• Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed Robert Hur as Special Counsel to investigate President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents — what I referred to in my post this morning as “the Biden matter.” Garland’s statement appointing Hur is posted online here. Hur is the former United States Attorney for the District of Maryland. Garland’s statement provides additional details on Hur’s background.
• Garland: “On December 20, President Biden’s personal counsel informed Mr. Lausch that additional documents bearing classification markings were identified in the garage of the President’s private residence in Wilmington, Delaware. President Biden’s counsel informed Mr. Lausch that those documents were among other records from the period of the President’s service as Vice President. The FBI went to the location and secured those documents.”
• Biden keeps his beloved Corvette in the garage. He asserted in response to Peter Doocy today that the garage is locked (“it’s not like they’re sittin’ out in the street”), but it is opened whenever he takes it for a spin, it is not secure, and it can be entered by anyone with access to the house. As Prince puts it in “Little Red Corvette” — “I felt a little ill when I saw all the pictures / Of the jockeys that were there before me.” Think Hunter Biden.
• Every news story that reported on the first cache of classified documents retrieved from a closet in the Penn Biden Center distinguished the Biden matter from the Trump matter. I think the documents locked up in storage at Mar-a-Lago may have been kept in an area more secure than Biden’s garage.
• Garland: “On January 5, 2023, [United States Attorney John] Lausch briefed me on the results of his initial investigation and advised me that further investigation by a Special Counsel was warranted. Based on Mr. Lausch’s initial investigation, I concluded that, under the Special Counsel regulations, it was in the public interest to appoint a Special Counsel. In the days since, while Mr. Lausch continued the investigation, the Department identified Mr. Hur for appointment as Special Counsel.”
• Garland: “This morning, President Biden’s personal counsel called Mr. Lausch and stated that an additional document bearing classification markings was identified at the President’s personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware.” That makes for three sets of classified documents, or documents with “classified markings.”
• Everyone involved has kept mum on the Biden matter long after public disclosure should have occurred.
• It appears that the White House has no intention of making public the list visitors to the Biden residences during the relevant period of time.
• At the White House press conference today, KJP stated and reiterated ad nauseam that the Biden matter had been handled “by the book.” I don’t think anyone asked for a copy of the book. I’d certainly like to see it.
• Biden assures that that he takes classified documents seriously. I doubt it. Indeed, the facts disclosed so far tend to undercut that assurance.
• Biden will say anything that suits his purposes. That is the principle operative here.
New licensing rules in Minnesota that require teachers to ‘affirm’ students’ transgender identities will meet immediate court challenges from civil liberties advocates.
JOY PULLMANN
Minnesota will soon ban faithful Christians, Muslims, and Jews from teaching in public schools by requiring that every state-certified teacher “fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as … gender identity … are … affirmed.” Once the new requirements clear a final procedural hurdle, they will be immediately challenged in state and possibly federal court, a civil liberties lawyer told The Federalist on Tuesday.
“We have lots of parents who are upset by this sort of thing in schools already,” said Doug Seaton, president of Minnesota’s Upper Midwest Law Center, in an interview. “They’re going to be even more upset with how their teachers are going to be licensed. Their teachers are going to have to be faced with hiding their beliefs or getting denied [for a state teaching license].”
Seaton said it was accurate to describe the nearly finalized regulations as communicating: “Christians, Muslims, and Jews need not apply for Minnesota teaching jobs.” That is unconstitutional, he said, so UMLC plans to sue once the changes go into effect.
The state agency that composed the changes disputed they would effectively ban religious Americans from teaching in Minnesota schools through a spokeswoman on Wednesday. The spokeswoman did not respond to a follow-up asking how Christians, Jews, and Muslims could adhere to their faith while complying with the licensing requirements that all new teachers publicly reject their faiths’ declaration that God has created only two sexes, male and female.
Minnesota’s Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board (PELSB), a division of the state Department of Education, has been working to change teacher certification requirements since 2019. Its latest public draft, which is finalized save for a few tweaks that don’t affect the content, includes multiple requirements that licensure candidates publicly support critical race theory and transgender ideology and include both in their teaching. Teachers must receive state licensure to be employed in Minnesota public and many private schools.
PELSB justified its changes by claiming “the predominantly white teacher workforce must be equipped to understand their own implicit bias and the unique lived experiences of all their students as a core requirement of teaching. For this reason, PELSB has worked closely with a wide range of stakeholders, including researchers and experts in the field of pedagogy, to ensure that anti-racism, cultural competency, and implicit bias were effectively embedded and identified throughout the scope of the proposed Standards of Effective Practice” (page 62).
“Standards for effective teaching” 1A in the nearly finalized regulations requires a teacher candidate to “affirm[] the validity of students’ backgrounds and identities.”
Standard 2D requires that a licensed teacher “fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity … sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation … are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn…”
Standard 2F mandates that “The teacher communicates verbally and nonverbally in ways that demonstrate respect for and responsiveness to the cultural backgrounds and differing perspectives learners bring to the learning environment.”
Standards 6, A-G require teachers to agree that the taxpayers supplying their salaries and the people who created the school system that will employ them are racists, and affirm other cultural Marxist beliefs. For example, Standard 6C requires that “The teacher understands the historical foundations of education in Minnesota … that have and continue to create inequitable opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for learners … especially for … students historically denied access, underserved, or underrepresented on the basis of race … gender, sexual orientation.”
The standards also require teachers to instruct their students in critical race theory, in mandates that teachers promote “anti-racism” and “equity.” Those two terms are defined by their advocates to mean instituting structural racism against people with comparatively lighter skin and using skin color to judge people’s merit and performance. See standards 4E and H, below (standard 4F below has been slightly revised).
Before the licensure changes can go into effect, they must be reviewed once more by an administrative law judge. The judge already reviewed the proposal and recommended four tweaks that do not change the content of the requirements, merely their wording, to comply with regulatory technicalities.
Since the board made the changes he requested, the judge is likely to approve the tweaked draft PELSB sent back to him on Dec. 16, 2022, Seaton said. PELSB expects these licensing changes to go into effect at the latest by this spring, its spokeswoman told The Federalist.
“[T]he PELSB has made it impossible for those practicing orthodox Christianity and Judaism, as just two examples, to freely exercise their religion and simultaneously hold a teaching license. It makes it impossible for those colleges who seek to teach students how to teach to also maintain a distinctly orthodox Christian message on this key tenet of orthodox Christianity. It compels potential licensees to speak the PELSB’s chosen beliefs as an established creed and live them out in order to have a job. It establishes the PELSB’s view of human sexuality and gender as orthodoxy despite sincere opposition based on biological reality and traditional orthodox theistic beliefs,” Seaton noted in written comments to the administrative law judge who approved nearly all the standards in December.
PELSB’s members are appointed by the governor, Tim Walz, a Democrat who was re-elected in 2022. After Minnesotans filled up public meetings to protest these licensure changes in fall 2022, PELSB told news outlets the changes will only apply to new license candidates, not renewals. State-licensed Minnesota teachers must renew their licenses every one to five years.
“They have claimed this won’t apply to renewals, but the statute says it will,” Julie Quist, chairwoman of Minnesota’s Child Protection League, told The Federalist. “So they came out after all the criticism [to say] that this doesn’t apply to renewals, but the statute hasn’t been changed. They can say they’re not going to enforce it, but that means they can change their mind any time they want to.”
Minnesota already requires all teachers to take classes in “cultural competency” to renew their licenses, a change that went into effect in 2020. Those classes include training on “bias” regarding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”
College teacher preparation programs in Minnesota will also have to comply with these new requirements, PELSB has noted. That sets up another constitutional conflict by requiring religious institutions to endorse behaviors and ideologies that conflict with their public confessions of faith, Seaton said.
“We have people in other employment settings who are being presented with this, this affirmation and carrying the flag for these ideas,” Seaton said. “So we have people who are quitting and being terminated and disciplined already in Minnesota” over being forced to publicly agree with critical race theory and transgender ideology in order to keep their jobs.
PELSB noted that many teacher preparation programs in Minnesota have already adopted these changes: “the new standards are already embedded into their programs.” The state university system has embarked on an “Equity 2030” campaign across all majors that demands “faculty must find a way to engineer identical outcomes among all demographic groups,” according to Center of the American Experiment Senior Policy Fellow Katherine Kersten.
“We see a left-wing capture of school boards and educational agencies all over the country, even in red states,” Seaton noted. “So I think it is likely this thing will be seen in other parts of the country as well.”
The Upper Midwest Law Center is seeking plaintiffs for its legal challenges to the new licensing regime, Seaton said, such as religious students studying to become public school teachers and Christian colleges that currently participate in the state’s teacher licensing programs.
“Many people don’t understand how far along we are, but there’s no question that’s how far along we are because it’s in statute now. And I don’t know exactly how we’re going to turn this around but we’re committed to it,” Quist said.
Quist said one place to start would be for private institutions to develop teacher training and certification programs and for religious and other schools to use such independent programs instead of state certification. She also suggested that churches, community organizations, and foundations get more serious about starting and funding private alternatives to public schools so children can get an indoctrination-free education.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children.
I have taught high school English in the public schools for twenty years in three states, including two red states and a deep blue state. I have taught mainstream English, honors English, and remedial English. I’ve worked in alternative schools, high-poverty schools, large high schools serving mostly English learners, and predominantly white, middle-class schools.
Last month I let my teaching license expire. For the first time since 1998, I am no longer qualified to be a teacher in my home state of Kansas. When I consider the public education landscape not only in the Midwest, but across the country, it is with sadness that I think, “Not qualified to teach secondary English anymore? You’re right.”
I’m not qualified to deliver counseling services to the legions of broken, fatherless, emotionally stunted students who walk through our classroom doors every day. I’m not qualified to engage in behavior modification with dysregulated, angry kids who exhibit no impulse control, zero empathy for others. Students have talked about killing me, threatened to hit me in the face. Upon writing up these incidents, I have been blamed, told I need to work on “building relationships” with students, or offered more training on working with students dealing with trauma and abuse. Administrators pass off these students’ comments with, “Oh, he didn’t mean it… “ “I talked to him… “ or “Think about what may have occurred in your class that provoked this behavior.” There are minimal consequences for students who verbally and physically assault teachers. It’s open season on public school staff. I am not alone.
I’m not qualified to instruct near-adults in the basics of third-grade reading, grammar, and spelling skills. It’s become increasingly impossible to teach high-school level literature, let alone the classics. I used to be able to hand a seventeen-year-old Anna Karenina, Lord of the Flies, The Good Earth, or a Shakespearean play not read in class, and the student could read and understand it. Today, nearly half of students cannot read at grade level. Efforts to teach literature have devolved into my reading most of the book aloud in class should I wish to foster a class discussion around a complex piece of fiction or any long-form text that requires reflection, analysis, and the ability to hold multiple plot structures in one’s mind. Rather than uphold standards for even the most basic high school English courses, administrators ask that I “modify” my curriculum and provide a veritable three-dimensional chess game of “accommodations” for students so that they can achieve a passing grade in my class without having moved the needle on their literacy skills one bit. If I wanted to teach elementary-level skills, I would have become an elementary-school teacher.
I’m not qualified to compete with cell phones, vacuous TikTok videos, never-ending rabbit holes of YouTube videos and games that deliver cheap dopamine hits to students’ starved psyches and groom their self-doubt, self-loathing, and ever-shortened attention spans. I am not qualified to teach delayed gratification to cohorts of students raised on cheap technological fare consisting of constantly flickering videos, short sound bites, and mere snippets of cogent English sentences.
I’ve opted out of the sleepless nights, the weapons-grade emotional exhaustion, the constant second guessing of myself and every assignment I create, teach, and grade. I’ve opted out of the blame from parents, administration, and entitled students. I am done feeling that I never work hard enough, that I can never sacrifice enough of my weekends, evenings, and holidays to remediate students, teach them some semblance of grade-level work, and serve as a family therapist, social-emotional services director, or anger-management group leader. I’ve opted out of tiptoeing around the subtle political indoctrination that’s increasingly present in the approved curriculum and with which I do not agree. I’ve opted out of feeling that my biggest crime teaching English in the public schools is that I actually teach English in the public schools.
I’m a simple English teacher. I’m not the best teacher out there, but I’m not the worst. I care that my students are literate, thoughtful, and that they leave my class prepared for college-level work. Or that they at least possess the work ethic and resilience to enter this brave new world we’ve created for them. I’ve tried not to give up on this career into which I’ve invested money, emotion, my free time, the bulk of my youth, really. I look back on the years when I had fun creating and teaching challenging curriculum with a sense of autonomy and support from most parents and administrators as a wind at my back. Those days are long gone. The schoolhouse of twenty years ago is not today’s schoolhouse.
Kansas State Department of Education, you’re right: when it comes to teaching in what passes for today’s public classroom, I’m no longer qualified.
Amie Adamson is a child of God, hiker, ultrarunner, friend, daughter, sister, and recovering public school teacher.
NBC News broke the story that a second set of classified documents were found in Joe Biden’s possession at an undisclosed location this past November. The NBC News story is here. The story has now been confirmed and reported roughly everywhere. Among the many accessible stories are those by the AP here and the Washington Post (via JWR) here. I cant’ get enough of it. Here are a few facetious notes on it.
• Every one of the stories is based on a single source: “a person familiar with the matter (NBC News and AP) or “a person familiar with the investigation” (the Washington Post) or similar. That person must have been incredibly busy yesterday. Who might he be?
• I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that the busy “person” is a member of President Biden’s “legal team.”
• When the first batch of classified documents was discovered, the media repeated in unison the exculpatory assurances of Biden’s lawyer. I posted the lawyer’s statement in Biden unclassified.” They repeated his assurances as the truth of the matter. The reporters of these stories are hacks and shills. You knew that, of course, but it bears repetition.
• According to that busy “person” who is the source of yesterday’s stories, the second batch of classified documents was discovered in early November around the same time as the first batch, yet the discovery of the second batch belies the lawyer’s statement.
• President Biden doesn’t know anything about either the first batch or the second batch. He did the right thing, even if he doesn’t know what the right thing is either.
• Biden doesn’t know anything about anything. That is, he knows nothing, We can all agree on that. It all comes as a great surprise to him.
• Unlike the classified documents seized from President Trump, the Biden documents do not threaten the national security of the United States or the possible destruction of the universe.
• The AP story betrays the AP’s possible impatience with toeing the Biden line: “The revelation that additional classified documents were uncovered by Biden’s attorneys came hours after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre dodged questions about Biden’s handling of classified information and the West Wing’s management of the discovery.” Perhaps KJP tests the limits of the AP’s patience.
• The AP story bluntly observes regarding KJP: “[S]he refused to say when Biden himself had been briefed, whether there were any more classified documents potentially located at other unauthorized locations, and why the White House waited more than two months to reveal the discovery of the initial batch of documents, which were found Nov. 2, days before the midterm elections.”
• And yet the AP carries on in the accustomed style on behalf of President Biden: “There are significant differences between the Trump and Biden situations, including the gravity of an ongoing grand jury investigation into the Mar-a-Lago matter.”
• I guess that means the Biden matter could be “grave” if a grand jury investigated it. In other words, it’s not grave yet! A grand jury could investigate it. It is therefore at least theoretically grave.
• Let us sign off this morning with the wisdom of Joe Biden as dutifully elicited by his minions at 60 Minutes.
Ordinary people have extraordinary power. Don’t believe me? Watch what happens if tens of millions ever decide to close their bank accounts all at once. Or critical sectors of the workforce decide to stay home for weeks. Or a sizable percentage of the population refuses to obey arbitrary and capricious government orders. When citizens become fed up enough to take matters into their own hands, those with government-bestowed titles learn quickly how little power those vaunted titles actually have.
If you were to ask a collection of random people what governments do, you would hear a multitude of answers: they make and enforce laws, collect taxes, regulate industry, police citizens, and mobilize militaries. In actuality, what governments do, first and foremost, is prevent citizens from ever understanding the above paragraph. Their first order of business is to convince the vast majority of people not in positions of authority to obey the cumulative will of the small minority in charge of the government. For most of human history, this magic act, in which so few control so many, has been accomplished through intimidation, violence, and other forms of coercion.
“Nothing is so certain as death and taxes,” the old proverb goes, but it might just as accurately be said of almost all governments throughout history that those in charge will extract from those under their thumb either death or taxes — and often both. Force is the only language most governments know, although that force is often disguised as being performed for the people’s “own good.” As it turns out, force is generally sufficient for corralling humans into their government-controlled pens, especially if there are carrots or other treats inside to keep them content, if not particularly happy. When those pens have nothing attractive to offer and become overrun with filth, however, then those doing the corralling must resort to more and more force in order to make their captives obey.
The rejection of this coercive paradigm formed the intellectual backbone of American independence. Aside from some notable Greek city-states and a few mostly forgotten tribes, America’s Enlightenment experiment in self-determination set itself apart from all other past forms of governance precisely because its guiding principles sought to level the playing field between the governing and governed and replace the confines of the government’s animal pen with a shared freedom to roam. “We the people,” the U.S. Constitution begins, before articulating common ideals uniting all Americans, including a determination to “secure the blessings of liberty” for “ourselves and our posterity.” The people, as the architects of the American system of government, alone control the limits of their liberty and perpetually hold the keys to any artificial pen constricting their free will.
Now, depending upon your level of cynicism, this revolutionary articulation of human self-government either never truly succeeded or has achieved periods of relative success while enduring its share of failures, as all human institutions invariably do. Putting America’s scorecard to the side, however, by far its most powerful contribution to human liberty has been the passing down from one generation to the next both a shared understanding of what freedom means and a shared commitment to pursuing American freedom doggedly, however incomplete.
America’s civic bonds have prevailed through challenging times by sustaining a common determination to preserve individual rights and to protect those rights from the treacherous dilutions of government decree. The inviolable sanctity of the individual — the acknowledgment that each human has special worth that cannot be indiscriminately erased for some utopian and misguided “greater good” — provides the foundations for American equality.
In America, no person’s life, liberty, or property can be said to be more important than any other’s. This has been the shared truth, even when Americans have failed to live up to the standard, keeping the people in charge of their own pen and government force in check, if not at bay. Although President Truman will always be remembered for embracing the notion that “the buck stops here,” ultimately, the buck stops at all times with the American people. They are, as William Ernest Henley would attest, alone the masters of their fates and the captains of their souls. That’s the American way.
It is not the American way, however, for citizens to live higgledy-piggledy under the ambiguous reign of one government dictate to the next. It is not American for an unelected bureaucracy to create rules out of thin air and enforce them upon the people through agency prerogative and regulation. It is not American for presidents to legislate through executive order.
It is not American for congresses to conduct show trials against American citizens or to demand that tech companies censor points of view. It is not American for courts to scribble over the Constitution whenever expedient. It is not American for the Department of (in)Justice to persecute citizens for their political beliefs or for the FBI to act as a lethal enforcer against the regime’s political enemies.
It is not American for there to be so many criminal statutes that no American could possibly know them all, let alone confidently act without fear of sanction. It is not American for there to be so many government agencies and divisions that no American could capably draw a diagram listing their roles and functions.
It is not American for the government to champion its secular religion over the moral tenets of Americans’ spiritual faiths. It is not American for the government to ignore the will of its citizens and subvert immigration law by leaving its borders unprotected and wide open. It is not American for an amorphous Intelligence Community to spy on American citizens with neither warrant nor probable cause. It is not American for the news media to be so co-opted by the State that they almost universally support the government’s talking points — no matter how ludicrous and unsupported — while taking aim at dissenting citizens’ debate.
It is not normal for a “government of the people” to regularly denigrate its citizens as racists, extremists, deplorables, terrorists, misogynists, bigots, and rubes. It is not normal for any government claiming to be “for the people” to declare half the nation “enemies of the State.”
These are the acts of a government committed to using intimidation, violence, and other forms of coercion in order to get its way. In short, they are everything the American system revolted against when American independence rejected top-down force for equality, individual liberty, unassailable rights, and freedom of thought beyond the reach of the government’s say.
That so many Americans still fail to see how distorted their acting government has become from what their Constitution affords is proof that those who corral humans into pens for a living have done their jobs exceptionally well. Like too many generations before them, Americans have allowed themselves to be rounded up with a little prodding, some tasty carrots, and reassuring words along the way. Too many look at the barbed wire surrounding them and assume that life must always be endured behind the government’s enclosure. Obedience in exchange for the government’s promises of safety, welfare, and happiness has created a narcotic bliss.
What happens, though, if enough Americans decide they are not safe, comfortable, or happy? What happens when the American government runs out of carrots, and those in cages realize they are surrounded by nothing but filth and decay? Perhaps then ordinary people will realize what extraordinary power they actually possess. Perhaps then sleeping Americans will reawaken. Perhaps the descendants of those who once turned the world upside-down will remember how to reject government tyranny and demand a return to the American way.
President Biden suffered another embarrassment today when it turned out that there was a second batch of classified documents in a location that is so far undisclosed, but is different from the Penn office where the first classified documents were discovered. This is obviously embarrassing for the Democrats, given that they were hoping to indict Donald Trump for having classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago basement.
The White House’s response to these discoveries is laughable, given the vigor with which Biden has denounced Trump as “irresponsible” for possessing classified information. Today Peter Doucy cross-examined Karine Jean-Pierre on several topics, with the newly-found classified materials coming in the middle:
Poor Karine has nothing better to say than that Biden’s lawyers did the right thing after they found the illegally-purloined–if you believe the Democrats–files. Congratulations to the lawyers! But of course, that was never the question. The question is why Biden took classified documents away from the White House and left them in various locations for a period of years in the first place.
In reality, nothing about this story is a big deal. All presidents and vice-presidents take documents with them when they leave the White House. And over-classification is endemic in the executive branch. The most trivial documents are likely to be deemed confidential or secret. Even top secret documents, when they have been made public, generally seem pedestrian. I suppose that a high percentage of the pieces of paper that a president sees in the Oval Office are classified, so that, if he wants to take a few boxes home with him to work on his memoirs, they inevitably will include quite a few classified pieces of paper.
This is not very important, or at least it wasn’t when prior presidents did it. It is only because the Democrats saw an opportunity to attack Donald Trump–maybe put him in jail!–that the subject of ex-presidents (or in Biden’s case, an ex-vice president) possessing classified materials has even come up. What Trump did was trivial, and what Biden did was, as far as we know so far, also trivial. But it represents another exploding cigar in the Democrats’ endless efforts to destroy Trump, once and for all.
complex piece of fiction or any long-form text that requires reflection, analysis, and the ability to hold multiple plot structures in one’s mind. Rather than uphold standards for even the most basic high school English courses, administrators ask that I “modify” my curriculum and provide a veritable three-dimensional chess game of “accommodations” for students so that they can achieve a passing grade in my class without having moved the needle on their literacy skills one bit. If I wanted to teach elementary-level skills, I would have become an elementary-school teacher. 
MN Prager Discussion Group 
You must be logged in to post a comment.