with the claim that “critical race theory is not taught in public schools,” despite a vast body of evidence showing that CRT is widespread in public schools. Even the national teachers’ union has admitted as much, and called for its implementation in all 50 states.
The NSBA deliberately misrepresents debates at school board meetings as “threats” and sometimes vociferous and angry speech as “violence.” The letter refers to dozens of news stories alluding to “disruptions,” “shouts,” “arguments,” and “mobs” but, contrary to its core claim, cites only a single example of actual violence against a school official: a case of aggravated battery in Illinois, which is obviously condemnable, but hardly the justification for a national “domestic terrorism” investigation.
The association even fabricated entire storylines to support its political objectives. For example, the NSBA claims that a Tennessee school board official named Jon White resigned due to “threats and acts of violence”; but the linked source reports that White resigned for “concerns about too much time away from his family,” with no mention of threats or violence. (In another local report, White complains about parents calling him a “child abuser” and other epithets, which, while harsh, are hardly an “act of violence.”)
Still, despite the school board association’s flimsy pretext, the Biden Administration appears to be doing its bidding. Garland’s memo instructs the FBI to coordinate with “federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement” to develop plans to “discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.” NSBA director Chip Slaven and national teachers’ union president Randi Weingarten immediately praised Garland’s aggressive actions.
This is a deeply politicized and dangerous escalation in the debate about critical race theory in public schools. For months, critical race theory proponents, including teachers’ unions, have struggled to respond to critics, and new survey data now show that strong majorities of all racial categories oppose CRT in public school. But as their standing in the polls has collapsed, the education establishment has turned to more heavy-handed tactics.
The purpose of mobilizing the FBI is not only to monitor dissent but to subdue it. The suggestion that parents might be engaging in “domestic terrorism” is designed to suppress speech and assembly and to justify the further federalization of education policy.
In congressional testimony last week, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona refused to say that parents are the “primary stakeholders” in their children’s education; this week, Attorney General Garland is attempting to drive an even bigger wedge between parents and public schools.
Parents should not let this overreach deter them from speaking out against critical race theory in their schools. The Biden administration has raised the stakes, so that this fight is no longer only about CRT; it is about protecting the basic rights of speech, assembly, and voter control over the country’s public institutions.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says Americans should “be afraid of your government” following an announcement from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that the FBI would begin to investigate alleged “threats” against school officials, a move that comes as parents have been voicing opposition to Critical Race Theory and mask mandates.
“Moms at school boards are being told that they’re criminals, potential domestic terrorists, for the crime of dissent, and I think criminalizing dissent is something that we should all be appalled with,” Paul said Wednesday on Fox News.
Host Ben Domenech asked the senator what he would say to Americans worried that “if they go to their local school board and say the wrong thing, that they’re going to end up on some list that Merrick Garland goes after.”
“I would say be afraid. Be afraid of your government,” Paul said.
“That’s a sad thing from someone in the government to say, but the thing is, is those lists already exist. For example, people in northern Virginia that have gone to [protests], have been then sought out by the school council, by the members of the school board and retaliated [against] in a sort of legalistic way to try to put them on some sort of list and chill their speech by letting them know there’ll be a penalty for showing up and protesting,” Paul said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s announcement on Monday came after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent President Joe Biden a letter claiming “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.” The NSBA asked the White House to consider investigating attendees of school board meetings and even using the 9/11-era Patriot Act to do so.
“I think the problem is it’s become so normalized to use government to search out and seek out your opponents,” said Paul.
The senator cited the FBI case of former Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, whose communications were monitored by the agency after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued warrants.
“There are people I know on the left who should have stepped forward and should have said how wrong it is to use this foreign intelligence court – that uses a standard lower than the Constitution – to go after a political campaign,” Paul said. “Yet, the Left — once it became about Trump, their hatred of Trump trumped everything else, and I have a feeling and a fear that the Left has become more authoritarian than we can really even imagine.”
“Look, there are all kinds of laws about decorum, and there ought to be,” Paul said. “The idiot woman that goes in the bathroom, filming Senator [Kyrsten] Sinema [D-AZ] in a bathroom, that is illegal according to every local ordinance and you should punish that person.”
“If you go to a school board meeting and you’re disruptive and you don’t obey the rules of the school board meeting, then there will be local punishment,” Paul said. “But that has nothing to do with the federal law, it has nothing to do with the Department of Justice. What Merrick Garland did is, he’s attempting to stifle dissent, …”
As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.
The recipient was his F.B.I. handler.
In the middle of an unfolding melee that shook a pillar of American democracy — the peaceful transfer of power — the bureau had an informant in the crowd, providing an inside glimpse of the action, according to confidential records obtained by The New York Times. In the informant’s version of events, the Proud Boys, famous for their street fights, were largely following a pro-Trump mob consumed by a herd mentality rather than carrying out any type of preplanned attack.
The audacious plot to kidnap a sitting governor — seen by many as a precursor to the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol by hundreds of Trump-supporting protesters — has become one of the most important domestic terrorism investigations in a generation.
The prosecution has already emerged as a critical test for how the Biden administration approaches the growing threat of homegrown anti-government groups. More than that, though, the case epitomizes the ideological divisions that have riven the country over the past several years. To some, the FBI’s infiltration of the innermost circle of armed anti-government groups is a model for how to successfully forestall dangerous acts of domestic terrorism. But for others, it’s an example of precisely the kind of outrageous government overreach that radicalizes people in the first place, and, increasingly, a flashpoint for deep state conspiracy theories.
The government has documented at least 12 confidential informants who assisted the sprawling investigation. The trove of evidence they helped gather provides an unprecedented view into American extremism, laying out in often stunning detail the ways that anti-government groups network with each other and, in some cases, discuss violent actions.
An examination of the case by BuzzFeed News also reveals that some of those informants, acting under the direction of the FBI, played a far larger role than has previously been reported. Working in secret, they did more than just passively observe and report on the actions of the suspects. Instead, they had a hand in nearly every aspect of the alleged plot, starting with its inception. The extent of their involvement raises questions as to whether there would have even been a conspiracy without them.
A longtime government informant from Wisconsin, for example, helped organize a series of meetings around the country where many of the alleged plotters first met one another and the earliest notions of a plan took root, some of those people say. The Wisconsin informant even paid for some hotel rooms and food as an incentive to get people to come.
Fox News has banned Rudy Giuliani and his son from appearing on its network, Politico Playbook reported on Friday.
Giuliani, who served as a personal attorney to former President Trump, has reportedly been banned for close to three months and only learned of the move by the news network right before Sept. 11, the news outlet reported.
Prior to a scheduled appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Sept. 11, “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Pete Hegseth apparently called the former New York City mayor the night before and apologized, telling him he had been canceled from their guest list.
A source close to the former New York City mayor told Playbook that Giuliani was upset by the decision because he had “done a big favor” for Fox Corp. founder and Chairman Rupert Murdoch.
“He was instrumental in getting Fox on Time Warner so it could be watched in New York City,” the source told Playbook.
A spokesperson for Fox denied Politico’s report that Giulani had been scheduled to appear on “Fox & Friends” on Sept. 11, but that person declined to comment on whether there was a ban for the former New York City mayor.
Additionally, Giuliani’s son, Andrew Giuliani, has also been reportedly banned, though it is unclear when that ban would have started. Since his New York gubernatorial campaign was initiated in May, Andrew Giuliani has not appeared on the network, Politico Playbook reported.
The news outlet reported that the Giulianis were told that the ban had come from the top of the network.
Yes, Rudy has had a few slips recently. As we get older, we all do that. However, for the most part, he seems of very sound mind.
The main thing with Rudy was he made crucial decisions that secured New York for a period of time and he held a key position during a pivotal period of American history (the 9/11 attacks). While lefties like those in charge of Fox News cannot take that from him, they can silence him.
Of course, since Fox began as a conservative powerhouse, it still holds a number of conservative voices. However, since the leadership has gone to the left, we cannot expect it to remain as a conservative source (as shown when it called Arizona for Biden early).
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Democrat lie #3: There was Trump/Russia collusion in 2016
Jake Sullivan repeatedly promoted Alfa Bank story at the center of Durham indictment
Special Counsel John Durham’s indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann will likely have made uncomfortable reading for a key member of President Joe Biden’s administration — his beleaguered national security adviser Jake Sullivan.
The grand jury indictment against Sussmann centers on a September 2016 meeting between him and then-FBI General Counsel James Baker in which Sussmann passed along allegations claiming there was a secret backchannel between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization. While Durham says Sussmann told Baker he was not working for any specific client, the special counsel contends he was secretly doing the bidding of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as well as working on behalf of a yet-unnamed technology company executive. Sussmann pleaded not guilty .
The Durham indictment states that “on or about September 15, 2016, Campaign Lawyer-1 exchanged emails with the Clinton Campaign’s campaign manager, communications director, and foreign policy advisor concerning the Russian Bank-1 allegations that SUSSMANN had recently shared with Reporter-1.” Durham wrote that “Campaign Lawyer-1 billed his time for this correspondence” to the Clinton campaign, with the billing entry of “email correspondence with [name of foreign policy advisor], [name of campaign manager], [name of communications director] re: [Russian Bank-1] Article.”
Clinton’s foreign policy adviser was Sullivan, while her campaign manager was Robby Mook, and communications director was Jennifer Palmieri. “Campaign Lawyer-1” was Marc Elias. Sullivan has not been accused of wrongdoing by Durham. The White House National Security Council did not return a request for comment.
On Halloween 2016, Clinton tweeted : “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank.” And she shared a lengthy Sullivan statement.
“This could be the most direct link yet between Donald Trump and Moscow,” Sullivan claimed . “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank. This secret hotline may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Trump’s ties to Russia. … This line of communication may help explain Trump’s bizarre adoration of Vladimir Putin.”
Sullivan added: “We can only assume that federal authorities will now explore this direct connection between Trump and Russia.”
That is why the New York Times and Politico find a need to cover stories like the Hunter Biden laptop when their revelation cannot hurt a Democrat. They still want to be seen as standing on the side of truth (even though they effectively lied when it made a difference).
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Democrat lie #4: Democrats respect our system of a non-political armed services
Democrat testimony proves the politicization of the armed forces
During his opening statement in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday morning, General Mark Milley denied inappropriate phone calls with the Chinese military and tried to reassure Americans he is dedicated to civilian control of the military.
“I am specifically directed to communicate with the Chinese. These military to military communications at the highest level are critical to the security of the United States,” Milley said. “My loyalty to this Nation, its people, and the Constitution hasn’t changed, and will never change, as long as I have a breath to give. My loyalty is absolute, and I will not turn my back on the fallen.”
“I firmly believe in civilian control of the military,” he continued.
Milley also stressed that he does not believe President Donald Trump planned to attack the Chinese in the final days of his presidency.
General Milley defends his calls with China:
"My loyalty to this Nation, its people, and the Constitution hasn't changed, and will never change, as long as I have a breath to give. My loyalty is absolute, and I will not turn my back on the fallen." pic.twitter.com/fglOolPlHZ
In his remarks, Milley also addressed a phone call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on January 8, 2021, in which she pressed him about the process to launch a nuclear weapon. Milley says he informed her that while launching such a weapon requires multiple people in the chain of command, the president is the sole authority to launch an attack.
Much like the Hunter Biden laptop news, admissions about the politicization of the military since Obama will likely leak out for years
Especially now that Biden is requiring everyone to take the jab or be dishonorably discharged (even if they have had COVID), we will likely see a continued politicization of our military.
When it came to questioning Sec. Pete Buttigieg, “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace was not fooling around. The interview from Sunday focused on the so-called infrastructure bill, which, if we’re being honest, is really a spending bill by any other name.
Wallace called out, early on in the exchange, the talking point that the United States ranks poorly when it comes to our infrastructure. As NewsBuster’s Nicholas Fondacaro highlighted:
You all like to say that U.S. infrastructure is ranked 13th in the world, but our colleague Chuck Layne of The Washington Post did some interesting research, three of the nations ahead of us on that list are Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates, which are tiny states and hardly comparable. Of the ten largest countries geographically, including China and Russia, the U.S. actually ranks first.
“So secretary, not to say that everything is fine, but why not be straight about the actual conditions here in the U.S. to the American people,” Wallace pressed.
Buttigieg refused to address why the administration was manipulating the facts. Instead, he simply argued that “the American people already know that our infrastructure needs a lot of work.”
Um, okay. It sounds to me that Sec. Buttigieg just didn’t know what to say to that.
Fondacaro highlighted another particular exchange in which Wallace called the transportation secretary out. “Again, Secretary Buttigieg, why mislead folks,” Wallace asked. The host even got Buttigieg, to both their credit, to say he “should have been more precise” when it comes to how many jobs would be created. Nevertheless, Wallace still wasn’t letting him off the hook as he stepped in to correct him.
Wallace: I want to give you another fact-check. All of you in the Biden administration have been selling this plan as a huge job’s creator. Here you are just last Sunday.
Buttigieg: The American jobs plan is about a generational investment. It’s going to create 19 million jobs and we’re talking about economic growth that’s going to go on for years and years.
Wallace: But it turns out the study you are citing from Moody’s Analytics says the economy will add 16.3 million jobs without the infrastructure bill and 2.7 million more with it. So it doesn’t, as you said last Sunday, create 19 million jobs.
(continued)
Dear Democrats:
Stop calling it a "COVID Relief" plan. A better name would be "The Pelosi Payoff." pic.twitter.com/YLEwvbakJE
I don’t know what prompted Wallace to temporarily change sides, but tough words won’t work for Wallace any more than silence works for Biden
On both sides, this all looks like an act to me. Wallace has finally found it within himself to act conservative and not toss softballs at the Biden administration. Similarly, Mayor Pete is acting like he has some experience and success. Remember, Mayor Pete presided over South Bend, famous for getting multiple awards from Domino Pizza’s “Paving for Pizza” campaign (and not the good type of awards, either).
Therefore, I don’t give either of these yahoos any credit. Wallace doesn’t get credit for being “tough” on one Biden underling one (or even two) times. Likewise, Mayor Pete doesn’t get lifted off the hook for another session of seamless lying and changing the subject.
Wallace will not earn his credits back until after he pulls dementia Joe through the ringer he put President Trump through.
Mayor Pete will not earn credits until he does something positive for the working people of America.
Representatives and Journalist Andy Ngo speak out against domestic terrorism at The Rise of Domestic Terrorism hearing in Congress
Representative Gohmert
On Wednesday, 24 February 2021, Representative Louis Gohmert spoke out at a hearing on “The Rise of Domestic Terrorism” before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.
Representative Gohmert points to the involvement of Antifa and BLM members (particularly John Sullivan) in the 6 January 2021 event.
Representative Tiffany
On Wednesday, 24 February 2021, Representative Tom Tiffany reminded the Democrats on the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security of their blind spots.
Representative Jordan
On Wednesday, 24 February 2021, Representative Jim Jordan interviewed the Antifa-targeted Andy Ngo at a hearing on “The Rise of Domestic Terrorism” before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.
Representative Jordan uses the interview to accentuate the threat that Antifa presents to the nation.
Journalist Andy Ngo provides testimony several times before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security
The initial testimony by Andy Ngo
On Wednesday, 24 February 2021, journalist Andy Ngo spoke out at a hearing on “The Rise of Domestic Terrorism” before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.
Andy Ngo points to the non-partisan nature of both left and right extremists. He gives specific examples of the violence of Antifa and BLM through his experiences in Portland.
Andy Ngo: Ignore Antifa and they will still exist
In this piece of testimony before the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on 24 February 2021, Andy Ngo points out that, even if the press continues to ignore Antifa, they will continue to exist and continue to kill. For example, although the press did not cover the event, Portland’s mayor called in National Guard on Election Night in response to widespread vandalization by Antifa. On Biden’s inauguration day, Antifa took the occasion to destroy the Portland Democrat party headquarters.
In response to the myth that Antifa only stands up against fascism, Ngo pointed out how they have been known to attack those carrying American flags, those wearing patriotic shirts, and those expressing support for the rule of law.
Waters World points to the intentions of Democrats
Jesse Waters points out the hypocrisy of Democrats as they:
Fixate on Trump voters (calling them “White supremists” and “systemic racism”) while those same Democrats ignore issues effecting children, unions, women, and other stereotypical Democrat issues
Fixate on Trump voters while Democrats vacilate between calling for release from lockdown and calling for further lockdown
Fixate on erasing any trace of a Trump legacy (like the Keystone pipeline) — even if that legacy would have benefitted certain Democrat groups (such as unions, blue-collar minorities, and women)
Ignore projects similar to the erased Trump legacy (like Russia’s Nord Stream 2 project that will make Europe dependent on Russian natural gas)
On the other hand, Biden has gone into overdrive:
Cutting the feet from under unions (even though he promised to be the “unions’ best friend” during the campaign and noted that “unions built the middle class”)
Refuse to support the unionization of Amazon (since Amazon contributed heavily to his campaign and is in his inner circle
Backing the “Pelosi Payoff” that packs the “COVID” relief bill with 91% projects like:
As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march.
During his opening statement in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday morning, General Mark Milley denied inappropriate phone calls with the Chinese military and tried to reassure Americans he is dedicated to civilian control of the military. 
When it came to questioning Sec. Pete Buttigieg, “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace was not fooling around. The interview from Sunday focused on the so-called infrastructure bill, which, if we’re being honest, is really a spending bill by any other name.
Mark 1:1 
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