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Journalist George Packer, who proved his progressive bona fides in a decades-long career writing for leftist publications, has written a lengthy article for The Atlantic regarding his personal discovery of something American conservatives have known for decades: Many of America’s public schools are nothing more than leftist indoctrination factories.

“When the Culture War Comes for the Kids” describes Packer’s personal experience with NYC’s public school system, where the “organized pathologies of adults, including yours — sometimes known as politics — find a way to infect the world of children,” he reveals.

Yet while Packer’s article is devoted to machinations of a school system, he also divulges the almost pathological levels of narcissism, self-aggrandizement, and arrogance of New York’s cultural elites, who lie awake at night wondering if they can get their two-year-old children into preschools costing $30,000 a year, even if it takes “gaming the special needs system” to do so.

Their angst is palpable. “The pressure of meritocracy made us apply to private schools when our son was 2 — not because we wanted him to attend private preschool, but because, in New York City, where we live, getting him into a good public kindergarten later on would be even harder, and if we failed, by that point most of the private-school slots would be filled,” Packer writes.

Packer soon realized meritocracy had nothing to do with it, noting that in recent decades “a broadening of opportunity” had been displaced by “a new class structure in which professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with little chance of seeing their children move up.”

“When parents on the fortunate ledge of this chasm gaze down, vertigo stuns them,” he adds. “Far below they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, outsourcing, rising morbidity rates — and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling.”

Not exactly. They won’t abandon a progressive ideology that ultimately ensures a societal split into rich and poor, with the latter dismissed as “deplorables” who refuse to embrace the elitist world of intersectionalism and diversity.

A world where social justice trumps meritocracy.

Thus, when the tuition at the preschool in which Packer enrolled his first child passed the $50,000 mark, and soon after his wife gave birth to their second child, he enrolled his kids in public school.

Yet he soon realized his “zoned” public school was a disaster, and he applied to “eight or nine” others. When his wait-listed son finally got a place in one of them Packer was ecstatic, taking additional pride in the fact that the boy was befriending children from different social strata, even as he and his wife wondered whether “we had cheated our son of a better education.”

All remained well until 2014, when a new mood Packer described as “progressive but not hopeful” took hold. “At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity,” he explained.

Packer soon discovered how that new progressivism played out in the classroom. The first thing that troubled him was the backlash against standardized testing, couched as “structurally biased, even racist, because nonwhite students had the lowest scores.” And while he was not on board with the “opt-out” movement, he soon realized it had become “a form of moral absolutism, with little tolerance for dissent,” even as actual meritocracy became the ultimate casualty.

That was only the beginning. Next up, identity politics. He recounted, “When our son was in third or fourth grade, students began to form groups that met to discuss issues based on identity — race, sexuality, disability.”

Then, the transgender agenda. Shortly after a second grade girl insisted she was a boy “almost every bathroom” in the school became gender-neutral. “Where signs had once said boys and girls, they now said students,” Packer reveals.

All of it was done without parental notification. “Parents only heard about it when children started arriving home desperate to get to the bathroom after holding it in all day,” Packer writes. “Girls told their parents mortifying stories of having a boy kick open their stall door. Boys described being afraid to use the urinals.”

Moving on 2016, two things dominated life in the Packer household: the musical “Hamilton” and the election of Donald Trump. Packer describes the former as a balm for the latter, as Packer claims both of his children were wholly traumatized by Trump’s victory.

“We owed our children a thousand apologies. The future looked awful, and somehow we expected them to fix it. Did they really have to face this while they were still in elementary school?” Packer asks.

Not unless the adults make their political biases transparent.

Which is exactly what the school system did to Packer’s son and his fellow students. “He learned about the genocide of Native Americans and slavery,” Packer writes. “But he was never taught about the founding of the republic. He didn’t learn that conflicting values and practical compromises are the lifeblood of self-government.”

It gets worse. “At the year-end share, the fifth graders presented dioramas on all the hard issues of the moment — sexual harassment, LGBTQ rights, gun violence,” Packer reveals. “Our son made a plastic-bag factory whose smokestack spouted endangered animals. Compared with previous years, the writing was minimal and the students, when questioned, had little to say. They hadn’t been encouraged to research their topics, make intellectual discoveries, answer potential counterarguments. The dioramas consisted of cardboard, clay, and slogans.”

Packers first child eventually entered middle school and it didn’t take Packer long to become disenchanted, as Democrat Mayor scumbag-Bill de Blasio and his equally radical School Chancellor Richard Carranza were working furiously to eradicate the “racist” concept of meritocracy, and Packer soon realized the $23 million Carranza spent on anti-bias training was a sham. “One training slide was titled ‘White Supremacy Culture.’ It included ‘Perfectionism,’ ‘Individualism,’ ‘Objectivity,’ and ‘Worship of the Written Word’ among the white-supremacist values that need to be disrupted,” Packer notes.

Ultimately, however, Packer remains myopic. “That pragmatic genius for which Americans used to be known and admired, which included a talent for educating our young — how did it desert us?”

“Progressives” abolished it, Mr. Packer. They replaced education with indoctrination and made academia a place where social justice and woke history flourishes, and reverse racism is celebrated. A place where content of one’s character is less important than the color of one’s skin, or one’s sexual or gender preference.

It is a world you, Mr. Packer, and your fellow elitists have championed for decades, all the “chasms” and “vertigo” that separate the privileged elitists from ordinary Americans fully intended. It’s what being “woke” — as in fully contemptuous of this nation’s customs, culture, traditions, and exceptionalism — is all about.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65640?mailing_id=4545&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4545&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

That’s the predictable part; the surprises are in the details. For example, while loose lips liar-Biden is still solidly in front, his numbers have slipped, especially in terms of voter enthusiasm. This may explain why dinky-Warren has begun to surge over the last couple of months. Fauxcahontas is fiery if nothing else, and she can stir up a crowd far better than “Sleepy loose lips liar-Joe.”

The poll numbers also show a clear divide among Democrat voters. loose lips liar-Biden, who is widely viewed as the most centrist candidate (graded on a hard-left curve), receives his strongest support from older white and black Democrats who appear less favorable to the socialist agendas of dinky-Warren and commie-Sanders. Meanwhile, both dinky-Warren and commie-Sanders see their strongest support coming from young white Democrats. The two-part question, then, is whether dinky-Warren can continue her surge, and whether loose lips liar-Biden can close the enthusiasm gap.

The Resurgent’s Steve Berman observes, “More and more, it appears to me that the Democrats don’t know who they want to run, only that they want Trump out. Given the candidates on top right now, it will be Republican voters who determine the general election results, which means what we’ve been saying all along is likely true. This is still, right now, Trump’s race to lose.”

Here in our humble shop, we still believe there’s something of a strategy behind the Democrats’ obsession with identity politics. As Mark Alexander wrote earlier this year: “The current Demo presidential primary strategy to defeat Trump dictates that the Left should field a lot of candidates, with the objective of raising a lot of money to build each candidate’s respective constituency. At the end of the primary, fold all those identity-politic constituencies into one massive amalgamation of general-election voters — a ‘collective constituency of dunces,’ as I fondly refer to it — adolescent dupes of all ages. Then focus that amalgam on defeating Trump.”

The real question, then, is whether the surviving candidate will be able to bring all those factions together by next November.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65588?mailing_id=4541&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4541&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Fast-forward to Wednesday when The Washington Post reported that an intelligence officer filed a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump alleging that he had made a “promise” to a foreign official that was “troubling.” Just who the foreign official was and what was promised is not known. However, it may be that the foreign official in question was Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump had a phone conversation with two and a half weeks prior to the whistleblower complaint.

Much of the mainstream media speculate’s that Trump was seeking to press Ukraine’s president into reinitiating a sidelined investigation into alleged illegal activity by Hunter loose lips liar-Biden, son of Democrat presidential candidate loose lips liar-Joe Biden. This speculation seemed to gain legitimacy after Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani commented on social media, “A President telling a Pres-elect of a well known corrupt country he better investigate corruption that affects US is doing his job. Maybe if scumbag/liar-nObama did that the loose lips liar-Biden Family wouldn’t have bilked millions from Ukraine and billions from China; being covered up by a Corrupt Media.”

The Leftmedia contends that Trump may be in hot water because of a possible quid pro quo with a foreign government to help him dig up dirt on a political opponent. That’s a serious charge, but the truth is that even this accusation pales in comparison to scumbag/liar-nObama’s promise to Medvedev. It’s also nothing compared to scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton’s hiring of Fusion GPS to fabricate dirt on Trump, which then served to launch the biggest political scandal in our nation’s history — the whole Trump/Russia collusion hoax and the attempted intelligence coup against a sitting president. And yet it will be treated by Democrats and the Leftmedia as a massive scandal.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65608?mailing_id=4541&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4541&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

When the Supreme Court, under a previous ideological majority, was handing down decisions favorable to the left, Democrats were fine with deferring to that third branch of government to achieve what they declined to produce in legislation. Some Democrats in conservative states took the position that it wasn’t their fault that cases voters regarded as constitutionally wrong and morally unprincipled were being decided. Blame the justices, not them.

The assault on the court has become worse now that Democrats see their primary avenue to legal and cultural change slipping away. The latest is the post-confirmation assault on Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Opponents failed to deny him a seat on the court with testimony from Christine Blassey Ford, who couldn’t remember important details of a sexual assault she claimed Kavanaugh perpetrated on her.

But frustrated Democrats at The New York Times keep trying. The Times published a story last Sunday that alleged Kavanaugh while at Yale, “exposed himself and friends pushed his penis into the hands of a female student.” The incident was supposedly witnessed by a classmate, Max Stier, who went on to become a lawyer for scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton (oh, the irony), who supposedly communicated the story to the FBI and senators at the time of Kavanaugh’s nomination.

According to AP, the Times story “was based on an upcoming book by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, ‘The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,’ about the junior justice’s brutal confirmation battle last year.”

Kavanaugh denies the incident ever happened. The young woman the incident supposedly happened to has declined to be interviewed, and, according to friends, “doesn’t recall the incident.”

The Washington Post reportedly had the same secondhand information about Kavanaugh a year ago, but “did not run the article because they could not confirm key details of the story.”

The Times, unconcerned with key details, went full-steam ahead. The rather weak editor’s note they were forced to publish on Sunday “correcting” the story pointed out quite glaringly its journalistic ineptitude. And in what can only be described as an assault to its reputation as a trusted media outlet, the Times, said Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine, has “abandoned liberalism for activism.”

There’s an old journalistic cliche that says don’t let facts get in the way of a good story and once again the Times is so eager to keep the Supreme Court and government in general under the control of Democrats that they will print anything, whether it is true or not, to further that goal.

You’d think the Times’ troubles would give other newspapers pause before they tried smearing a person’s reputation in pursuit of political goals, but no.

After the Times’ half-hearted correction, The Washington Post jumped into the mud pit with stories about previous attempts to impeach Supreme Court justices and promoting claims by those who say Kavanaugh’s confirmation wasn’t fair (it wasn’t for him, but that’s not what they mean).

As one would expect, several Democratic presidential candidates rushed to judgment and demanded Kavanaugh be impeached. Questions have been raised, after all, but liberal Democrats are the ones who are raising them. It’s always the seriousness of the charge, not whether the charge has merit. When the charge is proved bogus, the left moves on to new charges against the same or other persons whose views they oppose.

As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “It’s important to understand that this assault on the justice is part of the left’s larger campaign against the legitimacy of the current Supreme Court and an independent judiciary.”

This is all the left has in their dwindling arsenal. They’re still after President Trump’s tax records. They hate his Supreme Court appointments. They are livid that his economic policies are working when they have always believed the economy was their issue — never mind their failure to achieve any level of success close to what Trump’s administration has accomplished.

If the current Democratic Party was a defendant in court, it could credibly plead insanity. Let’s see how far this insane behavior gets them with voters in the next election. ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/65558?mailing_id=4539&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4539&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Colbert: You keep being asked in the debates: “How are you going to pay for it? Are you going to raise the middle-class taxes?”

dinky-Warren: So, here’s how we’re going to do this: Costs are going to go up for the wealthiest Americans, for big corporations—

Colbert: Taxes is what you mean by costs?

dinky-Warren: Yeah, and hard-working middle-class families are going to see their costs go down.

Colbert: But will their taxes go up?

dinky-Warren: But, here’s the thing—

Colbert: But, here’s the thing. I’ve listened to these answers a few times before and I just want to make a parallel suggestion for you about how you might defend the taxes that perhaps you’re not mentioning in your sentence. … Isn’t Medicare for All like public school? There might be taxes for it, but you certainly save a lot of money on sending your kids to school, and do you want to live in a world where kids aren’t educated? Do you want to live in a world where your fellow citizens are dying, even if it costs a little bit of money?

dinky-Warren: So, I accept your point and I believe in your point. Health care is a basic human right. We fight for basic human rights, and that’s Medicare for All. Everyone gets covered.

While the late-night comedian ventured where no mainstream-media journalists have dared to tread, it would be a mistake to interpret Colbert’s intention as an effort to knock dinky-Warren. If anything, Colbert was serving as a campaign consultant, recognizing the fact that Warren’s claim that only the wealthy and Big Business would foot the bill for Medicare for All is simply not a practical or viable solution. Ergo, Colbert’s advice to dinky-Warren to put a positive spin on raising middle-class taxes.

There may also be another reason why dinky-Warren is reluctant to connect the middle class to tax hikes to pay for Medicare for All. Warren has also promised to repeal President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which she fallaciously asserts benefited only the wealthy and Big Business, as a means of funding her climate agenda. Add this to the list of all the other “universal” items on dinky-Warren’s socialist platform and it quickly becomes apparent that everyone’s taxes will increase to pay for all this “free stuff.” Colbert knows that dinky-Warren, should she win the Democrat nomination, will be forced by Trump to come clean on the fact that her Big Government plans will require tax increases on everyone. So he’s trying to prepare her with the right spin.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65578?mailing_id=4539&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4539&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Abolish ICE thugs in Colorado want to see the homes and families of immigration enforcement officials set aflame.

Denver communists want alien detention facility employees dead, swinging from nooses with broken necks.

Both groups are brazenly using Facebook to spread their inflammatory and violent messages. So, where is Silicon Valley — whose top companies partner with the Southern Poverty Law Center smear machine to de-platform conservatives, pro-lifers and Donald Trump supporters — to stop the open borders left’s escalating hate?

On Thursday, Sept. 19, Abolish ICE Denver and the Denver Communists are organizing a protest outside the house of Johnny Choate, the warden of the immigrant detention facility in Aurora, Colorado. Choate works for GEO Group, which operates the center. Instead of laying blame at the feet of global profiteers who induce illegal immigrants to risk their families’ lives to trespass our borders, anti-ICE agitators are targeting homeland security employees and contractors who simply enforce federal immigration and detention laws passed by Congress.

The Denver Communists group shared a poster on Facebook with Choate’s face superimposed over a generic neighborhood map with private residential homes. “CONFRONT LA MIGRA WHERE THEY LIVE,” the radicals urged members. The graphic describes Choate as “warden of Aurora’s notorious ICE concentration camp.” That’s the same inflammatory and defamatory language popularized by Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and used by antifa militant Willem Van Spronsen, who attempted to firebomb the Tacoma ICE facility, also run by GEO Group, in July.

The protest announcement also includes the phrase, “Chinga La Migra!” It’s the slogan of Mijente, a Latino activist group leading the Abolish ICE movement. Translation: “F— the Border Patrol.”

A commenter edited a distorted image of Choate’s face surrounded by flames, suggesting arson. His post was liked by three other fans/followers/members of the Denver Communists’ Facebook Group.

Another commenter leveled his own explicit thread on the Facebook page targeting Choate and his family in his home:

“Reenact human rights abuses, get hanged by the neck until dead. Simple.”

As I report in my book “Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction?” this virulent hatred for ICE and the Border Patrol traces its ideological lineage back to the cop-bashing domestic terrorism of the 1970s that festered in academia and resulted in bloodshed across the country at the hands of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. Today’s Abolish ICE extremists harbor the same seething “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” contempt for immigration enforcement as the “progressive” cop-haters of the 1970s and their George Soros-subsidized heirs in the Bush-era A.N.S.W.E.R. and amnesty coalitions, Code Pink, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movement.

The underlying mission back then was the same as now: Destabilization, disruption and destruction of civil order.

David Booth, who lives in Choate’s neighborhood, refuses to sit by while these bullies invade his community.

“I was shocked and surprised when I found out there was going to be an 'ICE protest’ in my neighborhood,” he told me Tuesday. Booth discovered that Abolish ICE Denver used Facebook to spread information on how they will be “going door to door in the neighborhood to let people know that a ‘monster’ lives among us.”

Booth condemned the witch hunt headed his community’s way: “This policy of intimidation that we see the left continue to use is not OK. … I would like to see the neighborhood rise up and support this man and his family.”

I reached out to Facebook for a response to these public safety concerns, but received no answer by my deadline. For Coloradans, violent threats to law enforcement officials’ neighborhoods are especially disturbing given the chilling 2013 assassination of the head of the Colorado Department of Corrections outside his home in Monument.

Booth will stand publicly in defense of his community Thursday and says he has his neighbors’ support. “I think most of us, if not all, believe this protest is inappropriate regardless of where we stand on the issue of immigration,” said Booth. “Our neighbor is just doing his job, and has done nothing wrong, or illegal, in carrying out his duties.”

Following Stand With ICE rallies in Aurora, Colorado, and Montgomery County, Maryland, that have drawn nearly 1,000 citizens over the past two weeks, Booth decided he could not sit on the sidelines. He is not alone, and we have only just begun. I will join Coloradans again on Saturday, Sept. 21, when another Abolish ICE group marches to the Aurora ICE facility where the American flag was torn down in July.

If not us, who? If not now, when?   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/65534?mailing_id=4536&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4536&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Overdose deaths due to this class of drugs has devastated families and communities across the country, claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people between 1999 and 2017. Municipalities, states, and individuals have filed thousands of lawsuits against drug companies that manufactured these drugs, claiming that Big Pharma is ultimately responsible for the damage done.

Blaming pharmaceutical companies for this crisis is a gross oversimplification. Yes, they developed, manufactured, and ultimately marketed these drugs; thus they do bear some of the blame. But what about the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is supposed protect American consumers from just this sort of dangerous drug? Or all the state and federal lawmakers who pushed for reduced regulation and greater insurance coverage of opioids when they first hit the market? Or the millions of people who knowingly engaged in risky behavior with these drugs and found themselves addicted?

Then there are the doctors who prescribed opioids — often for 30 days when five would have done the trick. Some make the case that drug companies persuaded medical professionals to prescribe and over-prescribe opioids. But at some point, when the rise in addictions could no longer be ignored, doctors continued to prescribe opioids, despite having numerous pharmaceutical alternatives, including good old-fashioned, over-the-counter painkillers.

There’s no money in suing individual doctors, though, or even hospitals. Suing a federal government agency never goes anywhere. And good luck holding an elected official accountable for their legislative activity. But Big Pharma is loaded with cash. Or at least that’s what Big Law wants you to think.

Pharmaceutical companies operate on slimmer profit margins than most people realize. For every drug that makes it to market after years of testing and millions of dollars in research, there are several drugs that fall flat, costing companies millions in research and development that isn’t recouped in a marketable drug. This is not to say that we should weep for Big Pharma, but we should not just take what Big Law is telling us at face value.

Trial lawyers are in business to make money, just like pharmaceutical companies. In large class-action settlements, they usually pocket up to a third of whatever dollar amount is reached, so it’s in their interest to go after the biggest award they can get. It’s easy to see why they are eager to get involved in the opioid crisis, and why they want to paint pharmaceutical companies as evil.

Suing companies like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson, which was recently ordered to pay a half-billion dollar settlement to the state of Oklahoma, will not solve the nation’s drug-addiction problem. The Sackler family, which controls Purdue Pharma, knows this, and that’s why they sought a bankruptcy filing. They believe that restructuring the company into a business/charity hybrid will allow it to most effectively contribute to aiding those harmed by its products.

The filing has been dismissed by several states in the Northeast and on the West Coast (it’s no coincidence that these states are controlled by Democrats) as an attempt to duck justice. Purdue maintains that its plan will provide up to $12 billion in relief to state and local governments to clean up the damage done by OxyContin and turn the company into a “public benefit trust.” The Sackler family would give up control of the company and contribute $3 billion toward the settlement.

Several states have agreed to this deal because the alternative means many more years of litigation in which money that could go toward fixing the problem will instead go toward more legal battles. These battles will ultimately mean more expensive drugs and fewer pharmaceutical options for consumers.

But Big Law will still get its slice. That’s one thing we can all count on.   ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/65510?mailing_id=4534&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4534&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body