K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE:
⚡Clark County School District confirms they Knew about video of brutal beating at Las Vegas High School as teachers & students watched and even laughed…
More concerned with parents knowing this is happening & videos leaking than stopping daily violence at Vegas Schools! pic.twitter.com/6vN1NgDTuB
— Irish☘Girl (Erin) (@IrishAmerican27) February 6, 2022
HERSCHEL SMITH: The Party in Ottawa as Swarm Behavior.
LAWYERED UP FOR FREE SPEECH: Protest Is Protected by the Charter, Legal Group Supporting Truckers Tells Police. “As police step up efforts to deter the Freedom Convoy demonstration in Ottawa, the legal group representing the truckers is urging the authorities to respect their charter right to peacefully protest.”
ATTACKS ON RON DESANTIS OVER FLORIDA’S ‘DON’T SAY GAY’ BILL HAVE NO BASIS IN REALITY:
As a gay conservative myself, I decided to read the actual bill to see what all the outrage was about. As is so often the case, the left-wing shrieking moral outrage and charges of bigotry are wildly overblown and not based in reality. Does the proposed Florida law really “prohibit the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity,” as Twitter’s trending topics put it?
No. It doesn’t.
Quoting from the actual bill text, it simply “prohibit[s] a school district from encouraging classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels.” (Emphasis added.)
The proposed law also specifies encouragement of discussions on these topics cannot be done “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” Importantly, this bill does not prohibit students from having these discussions on their own initiative. Discussions of sexuality and gender identity simply can’t be forced by the schools.
Democracy dies in Old Blighty apparently.
MARJORIE TAYLOR-GREENE ACCUSES PELOSI OF RUNNING ‘GAZPACHO POLICE:’
Gazpacho, of course, is a chilled Spanish soup, made most frequently, though not exclusively, with tomatoes. The Gestapo was the notorious Nazi secret police.
Taylor-Greene no doubt meant to compare the Capitol Hill police to the murderous Nazi secret police, and not to the refreshing soup, though in truth the organization bears little resemblance to either.
And while it pales beside her confusion of Gestapo and gazpacho, I’d note that “Gestapo police” is redundant, like “Luftwaffe Air Force” or “Red Army Army.”
Exit question: How do the Gazpacho Police compare in ruthlessness to the Library Police…
…and the Phone Cops?
Merely a system test. Nothing to see here.
BLUE ON BLUE: Left splits over Supreme Court pick pushed by top Biden ally. “While most progressive lawmakers aren’t directly criticizing Childs for her past work, they are making it clear that the balance of power between corporations and the average American worker could prove their litmus test for Biden’s nominee. And on paper, it may be that Childs has the most work to do to meet that test. . . . Just as there’s a split among progressives in the Senate — with few lawmakers rallying behind a single candidate of their own — liberal outside groups are also divided. Some are fighting to make sure Biden chooses someone other than Childs, and others are steering clear of backing a specific pick.”
TO BE FAIR, HE WAS THE LEAST INSANE DEMOCRAT IN A CROWDED FIELD OF KOOKS: Remember When Eric Adams Was The Sane One?
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘Tinder Swindler’ Simon Leviev Conned Women Out of Millions in the Craziest Way You’ve Ever Heard.
FRONTIERS IN POOP: Fecal implants drive behavioral and cognitive changes in Alzheimer’s model.
COLORADO: A Black separatist group’s utopian dream for land near Telluride withered after an armed standoff.
They were about two dozen leftist revolutionaries, almost all people of color. In Denver and other U.S. cities, the group’s chapters had spent the pandemic handing out food and personal protective equipment while planning their signature project: Hammer City, a utopian settlement high in the Rocky Mountains free of coronavirus, cops, money and white people. Together they would renounce private property, work the land and build power.
Commenters on Facebook and Twitter widely ridiculed the concept as a “cult” doomed for failure. But the activists raised more than $60,000. On May 3, 2021, Augustus Romain Jr., the group’s commander-in-chief, posted a photo of 10 people standing among sagebrush with raised fists and a declaration on Facebook: Black Hammer had “liberated” 200 acres of land somewhere in Colorado. The soil, they wrote, was rich.
Black Hammer never said where their new community was. Within weeks, the group suddenly stopped its dispatches from the desert.
But donations continued pouring in, eventually cresting the $100,000 mark, according to the organization’s fundraising webpage. Critics online wondered where the money went when the Hammers left Colorado.
Read the whole thing.
JACK SHAFER: How the Right Learned to Love Saul Alinsky.
The only idea gaining bipartisan traction these days is the strategy of storming and occupying some power center.
In Canada, thousands of vaccine-mandate protesting truckers, supported by many of the country’s conservatives, have turned the streets of Ottawa into a monster truck rally, defacing the capital’s monuments, flying the Nazi flag, and bullying soup kitchen operators. The Ottawa showdown, titled “Freedom Convoy,” follows the Jan. 6 blitz on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s “patriots,” and what now is called that event’s dress rehearsal, the armed storming of Michigan’s state capitol in 2020.
Such turf takeovers have traditionally been the province of the left, not the right. In the 1930s, leftist union organizers took over auto and rubber factories to gain recognition. In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights and anti-war movements staged sit-down protests of their own, with the peaceniks famously occupying the office of Columbia University’s president. (Taking over a college president’s office remains a protester favorite.) In 2011 and 2012, anti-capitalist activists from the Occupy Wall Street movement commandeered Manhattan’s streets (“Whose streets? Our streets!”) in their campaign against income inequality. Their methods and message spread across the country and around the world. Following the George Floyd murder, Portland anarchists set fire to a police precinct and essentially took possession of the city’s downtown streets, holding them for months.
What took the right so long to discover the politics of occupation? Do they not get cable television or something? Perhaps they’ve been too hung up on good manners and property rights to knock down the door of power and hijack it? And what does it mean that some righties have now decided that rushing the barricades, breaking windows, and intimidating the state is a fruitful political technique?
I’ll take “Headlines from 2009” for $500, Alex.
RACE CARD: DECLINED. After Playing Race Card, Stacey Abrams Apologizes for Maskless Photo.
TOP SELLER: CRKT Swindle EDC Folding Pocket Knife: Gentleman Everyday Carry. #CommissionEarned
HOW FORTUNATE FOR PFIZER: Pfizer expects to sell $54 billion worth of COVID-19 shots, treatment pills in 2022.
REVENGE OF THE COVID MOMS.
“This is the year that parents say, ‘You’re either with us or against us.’”
Maron is running in New York’s 12th congressional district against Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat who has served for nearly 30 years representing both the 12th and 14th districts. Maloney, 75, turned heads at last year’s Met Gala dressed in a suffragette-themed purple, white, and green gown while mask-clad attendants stood by drearily in the wings. She’s warded off challengers from the left-wing of the party for the past few terms; 28-year old Democratic Socialist Rana Abdelhamid is her latest progressive challenger. But the Democrats’ newly-unveiled redistricting plan out of Albany cuts out leftier enclaves in Brooklyn and Queens from her district.
That’s good news for Maloney. But it’s potentially even better for Maron—and all the other moms lined up behind her.
Natalya Murakhver, an Upper West Side mom of two, heard Maron at an open-the-schools rally in March 2021. By Murakhver’s count there have been five such rallies over the past two years. There was no waiting for the politicians—“they were completely disinterested in responding to our calls”—so she sued New York in April to force the city to reopen.Then she launched #MaskLikeAKid, which was all about unmasking children. Then, in October, Megyn Kelly had Murakhver on her show to talk about all the angry moms out there. With Maud Maron. “I was a very liberal Democrat,” Murakhver told me. “Now, my vote is up for grabs to whoever puts kids first.”
Ditto Vanessa Steinkamp. Steinkamp now lives in the Dallas suburbs, by way of New Orleans and Chicago. She’s 45, a teacher, a mom of three, and a politically homeless Never Trump Republican. When Covid hit, she says, it was like everyone forgot the kids. Now they are the only thing that matters.
“Hell hath no fury like an angry mom,” Steinkamp says. In 2019, she ran unsuccessfully for the City Council. She’s thinking of running again.
One of Steinkamp’s biggest online allies is Emily Burns, also 45. Burns is a mom of three who studied neuroscience at Rockefeller University. She’s running for Congress, as a Republican, in Massachusetts’ 4th congressional district, just outside Boston. That seat is now held by Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat who’s the son of Anthony Fauci’s deputy. Auchincloss has held the seat for one year after getting an endorsement by the previous district rep, Joe Kennedy III. So it’s basically Burns v. The Establishment.
Or rather it’s the Establishment v. Burns and Julie Hamill, a 39-year-old real-estate lawyer with three sons in Palos Verdes, just south of Los Angeles. She’s suing the local school board over the masks. Margaret Nichols, 45, in Brooklyn, is considering doing the same. Nichols threw a party when Biden won, but now feels partyless. She’s heading up a coalition of parents looking to support candidates in the November elections that will get the masks off.
Roxanne Hoge, 52, a Jamaican immigrant-slash-actor-slash-former California State Assembly candidate also wants a new political class—one that responds to the parents and their kids. Hoge belongs to a group of moms fed up with school policies. They get together on weekends and, over wine and cheese, talk about the politicians’ hypocrisy and their anger.
It didn’t take long for the Angry Covid Moms to Google and friend and follow each other, to start to think of themselves not as isolated islands of angry momness, but as part of something bigger. The start of a movement.
Good.
COLLAPSE: He’s Fallen and He Can’t Get Up: Joe Biden Poll Average Slumps to Under 40 for the First Time. “Just when Biden needs support on Capitol Hill to turn things around, do you know what he did?”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Convoy!
Who would have though C.W. McCall would have written the anthem for freedom.https://t.co/8DyC885Uea https://t.co/oslC4q8Ms3
— Magills (@magills_) February 9, 2022
Related:
https://t.co/EGZMUcTl13 pic.twitter.com/ehclY8z1jO
— Magills (@magills_) February 9, 2022
THE GREAT PIVOT: Open Everything. The time to end pandemic restrictions is now.
Yascha Mounk should have written this in the summer of 2020, but remains “convinced” that shutting everything down for more than a year was “the right thing to do.”
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