Category Archives: Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to go behind the scenes of her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

After 2020, which was easily the weirdest national election weve gone through in memory it was, you know, massive changes to election laws, massive changes to the procedures by which we handled voting, massive propaganda, massive tech suppression like all these things that made people feel very uncomfortable about how things were done, Hemingway said.

Then you werent allowed to have a single complaint about it, she continued. And I thought the fact you werent allowed to talk about it or have questions was deeply suspicious and weird considering it came from the same people who had for years been claiming the other thing. And its not just 2016 and the Russia collusion hoax. There are many presidential elections weve had in recent years that people claim were stolen by Republicans.

Hemingway said 2020 showed that we need to be more prepared to deal with future takeover strategies employed by hierarchical institutions.

People who care about knowing whats happening in elections and having trust in what they are shouldnt just be looking at what they did in previous elections, Hemingway warned. The people who did this knew that people were going to figure out that they did this crazy embedding into systems. So presumably, they know that people are going to make it illegal and theyre going to move on to the next thing. So people need to be kind of imaginative about how the election administration can be corrupted so that they can be ready to see whats going to happen in the future.

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Mollie Hemingway Goes Behind The Scenes Of Her New Book 'Rigged' - The Federalist

Failed Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton overlooked years of her own doubts that former President Donald Trump was legitimately elected to accuse him of leading a very dangerous continuing high-level attack on the legitimacy of our government and the election of our president on Monday.

Our former president is not only behind it, he incited it, he encouraged it, and he continues to do so, Clinton told the hosts on ABCs The View. And you have leaders of the Republican Party who have willingly gone along as though theyre members of a cult, not a political party but a cult, and theyre continuing attacks on the election.

Clinton also complained about the disinformation network known as Facebook and said the nation is in a full constitutional crisis as a result of Trump.

We are still in the midst of a concerted, well-funded effort to undermine American democracy, she said.

As noted by Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway in her new book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Democrats such as Clinton have labeled decades of presidential victories for their opponents as illegitimate.

If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election.In fact, the last time they accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.

For months leading up to the 2016 election, Clinton worked with the corrupt corporate media and Democrats to create and amplify false narratives about Trump colluding with the Russians. This conspiracy theory was not only used to spy on the Trump campaign but fed into lies post-Clintons election loss that there were hacked voting totals and illegal voter suppression.

Clinton especially sowed doubts about the legitimacy of Trumps presidency and questioned whether she actually lost the 2016 election.

You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you canhave the election stolen from you, Clinton said in 2019.

I knowhes an illegitimate president, Clinton later said.

Just last October, Clinton claimed that there was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level, and We still dont know what really happened.

Theres just a lot that I think will be revealed. History will discover, she said on The Atlantics politics podcast. But you dont win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, Whoa, somethings not right here. That was a deep sense of unease.

Jordan Davidson is a staff writer at The Federalist. She graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism.

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Election Conspiracist Hillary Clinton Whines About Trump's 2020 Criticisms - The Federalist

On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Jill Simonian, the director of outreach for PragerU Resources for Educators and Parents, joins Culture Editor Emily Jashinsky to discuss the new PragerU documentary Miseducated: The Decline of Americas Schools and explain why American schools are obsessed with race, gender, and revisionist history.

What were facing now in education really started decades ago and it has been a slow and steady roll. And, like you said, the rot is so deep. And what is that rot? Christopher Rufo explained it quite frankly, long story short, as Marxism, Simonian said.

Simonian said parents should keep speaking up and speaking out even when they are nervous about repercussions.

I think weve gotten to a point in our social structure where, really, people are really scared about being labeled something awful if they happen to say you know what, I dont necessarily agree with that and I question that narrative,' Simonian said. Fear, I think, has overtaken a lot of whats going on in education now.

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How US Educational Institutions Turned Into Havens For Indoctrination - The Federalist

It was just above freezing on Capitol Hill the night of Jan. 8, when Twitter banned President Donald Trump from messaging his nearly 90 million followers.

The censorship of a sitting American president by unaccountable and unelected billionaires in California was a dangerous escalation, but here in Washington, Democrats were overjoyed, most Republicans were relieved, and the corporate press was ecstatic. To even question the decision publicly in D.C. was to support an imagined insurrection.

That night, as friends and I discussed the damage done and the battles ahead around my kitchen bar, we foresaw a world where these kinds of sweeping actions would become common to the point of mundane, losing any fig leaf of justification along the way. As the hours wore on and the beer animated our discussion, one of our company, Martn Avila, sat aside and said little.

It was strange: Avila was a technologist who stayed in a guest room when he was in town. Hed been predicting this moment for years, but the night it happened he chose to retire with barely a word.

Early the next morning, I heard the engine start on his 94 Range Rover as he pulled the truck into the winter air. He was heading to North Carolina to meet with some old friends.

President Trump was far from the first to be banned by Twitter, but his permanent suspension marked the start of a long, dark night, when anyone anywhere might be banned for anything at the whim of a technocrat.

Wed seen warnings the sun was setting on a free internet: Mozilla Firefox President and cofounder Brendan Eich was fired over his Christian religion in 2014; Google worked openly to demonetize content it didnt like in 2020; and that same year social media giants censored a true story from a major newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton in order to assist their political allies. Treating the U.S. president worse than a terrorist spokesman, however, was something new.

In response, President Trumps followers flocked to Parler, a Twitter competitor that hadnt banned him from their platform, quickly making it a top-downloaded app in the Apple and Google Play stores. Seeing the threat to their censorship, on Saturday both stores announced they would ban the companys app. That evening, their web host, Amazon Web Services, took Parler entirely off the internet.

These actions cant be overstated: To ban an app from the major stores is to essentially ban it from being used by any of your customers and at the moment of its greatest momentum. To ban it from the very servers it uses is to lower it into its grave. For three of the most powerful companies on the planet to do so in concert is nothing less than the end of a crucial idea that if you dont like the way somethings done, you can do it yourself, and if youre good and lucky enough you might even succeed. We called that idea the American dream.

But the very existence of men like Eich, as well as the ongoing occasional leaks and small rebellions within the tech giants, speak to a community of dissidents throughout Silicon Valley that until this final moment had seen few reasons to start something new. By the end of the weekend, that calculus had irrevocably changed and Avila and a small number of other conscientious objectors had launched the first salvo against the core of Big Tech by starting a new company called RightForge.

The mission is simple on its face: create an internet governed by the principles enshrined in our Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. The execution, however, requires something more than previous attempts to combat Big Tech supremacy: Instead of playing whack-a-mole by challenging platforms and software, go after the rot at the core, creating a separate, sprawling infrastructure built on hard work, skill, and servers. That is, a second internet.

Its a fundamental problem wed never had to think about before. What happens when the companies that own the ground say you cant build here anymore if youre a conservative, a free-thinking scientist, an upset parent, or simply a Christian?

Thats no hyperbole: Just last month, GoDaddy cut the legs out from Texas Right To Life for providing a forum to protect the constitutional right to life by reporting violations of the states new law. The publicity GoDaddy received from the corporate press was so unanimously positive, a company called DigitalOcean jumped on the bus, crowing that they deserved credit for deplatforming Christians they werent even officially doing business with yet.

The tyrants who seek to control arent brave, nor are they new and its far from the first time the lords who own the land have told the rest they cant build there anymore. Four hundred years ago, the Puritans set sail for the Americas under just such circumstances. Theyd hoped to land in the colonies down south, just as Americans had hoped for a free internet, but forces outside their control had a different plan so they chartered their own founding and forged their own destinies.

RightForge seeks to do just that, because today that is the only way forward. While Ive devoted my life to journalism, everything is at stake; if the internet is not free, honest journalism itself is threatened along with honest political debate, education, science, and the rest.

Wherever despotism abounds, President Calvin Coolidge warned the American Society of Newspaper Editors nearly a century ago, the sources of public information are first to be brought under its control.

Few in politics, the press, or tech recall his warning; worse yet, few still believe it. The most powerful insiders in the world have turned on the American people and the heritage of liberty we cherish, proudly taking aim at our open society. The only choice remaining is to create an alternative; if we dont forge our own path free from their control, this night weve entered will only grow darker and longer.

So, on the first Monday of the month I joined them in their fight as chief communications director, where Ill be defending and expanding an internet where people of all politics and religions can communicate, interact, and conduct commerce free from arbitrary power.

This mission stands in support of honest journalism and against those who seek to censor it, so far from leaving, Ill be remaining at The Federalist. Were on the front lines of every single battle for our culture and country, and Im anxious for the fray.

This fight is a crucial one. One by one, from science and the universities to banking and commerce, press and opinion, conservatives are losing access. We may soon need alternates to all these things and will need access to an internet infrastructure to build them.

Its as easy to be optimistic as it is pessimistic neither posture requires much effort beyond a smile or a frown. Assuming everything will be OK that the rulers will overreach and grow weary, or that some mythical backlash is coming isnt realistic, and is as incompatible with the American way as defeatism in the face of difficult odds. Big Tech might be big, but were a strong people with the intelligence, the technology, the means, and the grit to fight for our freedoms and forge our own destinies.

Weve done it before; were doing it again.

Christopher Bedford is a senior editor at The Federalist and chief communications officer at RightForge.

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Freedom From Censorship: Inside The Battle To Build A Second Internet - The Federalist

Virginia Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffes disastrous interview with a local station on Friday didnt just show his unpreparedness and inability to budge from one-line talking points, it also outed him as a bald-faced liar.

How do you define critical race theory? asked WAVY News 10s Anita Blanton.

I answer this question very clearly, McAuliffe responded, before not answering the question. Its not taught in Virginia, its never been taught in Virginia. And as Ive said this a lot: Its a dog-whistle. Its racial, its division, and its used by Glenn Youngkin and others this is the same thing with Trump and the border wall to divide people.

So how doyoudefine it? Blanton pressed.

Anita! It is not taught here in Virginia, McAuliffe snapped.

But how do you define it?

Doesnt matter, its not taught here in Virginia, McAuliffe said. Im not even spending my time because the school board and everyone else has come out and said its not taught. Its racist. Its a dog-whistle.

But if we dont have a definition how can we say its racist? I just want a definition from you, Blanton continued, promptingMcAuliffe to blame her for wasting precious viewers time by asking.

Even worse than McAuliffes condescending tone or hostility to answering a basic question was the obvious untruth of the talking point he fell back on. Yes, critical race theory is indeed in Virginia classrooms. There may be no other state in the union where examples of radical and pervasive critical race theory in the public school system abound more.

In Alexandria, a page on the Alexandria City Public Schools website promotes resources including How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, White Rage by Carol Anderson, and White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy and Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black by Bettina Love.

Another ACPS webpage encourages parents to let go of colorblindness and ensure your kids are aware of race, while also linking to aForbes articlethat suggests understanding our countrys deeply rooted racism with resources such as:

In Loudoun County, Loudoun County Public Schools firsthired consulting firm The Equity Collaborative in April 2019 and has since poured money into critical race theory consultants. The Equity Collaborative, which LCPS paidmore than $400,000 for an equity audit,operateson the assumption that racism controls the political, social, and economic realms of U.S. society.

Monica Gill, a 25-year veteran government and history teacher in Loudoun County, observed in June: Much of what is being touted in Loudoun County teacher trainings and trickling down into classrooms are poisonous fruit straight off the critical race theory tree.

The Loudoun County School Board also infuriated teachers and parents in fall 2020 when it tried to introduce a code of conduct for employees that wouldprohibit even private speech that was not in alignment with the school divisions commitment to action-oriented equity practices. Those equity practices include the school districts Action Plans to Combat Systemic Racism and its Comprehensive Equity Plan.

Andrea Weiskopf, an English and Latin teacher at River Bend Middle School in Loudoun County, tweeted in June, The best thing about the summer is that I can spend all my time planning how to incorporate Critical Race Theory into my lessons.

In Fairfax County, Superintendent Scott Brabrand announced in a survey to parents over the summer that Fairfax County Public Schools would be developing a new Anti-Racism, Anti-Bias Education Curriculum Policy. The survey came from a New York consulting firm, which FCPS has contracted with for a four-year CRT program and which has been paid nearly $50,000 from FCPSs chief equity officer.

Fairfax schools also sent a PowerPoint to teachers in July explaining that CRT is an interpretive framework that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression.

CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice, the PowerPoint claimed, adding that critical race theory is a useful approach to issues such as school funding, segregation, language policies, discipline policies, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and accountability policies.

In Arlington County, the director of diversity and inclusion at Arlington Public Schools asked Amazon to send the school district copies of Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by critical race grifter Kendi, after which Amazon sent hundreds of copies of the book to the school system to the tune of $5,000.

In conservative Powhatan County, as Ashley Bateman reported for The Federalist in July, County Supervisor David Williams shared slides from theVirginia Inquiry Collaborative (VIC), a consortium encouraging race-based teaching to include the oppressiveness of white culture and learning through the lens of systemic racism.

And at the Virginia Department of Educations 2020 equity summit, critical race theorist Bettina Love gave a keynote address about systemic racism and dismantling capitalism.

McAuliffes cringe-worthy conversation with Blanton about CRT comes on the heels of his comment in a debate against Republican opponent Glenn Youngkin that I dont think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.

A majority of Virginians disagree with McAuliffes sentiment, however, with a new poll showing that 52 percent of respondents believe parents should have more control of school curricula than school boards, and only 33 percent saying school boards should have more power than parents.

Critical race theory is rampant in Virginia public schools, and McAuliffe is either lying out of his rear or ignorant to a disqualifying degree about one of the hottest topics in his state.

Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

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Yes, Terry McAuliffe, Critical Race Theory Is In Virginia Schools - The Federalist

In recent weeks, the Biden administration has begun asserting that the spending bill independent experts believe could cost $5.5 trillion over a decade will actually cost zero. Putting aside the way these patronizing assertions insult voters intelligence, does the kernel of the Biden claimthat the Democratic reconciliation proposals will be fully paid-forstand up to scrutiny?

In a word, hardly. Multiple elements in the history of Democrats last big spending bill, Obamacare, have turned it into a budget buster, suggesting that Bidens zero legislation will follow the same fiscally irresponsible path.

First, the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress employed numerous fiscal gimmicks. While drafting the bill, they delayed implementation of the bills main provisions from 2013 to 2014, lowering the upfront spending.

In his September 2009 speech to Congress, Barack Obama claimed his proposal will cost around $900 billion over ten years. Not only did the final legislation come in hundreds of billions over his claim, it also counted the laws Medicare savings as both funding Obamacare and extending Medicares solvencya budgetary trick refuted by both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Medicare actuary.

Another Obamacare gimmick came in the CLASS Act, a long-term care program. Kent Conrad, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, famously called CLASS a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing Bernie Madoff would have been proud of, because it would generate a mirage of surpluses in its initial ten-year budget window, only to run huge losses in future decades. When in 2011 the Obama administration couldnt certify CLASSs actuarial soundness, the program never got off the ground, and $70.2 billion in phony savings suddenly evaporated.

Democrats plan to employ many similar gimmicks in their current spending spree. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, suggested lowering the bills cost by cutting programs from ten years to fivewith every expectation that future Congresses will extend them.

Democrats also are counting on funny money from dynamic scoring, making the illogical and contradictory claim that expanding the welfare state will increase economic growth and tax revenue. And the Treasury Department proposed that one tax increaseclosing the loophole that Biden himself exploited to reduce his familys payroll taxes by nearly $517,000get deposited into the Medicare Trust Fund, reprising Obamacares double-counting scheme.

The second ding on Obamacares soundness comes from provisions repealed by subsequent Congresses. Repealing the health insurer tax and the medical device tax, as a bipartisan spending bill did in 2019, lowered insurance premiums, but also added to federal deficits.

Congress also repealed two other Obamacare provisionsthe Cadillac tax on high-cost employer insurance, and a cap on per-beneficiary spending in Medicarewith the potential to lower long-term health costs and contain entitlement spending. Both provisions had significant flaws. For instance, the unelected board was directed to enforce the Medicare spending cap in ways that could have impaired access to treatments.

Lawmakers, including Republicans, should have insisted on creating better alternatives before repealing these cost-containment provisions outright. They did not.

Obamacares third fiscal flaw comes via provisions that future Congresses will likely need to revisit. While providing a one-time increase in the number of hospitals patients with health coverage, the law reduced their Medicare payments in perpetuity.

Every year since Obamacares passage, the Medicare actuary has released reports calling these productivity adjustments unsustainable. The most recent version noted that within two decades, the perpetual payment reductions would cause one-third of hospitals and 60 percent of nursing homes to lose money, raising the possibility of access and quality-of-care issues for Medicare beneficiariesissues that Congress would have to address.

Finally, the estimates of budget scorekeepers can miss the mark, sometimes wildly. A December 2017 Congressional Budget Office analysis demonstrated that CBO greatly overestimated enrollment in and federal spending on subsidized coverage in Obamacares exchanges, while underestimating enrollment and costs in free Medicaid coverage in states that chose to expand that program.

Recall too that while CBO claimed the federal takeover of student loans would save $58 billion over ten years at the time of its inclusion in Obamacare, an Education Department analysis last year concluded that this pile of toxic debt could cost taxpayers $435 billion.

As Democrats attempt to enact a second Great Society agenda, the Medicare program they want to expand provides a cautionary tale. In 1965, Medicare coverage of physician services was estimated to require federal appropriations of about $500 million a year from general tax revenues. Last year, general revenue transfers to Medicare Part B totaled $328.4 billionan 76-fold increase, even after accounting for inflation.

It seems that no matter the president, nothing becomes so costly as a free government program.

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Only An Idiot Would Believe Congress's Spending Spree Will Cost 'Zero' - The Federalist

The New York Times reported over the weekend that major cities are reacting to surging violence by reinvesting in their depleted police departments. Thats great news, but lets not forget how we got here and whos to blame for the horrific crime waves were experiencing to begin with.

All of the rioting, the looting, the vandalism, and, most devastating, the 30 percent nationwide increase in homicides of 2020, were the direct result of Democrats and leftists in the media instigating, justifying, and excusing violent crime in the wake of the death of George Floyd. This, as Mollie Hemingway reminds us in her new book, Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, was solely done for the purpose of winning the most disgusting political war theyve ever waged: the fight to deny Donald Trump a second term.

Rigged is an expansive look at the overt and covert coordination among the Democrat Party, the corrupted national media, behemoth internet companies, and other major institutions to tip 2020 in their favor, even as it meant lying to and manipulating voters, and, yes, violence.

Despite its radical extremism, Black Lives Matter received a tremendous amount of support from corporations and other elite groups, writes Hemingway. Its website even proclaimed the movement wanted to disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure and sought to defund the police.

As far as policing goes, thats exactly what happened. Across the country, governments at the local level began slashing budgets for law enforcement, Democrat mayors ordered police to dramatically reduce arrests related to looting and vandalism, and leftist prosecutors declined to pursue major offenses. All of this was done with the nodding approval of CNN, MSNBC, the major networks, and national papers.

The scenes that came out of the riots around the country the first weekend in June were apocalyptic, although the media did their best to downplay the carnage, writes Hemingway. In one memorable image, MSNBCs Ali Velshi stood in front of a massive burning building in Minneapolis one night and said, I want to be clear on how I characterize this. This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly. At a protest a couple of months later, CNN was mocked for describing a Kenosha riot as a fiery but mostly peaceful protest as fires and chaos raged in the background.

The carnage and chaos resulted in dozens of deaths and themost expensive insurance claims tab for rioting ever (which could be as high as $2 billion and maybe more). Hemingway counts at least 25 people who died in the horror.

The left romanticized it the entire time. In June of 2020, now-Vice President Kamala Harris warned that everyone beware because the protests are not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.

Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said in an interview on MSNBC two months later, There needs to be unrest in the streets for as long as theres unrest in our lives, and unfortunately, theres plenty to go around.

Yeah, they were sure to offer the obligatory peaceful qualifier so as to give the sacred fact-checkers in the media a reason to rebut every accurate and legitimate charge from critics who could see with their own eyes what was happening that Democrats and their friends in the press were tacitly approving of the havoc taking place around the nation.

It was in every sense a hostage situation. All major cities were boarded up as the mayhem continued, and just as soon as things seemed to calm down heading into the fall, the plywood was reinforced in anticipation of an election outcome that might not go the way Democrats wanted. A Trump victory would be another excuse to continue the rioting over a media-generated narrative that such an outcome was yet more proof that this is a racist country and black people are perpetually in life-threatening danger.

Were only just now recovering from the strain of it all. And if we dont want a repeat in 2022 or 2024, we cant forget who caused it.

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Police Rebuild After Democrats Tore Them Down To Win An Election - The Federalist

The following is a transcript of my radar from Wednesdays edition of Rising on Hill TV.

Two years ago I wrote about Greg Gutfelds eye-popping ratings. The ratio of news coverage to viewers, compared with the ratio of media coverage to viewers for comedians like Samantha Bee, said something profound about the media bubble.

It still does. Its the Coming Apart thesis in practice, a consequence of elite sorting.

Call it the Law of Rotten Tomatoes. Why do critics love Nat Geos fawning Fauci while audiences hate it? Why do critics hate the sharply new Chappelle special while audiences love it? Why is the consensus so different between classes? Because journalists have similar backgrounds, lifestyles, and tastes. The incentives to question that dogma are low. The incentives to champion it are high.

Despite being on cable Gutfeld is now the number two host in late night, behind only Stephen Colbert. Colbert, despite a legendary run at Comedy Central, now inspires more cringes than laughs. He is nearly unbearable. So why is he the king of late night?

This is an example I always use to illustrate a trend that gets way too little attention. Colbert and Gutfeld are nothing averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of two million viewers, according to Nielsen. It may seem crazy that Colbert is sharing the same top slot as Johnny Carson, whose last year on The Tonight Show was pulling in triple the nightly viewers 30 years ago.

So whats the big deal? This is a story about the business of commercial art as much as the quality of it. But its political too.

Gutfeld is an instructive foil for two reasons: first hes on cable, which has undercut the networks power along with streaming, and second because hes politically incorrect, which is an advantage since all the comedians whose asses hes kicking insist on following rules that needlessly handicap them.

And yet that doesnt explain Colbert. Hes not funny but he is, as Gutfeld recently said, Sesame Street for Democrats. Theres a market for that, and in the era of media fragmentation, so long as you corner the market on a niche, you can pull in two million viewers and win the late night race. So if theres a market for cringey Boomer resistance comedy, and there is, then all you have to do is produce that low-hanging fruit better than anyone else.

This has obvious upsides. It means scrappy alternative shows like Rising have more power than certain shows on dusty cable platforms like CNN. It means places like The Intercept and The Federalist are more powerful than they could have been before.

One story Ive been following closely at The Federalist is The Daily Wires very intentional and well-funded campaign to compete with the Hollywood establishment. Just last night, The Daily Wire announced itll release Terror on the Prairie next spring, anticipating more vaccine mandates in the film industry. See whats happening here?

When Disney booted Gina Carano from The Mandalorian,The Daily Wire immediately collaborated with her on this new film. As Ben Shapiro told me back in August, We entered the entertainment space in order to deliver a message to Hollywood: You no longer have a monopoly.

Why can a conservative media outlet make that claim in 2021? Because streaming makes the barrier to entry lower, allowing more players to compete. Political correctness is creating niches that are easier for new competitors to fill.

Every industry is starting to have its own version of Substack thanks to both these forces. An upside is that heterodox celebrities like Gina Carano increasingly have landing pads outside the industry establishment, which incentives artistic freedom and integrity.

A downside is that it encourages us to stay divided, to cluster in niches that let us share more with a few than less with more. Maybe you found Johnny Carson to be vanilla. Maybe, like me, you love political comedy and find the kind of comedians who made and make it in mass media to be uninteresting. When you have to appeal to everyone, you have to be a little less offensive, especially now. But without Johnny Carson and the mass media he thrived in, we are not forced to confront what we share, we are encouraged to emphasize what makes us different and live in that universe. Maybe you love Jezebel and Lindy West and fourth-wave feminism you can watch Shrill and The Handmaids Tale and never have your values questioned.

Mass media was quickly a success and then a causality of technological advances. This will have advantages and disadvantages but the least we can do is recognize that were in a very different place and its influencing our culture in dramatic ways.

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Will Media Fragmentation Solve The Culture War Or Make Us More Divided? - The Federalist

The critical race racket has become nearly ubiquitous in American education, as shown by the recent embrace of this radical ideology by Americas two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

As Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal reports, [a]t its annual meeting earlier this month, the NEA adopted a proposal stating that it is reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory. The NEA also vowed to fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric and issue a study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.

As Riley notes, the AFT has similarly embraced this radical orthodoxy sweeping academe, partnering with Ibram X. Kendi, an activist-scholar who openly embraces racial discrimination against whites. Riley points out the perverse irony of Kendis assertion in How to be an Anti-Racist that [t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. Some anti-racism, indeed.

The teachers unions embrace of a radical ideology that until only recently was the preserve of faculty lounges at elite liberal arts colleges shows just how quickly this worldview has become mainstream not only in leftist circles, but increasingly, in elementary and secondary education as well. The great work of Heather MacDonald and Christopher Rufo in exposing the seepage of this pernicious doctrine into academia, corporate America, and even the military has shown just how rapidly CRT has come to dominate the national discourse.

This, despite gaslighting from the likes of AFT President Randi Weingarten, who claimed simultaneously that CRT is not being promulgated in Americas schools while pledging to defend, in a court of law if necessary, those teaching it.

To better understand how far CRT has been embedded into American education, we viewed more than a dozen webinars and lectures by leading social justice educators, CRT proponents, legal scholars, and elementary and secondary educators. They included: How to Use the Books You Choose: Elevating the Status of Marginalized Identities in Childrens Literature through Classroom Teaching, a February 9 webinar hosted by Boston Universitys Wheelock College of Education; Anti-Racist Teaching Practice, a November 2020 webinar hosted by California State at Fullerton; White Fragility, a lecture by Robin DiAngelo (author of the noted book of the same name) hosted by the Family Action Network; and Impacts of Racism on PK-12 Classrooms, a February 2021 University of Iowa anti-racism professional development webinar series.

The lectures ran the gamut geographically and covered education at every level, from pre-kindergarten to the graduate level. What they revealed was nothing short of pure indoctrination. To fully appreciate the destructive quality of intersectional education particularly in early childhood, when minds are malleable and nuance and perspective are elusive we highlight what until recently few outside conservative think tanks seemed to fully appreciate: Critical race theory is being adopted in education at the earliest possible age with remarkable zeal.

Several of the webinars we viewed, including those sponsored by the Wheelock School of Education, were designed for elementary educators. Its worth stressing that, lest one harbor any doubts about where American education is headed ideologically, these are programs that teach the teachers. What stood out is the nearly universal calls to radically transform, restructure, and reimagine curricula at every level to reflect critical race theory.

Take for example Teaching History for Justice, an April 30, 2021, webinar from Wheelock with Kaylene Stevens, program director for social studies education at Wheelock, and Chris Martell, assistant professor of social studies education at the University of Massachusetts Boston, co-authors of Teaching History for Justice, Centering Activism in Students Study of the Past (Teachers College Press, 2020). The webinar highlights the need to reorganize how social studies and history are taught.

For them, the powerful individual-based approach to teaching history, whereby students learn about leaders from Julius Caesar to Abraham Lincoln who have shaped history, is not only flawed but irredeemably grounded in white supremacy. What, then, should emerge to take its place?

For Stevens and Martell, the traditional approach must be supplanted by a movement-centered curriculum, one grounded in activist thinking, with the goal of encouraging students to become activists at the earliest possible age. Traditional models of instruction that aim to teach students to think like a historian or think like a democratic citizen are inherently lacking; they must be supplemented with thinking like an activist.

Figures they tell teachers are worthy of study, all cited approvingly, include Angela Davis (described as an activist for racial and gender equity and democracy, a prison abolitionist, and member of the Black Panther and Communist parties) and Marsha P. Johnson (an activist for queer and trans law and founding member of the Gay Liberation Front and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). If only Caesar had been an activist.

Whats more, Stevens and Martell ridicule a 19th-century history textbook that deigned to praise Lincoln as one of the greatest of men. Even more disturbingly, the authors lament that their books recommendations only begin with kindergarten, since anti-racist work would ideally start in early childhood settings.

Finally, sources with which students engage should rely less heavily on written texts and more on oral history and artifacts to better capture certain communities. The upshot of this new mode of instruction is more activism and indoctrination and less rigor all at the earliest possible age. But dont worry, theyre quick to remind us that Teaching History for Justice is political but not partisan. One can only help but wonder if some forms of activism are more encouraged than others.

As if this new mode of instruction is not bad enough, the luminaries at Boston University also determined that childrens books can be harnessed for CRT indoctrination. In a seminar entitled How to Use the Books You Choose: Elevating the Status of Marginalized Identities in Childrens Literature through Classroom Teaching, Dr. Andrea Bien and Dr. Laura Jimnez explain the emotional damage visited upon primary school-aged children particularly those that belong to underrepresented groups due to a lack of self-representation in childrens literature.

Jimnez states, As a Latina lesbian, I did not see myself reflected in a book until I was 47 years old. . . . What that tells me is that my experience, my identity, my place in the world is not worthy of inclusion in literature. To right this supposed wrong, the speakers posit that including more politically correct stories in childrens curricula must only come with the erasure of what they consider to be harmful or outdated books.

To the speakers, The Rainbow Fish, a childrens classic used by teachers nationwide to teach our youth about the values of friendship and sharing with others, ought to be promptly removed from classrooms. Why? Because the protagonist of the story decides to share his colorful scaleshis unique and defining characteristicwith others as a token of friendship.

For Bien and Jimnez, this is not a kind and selfless act, but a harmful message to any child who does not fit the supposed societal norm that they must mutilate themselves to fit in. In the opinion of the speakers, the societal norm in the United States of America excludes any person that is not white, straight, cis, Christian, male, and able[bodied]. The Rainbow Fish is, unfortunately, a singular example in this seminars hour-long crusade to reshape childrens literature in the United States for an alleged lack of attention to racial identities.

Make no mistake. The purpose of this seminar and countless others like it isnt to simply engage in friendly discussion or debate. Rather, the purpose is to influence teachers from coast to coast to fundamentally reconstruct what and how Americas children are taught in schools.

What stood out as most striking across the board is how brazen social justice educators are in their calls for the transformation of Americas elementary education into little more than social justice bootcamps, while union leaders and liberal elected officials vociferously deny that CRT is being taught at all. After all, several of these experts contend that to refrain from this method of teaching is to set down a hidden or implicit curriculum, a tacit narrative inculcated by not teaching what ought to be taught. The message is clear: Teach this nonsense or you are complicit in oppression or worse.

Another example of this weaponization of elementary education for ideological ends was a social justice webinar hosted by Be GLAD, a self-described national organization providing professional development to states, districts, and schools serving as a professional development model in the area of academic language acquisition and literacy. Perhaps most concerning, Be GLAD boasts the imprimatur of being a U.S. Department of Education Program of Academic Excellence.

Designed to train elementary school teachers in social justice education, the webinar covered the usual topics of systemic racism and microaggressions, toeing the leftist line that virtually every facet of American life is saturated in racism from the banking and housing systems, to criminal justice, public health, and education. Calls for systemic anti-racism, a supposed panacea for these ills, include some familiar appeals to [d]ismantle[] barriers, and some novel ones perhaps unfamiliar to a lay (read: rational) audience, such as [d]ecolonization of the mind. Well, thats a tall order for 7-year-olds.

Most jarring of all is how the presenters lauded the use of a Black Lives Matter Process Grid, in which students map out their identities, presented in tabular form and replete with corresponding lists of those with a power advantage (unsurprisingly straight, white, Christian males) and those with oppressed disadvantage, broken down by age, social class, gender, race, ethnicity, language, ability, sexual orientation, and religion.

In nearly every webinar reviewed, the presenters go out of their way to dismiss the idea that this methodology constitutes indoctrination. It goes without saying that encouraging teachers to educate that colorblindness is inherently racist and that diversity can be oppressive hardly encourages independent thought.

Sadly, this approach seems to be working. For example, in a webinar hosted by Cal State Fullertons College of Education entitled Anti-Racist Teaching Practice, speaker Monique Marshall, an elementary school teacher, presented the audience a video clip of a 6-year-old student. In the video, when asked to define his multicultural identity, the young boy began his response by stating that the color of his skin defined his outside identity, which elicited smiles from the presenting speakers.

To be clear, there are people with whom we trust the education of our youth who actively encourage children to view the color of their skin as an individuals defining characteristic, thus dividing their students along the lines of race and identity. A far cry from not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. After all, for CRT enthusiasts, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s noble aspiration is not merely impractical but a concession to injustice and oppression.

So where does this leave us? These seminars and workshops show CRT is no longer fringe but is well within the mainstream of elementary and secondary education. Its no longer confined to post-secondary and graduate levels.

Therefore, recent grassroots efforts to combat this dangerous ideology are imperative. They symbolize that parents are finally giving the issue the attention it deserves.

While it may provide a minutes solace that the Biden administrations Department of Education removed express references to CRT from its July 19 notice in the Federal Register soliciting grant applications, these seminars demonstrate that American educators dont need the governments encouragement to import these views into the classroom. CRT is in the pipeline, and doesnt seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Continuing to expose its advance is necessary so American elementary and secondary education can escape the grips of a worldview that, despite its professed aim of racial progress, is deeply flawed and divisive.

Peter Kirsanow is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Christopher Ross served as a legal intern at the commission and is in his third year at the University of Mississippi School of Law. Maximos N. Nikitas, who is a second year at Notre Dame Law School, also served as a legal intern at the commission and as speechwriter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior David L. Bernhardt.

Read more:

Teachers Are Being Re-Educated In Critical Race Theory - The Federalist

The divisive national debate about abortion is in the news as much as ever. Texas new ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy was blocked by a judge on Wednesday but allowed to continue on Friday, Democrats huge spending bill is in part being held up by an amendment allowing federal funding of abortion, and, in what will be the most-watched case in decades, the Supreme Court may overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling later this year.

The Roe ruling highlighted the greatest logical flaw in support for abortion: for abortion to be illegal at some point before birth (and even most pro-choice Americans agree it should be illegal in the very late stages), you have to pick that point in time. But when?

With Roe, the Supreme Court first took a trimester approach to when abortion should be permitted. As the Roe opinion was drafted, the justices disagreed on the stage at which abortion should be regulated, even changing that point from the end of the first trimester to the end of the second.

In its final form, Roe forbade virtually all abortion regulation in the first trimester, allowed regulation only if serving the mothers health in the second, and banned prohibition in the third trimester when a mothers health was a consideration. The latter was broadly defined in the companion case Doe v. Bolton to include emotional, psychological, and family health, thus effectively allowing all abortions.

The justice who wrote the majority opinion in Roe, Harry Blackmun, even wrote in a memo to his colleagues that Roes use of trimesters was arbitrary but perhaps any other selected point, such as quickening or viability (of the fetus), is equally arbitrary. In Roe, the court did not resolve the question of when life begins but ruled that a fetus did not qualify as a person as used in the Constitution.

Later, the Supreme Court abandoned the arbitrary trimester framework in favor of another arbitrary and selected point Blackmun had identified in that memo. In its 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling, the court barred undue burdens on abortion before fetal viability.

But drawing the line at the point of viability is also problematic that point will continue to get earlier in the pregnancy as medical advances create better means of keeping the unborn alive outside the womb; indeed, viability is now weeks earlier than it was when Roe was decided. Yet the unborn child did not become a person because it could survive due to modern science. Newborns are not technically viable either, as they cannot survive on their own. By this logic, we should consider it acceptable to kill newborns.

As the issue comes to the forefront of national debate yet again with the court hearing oral arguments on December 1 in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, here are the many reasons the arguments in favor of abortion are wrong.

Pro-Abortion Claim: The government should stay out of peoples private lives. This is a womans choice, not anyone elses, and a womens rights issue.

Why Its Wrong: Laws often restrict an individuals rights, including the right to hurt another person or infringe upon anothers rights. In taking the life of an unborn child, a woman is taking away the most basic of all rights.

An unborn child is not part of a womans body, but a separate, individual human being with its own rights. It is not the mothers property, just as parents are legal guardians of children but not the childrens owners and are not allowed to abuse their children.

Pro-Abortion Claim: When most abortions take place, in early pregnancy, a fertilized egg is just a mass of cells, not a human being. It doesnt feel pain.

Why Its Wrong: A new life begins at conception and should not be destroyed by human interference.

First, one-third of abortions take place after nine weeks of pregnancy. From the moment of conception, the zygote has its own unique DNA structure, is alive and growing, and is equipped to become a mature human being.

Six weeks after conception, the unborn childs heartbeat is detectable but began beating before then. At week three, neural development begins. At week four, the eye, ear, and respiratory systems begin to form. At week six, the mouth and lips are present. At week seven, the embryo looks like a baby.

The beginning of life could be defined by many different points of development fertilization (the fusion of the nuclei of the sperm and egg cell), implantation, the first movement, heartbeat, or brain waves, consciousness, or birth. Any point you choose could be just a days difference between life and death for an unborn child. Nor does the absence of pain at early stages make it moral to kill the unborn child, just as it would not with an adult.

Abortion can involve sucking a baby out of the uterus (or as Planned Parenthood putsit, the suction machine is turned on and the uterus is gently emptied), causing a stillbirth by injecting a salt solution into the uterus, and other horrors.

Pro-Abortion Claim: Abortion cant be a crime against nature if fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried in nature.

Why Its Wrong: The occurrence of an event in nature does not justify deliberately mimicking that event. The elderly die of natural causes, but that doesnt make it right to kill them. And many miscarriages are associated with extra or missing chromosomes.

Pro-Abortion Claim: Birth control isnt 100 percent effective. When it fails, women have been responsible and need abortion as another method to avoid having a child.

Why Its Wrong: Seven percent of women report having unprotected sex in the past three months, not including 8 percent who have unprotected sex but are seeking pregnancy or already pregnant. Many people who use birth control do not do so effectively. The pregnancy prevention rate of birth-control pills used consistently and correctly is 99 percent. For that small portion who correctly used birth control but it did not work, they have to accept the risks of sexual activity, which include a child. Contraception is free with most health insurance plans and easily available.

Pro-Abortion Claim: In the case of rape or incest, when a woman was an innocent victim of an involuntary act, she should not be forced to carry a child. She would be forced to suffer even more.

Why Its Wrong: One percent of women say they want an abortion because they were raped, and less than 0.5 percent say they are pregnant as a result of incest. Even in such very rare cases, an unborn child should not be killed for another persons evil deed. The pregnant woman needs love and support, not more trauma.

An estimated 800,000 abortions take place in the United States each year. Common reasons given for seeking an abortion are that a child would disrupt the mothers education (38 percent), interfere with job or career (38 percent), or be unaffordable (73 percent). About half of respondents said they didnt want to be a single mom or were having relationship problems.

About a third said they didnt want any more kids; 25 percent said they didnt want people to know they had sex or got pregnant; 32 percent said they werent ready for a child; and 22 percent didnt feel mature enough to raise children. More than half of those seeking abortion have had at least one previous birth.

Pro-Abortion Claim: Minors are too young for the responsibilities of parenthood.

Why Its Wrong: About 3 percent of females who get abortions are younger than 18, and 8 percent are 18 to 19 years old. Parents of minors should teach their children about the consequences of sex, the benefits of abstinence, and the limitations of contraception, among other things: Sex can lead to pregnancy and if it does the unborn child should not be killed. Accepting truths that you dont like is part of maturity and sex should be reserved for mature people ready to care for a child.

Pro-Abortion Claim: If abortion were made legal only in cases of rape or incest, women would lie.

Why Its Wrong: The court system could settle the truth of their claims and more reporting of rape and incest would help bring perpetrators to justice.

Pro-Abortion Claim: Abortion is safer than continuing a pregnancy to term.

Why Its Wrong: Even if abortion is safer than pregnancy, that doesnt make it right. But with modern medicine, the death risks for both abortion and pregnancy are low.

Pro-Abortion Claim: It would be better for abnormal fetuses to be aborted than live with poor health or a disability.

Why Its Wrong: In the case of the small minority of fetuses with a potentially life-threatening abnormality, a natural death may result, but, if not, the child should be given the benefit of the doubt, not be killed. Its wrong to kill disabled people for their disabilities.

Pro-Abortion Claim: If abortion were outlawed, women would just get riskier, dangerous abortions.

Why Its Wrong: People break other laws with repercussions too, but we dont avoid that outcome by not making those laws. Plus, outlawing abortion would save millions of unborn babies lives.

It is difficult to know the number of abortions resulting in death before abortion was legalized, because many illegal abortions went unreported. Education is the best alternative, so that women know the risks of trying to get an abortion illegally, how to effectively use birth control, and how they can receive assistance as mothers.

Pro-Abortion Claim: The right to an abortion has led to a more prosperous society as women have continued in their careers and low-income couples have not been burdened with an additional expense. Abortion has reduced the child abuse and crime that arise from unwanted children.

Why Its Wrong: Abortion has been bad for our society, as it devalues human life and the fulfillment that only family and children, not a job, can provide. If women want to put careers first or cant afford children, they should practice abstinence or correctly use birth control and accept the consequences if those fail.

If women are poor and do have children, the government provides assistance. Adoption is also a better option than killing an unborn child. Many loving, screened, financially stable parents are waiting to adopt babies.

As for whether studies prove that abortion has reduced crime or abuse, this is a dangerous line of argument. Should we abort babies of certain groups more likely to be criminals?

Pro-Abortion Claim: A woman has a right to privacy, as recognized by the Supreme Court, and to make her own decisions about her life and happiness.

Why Its Wrong: Roe v. Wade continues to be so strongly resisted because it was deeply legally flawed.

In the majority opinion in Roe, Justice Blackmun acknowledged that the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy, and thus abortion, but that a number of prior court decisions have found a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy grounded in the First, Fifth, and particularly the Ninth and 14th Amendments.

The latter reads, No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. The Ninth Amendment states, The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

The legal arguments are lengthy, but the short version is that the constitutional right to liberty simply does not grant the right to kill another person, and an unborn child is a person. The Constitution does not explicitly guarantee a right to privacy or, by extension, abortion. The Supreme Court has been gravely wrong before (such as with racist rulings in Dred Scott v. Sandfordand Plessy v. Ferguson).

Abortion is a deeply divisive issue, and about half of Americans consider themselves pro-life and half call themselves pro-choice. Overturning Roe would not end abortion rights but return the issue to the states, allowing for a more democratic process.

Continued here:

12 Pro-Life Truths To Counter Every Abortion Myth - The Federalist