Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix

At Amazon, Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Our Social Ills. 

Teen Girls' Sexy TikTok Videos Take a Mental-Health Toll

Our society’s completely FUBAR.

At WSJ, "Girls are often anxious and overwhelmed by the attention they get after posting suggestive videos; therapists say more are suffering emotionally":

When Jula Anderson joined TikTok at age 16, her first video featured her family’s home renovations. It got five likes. After seeing others post risqué videos and get more likes, she tried it, too.

“I wanted to get famous on TikTok, and I learned that if you post stuff showing your body, people will start liking it,” Jula, now an 18-year-old high-school senior near Sacramento, Calif., said.

Sudden TikTok fame is catching teens off guard, leaving many girls unprepared for the attention they thought they wanted, according to parents, therapists and teens. In some cases, predators target girls who make sexually suggestive videos; less-dangerous interactions can also harm girls’ self-esteem and leave them feeling exploited, they say.

Mental-health professionals around the country are growing increasingly concerned about the effects on teen girls of posting sexualized TikTok videos. Therapists say teens who lack a group of close friends, and teens with underlying mental health issues—especially girls who struggle with disordered eating and body-image issues—are at particular risk.

“For a young girl who’s developing her identity, to be swept up into a sexual world like that is hugely destructive,” said Paul Sunseri, a psychologist and director of the New Horizons Child and Family Institute in El Dorado Hills, Calif., where Jula began receiving treatment last year for anxiety and depression. “When teen girls are rewarded for their sexuality, they come to believe that their value is in how they look,” he said.

He said approximately a quarter of the female patients at his clinic have produced sexualized content on TikTok.

Carter Barnhart, co-founder of Charlie Health, a virtual mental-health care provider, said a growing number of teens she treats report their self-esteem is dependent on the quantity of likes they get on TikTok. “Many of them have figured out that the formula for that is producing more sexual content,” she said.

Videos just ‘for you’ 

Teens’ dependence on TikTok for social validation has risen as the app has become their favored platform. TikTok overtook Instagram in popularity among teens last year—and became the most visited site on the internet.

TikTok’s algorithm regularly propels virtual nobodies onto millions of viewers’ For You pages. TikTok weighs whether viewers show strong interest in a particular type of content, measured by whether they finish watching videos, the company says. Its recommendation engine then chooses videos to send to those viewers, regardless of the creator’s follower count or past video virality.

Platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Twitter work differently, serving content to users based on search terms and friend connections, so developing a sizable following—and going viral—on those sites can take longer.

“We think carefully about the well-being of teens as we design our safety and privacy settings and restrict features on TikTok by age,” a TikTok spokeswoman said in a statement. “We’ve also worked with youth safety experts to develop resources aimed at supporting digital safety and literacy conversations among parents and teens.”

A company fact sheet says “content that is overtly sexually suggestive may not be eligible for recommendation.” The spokeswoman said content from users who state they are under 16 isn’t eligible for promotion via the recommendation engine, nor would it appear in search results.

Teens are known to lie about their age when creating social-media accounts. Users must be 13 to create a TikTok account, and it is company policy to suspend the accounts of kids the safety team believes to be underage.

At Newport Academy’s outpatient treatment program in Atlanta, 60% of the girls treated since the program started last summer have posted sexually inappropriate videos on TikTok, said Crystal Burwell, the program’s director of outpatient services.

One 16-year-old girl Dr. Burwell is treating made progressively more suggestive videos. “The more likes she had, the more revealing her outfits became,” she said.

The girl ended up chatting with a man who urged her to take their conversation off TikTok and into a messaging app. The girl sent the man partially nude photos of herself and the two were making plans to meet in person when her parents discovered the texts, according to Dr. Burwell.

“When you combine human behavior and algorithms, things get messy,” Dr. Burwell said. “We’re trying to clean it up, one client at a time.”

TikTok famous

A few months after she joined the app in the summer of 2019, Jula Anderson’s wish for TikTok fame came true. A video of her wearing a tightfitting tank top and lip-syncing the pop song “Sunday Best” blew up. For reasons Jula and her mother, Shauna Anderson, still don’t understand, TikTok’s algorithm pushed the video to viewers’ For You pages. More than a million people viewed the video and nearly 500,000 people liked it, they both said.

Jula’s following went from a few hundred to more than 200,000. There was nothing overtly sexual about the video, she and her mother said, but her video’s comments were inundated with boys and men saying how hot she looked. Buoyed by the success, Jula made her videos more risqué, including by lip-syncing lyrics about sex and getting more revealing in her wardrobe choices. “I’d wear clothes that I wouldn’t wear to school but that I felt good in,” she said. “I didn’t view them as that sexual, but other people did.”

By then, she was constantly checking her likes. “It was my whole world,” she said.

Her parents weren’t aware of how suggestive the videos had gotten until Jula’s grandparents, tipped off by cousins, alerted them.

“To us, she’s this sweet girl, so it’s almost like this split personality between who she really is and how she portrayed herself on TikTok,” Ms. Anderson said. “When we confronted her about it, she was like, ‘Mom, that’s what everyone is doing.’”

Ms. Anderson said that her daughter didn’t have a close group of friends, and she thinks the isolation of the pandemic intensified her need to find connection. “She thought this was a way to be liked and have friends,” Ms. Anderson said. “I struggled with what to do, because the thing I love about TikTok is that kids can be really creative, and we encouraged that as a family.”

Worried about dangers that might arise from publicly viewable videos, Jula’s parents asked her to delete the suggestive ones. They also discussed the issue in family and individual therapy sessions.

Jula, who said she had a history of anxiety before joining TikTok, said the widespread attention and creepy comments from men had become difficult to handle. Comments critical of her appearance also stung.

Following the intervention, she chose to step away from TikTok for a few months. She said it was hard. In the middle of last year, she returned to the app but created a new account that she set to private. She has just a few followers—people she knows in real life. She said she rarely posts now.

Jula said she ultimately decided that the suggestive videos weren’t how she wanted to portray herself to the world, or to younger girls who might see them. She has four younger sisters and said she doesn’t want them to seek or receive attention the way she did.

“I think I tried growing up a lot faster than I should have,” Jula said...

Keep reading.

 

'Profoundly Unpresidential': President Biden's Disgraceful Voting Rights Speech in Georgia (VIDEO)

Watch Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speech, "Profoundly Unpresidential," at the video below. 

Peggy Noonan, at the Wall Street Journal, has thoughts, "Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point":

It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.

The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges.

By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.

He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.

In the speech Mr. Biden claimed he stands against “the forces in America that value power over principle.” Last year Georgia elected two Democratic senators. “And what’s been the reaction of Republicans in Georgia? Choose the wrong way, the undemocratic way. To them, too many people voting in a democracy is a problem.” They want to “suppress the right to vote.” They want to “subvert the election.”

This is “Jim Crow 2.0,” it’s “insidious,” it’s “the kind of power you see in totalitarian states, not in democracies.”

The problem is greater than Georgia. “The United States Senate . . . has been rendered a shell of its former self.” Its rules must be changed. “The filibuster is not used by Republicans to bring the Senate together but to pull it further apart. The filibuster has been weaponized and abused.” Senators will now “declare where they stand, not just for the moment, but for the ages.”

Most wince-inducing: “Will you stand against election subversion? Yes or no? . . . Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace ? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor ? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

If a speech can be full of itself this speech was.

From the floor of the Senate the next day came Mr. McConnell’s rebuke. It was stinging, indignant to the point of seething. He didn’t attempt to scale any rhetorical heights. The plainness of his language was ferocious...

Keep reading.  

George Packer, Last Best Hope

At Amazon, George Packer, Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal.

The Pending November 'Shellacking' for Democrats

At the Los Angeles Times, "Democrats face a tough slog in midterm battle to keep Congress":

Democrats have long known history is not on their side in the 2022 midterm elections. But as they enter this campaign year, the steep climb to keep their majorities in Congress appears even more daunting with the COVID-19 pandemic stubbornly persistent and voters concerned over inflation and crime.

The unsettled national climate — if it holds in November — will likely favor Republicans, who need just five additional seats to take control of the U.S. House and only one more for a majority in the Senate.

The sitting president’s party almost always loses ground in midterm elections — doing so in all but two such contests since the end of World War II. And Democrats hoping to buck precedent have few easy fixes for the problems on voters’ minds or for President Biden’s underwater approval ratings.

“Sometimes you have a messaging problem, and other times you just have a problem. In this situation, [Democrats] just have the latter,” said Matt Gorman, a Republican strategist who ran communications for the GOP’s House campaign arm in 2018. “No slogan or single policy achievement can turn around a broader environment. There would have to be a seismic shift.”

Democratic campaign officials reject predictions of a gloomy November, saying they’re confident they’ll have a solid pitch for voters.

“Democrats are going to hold the House because we are delivering for the American people,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He pointed to millions of jobs created in the last year, as well as vaccine distribution and efforts to lower healthcare costs.

“Kevin McCarthy and his band of extremist House Republicans have yet to present a single realistic idea to move this country forward,” he said, referring to the congressman from Bakersfield who leads the GOP in the House.

There are some silver linings for Democrats.

The party probably avoided a worst-case scenario in the redistricting for the House. Though the GOP had an overall advantage in drawing the new congressional maps, so far they’ve mostly tried to shore up existing red districts instead of aggressively creating new ones, experts say.

In the Senate, Democrats are defending seats in battleground states that Biden won last year, albeit by the barest of margins in places like Arizona and Georgia. Senate races can also depend more on individual candidates, making Democrats slightly less vulnerable than their House counterparts if there is a wave election against them.

Still, “it obviously takes unique circumstances to redirect a midterm election,” said Stuart Rothenberg, senior editor of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan political newsletter. “I don’t know whether there’s anything that’s going to happen that’s so shocking to people, so stunning that it will give the Democrats the ammunition they need to change the election.”

Privately, Democratic strategists acknowledge the difficulties ahead, particularly after losing the Virginia governor’s race in the fall and barely escaping a similar defeat in deep-blue New Jersey. Those off-year races often have served as early indicators for the direction of the midterms.

The Democrats’ challenge partially lies with the nature of midterms: Supporters of the party in power are often disappointed that the president’s campaign promises have not yet been fulfilled, dampening their enthusiasm, while the opposition is motivated by unhappiness at being out of power.

Republicans, meanwhile, have a more basic task: keeping the focus on the majority party.

“The strategy for Republicans is a pretty simple one: Don’t screw it up,” said Ken Spain, former spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Don’t make yourself the issue and allow the election to be a referendum on Democratic control of Washington.”

Distilling the party’s campaign message, Emma Vaughn, a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, kept the focus tightly on Biden.

“Biden has lost all credibility — he has failed to ‘shut down the virus’ like he promised, pushed Americans out of work with unconstitutional mandates, overseen a rise in crime, presided over skyrocketing prices for everyday goods and promoted trillions more in reckless spending,” she said...

 

Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War

At Amazon, Stephen Marche, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future.

Biden Blasts Trump in January 6th Address (VIDEO)

He just looks old, cranky, and mean. 

For all the devastating problems we've got, this is all he's got. This is all the Democrats got. We'll be hearing about January 6th all year. Biden's just previewing his party's midterm election strategy. 

Disgusting. 

At WSJ, "Biden Assails Trump in Speech Over Jan. 6 Riot, Efforts to Overturn 2020 Election Results":

WASHINGTON—President Biden placed blame squarely on former President Donald Trump and his supporters for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, using the first anniversary of the attack to assail the former president’s attempts to undermine the 2020 election results.

Mr. Biden’s remarks, from the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, represented his most pointed rebuke of his predecessor, saying Mr. Trump’s “bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”

The president accused Mr. Trump of spreading a “web of lies about the 2020 election,” pointing to his false claims of election fraud and his attempt to block the certification of the election by Congress that day. Mr. Biden didn’t mention Mr. Trump by name, referring to him throughout the speech as the former president.

Mr. Biden credited law enforcement members, including the Capitol Police, for saving the rule of law. “Our democracy held,” he said.

Mr. Trump, in a statement released shortly after Mr. Biden’s remarks, said the president “used my name today to try to further divide America. This political theater is all just a distraction for the fact Biden has completely and totally failed.” Mr. Trump has said the “real insurrection” happened on Election Day in 2020, not Jan. 6, 2021.

The former president had planned to hold a news conference later in the day. But he canceled the event Tuesday night, saying he would discuss the anniversary during a coming rally in Arizona.

Mr. Biden’s remarks opened a day of remembrances on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) each led a moment of silence on the House and Senate floors. In the afternoon, Mrs. Pelosi is participating in a conversation with historians and later a series of testimonials from lawmakers. The two leaders will join a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps in the early evening.

The attack has served as a dividing line between the two parties in Congress, and few Republicans participated in the formal commemorations. Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), accompanied by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, was the only GOP lawmaker who attended the moment of silence in the House chamber. Democrats have called the riot an assault on democracy, and have cited the event in calling for passing new election laws. GOP leaders have condemned the action of rioters, but they have accused Democrats of trying to use the attack to embarrass Republicans for political gain.

Mr. Biden said the moment called for Americans to “decide what kind of nation we are going to be. Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people?”

“We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation,” Mr. Biden said. He said Jan. 6 marked “not the end of democracy. It’s the beginning of a renaissance of liberty and fair play.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, speaking before Mr. Biden, equated the riot to some of the darkest days in the nation’s history, including the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

On the Senate floor, Mr. Schumer called the Jan. 6 attack “the final, bitter, unforgivable act” of Mr. Trump’s presidency. Mr. Schumer said that it was important to counter the falsehood that the election was stolen because it could provide a pretext for more violence.

In a statement, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) blasted Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris over their remarks, saying that the speeches “were an effort to resurrect a failed presidency more than marking the anniversary of a dark day in American history.”

Hours before the Capitol breach, Mr. Trump spoke at a rally and urged his supporters to stop Mr. Biden’s election win, repeating his false claims that the election was stolen. Some of his supporters then marched to the Capitol and overwhelmed police officers, forcing the evacuation of lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence and temporarily disrupting the certification of Mr. Biden’s win. More than 700 people face criminal charges for their alleged actions that day.

The D.C. medical examiner’s office determined that four people died as a result of the riot, including Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to jump through shattered glass at the door to the Speaker’s Lobby. Two died of heart conditions and one from an amphetamine intoxication. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit was assaulted at the riot, suffered a stroke and died the following day of natural causes, the medical examiner’s office found.

House Democrats, joined by 10 Republicans, impeached Mr. Trump last January on the charge of inciting an insurrection. Mr. Trump was then acquitted in the Senate, with the votes of all Democrats and seven Republicans falling short of the two-thirds threshold needed to convict...

The rest is history, as they say.

The headlines have been dire at home and abroad. The drums of war are beating loudly in Eastern Europe as a showdown at the Russo-Ukrainian border looms. Meanwhile, Moscow's sent troops to Central Asia's Republic of Kazakhstan. Violent anti-government protests have threatened the regime of Nursultan Nazarbayev, which is closely allied to Russia. 

The Omicron variant is closing down government facilities and schools, and the White House has no clue on the way forward. In fact, Biden's going to shift administration policy to emphasize "living with covid," which for Democrats that the president's 2020 campaign platform to "end the pandemic" was a lie. The shoe's on the other foot, it hurts, and the race is lost. 

Still more.

College, University Lockdowns Can't be Justified by the Science

Dr. Marty Makary, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Universities' Covid Policies Defy Science and Reason":

Universities are supposed to be bastions of critical thinking, reason and logic. But the Covid policies they have adopted—policies that have derailed two years of students’ education and threaten to upend the upcoming spring semester—have exposed them as nonsensical, anti-scientific and often downright cruel.

Some of America’s most prestigious universities are leading the charge.

At Georgetown University, fully vaccinated students are randomly tested for Covid every week. Using a PCR test, which can detect tiny amounts of dead virus, asymptomatic students who test positive are ordered to a room in a designated building where they spend 10 days in confinement. Food is dropped off once a day at the door.

I spoke to several students who were holed up. One of them told me she would sometimes call a friend to come and wave at her through the window, just to see a human face. Another told me that the experience in quarantine “totally changed” her feelings about the school. “Everyone’s just fed up at this point,” she said. “People walk around the library and yell at you if you drink a sip of water. And it was during finals.” She told me she is thinking about “transferring to an SEC school just to have an in-person experience.”

Given the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recently changed the official quarantine period from 10 days to five, I reached out to Georgetown’s Chief Public Health Officer, Dr. Ranit Mishori. She told me that Georgetown is still using a 10-day quarantine.

Students are the lowest risk population on planet Earth. Over the last six months, the risk of a person in the broader age group (15-24) dying of Covid or dying with Covid (the CDC does not clearly distinguish), was 0.001%. All or nearly all of those deaths were in a very specific subgroup: unvaccinated people with a medical comorbidity. But despite Georgetown’s strict vaccination, masking, testing, and quarantine requirements, the university announced late last month that “all University events, including meetings with visitors, will need to be held virtually or outdoors,” among many other restrictions.

At Princeton University, fully vaccinated students are not allowed to leave the county unless they are on a sports team. They’re also testing all students twice a week, usurping the scarce testing supply from vulnerable communities so that low-risk, young people can use them.

At Cornell, masks are still the rule—and even recommended outdoors. “Masks must be worn indoors at all times, unless in a private, non-shared space (e.g., dorm room or office); we strongly recommend masking outdoors when physical distancing is not possible,” the school announced in mid-December.

At Amherst, students must double mask if they don’t use a KN95. In nearby Boston, at Emerson College, students are tested twice a week and have stay-in-room orders. The college instructs students to “only leave their residence halls or place of residence for testing, meals, medical appointments, necessary employment, or to get mail.” Seriously.

At these institutions of higher learning and thousands more, science is supposedly held in the highest esteem. So where is the scientific support for masking outdoors? Where is the scientific support for constantly testing fully vaccinated young people? Where is the support for the confinement of asymptomatic, young people who test positive for a virus to which they are already immune on a campus of other immune people? The data simply do not justify any of it...

 

Michael Shellenberger, San Fransicko

At Amazon, San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

Why Democrats Self-Destruct on Crime

From Michael Shellenberger, "Progressives still deny rising crime even as it undermines Joe Biden's presidency."

Plus, "Victory! San Francisco Mayor Promises Crackdown on Drug Dealing & Crime."

Tough Talk: Mayor London Breed Cracks Down on Crime (VIDEO)

At KPIX CBS 5 San Francisco, "S.F. Mayor London Breed Announces Crime Crackdown; ‘Less Tolerant Of All The Bulls-t That Has Destroyed Our City’."

And from the Mayor, "A Safer San Francisco."

Democrats Legalized Crime, Thousands Died (VIDEO)

 From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "And the killing is just getting started":

Here’s former Philly Mayor @Michael_Nutter denouncing “white wokeness” and “white privilege” for resulting in more homicide and crime pic.twitter.com/05bLU1Tdqn

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) December 14, 2021

4,901 more people were murdered last year than in 2019. The 30% increase in murders during the year of Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform was catastrophic. And it’s not over.

With the early numbers coming in, over a dozen cities broke their murder records in 2021. Cities across California are continuing to show double digit increases. Philly broke past 500 murders and in response Soros DA Larry Krasner, whom many blame for the crime wave, assured tourists that everything was fine and they should feel safe coming to the City of Brotherly Love.

"We don't have a crisis of lawlessness. We don't have a crisis of crime. We don't have a crisis of violence,” Krasner, newly reelected with a mandate to keep giving criminals a pass, insisted.

That was too much for even Philly’s Democrat establishment.

"It takes a certain audacity of ignorance and white privilege to say that right now," former Mayor Michael Nutter blasted Krasner, "I have to wonder what kind of messed up world of white wokeness Krasner is living in to have so little regard for human lives lost, many of them Black and brown, while he advances his own national profile as a progressive district attorney."

"I’d like to ask Krasner: How many more Black and brown people, and others, would have to be gunned down in our streets daily to meet your definition of a 'crisis?'"

Krasner belatedly apologized, after critics, many of them, like Nutter, black, attacked him for gaslighting them, insisting that he had just said “some inarticulate things”. Why did Krasner think he could offer up a crazy lie like that? He had just won his reelection race by 69% to 31%.

The proponents of the leftist pro-crime policies that led to this nightmare keep telling crazy lies.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that, “A lot of these allegations of organized retail theft are not actually panning out.”

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki falsely argued that the pandemic was the "a root cause" of the crime wave.

The legalization of theft, the elimination of bail, the revolving door arrests and releases of criminals, the mass jailbreak of violent felons and gang members to “protect them” from the pandemic, reduction in sentences, diversion programs, refusals to prosecute certain offenses, police defunding, and the rest of the catalog of criminal justice reform are the real root causes.

In typical leftist fashion, a radical transformation was enacted through a set of policies disguised as reforms based on an even more radical understanding of how society should work. And, much as with critical race theory or wealth redistribution, we’ve been bombarded with pop propaganda, but virtually no discussion of what the underlying ideology behind it believes.

Criminal justice reform was based on the conviction that crime was due to social inequity, that criminals were innocent victims of an uncaring society, that the police were the latest incarnation of slave catchers, that prisons were the new slavery, and that crime prevention was racist.

Pro-crime ideologues argued for legalizing property crimes since property was theft, and for substituting restorative justice therapy sessions for prison sentences for rapists and killers. They called for abolishing police and prisons because once society is transformed, there will be no more crime because the root cause of crime isn’t individual choice, but systemic racism.

This isn’t some fringe idea by a few nuts. It’s what the Squad believes. That’s why Rep. Tlaib introduced a bill that called for freeing all federal prisoners. It’s what key elected officials in cities like New York City, Minneapolis, and Chicago used as their guiding light when advancing the disastrous policies that wrecked their respective cities.

And yet the media has offered virtually no exploration of these beliefs to mainstream audiences.

Instead the media lied about the most basic things like the meaning of “defund the police”, denying that it meant the elimination of police departments, and justifying assorted “abolitionist” measures like opening up prisons as one-time responses to the pandemic. Even now the media continues echoing the false claims of the Democrats that the crime wave is a pandemic crisis.

And that’s a lie.

The crime wave has followed political patterns. That’s why commercial burglaries and gang murders are up while rape is down. Those crimes that Democrats still take seriously, like rape, are not in crisis mode. It’s those crimes that they either don’t take seriously, like property crimes, or those that they enable, like murders by the career criminals they freed, that are booming.

Criminal justice reform is not the first time that radical leftists imposed a dramatic policy program with virtually no public explanation of what it was or how it would work. The few times that media talking heads actually asked Democrat officials, like those in Minneapolis, who would deal with crime if the police were no longer around to respond to calls, the responses were nonsensical.

And yet no media outlet was willing to bottom line the agenda of criminal justice reform by admitting that its proponents did not believe that crime needed to be “fought” to begin with.

"If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police I invite you to reflect: are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?" Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender tweeted.

What was this new system? No one was willing to discuss what exactly it entailed.

But the system is plain to see. Watch a video of a thug hauling away trash bags full of stolen merchandise from a CVS. Or more videos of porch pirates brazenly walking away with packages. At the local supermarket, staff have been told not to interfere with shoplifters.

The new system abolishes private property by legalizing theft.

It’s a simple proposition that the media refuses to speak out loud because the vast majority of the public would never go along with it. That’s why statements by criminal justice reform politicians and police defunding slogans can never be followed to their logical conclusion.

The new system abolishes private property and treats gang violence as a social problem to be met with wealth redistribution, community intervention, and other means of bribing the thugs.

The crime wave is not a baffling phenomenon, but exactly what the defunders wanted.

Thousands of people have died as a result of a leftist social experiment. And thousands more will go on dying because it’s a lot easier to destroy public safety than it is to restore it.

And that won’t change until we start telling the truth about what’s really happening...

 

Fauci Strikes Again

At AoSHQ, "Fauci: Families Should Require Vaccine Passports Before Allowing Relatives Into Their Homes for Christmas."

San Francisco Out of Control

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: 'San Francisco’s vaunted tolerance dims amid brazen crimes' — and after 30 or so years of a city in decline, the AP is finally on it!"

Another smash & grab in #SanFrancisco. This time the victims, including 2 toddlers, were inside the van when it happened. The victims visiting from a Chicago say the suspects stole a bag w/ a laptop, headphones, passport & the kid’s birth certificates.More tonight on @kron4news pic.twitter.com/31q1BUKjhP

— Taylor Bisacky (@TaylorBisackyTV) December 9, 2021

Which America Do You Want to Live In?

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit,"ROGER SIMON: COVID May Be Waning, but Will They Tell Us?." 

And quoting National Review:

And it’s ending, despite Biden and Fauci’s dreams of endless lockdowns: “On Saturday in New York City you needed a vaccine passport to eat in a restaurant or grab a drink in a bar, work out in a gym, go to a movie, or attend any sporting event. Just four hours to the west nearly 110,000 maskless Penn State Nittany Lion fans who had to provide no health records to anyone to attend the game reveled in their school’s biggest football game in two years, packed as close together as possible all clad in white in one of the great football cathedrals of this country. Watch this video and tell me which America you want to live in, the one where you have freedom and embrace life or the one where you either bow down to the authoritarian whims of a group of leaders who don’t even follow their own rules or have no ability to do anything.”

R.T.W.T. 

 

Democrats Plot Escape From Biden's Poll Woes

At Politico, "The party’s own polling has the president in the red. Lawmakers know they need to get better at selling his agenda to avert midterm disaster":

Rep. Jared Golden is facing one of the toughest reelection battles in the country. One thing he says doesn’t keep him up at night, though, is President Joe Biden’s sinking approval rating. “I really don't care at all. I've got my own approach to doing things,” the Maine Democrat said, adding that he handily outran Biden in Trump country. “What I know about his approval ratings right now versus my own is that I'm outpacing him by about 30 points."

Golden's nonchalance is rare.

Most Democrats are worried that Biden’s flagging polling numbers — with an approval hovering in the low 40s — will lead to a thrashing at the ballot box. With historical headwinds and a GOP-dominated redistricting process already working against them, they fear that unless Biden pulls out of his current slide, Congress will be handed to the Republicans in next year's midterms.

Even the party's own polling has the president in the red. A poll from House Democrats’ campaign arm earlier this month showed the president down in battleground districts across the country, with 52 percent of voters disapproving of the job he’s doing, according to three party members briefed on the data.

Of course, the election is 11 months away, an eternity in politics. Democrats say once they finally clinch their full agenda, Biden will recover and so too will their prospects for keeping their slim majorities. But there’s plenty of handwringing about where Biden stands. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), for one, said Biden’s recent numbers are “scary.”

“We’re in a difficult period now. One of the challenges we have is, we’ve been legislating this year, as he has,” said Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, whose state represents Democrats’ best chance of picking up a GOP-held Senate seat. “While you’re legislating, you’re not communicating.”

Just three years ago, former President Donald Trump's unpopularity sank the GOP House majority, though a favorable map helped Republicans keep the Senate. Biden and Democrats in Congress may face a similar dynamic next year. They have only a handful of vulnerable Senate seats, but a veritable cavalcade of at-risk House seats.

But even a favorable Senate map might not be enough. Morning Consult found Biden underwater in the battleground states of Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Nevada and Arizona. Democratic senators are generally running ahead of the president, according to the House Democratic campaign arm's poll — the question is, how much they need to do so in order to win.

Democrats acknowledge they have a big problem. Their proposed antidote: Finish the battles over legislating as quickly as possible, then spend their next few months talking up their infrastructure and coronavirus relief laws, as well as their forthcoming social spending bill.

“Maybe it would be the first time that the Democratic Party has ever been disciplined on message,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “But theoretically we could finish a historic year of legislating for the middle class in the next month and spend all of our next year talking about what we did.”

Still, some fret that even if they do pass Biden’s marquee agenda item — the $1.7 trillion climate and social policy bill — it won’t bring the big bump at the polls that Democrats are hoping for. House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-Mass.) advised his party to focus on “seizing credit.”

“The messaging challenge is pretty apparent. When you look at the individual parts of what we’ve done, they’re all not just marginally popular, but they’re wildly popular with the American electorate,” Neal said...

 

White 'Antiracist' Teacher Fired in Tennessee

This is a the Washington Post, via Memeorandum, "A White teacher taught White students about White privilege. It cost him his job."

The guy's employed was terminated in 2020. He lost his appeal in October -- and the dude was tenured. 

Here's the story at Education Week, "Teacher Fired for Lesson on White Privilege Loses Appeal":

A Tennessee teacher was fired justifiably last school year for teaching his students that white privilege is a fact of life

rather than a theory, an outside hearing officer overseeing his appeal process ruled late last week.

Matthew Hawn, a Sullivan County, Tenn., contemporary issues high school teacher, was insubordinate and unprofessional and violated the teacher code of ethics when he failed to provide students “varying viewpoints” on the existence of white privilege during a lesson on police brutality against Black men, hearing officer Dale Conder said in his decision.

“Despite knowing he was to provide varying viewpoints, Mr. Hawn did not provide a viewpoint contrary to the concept of white privilege,” Conder wrote in his decision.

Hawn, reached by Education Week over the weekend after the ruling, has not yet decided whether to appeal Conder’s ruling.

“I really thought that I was going to be teaching in Sullivan County. I thought we made a great case,” said Hawn, 43, who grew up in the county and had been teaching in the district for 16 years. “I’m just extremely disappointed and defeated.”

The ruling comes amid a raucous national debate over whether districts and states should censure the ways teachers talk to students about America’s racist past.

As his case gained national attention, Hawn, who was tenured, decided to appeal the firing, asking for a hearing to determine whether the district acted legally.

Hawn taught a contemporary issues class at Sullivan Central High School for more than a decade, where he brought up current events in his classroom for students to debate and discuss. In September 2020, Hawn told his contemporary issues students, “white privilege is a fact,” while juxtaposing the police shooting of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, and the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager who walked away unharmed after fatally shooting two people at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wis.

On Sept. 10, Hawn was told by his principal in an email to allow room for classroom discussion and not make declarative statements about the topics he brought up in class. Undeterred, he later that year assigned a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay called “The First White President” about Donald Trump, which calls the former president a white supremacist.

After a parent complained, Assistant Director of Schools Ingrid Deloach issued Hawn a reprimand for failing to provide varying perspectives, which is a requirement under Tennessee’s Teacher Code of Ethics.

When Hawn wanted to discuss former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s verdict for killing George Floyd with his class in June, he chose to show a video of Black poet Kyla Jenee Lacey reciting her poem, “White Privilege.” This time, he also assigned students to read Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking an invisible knapsack” and CNN writer John Blake’s opinion piece, “It’s time to talk about Black privilege.”

Conder did not consider any of these to be a “varying perspective” to the poem, because they did not question the existence of white privilege.

“These articles do not challenge the concept of ‘white privilege,’” he said in his decision...

 

Democrats Have Problems in Rural America

It's Steve Bullock, the former governor of Minnesota.

I actually disagree with the specifics of how he governed his state over the last decade, before this year, but his larger, "structural" analysis (that is, "systemic," to borrow from the radical left), is fundamentally sound. 

At NYT, "I Was the Governor of Montana. My Fellow Democrats, You Need to Get Out of the City More":

I take no joy in sounding the alarm, but I do so as a proud Democrat who has won three statewide races in a rural, red state — the Democrats are in trouble in rural America, and their struggles there could doom the party in 2022.

The warning signs were already there in 2020 when Democrats fell short in congressional and state races despite electing Joe Biden president. I know because I was on the ballot for U.S. Senate and lost. In the last decade and a half, we’ve seen Senate seats flip red in Arkansas, Indiana, North Dakota, and more. Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats around the country since 2008. And in this year’s governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey, we saw the Democratic vote in rural areas plummet, costing the party one seat and nearly losing us the other. It was even worse for Democrats down ballot, as Democrats lost state legislative, county, and municipal seats.

The core problem is a familiar one — Democrats are out of touch with the needs of the ordinary voter. In 2021, voters watched Congress debate for months the cost of an infrastructure bill while holding a social spending bill hostage. Both measures contain policies that address the challenges Americans across the country face. Yet to anyone outside the Beltway, the infighting and procedural brinkmanship haven’t done a lick to meet their needs at a moment of health challenges, inflation and economic struggles. You had Democrats fighting Democrats, letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and desperately needed progress was delayed. It’s no wonder rural voters think Democrats are not focused on helping them.

I was re-elected as Montana’s governor in 2016 at the same time Donald Trump took our state by more than 20 points. It’s never easy for Democrats to get elected in Montana, because Democrats here are running against not only the opponent on the ballot, but also against conservative media’s (and at times our own) typecast of the national Democratic brand: coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.

To overcome these obstacles, Democrats need to show up, listen, and respect voters in rural America by finding common ground instead of talking down to them. Eliminating student loans isn’t a top-of-mind matter for the two-thirds of Americans lacking a college degree. Being told that climate change is the most critical issue our nation faces rings hollow if you’re struggling to make it to the end of the month. And the most insulting thing is being told what your self-interest should be.

Get out of the cities and you will learn we have a libertarian streak, with a healthy distrust of government. We listen when folks talk about opportunity and fairness, not entitlements. We expect government to play a role in our having a fair shot at a better life, not solve all our problems.

We need to frame our policies, not in terms of grand ideological narratives, but around the material concerns of voters. Despite our differences and no matter where we live, we generally all want the same things: a decent job, a safe place to call home, good schools, clean air and water, and the promise of a better life for our kids and grandkids.

For me, that meant talking about Obamacare not as an entitlement, but as a way to save rural hospitals and keep local communities and small businesses afloat. It meant talking about expanding apprenticeships, not just lowering the costs of college. It meant framing public lands as a great equalizer and as a driver for small business. It meant talking about universal pre-K not as an abstract policy goal, but being essential for our children and for keeping parents in the work force. It meant talking about climate change not just as a crisis, but as an opportunity to create good jobs, preserve our outdoor heritage, and as a promise not to leave communities behind.

These lessons apply broadly, not just to swing states. We need to do the hard work of convincing voters that we are fighting for every American, regardless of party or where they live, or it’ll only get worse for us in the 2022 midterms and beyond...

Still more.

 

Protesters at Arizona State Hold 'DEATH 2 AMERICA' Sign at Kyle Rittenhouse Protest

Arizona State's in Tempe, just outside of Phoenix. It's a really university, but I wouldn't want to go there.

See, "Arizona State University Defends ‘Death 2 America’ Sign at Anti-Rittenhouse Rally."

Representative Rashida Tlaib Struggles to Defend Closure of Federal Prisons

She sponsored a House bill called the BREATHE Act.

It's the Black Live Matter bill. According to Wikipedia:

The BREATHE Act's most notable diversion from past reform efforts is its explicit demand that Congress repeal the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, colloquially known as the "crime bill." For example, the BREATHE Act would repeal the "three-strikes law," which when it passed in 1994 was seen as a rule that would deter repeat criminal activity, and prohibit use of the modern Taser, which was developed in the '90s by a private company and subsequently marketed as a way to prevent police killings as an alternative to firearms.They bill's supporters argue that these practices and policies have been harmful and dangerous.

The bill also stipulates that all federal prisons would be closed within ten years of passage into legislation. This is, in other words, bat-shit crazy.

More here, "The Ghost of Defund Comes for Rashida Tlaib."

And her embarrassing interview with Axios' Jonathan Swan: