While Gov. Ron DeSantis is trying to make Florida the state in which “woke goes to die,” that doesn’t mean every city in Florida is on board with that agenda. Jacksonville enacted a far-reaching public accommodation law holding that businesses may not do or say anything that makes people feel “unwelcome, objectionable, or unacceptable” because of their so-called “gender identity.” The Queen of Angels Catholic bookstore, however, recognizes compelled speech and censorship when it sees them and has sued the city in federal court to block the regulation.
Queen of Angels runs its bookstore along completely Catholic lines. Catholic doctrine informs all its practices, everything from the materials within the store, to its observance of Catholic ritual, to its blog and other publications commenting on issues related to the faith, including celebrating public policies aligned with Catholicism and opposing policies running counter to it.
The City of Jacksonville enacted an ordinance (Jacksonville, Fla. Code §§ 406.101 et seq.) that explicitly controls any forms of expression that makes people feel uncomfortable regarding multiple long-recognized categories such as race and sex. However, at § 406.102, the policy explicitly states that it extends to “gender identity.” And at § 406.201, it makes it an “unlawful practice” for any public accommodation, when it comes to a person’s “gender identity,”
To publish, circulate, issue, display, post or mail and communication, notice or advertisement to the effect that accommodations, services, goods advantages, facilities are denied to a person or that the patronage of such person is unwelcome, objectionable, or unacceptable.
The complaint points out that, in city after city across America, whenever such an ordinance has been put into place, it has been extended to mean that places of public accommodation must refer to customers by their “preferred pronouns”—a category of communication that the complaint points out is “effectively limitless.” (And indeed, as Libs of TikTok shows, people are making up new ones all the time.)
Given the way in which cities and courts apply these ordinances, Queen of Angels recognizes that its ability to “speak and operate consistent with its Catholic beliefs” is threatened. The law bans Queen of Angels from adopting a pronoun policy (pronouns will conform to a person’s obvious biological sex and, if that’s a problem, store personnel will use the person’s first or last name), let alone implementing that policy.
It also interferes with the store’s ability to publish any written material or to do anything at all that might make someone feel “unwelcome, objectionable, or unacceptable” on so-called “gender identity” grounds. No pronoun policy and no discussion of Catholic doctrine allowed!
Although the Commission hasn’t come after Queen of Angels, the business clearly worries that it’s going to be in activist crosshairs, just has been the case with Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker—and the penalties in Jacksonville are extreme enough to put the store out of business. Therefore, the bookstore seeks both an injunction stopping the city from acting on the “gender identity” parts of the ordinance and declaratory orders holding that the ordinance violates the bookstore’s federal and state rights to freedom of speech and worship. I would add that it should also seek substantial damages to ensure that all such ordinances, which are blatantly unconstitutional, vanish forever from American law.
This is a totally righteous lawsuit against a town ordinance that obviously both compels and censors speech in violation of religious conscience. The ordinance is also an invitation to the kind of character seen in the video below complaining to the City of Jacksonville in the hope that he destroys the bookstore’s right to operate:
What the Queen of Angels bookstore is doing is the right way to push back against encroaching wokeness. It’s exactly what the left did to implement wokeness in the first place: One lawsuit at a time, asserting a single person’s or institution’s constitutional rights. And it’s much better to be proactive than to wait for the leftist axe to fall, as it inevitably will.
As pollution has declined worldwide and damage from extreme weather events has grown less and less, the environmental movement has become ever more shrill and demanding. It has become obvious that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is no longer a scientific hypothesis–it failed, in that regard–but rather is an unhinged pseudo-justification for every left-wing policy prescription.
At the Spectator Australia, Alan Moran documents the fact that the Earth is getting along swimmingly, notwithstanding howls of anguish–or rather, demands for power–from the enviro Left. His focus is mostly on Australia, although the same conclusions obtain globally.
While the Earth is (happily) warmer today than during the Little Ice Age, temperatures in recent years have actually been flat or declining. This chart is global, based on satellite measurements:
When enviros talk about global warming and Australia, they generally wring their hands over the Great Barrier Reef. But in fact, “the coral coverage over the GBR is presently at record levels.”
Liberals tell us the Earth is suffering a “climate emergency.” But if it is an emergency, shouldn’t it actually be hurting people? These data are global, from the International Disaster Database:
Currently, many Western countries (but not China, Russia or India) are impoverishing themselves by making war on affordable, reliable energy. Maybe someday voters will understand that impoverishment is not unfortunate collateral damage from saving the planet, but, rather, is the desired objective, along with unfettered government domination.
The Earth is in great shape, but our politics are demented.
Military historian and Hillsdale College professor Mark Moyar has just published Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War, 1965-1968, which is the second in what will become a massive three-volume revision of the entire Vietnam War. It is a book that should be widely read, much discussed, and reviewed in depth regardless of one’s view of that sad chapter in American diplomacy and conflict in Vietnam.
The first book, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 appeared in 2006. It gained considerable attention for its heterodox analysis of the postwar origins of communist aggression against the South, beginning with the disastrous French colonial experience and its transference to the Americans. Moyar described the Byzantine intrigue through which the Kennedy Administration inserted American ground troops into Vietnam, and why and how his successor Lyndon B. Johnson rapidly escalated the American presence.
Moyar’s controversial argument in volume one centered on the disastrous decisions of these two administrations that ensured Americans would be sent into an uninviting distant theater of operations in the dangerous neighborhood of both communist China and Russia. Worse, they would be asked to fight under self-imposed limitations of the nuclear age in which their leaders could not achieve victory or perhaps even define it.
Still, Moyar argued that there was nevertheless a chance to achieve a South-Korean-like solution at much less cost, one that was thrown away through a series of American blunders. Most grievous was the American support for the 1963 coup that removed South-Vietnamese strongman president Ngo Dinh Diem and led to his almost immediate assassination‚ even as he was evolving into a viable wartime leader.
Moyar additionally deplored the biased and lockstep reporting of anti-war media, including its icons David “The Best and the Brightest” Halberstam and Neil “A Bright, Shining Lie” Sheehan, who operated on ideological premises far different from reportage in World War II and Korea. Both characteristically exaggerated American shortcomings consistent with their theme that Vietnam was an anti-colonialist war of liberation rather than a Cold War proxy fight over unilateral communist aggression.
Moyar’s Ho Chi Minh was not so much a romanticized “Uncle Ho” national liberationist of the anti-war movement, as a hard-core Stalinist whose agenda at any cost was always the absorption of all of Vietnam into a Soviet-satellite communist dictatorship.
This new second book of the saga follows and expands these themes, with the same scholarly rigor and comprehensive documentation that includes translated North Vietnamese archives as well as a number of memoirs of key American figures that have appeared in the 17 years since the appearance of the first volume. Most importantly, Triumph Regained is the first comprehensive combat history of the war that documents all the major battles of these four years, which saw U.S. troop levels in Vietnam peak in 1968 at well more than a half-million soldiers.
There appears a tragic monotony to these accounts of near weekly battles: initial communist probing attacks are designed to prompt an American response. The subsequent ambush of U.S. troops follows as they are air dropped into these remote jungle and mountainous theaters. Then like clockwork a quick recovery ensues as Americans size up the enemy landscape, call in murderous artillery and napalm attacks, and inflict terrible casualties. Then a few hours or days later, Americans fly out of the now abandoned combat zone. They usually suffered “moderate” numbers of killed in action, characteristically a tenth to even a hundredth of the losses inflicted on the North Vietnamese—but all to be reported from the front as a futile wastage of American lives.
Still, Moyar shows that too often the United States lacked a comprehensive strategy of victory and was shackled by unworkable rules of engagement—a now familiar dilemma in the half-century that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most grievously, the military was too often blocked from fully interdicting supplies and manpower of the communists at their sources in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Yet the more enemy men and materiel entered the theater unimpeded, a frustrated administration sought to compensate by single-mindedly increasing the numbers of American soldiers, purportedly in the fashion that had finally brought a stalemated “victory” in Korea.
Moyar’s President Johnson at times seems a tragic Hamlet-like figure. LBJ always claimed that he did not wish initially to send troops to Vietnam. But he was purportedly persuaded to do so by his hawkish Kennedy-leftover advisors—only eventually to be lectured to exit ignominiously by the very former zealots who advised him to escalate in the first place. Moyar’s late-phase Johnson remains a complex character, subject to constant bouts of self-doubt, self-pity, and lethal indecision. Nevertheless he harbored a natural—and correct—suspicion of his condescending and politically fickle old-time liberal Cold Warriors, especially the fixer Clark Clifford, the former whiz kid Robert McNamara, and the Brahmins Averell Harriman and the Bundy brothers. Yet when it most counted, LBJ ultimately yielded to their flawed, politically motivated reversals, and rejected the sounder realist assessments of his inner circle of Ellsworth Bunker, Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow, and Maxwell Taylor.
Moyar offers a number of reassessments that may surprise both diehard critics of the war and those who felt victory was “forsaken” by Congress and our so-called wise men. Gen. William Westmoreland, for example, is usually written off now as the father of futile “search and destroy missions” that defined progress only by inflating enemy “body counts” and sent American soldiers into remote jungles where they were easily ambushed. Not quite true, Moyar shows.
Westmoreland’s forward deployments prevented the North Vietnamese from massing troops for major attacks, and kept them away from South Vietnamese population centers. That buffer was one reason why ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) forces steadily grew and by 1968 numbered over 1 million troops, and often were achieving parity against the North Vietnamese. Moyar believes that the pacification strategies—championed by the media hero John Paul Vann—were demonstrably flawed in comparison.
There was no real “Viet Cong,” a construct that Moyar shows was not much other than a few thousand communist agents in the South who posed as a large popular resistance movement. In truth, most hostiles in the South of any size were always North Vietnamese infiltrating communist troops and they had almost no popular support among the South Vietnamese.
The media continued to peddle fake news. Despite the claims of journalists and antiwar activists (often the same players), American public opinion supported the war for years. The people did not begin to turn against Vietnam until they tired of futile policies that either could not or would not unleash the military to win the war. Moyar suggests Americans were willing to assume enormous costs in the Cold War, but not in ossified theaters where their sons’ sacrifices were not in the service of victory.
It is also not accurate that Johnson’s “Rolling Thunder” air campaigns were nonsensical indiscriminate area bombings that slaughtered civilians without achieving much utility, in supposed contrast to the deadly Linebacker I and II precision and smart-bombing campaigns that followed in the Nixon Administration. In fact, North Vietnamese archives reveal that even Rolling Thunder terrified the enemy, especially during the abject obliteration of Tet forces surrounding Khe Sanh. Most of the communists’ later diplomacy was designed not to achieve a two-nation settlement but to stop at any cost the devastating bombing. The costly American missions had finally been honed to cripple severely communist supplies that were not declared politically out of reach. They killed thousands of enemy troops in the field, and helped to force the Vietnamese to the Paris Peace conference.
Far from the Tet Offensive being a pivotal communist victory as reported by the media, the 1968 North Vietnamese holiday surprise attacks proved a veritable bloodbath for the North. After their unsustainable losses, the North Vietnamese essentially gave up major conventional offensive operations and in fear of American firepower withdrew a credible presence in the South—even as Walter Cronkite and the network news declared enemy corpses on the Saigon embassy lawn were veritable proof of a fatal U.S. defeat warranting withdrawal.
General Creighton Abrams, the successor to Westmoreland as commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, was indeed an inspired supreme commander. But he was not necessarily always the corrective to a supposedly incompetent Westmoreland. Moyer controversially argues that Abrams wisely continued Westmoreland’s search and destroy missions for a time. He eventually stopped them not because they had failed, but rather because they had successfully eroded communist concentrations to such a degree that they could be slowly discontinued.
The disconnect between the American media and the realities of the war, evidenced in the North Vietnamese official archives remains striking. Moyar juxtaposes a media assuming the inevitable victory of the North Vietnamese with the communists despairing they were losing the war to the Americans. Each evening at home, as the American public was told we were being systematically killed and crippled by far more adept “jungle fighters,” the communists were mired in depression as they saw their mounting losses as unsustainable and found no other alternative than to go to Paris to negotiate a reprieve. The American military leadership that the media mocked as inept, and the soldiers who were caricatured as drug-ridden, crazed, disobedient, and near insurrectionary were never seen as such by “Charlie” who had to fight them. No wonder then, by late 1968, the Soviets were finally preferring an end to the war, while their Chinese rivals eventually gave up on their North Vietnamese clients. Both feared the growing likelihood of an independent and pro-Western Vietnam in Southeast Asia.
What undermined the Johnson Administration’s war effort ultimately was its rank politicization of the conflict. LBJ became terrified that the left-wing anti-war movement would force him out of office in 1968 in favor of an anti-war candidate unless he capitulated and ordered a bombing cessation, froze troop increases or pulled soldiers out of Vietnam, and perhaps agreed to the unhinged calls for a “coalition” government in the South. Johnson’s despair, of course, was ironic since, for most of his tenure, the old politico enjoyed a Democratic supermajority in the Senate and a huge majority of over 150 seats in the House, ensuring the Democrats could do anything they liked in the war, which of course they had begun and owned.
To the degree Johnson gave in to the pacifists in his circle, the increasingly viable American effort stalled. After his refusal to seek reelection in early 1968, LBJ then found himself in a truly Orwellian situation. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, both to win the nomination and the 1968 general election, felt he would have to insidiously distance himself from his president and boss. By November, the politics became more surreal. LBJ had to endorse Humphrey even as he realized that Nixon would far more likely continue LBJ’s effort that by 1968 was finally winning the war—while his own party would end it and destroy all the hard-won progress of the last two years.
We talk today about “collusion” and “political interference” in our elections, without remembering that Johnson and his subordinates were past masters at it. Most White House discussions about the peace talks and their connection to bombing halts were predicated not just on military efficacy, but on what might play best to the Democratic anti-war base and could win back the American electorate in 1968.
Moyar relates that the communist world and Europe openly rooted for a Humphrey victory over Nixon and was willing to interfere in our elections. Indeed, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin secretly offered the likely nominee Humphrey and his campaign a sizable campaign donation among other aid (refused, but not disclosed by Humphrey) to defeat the globally detested Cold Warrior Nixon. In a familiar example of left-wing “projection,” LBJ and his advisors were convinced that some in the 1968 Nixon campaign were colluding with the Saigon leadership to halt any concessions at the Paris talks. No such proof was ever found. No matter: Johnson wiretapped U.S. citizens in a vain effort to prove the empty rumors. That smear was demonstrably false, but in truth Johnson himself halted the bombing, and his team grew lenient in Paris to aid the suddenly surging 1968 Humphrey campaign.
We talk of a “Vietnam War.” In fact, it was a Cold War communist proxy effort that saw over 100,000 Chinese auxiliaries engaged in supply and repairing Vietnamese infrastructure, while thousands of Soviet “advisors” manned tanks, flew planes, and organized and operated anti-aircraft systems. Vladimir Putin’s current objection to U.S. military aid to Ukraine is again ironic, given Russia was historically an active participant on the ground in Vietnam and both directly and indirectly killed Americans in efforts to defeat the United States.
Moyer ends volume two on a mixed note. An exhausted and beaten North was negotiating in fear that its massive losses of 1967-1968, if continued, would have threatened the Hanoi regime itself. An elected Republican hawk Richard Nixon, inheriting a war that already had cost 35,000 dead, was now opposed by the same Democrats who started it. A growing number of frustrated Americans wanted either to win the war or to get out. Nixon would soon take the gloves off, ensuring that a nearly defeated North would be subject to greater bombing pressures—even as the anti-war Left enjoyed complete control of a Congress that was suddenly liable to cut off aid to Saigon, could more easily mobilize against a now oppositional and conservative White House—and the ingredients of the Watergate debacle were on the distant horizon.
Moyar draws on a tradition of Vietnam War revisionism, especially Don Oberdorfer’s corrective on the Tet offensive, Lewis Sorley’s thesis of a radical American improvement under Creighton Abrams, and Michael Lind’s unorthodox but well-argued thesis that the “necessary” Vietnam War sought to ensure American Cold War credibility and diverted communist aggression from other more strategically important U.S. allies and vulnerable neutrals.
The role of Encounter Books should also be noted and congratulated for assuming publication of the series from Cambridge University Press, the original publisher of volume one that somehow did not follow up on its initial much-discussed and reviewed book.
Finally, Moyar does not answer in this second volume the existential question that has haunted America long after the war; namely, was the price tag of 58,000 dead Americans and trillions of dollars in treasure worth the cost and effort of 10 years of war to keep South Vietnam autonomous and to check Soviet expansionism? Or would a far better-managed effort leading to a free Vietnam at even far less cost even have been worth it?
For those answers, we await Moyar’s third and final volume of this landmark work. These first two books have been well argued, meticulously researched, engaging to read—and are anathemas to the all too often orthodox view of an imperialistic American meeting its destined comeuppance through the folly of trying to save Vietnam.
Triumph Regained shows that America’s war in Vietnam could have been won earlier at far less blood and treasure, and in fact, almost was, even belatedly so by 1968.
Volume three no doubt will assess whether the war should have been fought.
Of all the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, no “conspiracy theory” has been more obviously true since the very beginning than the Wuhan lab leak theory.
In March of 2020, Tony Fauci was interviewed by National Geographic and completely dismissed the “theory” that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab of virology. In fact, he said there was no evidence to support it. Instead Fauci claimed the body of evidence strongly suggested that the virus simply jumped species; ie, it was natural.
Was Fauci, the so-called face of science itself, stupid? It wouldn’t have been the first time Fauci embraced and promoted an erroneous and idiotic theory. During the AIDS epidemic in May 1983, Fauci promoted the theory that AIDS was transmitted by “routine close contact, as within a family household.”
At the time of Fauci’s dismissal of the lab leak theory, President Trump’s State Department had already put out a statement asserting that the U.S. intelligence community “had evidence that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory were sick with Covid-like symptoms in autumn 2019.”
While Fauci’s 1983 theory that AIDS was spread via close contact can be chalked up to ignorance, stupidity, or both, his denial of the evidence-based lab leak theory and support for the absurd “wet market theory” — somebody ate a bat with the virus and contracted it — cannot. Fauci lied.
We know Fauci lied because in October of 2021, Lawrence Tabak, a top National Institutes of Health official, admitted that U.S. taxpayer money did go to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to fund “gain-of-function research,” the very research Fauci had repeatedly denied funding. Fauci, of course, was the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Furthermore, a leading infectious disease expert had sent an email to Fauci in January of 2020, writing that “Some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” Despite this, Fauci dismissed the lab leak theory as baseless.
Now the U.S. Energy Department has assessed that the COVID-19 virus likely originated from an accidental lab leak in China. What reason would Fauci have to cover up this truth? The only conceivable explanation is that the United States had a role in creating it. The important questions now are: Did the U.S. help create the virus in conjunction with the Chinese? And: What was the intention behind creating the COVID-19 virus?
The explanation, which we can call a “conspiracy theory” for the time being, may be terrifying and condemn the entire U.S. government and the Department of Defense.
Shortly after the virus was recognized as COVID-19 in early 2020, President Trump announced that the United States was “very close to a vaccine.” How could this be?
In July of 2020, the Washington Post ran this headline: “How a secretive Pentagon agency seeded the ground for a rapid coronavirus cure.” Amy Jenkins, the manager of DARPA’s antibody program, said, “We have been thinking about and preparing for this for a long time, and it’s almost a bit surreal.”
DARPA is the research arm of the Department of Defense, an acronym for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It turned out that DARPA began investing in experimental RNA technology in 2011. ADEPT, DARPA’s Autonomous Diagnostics to Enable Prevention and Therapeutics division, invested $292 million in an array of technologies between 2011 and 2019 in an effort to reduce timelines for vaccines.
By 2019, a project funded by DARPA at Moderna supposedly demonstrated great promise in a clinical trial. That trial provided protection against a mosquito borne virus known as Chikungunya.
By March of 2020, Moderna became the first company in the United States to conduct a clinical trial with the experimental mRNA technology to stop COVID-19. But Moderna wasn’t the only pharmaceutical company conducting such experiments.
Pfizer, the DARPA-funded CureVac, the CCP People’s Liberation Army Academy of Military Sciences in China, and a lab at the Imperial College in London had all also conducted research.
The only way out of the pandemic, as presented by Fauci and countless others, was by injecting ourselves with this experimental mRNA vaccine. Even as anxious Americans waited for its availability, proven and existing treatment options like hydroxychloroquine and zinc, were dismissed as ineffective.
Once available, mandates and other coercive tactics were utilized to compel Americans to get the jab. The media, and even Biden, claimed the experimental vaccines, which hadn’t even been tested for efficacy, would prevent the contraction of COVID. When this was proven untrue, the same needle pushers then claimed it would reduce symptoms.
It is undeniable that the goal was to get this vaccine injected into as many American bodies as possible. What else could explain the campaign? Were the American people knowingly being used as lab rats so that DARPA could finally test its military research?
More sinister “conspiracy theories” aside, was COVID-19 intentionally engineered by the U.S. government with the intent to infect human specimens with the virus so that it could then test its revolutionary mRNA technology?
If you were a scientist developing a revolutionary vaccine technology intended to accelerate vaccine development from years to months, how would you test it? Such technology could not be put to the test without the introduction of a pathogen, or virus, upon which to test it. Such a test would necessitate the infection of a human specimen on which to conduct a trial.
Among other tyrannical uses, was the pandemic unleashed to give DARPA the clinical trial it needed to test its technology?
Was it an accident or was it intentional? Were the Chinese to blame or was the U.S. government? These are questions that must be answered.
Intentionally or not, the American people were used as lab rats for an experimental vaccine — a vaccine, which had been in development for nearly a decade.
Drew Allen, the Millenial Minister of Truth, is the host of “The Drew Allen Show” podcast and a widely published columnist and political analyst. He is the Vice President of Client Development at Publius PR and also the Editor of the Publius National Post. Subscribe to read his work at drewallen.substack.com.
So Transportation Secretary Pee-Wee Herman is blaming the Trump Administration for the East Palestine train derailment, claiming it is the fault of “de-regulation.” Economist David Henderson points out that railroad deregulation occurred under Jimmy Carter. Oh, and by the way, here’s the time-series data on railroad accidents:
Carter. Oh, and by the way, here’s the time-series data on railroad accidents:
Turns out Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler agrees:
Sitting in for the comedian/host of the Jimmy Dore Show, Maté devoted a segment to what I have called “Clapper’s claptrap.” Clapper’s claptrap takes up the intervention of the Deep State 51 in the 2020 election through the work of Natasha Bertrand and Politico. Now the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler has entered the fray on behalf of the Deep State 51. Maté deconstructs the Clapper/Kessler intervention with exhibits. For mature audiences only, the video is both educational and entertaining.
The schoolmarm is an iconic figure from America’s western past. She was a 19th-century schoolteacher who, in that one-room schoolhouse on frontier territory, taught American children the three Rs, as well as reverence for their country. Fast forward 150 years or so, and you have an epicene, whatever gender teacher urging students to call her “mom” so that they disgorge their secrets to her. However, there are weapons to fight against this vile scourge.
Up until quite recently, the teacher’s job was to pass on concrete knowledge to equip children to be productive adults and good citizens. That was the beginning and end of a teacher’s job. Then, states passed laws that imposed on teachers the obligation to file a report if they thought a parent was abusing a child. That was a reasonable thing to do, given that a teacher might be the only other adult in a child’s life and, therefore, would be the one who noticed bruises or malnutrition.
Somehow, though, this responsibility morphed into a cadre of teachers deciding that all parents are potential abusers—not physical abusers, but potential mental abusers. And what constitutes mental abuse? Parents who challenge those teachers who deviate from the hard work of teaching concrete information (math, reading competency, etc.) and slide effortlessly into celebrating their own life choices in the classroom—and the more deviant, the better.
And that’s how you end up with the peculiar human being in the video, below, who is delighted that her students are confused about her biological sex. In her classroom, the most important thing is for students to learn “gender identity.” And to further that knowledge, this teacher explicitly usurps the mother’s role. It’s a case of “Go away, mommy. For the few hours a day and finite months of the year that I have your child, I know and love that child better than you ever could”:
Will it surprise you to learn that this woman says of her relationship with her own mother that “it’s broken”? But still, she wants to be your child’s “mom.”
Chaya Raichik, the woman behind Libs of TikTok has spent years documenting the predatory behavior that America’s K-12 teachers are bringing to the classroom. It’s no wonder that she’s published her own children’s book, one that has a very important message for children: If your teacher is trying to come between you and your mommy and daddy, your teacher is doing a bad thing. Here’s Raichik’s little promo for her book:
I’ve been fortunate that I always had a strong channel of communication with my children. As readers are probably aware, I’m hyperverbal, so nothing went unsaid in my household. The two other tricks I learned as a parent were to catch my children being good 75% of the time and to be opinionated but not judgmental, both of which create trust.
“Catch them being good” is a reminder that children must learn to be good. If you only catch them being bad (a) they will often be bad to get your attention because all children crave parental attention, and (b) they will view you as a dangerous person for confidences because the likelihood is that they’ll get in trouble for anything they reveal to you.
That principle does not mean that you cannot teach children that their behavior is wrong, and that’s where “opinionated but not judgmental” comes in. If my kids told me something of which I disapproved, I’d give my opinion about whatever they told me, but I would not attach to my children or their friends the label (or judgment) that they were bad, stupid, lazy, etc. It kept them from getting defensive and allowed me to express my concerns about behaviors or people that were dangerous to them.
One of the best days of my parenting life was when my teenager told me, “I can tell you anything. You don’t make me feel bad about myself, but you give always give me helpful advice that makes things better.” That’s not because I’m so wise; it’s just because I kept the channels of communication open in a way that encouraged honesty, not secrecy. And I was lucky, of course, that I didn’t have to parent against the COVID backdrop, complete with lockdowns, but I do know that keeping the channels is better than the alternative.
As parents, we all must do that nowadays because the culture is aggressively opposed to us. That happened in the 1960s, too, when college campus culture encouraged kids to follow Timothy Leary’s mantra to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” They did in droves, and so many shining young lights got snuffed out.
Now, the same aggressive culture tells the K-12 kids to “turn against their parents, tune in to sexual deviancy, and drop out of their biological sex.” The long years of the COVID lockdown made children even more vulnerable to these lessons. It’s totally toxic and can best be countered by parents and children who have strong lines of communication and trust between them.
Raichik is right to help children remember that their parents love them more than their teachers ever could. And I really promise that “catch them being good” and “opinionated but not judgmental” will make sure that the kids confide in you, and not the purple-haired weirdo at the front of the classroom.
I recall first writing about it in an editorial for Investor’s Business Daily in this piece here — how illegally present minors were dumped into the U.S. instead of sent back to their homelands or placed in a holding facility as the law requires, based on leftist pressure on the Obama administration to let them out as catch and release cases. Children belong with their families, the left claimed, bringing out the individual tear-jerking narratives. Did the kids go back with their families? Nope — they were handed off to “guardians” claiming to be relatives, who promptly put them to work on egg farms in Ohio, working in slave-labor conditions. That’s some sleight of hand.
Seems Big Labor and all its Democrat allies have somehow not noticed all those egg farms with their child labor, and how they have multiplied across the industries as described above by the Times, or more likely, they don’t care, given their advocacy for open borders. Always looking out for the little guy, they claim.
Big Labor has a lot to answer for in this one, and so do the open borders advocates; the government-bankrolled NGOs who “coach” migrants; the Democrats who advocate for catch and release; the Department of Health and Human Services, which is supposedly watching these kids; the Department of Labor’s failure to enforce the law on child labor; the Department of Homeland Security, which processes all asylum claims as valid claims, and never mind that creepy man in the corner claiming to be some unaccompanied kid’s “uncle.” Above all, Joe Biden does. This is his legacy, the return of slave labor and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle–style sweatshops exploiting illegal alien labor.
It’s a repulsive record, and Republicans must remind voters that this is what the labor force is morphing into in leaps and bounds under blue government rule — an exploitation system that shuts out American workers, due to the presence of child workers who are shoved into 12-hour-a-day illegal jobs, which they cannot compete with, and the sheer laxity of labor enforcement along with the silence of the politicized labor unions as this phenomenon grows by leaps and bounds with the open border. What an ugly, ugly picture. This is the Dorian Grey effect of Joe Biden’s rotted presidency, this new era of child exploitation and the transformation of America into a developing country.
These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.
Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. This labor force has been slowly growing for almost a decade, but it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down.
The Times spoke with more than 100 migrant child workers in 20 states who described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined.
The unaccompanied children have been “processed” by the Border Patrol in the border surge, some 150,000 of them this year, handed off to adults who are supposedly “guardians” but who in all likelihood are human-traffickers. Based on the figures given, it’s about 85,000 children now working in sweatshop conditions, probably more, assuming that these children are the ones the Department of Health and Human Services claims it has been unable to contact to check on their welfare. Neil Munro at Breitbart News has more here.
“They should not be working 12-hour days, but it’s happening here,” said Valeria Lindsay, a language arts teacher at Homestead Middle School near Miami. For the past three years, she said, almost every eighth grader in her English learner program of about 100 students was also carrying an adult workload.
Migrant child labor benefits both under-the-table operations and global corporations, The Times found. In Los Angeles, children stitch “Made in America” tags into J. Crew shirts. They bake dinner rolls sold at Walmart and Target, process milk used in Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and help debone chicken sold at Whole Foods. As recently as the fall, middle-schoolers made Fruit of the Loom socks in Alabama. In Michigan, children make auto parts used by Ford and General Motors.
This is the kind of exploitation we have read about in places like Bangladesh and China. But it’s alive and well in the U.S., with a huge upsurge in it dating to Biden’s opening of the border.
I recall first writing about it in an editorial for Investor’s Business Daily in this piece here — how illegally present minors were dumped into the U.S. instead of sent back to their homelands or placed in a holding facility as the law requires, based on leftist pressure on the Obama administration to let them out as catch and release cases. Children belong with their families, the left claimed, bringing out the individual tear-jerking narratives. Did the kids go back with their families? Nope — they were handed off to “guardians” claiming to be relatives, who promptly put them to work on egg farms in Ohio, working in slave-labor conditions. That’s some sleight of hand.
Seems Big Labor and all its Democrat allies have somehow not noticed all those egg farms with their child labor, and how they have multiplied across the industries as described above by the Times, or more likely, they don’t care, given their advocacy for open borders. Always looking out for the little guy, they claim.
Big Labor has a lot to answer for in this one, and so do the open borders advocates; the government-bankrolled NGOs who “coach” migrants; the Democrats who advocate for catch and release; the Department of Health and Human Services, which is supposedly watching these kids; the Department of Labor’s failure to enforce the law on child labor; the Department of Homeland Security, which processes all asylum claims as valid claims, and never mind that creepy man in the corner claiming to be some unaccompanied kid’s “uncle.” Above all, Joe Biden does. This is his legacy, the return of slave labor and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle–style sweatshops exploiting illegal alien labor.
It’s a repulsive record, and Republicans must remind voters that this is what the labor force is morphing into in leaps and bounds under blue government rule — an exploitation system that shuts out American workers, due to the presence of child workers who are shoved into 12-hour-a-day illegal jobs, which they cannot compete with, and the sheer laxity of labor enforcement along with the silence of the politicized labor unions as this phenomenon grows by leaps and bounds with the open border. What an ugly, ugly picture.
This is the kind of exploitation we have read about in places like Bangladesh and China. But it’s alive and well in the U.S., with a huge upsurge in it dating to Biden’s opening of the border.
I recall first writing about it in an editorial for Investor’s Business Daily in this piece here — how illegally present minors were dumped into the U.S. instead of sent back to their homelands or placed in a holding facility as the law requires, based on leftist pressure on the Obama administration to let them out as catch and release cases. Children belong with their families, the left claimed, bringing out the individual tear-jerking narratives. Did the kids go back with their families? Nope — they were handed off to “guardians” claiming to be relatives, who promptly put them to work on egg farms in Ohio, working in slave-labor conditions. That’s some sleight of hand.
Seems Big Labor and all its Democrat allies have somehow not noticed all those egg farms with their child labor, and how they have multiplied across the industries as described above by the Times, or more likely, they don’t care, given their advocacy for open borders. Always looking out for the little guy, they claim.
Big Labor has a lot to answer for in this one, and so do the open borders advocates; the government-bankrolled NGOs who “coach” migrants; the Democrats who advocate for catch and release; the Department of Health and Human Services, which is supposedly watching these kids; the Department of Labor’s failure to enforce the law on child labor; the Department of Homeland Security, which processes all asylum claims as valid claims, and never mind that creepy man in the corner claiming to be some unaccompanied kid’s “uncle.” Above all, Joe Biden does. This is his legacy, the return of slave labor and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle–style sweatshops exploiting illegal alien labor.
It’s a repulsive record, and Republicans must remind voters that this is what the labor force is morphing into in leaps and bounds under blue government rule — an exploitation system that shuts out American workers, due to the presence of child workers who are shoved into 12-hour-a-day illegal jobs, which they cannot compete with, and the sheer laxity of labor enforcement along with the silence of the politicized labor unions as this phenomenon grows by leaps and bounds with the open border. What an ugly, ugly picture. This is the Dorian Grey effect of Joe Biden’s rotted presidency, this new era of child exploitation and the transformation of America into a developing country.
MN Prager Discussion Group 
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