Don’t take our word for it. After the U.S. Education Department released figures this spring indicating that “nearly 240 schools … reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting” in the 2015-2016 school year, National Public Radio spent three months painstakingly trying to corroborate that report. NPR “reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.” In fact, NPR confirmed just 11 incidents, while 161 schools reported no such incident. Many school leaders “had little idea of how shootings got recorded for their schools.”
               Granted, 240 schools represent just 0.2% of the nation’s 96,000 schools, and the incorrect data was due to simple human error in self-reporting by those schools, but such reporting is consequential when it comes to public policy. NRP explains:
               This confusion comes at a time when the need for clear data on schoolviolence has never been more pressing. Students around the country are heading back to school  this month under a cloud of fear stemming from the most recent mass shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas.
               At least 53 new school safety laws were passed in states in 2018. Districts are spending millions of dollars to “harden” schools with new security measures and equipment. A blue-ribbon federal school safety commission led by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is holding public events around the country, including one in Alabama Tuesday. Children are spending class time on active-shooter drills and their parents are buying bulletproof backpacks.
               Back in February, we noted another study debunking the idea of an epidemic of school shootings. In fact, there are one-quarter as many school-shooting deaths now as in the early 1990s.
               None of this is to minimize a single death at the hands of either a willful murderer or an accidental trigger-puller. Nor is it a reason to ignore behavioral red flags as officials did in Parkland or to ease up on school security. But when students are being used as pawns in a larger and strategic push for gun control, these numbers matter. And the Education Department’s numbers were roughly triple the already wildly exaggerated statistics of the anti-Second Amendment group Every town for Gun Safety. Kudos to NPR for doing real journalism to correct the record.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57926?mailing_id=3705&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3705&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             Over the weekend, the  dummycrats-Democratic National Committee voted to modify its charter to account for “all” of the genders. There are, of course, only two, but hey, this is the modern dummycrats-Democrat Party. As National Review reports, the charter will now “define gender as being determined by self-identification and [will] include a classification for gender non-binary members.” Furthermore, “The previous charter required that all committees be divided evenly between men and women but, under the newly adopted system, committees ‘shall be as equally divided as practicable between men and women (determined by gender self-identification) meaning that the variance between men and women in the group cannot exceed one (1).’”
               Sounds like fuzzy math to us. “At the root of our diverse party is a commitment to inclusion and opportunity,”   dummycrats- DNC Chair Tom Perez crowed in a statement. “By adopting this amendment, the dummycrats-Democratic National Committee is ensuring every dummycrats-Democrat feels welcome and embraced for who they are. This action reaffirms our solidarity with the LGBTQ community.”
               This “choose your own identity” fantasy has its limits, however. Ask Rachel Dolezal, the white women who insists she’s black.
               Meanwhile, the dummycrats-DNC reduced the power of superdelegates in its presidential primaries after the liar-Hillary Clinton/commie-Bernie Sanders debacle revealed that the “ dummycrats-Democratic” Party wasn’t all that democratic.
               Perhaps one answer to why these changes are happening now is to follow the money. dummycrats-DNC fundraising is down from previous cycles, and it’s raised about half the total for the Republican National Committee. Loyal donors are telling dummycrats-DNC politicos to buzz off “until they get their act together.” Some rank-and-filedummycrats-Democrats are just walking away. Amidst the trend of more dummycrats- Democrats becoming Trump-deranged, gender-fluid, full-on socialists, it’s no wonder.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57899?mailing_id=3703&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3703&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             As always with trade, the answer is “yes and no.” There are good aspects and bad ones.
               Points reached in the agreement include changes to automobile manufacturing. Each car produced would have to be 75% sourced in North America, up from 62.5%, to avoid tariffs when being transported across national borders. Also, 40-45% of each car produced must be manufactured by workers making $16 per hour or more to avoid tariffs. That helps American manufacturers, but it will raise prices for consumers. Additional updates to rules on intellectual property and labor are also part of the agreement.
               The deal still must be approved by Congress and the Mexican government. Trump is eager to make this happen before the midterms, and Peña Nieto is likewise hoping to have his government approve the measure before he leaves office on Dec. 1. At this point, there don’t appear to be any insurmountable political hurdles to prevent the trade agreement from becoming a reality, but never underestimate the machinations of American dummycrats-Democrats or Mexican Socialists like incoming President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador. And in any case, time constraints likely mean it isn’t going to happen this year.
               It’s important to note that this is a strictly bilateral trade agreement between the U.S. and Mexico. What will become of Canada, the third member of NAFTA, is yet to be determined, though clearly Trump means to use this as leverage with our northern neighbors. Trump told reporters that negotiations with Canada would start back up immediately, and Peña Nieto voiced his hope that the U.S. and Canada would be able to come to an agreement. Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, said separately Monday that her country was encouraged by the optimism shown by the U.S.-Mexico agreement. “Progress between Mexico and the United States is a necessary requirement for any renewed NAFTA agreement.”
               Trump, of course, says he’s prepared to scrap NAFTA  altogether, insisting that the very name has bad connotations. He has repeatedly referred to NAFTA as a historically bad trade deal  for the U.S. — a “disaster” — and thus he would rather this deal be referred to simply as the United States-Mexico Trade Agreement. Moreover, Trump has signaled his comfort with cementing two separate bilateral deals with Mexico and Canada, though those two nations still hold out hope that NAFTA can be renegotiated and salvaged.
               Trump’s strategy is simple: The U.S.-Mexico deal puts pressure on Canada, which was sidelined while Trump pursued a divide-and-conquer approach to negotiating better deals with America’s biggest trading partners.
               Markets reacted favorably to the news, with major U.S.-based auto manufacturers seeing bumps in their stock price and equity markets across North America also getting a boost.
               A few months ago, dummycrats-Democrats, business leaders, and international trade groups cried that Trump was going to wreck the world economy and crash America’s economic rebound with his tariffs and his America-first approach to new trade deals. None of this has come to pass. In fact, little by little, the very nations that claimed they were prepared to engage in a trade war with the United States have started changing their tune.
               Earlier this summer, the EU came to an agreement with the U.S. that will allow us to export more produce and liquid natural gas to Europe. The door was also left open to work toward a zero-tariff trade deal between the U.S. and EU.
               The new deal with Mexico and the positive signs for an agreement between the U.S. and Canada suggest that Trump will continue scoring points on trade. The more victories he lines up, the stronger will be his bargaining position with tougher nations like China.
               As we have said frequently, never underestimate the art of the deal.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57903?mailing_id=3703&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3703&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             Oh, wait. It’s South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, working with the communist African National Congress, who is proposing changes to that nation’s constitution to take land from white farmers. Those farmers are the descendants of the European colonists who first settled the region and fought subsequent battles for the geographically favorable land at the southern-most tip of the African continent. Ramaphosa is working to collectivize and control the country’s farming infrastructure.
               But why? Why would a nation ranked 77th in the world by The Heritage Foundation’s 2018 Index of Economic Freedom, with relatively positive commentary about the improved investments and reduction in tax burdens and trade barriers, seek to turn an entire sector of its economy into a state-controlled industry by the confiscation of private property to be reassigned to other owners?
               While the anti-Trump media and governing elite parrot the narrative that Trump’s a racist, the same have been pretty silent on this developing issue. Their silence is likely a subtle response to the fact that President Trump recently spoke against this overreach. Put simply, whatever Donald Trump’s against, they’re for, and vice versa.
               In this case, Trump heard what America heard. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson exposed the practice of racism in South Africa — perpetrated in the name of some collective punishment of white citizens through the confiscation of their personal property with no compensation. Trump’s response indicated he had instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the announced moves, leaving no doubt he rejected the practice.
               Let’s extract the players in this global drama to focus not on the inflammatory personalities but the principles involved. This is where all nations playing footsie with the rising popularity of socialism and the ignorance of outcomes of this social justice brain rot need to perk up.
               In the name of social justice, the president of a nation with a very high unemployment rate of over 25% has determined that the remedy to its out-of-work blacks (almost 30%) is to change its “laws” to permit the theft of legally possessed land of white farmers to redistribute the possession to nonwhite citizens. And, you might be asking, what crime has the white citizen population committed that has been supported by evidence and convicted in a court of law to have such restitution enforced as part of an act of justice? Good question.
               Has this ever occurred? Surely, such tyrannical behavior has no place in modern-day history! Well, um, South Africa’s neighbor had its own “Land Reform” back in 1980 and it kinda didn’t work out so swell.
               Zimbabwe, as described by Wikipedia, engaged in “an effort to more equitably distribute land between black subsistence farmers and white Zimbabweans of European ancestry … to alter the ethnic balance of land ownership.” From its beginnings, the program paid white farmers of European descent for their land. When the money ran out, the Zimbabwe government engaged in a “fast track” program to take the properties with no compensation. Not only were political structures shaken, the banking system was rocked with violence spurred by the natural conflict of government-sanctioned theft. That was followed by food shortages and two decades of economic loss, all in the name of some manufactured social justice.
               See if this pattern seems vaguely familiar when compared to some of the tactics of the new dummycrats-Democratic Socialists gaining prominence in America: First, a victim group is identified. Second, the offending group is also identified, whether through actual offense in years (even centuries) past, or some manufactured status as “privileged” that allegedly causes material harm to the said victim group. Third, there is political intimidation. Pause here to think of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it), which serve as the common tactics of the dummycrats-Democrats. Once political intimidation may or may not work, there’s violence by a group of agitators in the name of protest and a faux morality accepted by those seeking a collective offender due for vigilante justice.
               In the case of South Africa, reports of more than 400 white farmers being murdered during the last 12 months should be staggering. Instead, the Leftmedia is breathlessly trying to use Trump’s call for an investigation into the violence as some response to a white nationalist call. The media certainly has and will continue to omit remarks by a supporter of this government theft, militant activist Julius Melama, who alleges that only by death will he and his militants be stopped. He goes on to falsely claim that Jews are training the white right-wingers to be snipers for such a cause too protect white farmers.
               So, social justice warriors, you’ve been exposed. Today’s prettied up socialism is no different from the same old Communism that murders, destroys, and corrupts, regardless of the cause or the continent.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57883?mailing_id=3701&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3701&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             Human intelligence is not like the James Bond movies — at least not completely. Much of it is more like the ways a cop talks with his informants. In fact, it usually is just that. The big difference is that the CIA usually has had a lot more leeway in how its informants can operate than a detective looking to bring in a drug kingpin or a killer. The informant — or “asset” — is taking huge risks, as he is pretty much betraying his country. Some countries don’t take kindly to that.
               Well, some new tools came along. The idea was to reduce the risk to assets through the use of an online system. This was seen as a way to get information faster and theoretically keep the asset safer. The assumption was that an agent could get information and still be at his desk working as a cultural attache or some other official cover in the embassy — and not be seen by the opposing side meeting with the informant on numerous occasions.
               Well, U.S. intelligence didn’t set the system up right, and it was compromised. Exactly how, we still don’t know, years after the fact. The most likely explanation appears to be a combination of a poor set-up of the online comms system (initially designed for use in the Middle East) that allowed China to hack into a more secure version of the online system, along with the acts of a Chinese spy in the CIA. One of the other fundamental failures was to not take China’s Great Firewall into account.
               The end result: At least a dozen assets were captured and executed. America lostassets in China, as China increased its power. There’s no sugar-coating the fact that this was a major disaster. But rebuilding networks is not the only challenge facing the intelligence community. It is facing some other challenges, inflicted by Beltway politicians.
               We should remember that during the War on Terror, members of the intelligence community were told that enhanced interrogation techniques were legal and could be used when necessary, only to see thescumbag/liar-nObama administration do an about-face with cover from the likes of rino-John McCain. Even afterscumbag/liar-nObama was gone, rino-McCain then proceeded to help dummycrats-Democrats slime Gina Haspel, now the CIA director, over those interrogation techniques. Such shameful treatment makes agents in the field wonder if politicians will have their back or stab them in it.
               The other problem is that the questions over the misuse of the FISA court have now made it that much harder to rebuild the intelligence community or to get agents to take risks to carry out missions necessary to protect this country’s vital interests, even in the face of the growing threats from Russia and China. The takedown of Iran’s nuclear ambitions is also going to require covert action and intelligence gathering — the type of missions our intelligence agencies are intended to carry out.
               As a result, we now are at a greater risk of being caught by surprise should China make an aggressive move.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57823?mailing_id=3695&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3695&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             His citation reads: Technical Sergeant John A. Chapman distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism as an Air Force Special Tactics Combat Controller, attached to a Navy Sea, Air, and Land (SEAL) Team conducting reconnaissance operations in Takur Ghar, Afghanistan, on March 4, 2002. During insertion, the team’s helicopter was ambushed causing a teammate to fall into an entrenched group of enemy combatants below. Sergeant Chapman and the team voluntarily reinserted onto the snow-capped mountain, into the heart of a known enemy stronghold to rescue one of their own. Without regard for his own safety, Sergeant Chapman immediately engaged, moving in the direction of the closest enemy position despite coming under heavy fire from multiple directions. He fearlessly charged an enemy bunker, up a steep incline in thigh-deep snow and into hostile fire, directly engaging the enemy. Upon reaching the bunker, Sergeant Chapman assaulted and cleared the position, killing all enemy occupants. With complete disregard for his own life, Sergeant Chapman deliberately moved from cover only 12 meters from the enemy, and exposed himself once again to attack a second bunker, from which an emplaced machine gun was firing on his team. During this assault from an exposed position directly in the line of intense fire, Sergeant Chapman was struck and injured by enemy fire. Despite severe, mortal wounds, he continued to fight relentlessly, sustaining a violent engagement with multiple enemy personnel before making the ultimate sacrifice. By his heroic actions and extraordinary valor, sacrificing his life for the lives of his teammates, Technical Sergeant Chapman upheld the highest traditions of military service and reflected great credit upon himself and the United States Air Force.
               Military.com elaborates, “In all, Chapman sustained nine wounds, seven of which were nonfatal, according to his autopsy report. A medical examiner concluded he lived and fought through gunshot wounds to his thigh, heel, calf and torso, which pierced his liver. He had a broken nose and other facial wounds, suggesting he engaged in hand-to-hand combat in close quarters. The final fatal shots likely came from a PKM machine gun, officials said.”
               In May, we relayed the story of Navy SEAL Britt Slabinski, who received the Medal for actions in the same battle. Actions during that battle were the subject of some controversy because Chapman was presumed dead and left behind only to revive and continue fighting. We believe each American Patriot involved in this battle acted with honor and bravery given the circumstances, and we’re pleased to see both Slabinski and Chapman awarded with our nation’s highest honor.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57821?mailing_id=3695&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3695&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body