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This High School Football Coach Decision to take a stand is now heading to the Supreme Court
By Salena Zito
CAMP HILL, Pennsylvania — With 48 seconds to go in a high school football matchup last fall between Cedar Cliff and Cocalico, the game came down to a shootout between the two central Pennsylvania rivals.
To say that the intensity level was through the roof would be an understatement. Yet when the game ended, the two teams met in the end zone and prayed together.
It is more common than not on any given fall Friday night in this country to see a coach praying silently on the field both before and after a local high school football game.
Most of the time, the teammates gather arm-in-arm and either participate or bow their heads respectfully. Most of the time, the parents and community members in the stands either don’t see the silent reflection or think nothing of it.
And most of the time, coaches are not fired or suspended for simply expressing their faith while in public. That was not the case, however, seven years ago, when Seattle-area assistant football coach Joe Kennedy was suspended for praying before and after his high school football games. It was a practice he had done without notice or controversy for several years until someone claimed to be offended.
Kennedy still attended the next game, only on the other side of the field, hugging his players over the fence as they took the field. And yes, he prayed with them and others in front of the bleachers after the game.
At the time, he told the local press he was willing to take the matter as far as the Supreme Court if need be. His reasoning, he said at the time, was that he was teaching his players that “if you believe in something, you stand up.”
His case first went to the lower court
Click here for the full story
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Wokeism Is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult
Victor Davis Hanson
Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—of those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda.
Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past.
Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness.
Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism.
But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is.
Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden.
Woke’s Victims
Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America’s suburbs.
Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity.
The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy.
They are the ignored—the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed.
We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences.
The packages thrown along the ground by thugs and gangsters represent, among other things, lost COVID-19 test results of the ill. Presumably, they unknowingly are waiting still by the window for the delivery of results that never arrive. The package in the dirt was, perhaps, a key tractor part eagerly awaited, in vain, by the broke farmer in the Central Valley. The mess included the life-saving medicines shipped to the sick that disappeared.
And our elected leaders did what in response? Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for using the insensitive word “gangs” to describe those who plunder, loot, and trash railcars.
Always In Search of Targets
It is a cruel thing to indoctrinate children with the lie that they are innately guilty of oppression due to their skin color. One accurate definition of racism is collective ill-treatment of an individual due to his innate appearance—on the pretext that such bias is deserved, given the target is deemed mentally, spiritually, or morally inferior because of said traits. But that, in a nutshell, is the essence of critical race theory: the destruction of all human traits and unique characteristics, as demonized individuals are reduced to stereotyped, faceless members of a collective.
For over a half-century, female athletes have sought to achieve parity in society’s attitudes to sports. Title IX forced universities to ensure rough equality for both female and male sports.
But the woke effort to redefine transitioning biological males as identical to biological women will assuredly destroy the life work of thousands of pioneer athletes.
Ironically, the sexist woke movement has allowed men to take hormones and undergo surgery to become females—even as their immutable skeleton frames, muscularity, or organ characteristics ensure an unfair and asymmetrical contest.
The lives of thousands of young female athletes will likely be diminished. Each sprinter, every swimmer, and all female pole-vaulters will now inevitably at some future date have a rendezvous with career implosion—defined by losing to a transgendered female/biological male.
Records are being rewritten, the very nature of individual women’s sports changed, and soon there will no longer remain an idea of “women’s sports” at all.
The Forgotten Broken Eggs of the Woke Omelet
The green wokeists postulate that they are saving lives by radical efforts to restrict gas and oil production, to raise fuel prices. They want to force Americans to buy high-priced alternative sources of wind- and solar-generated power and battery-powered cars. But away from the faculty lounge, millions of Americans are colder and less mobile this winter, paying far more to heat their homes and to drive to work.
Most of the woke climate change activists rarely see the poor trying to empty their purses to scrounge combinations of cash and credit cards to leverage over $100 to fill their cars’ gas tanks. Tesla drivers might be the architects of last year’s war on carbon fuels. But real-life victims pay for their piety—those who have no such options to buy high-priced electric cars.
For the cosmopolitan woke, the border is many things: a mere xenophobic construct, a racist barrier, a nationalist tic.
But the thousands who live near the Mexican border see their homes and farms overrun with drug traffickers—and during a pandemic thousands of unvaccinated and possibly sick illegal aliens. They suffer firsthand from daily violence as all security disappears.
For the American poor, who rely on government health clinics and state entitlements, the influx of thousands of illegal aliens into their communities becomes a zero-sum game. The more noncitizens put demands on such already oversubscribed services, the fewer citizens there are who will have access to quality care.
The woke lecture that colleges and universities must now go beyond their former de facto racial quotas for admissions and hiring, already mostly based on proportional representation and disparate impact. But now a sort of reparations system emerges. It is what the Left itself used to call in derision “overrepresentation.”
Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback. Again, it is the idea of making the current generation pay for the supposed sins of the long dead of centuries past.
Aside from the destruction of merit by the substitution of racial criteria, millions from a discarded generation will have doors slammed on their careers—simply because of the color of their skin. And they will never forget that.
The woke do not even make the effort to admit that class matters as much as, or more than, race. By doing so, they doom millions of poor white and Asian students, who managed in poverty to achieve excellent grades and test scores, from being admitted to top-tier schools. Their actual achievement, despite their absence of wealthy, college-educated, or well-connected parents, means little.
Once a morally bankrupt society—for naïve, utopian, or ignoble reasons—begins to calibrate graduation ceremonies, dorm space, roommate selection, achievement, and grading standards based on race, then it not only will lose its standard of living, but it will deserve to. And it may have a future date with the violence of Rwanda, Iraq, or the Balkans.
Power, Not “Equity,” Is the Creed
In sum, wokeness is not about kindness, equality, fairness, or morality.
It is the power agenda of the elite of all races. For differing reasons, they rig the game in their own interests, without a care about who suffers.
Rich white people assume that they possess the money, the influence, the networking skills, and the connections to navigate around the very exclusionary rules they make for others. For them, there are seldom costs. But they win apparent psychological gain at feeling spiritually superior while driving a Range Rover.
They get high on the sense of power they wield to engineer the lives of millions deemed less important than they. And to the degree they feel guilty about their own monopoly of wealth and leisure, such transient superficial remorse is alleviated by abstract caring for the “other.”
If they can ensure that 50 percent of TV commercials highlight African Americans, then they worry little about the nation’s existential crisis of 800 blacks murdered in Chicago this year. And no such television execs have a clue—or likely a concern—about how to stop it.
The woke take out a medieval contract that all their material indulgences can be balanced by virtue-signaling caring for the less fortunate—although always at someone else’s expense.
Woke = Wealthy Careerists
And for the millions of the affluent, elite nonwhite? The resurgence of racial obsessions conveniently destroys the old idea of class, even though now it is the far more precise calibration of inequality.
For all the woke talk about “constructs” of gender, race is somehow alone exempted and declared innate, definable, and immutable. One’s appearance becomes the permanent victimized refuge—even of NBA multibillionaires and billionaire rappers alike.
A Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren can desperately seek to leverage a career in becoming Native American, apparently as if they were almost trapped in their own white bodies. Yet they can still not manage to construct such assumed identities in the manner of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.
If race is now the sole immutable barometer of who is a victim, who a victimizer, then LeBron James, Jay-Z, Kayne West, Chris Rock, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are always to be among the eternally oppressed. The enormous influence, power, status, and wealth they wield never negates their victimhood, despite a nation three generations into affirmative action.
In the immoral calculus of woke, the poor white or Southeast Asian offspring of poorly paid high-school dropouts constitute “the privileged.” And a multimillionaire racist like the TV anchorwoman Joy Reid claims to be the perpetual victim, not the inner-city African American retiree who in 2021 has lost local police protection.
No wonder the woke elite and the affluent leftists fixate on race, given they are now the ruling class. Otherwise, their own privilege would be the obvious target of the once-beloved “Revolution.”
So, they fear that by their own prior left-wing standards, they too could end up on the wrong side of their moral Maginot Line. Wokeism’s obsessions with ferreting out “white privilege” are a way for rich people to head off (so to speak) the fate of Marie Antoinette.
Totalitarian Wokeism
A final note. We know wokeism is both contrary to human nature and antithetical to democracy and constitutional government.
Without public support, it has instead embraced an entire array of cruel, Soviet, and Maoist means to achieve its own self-interested ends. Woke talk about “racists” eerily emulates Soviet boilerplate about “counterrevolutionaries.” Today’s wokeist spouts things that could come right out of the mouth of the novelist Boris Pasternak’s character Army Commissar Strelnikov, or Mao’s Little Red Book concerning “suppression of counterrevolutionaries.”
No wonder the woke, so-called “humanists” are the first to resort to Trotskyization and iconoclasm. They are masters of censoring, blacklisting, scapegoating, deplatforming, ritual humiliation, doxxing, cancel-culture, ostracism, and disbarring.
Wokeism’s logic is the eternal one of the bully Jacobin with his guillotine lists of the revolutionary unpure, the 19th-century lynch mob storming the frontier jail, the Red Guards hounding the counterrevolutionary, and the forced mental hospitalizations of the Soviet Union.
But above all, wokeism is a cruel cult—created by and for the careerist benefit of the privileged.
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Why I love cops more than ever
By compelling spineless leaders across the country to diminish our law enforcement, would-be revolutionaries got a lot more than they bargained for.
By David Suissa
A year ago, this love letter to law and order would have made me a target of Twitter mobs trying to cancel me for being a disgusting racist.
Those days are long gone.
As we see murders rising alarmingly across the United States, including a New York cop murdered on Thursday after responding to a domestic dispute in Harlem, the woke brigades screaming to “defund the police” since the riots of 2020 seem to have canceled themselves. You barely hear a peep from them. They must be hiding in their basements or in a corner of some trendy cafe with fellow cop-haters, hoping no one will see them.
How they must miss the glorious summer of 2020, when rioting, looting and burning police precincts were all fair game; when the woke media conveniently looked the other way; when white cops became America’s ultimate bad guys.
Those were the days, you’ll recall, when white America was so consumed with racial guilt it stopped seeing straight. Jumping on the anti-cop and anti-racist bandwagons—which merged as one—was all that mattered. It was performative activism at its emptiest. Who suffered most? Blacks in the inner cities, of course, who had to brave the inevitable rise in crime that followed the “defunding” of law enforcement.
Has there ever been a dumber, more moronic idea in democratic history than the defunding of law and order? I know all about the caveats—the transfer of funds rather than defunding, the reforming rather than dismantling, etc.—but let’s be honest: the word “defunding” captured perfectly the over-the-top rage against the police that rioters spread across the country.
The anti-police campaign, in fact, was so successful that it spectacularly backfired. Eventually, even the loudest progressives realized they didn’t want to be mugged on city streets. The woke mayor of that super-woke city, San Francisco, said she would no longer tolerate “all the bulls**t that has destroyed our city. … We are past the point where what we see is even remotely acceptable.”
Try to organize a “defund the police” march in Los Angeles today and you’d be lucky to get a minyan. With murders in 2021 up 53 percent versus 2019, the mood in La La Land is squarely in the “please bring back the cops” camp, not to mention bring back prosecution that will deter, not encourage, crime.
On the other left coast, it took only a week or two for the new Manhattan District Attorney to walk back his memo announcing a decriminalization plan that he said “will make us safer.” Could it be that he quickly figured out this was exactly the wrong message you want to give to potential criminals?
Our country is in transition mode from being hypnotized by wokeness to being mugged by reality. This mugging transcends politics. Friends of mine who are diehard Democrats and can’t stand the rise in crime in Los Angeles don’t really care which party will make their city safe as long as it gets done.
This is surely a messianic moment. We finally found something that is stronger than partisan politics: the fear of dying.
The truth is, I love cops. Every time I see one, I thank them for protecting my family. I understand there are rogue cops who must be rooted out, but all in all, maybe because I was born in the Third World, I love living in a country where law and order are taken seriously.
This was never about denying the presence of racism and brutality among some elements of our law enforcement. It was always about finding the right balance between reform and keeping our cities safe. The word “reform,” however, is not very sexy, so would-be revolutionaries went all-in on “defund the police.” But by compelling spineless leaders across the country to diminish our law enforcement, they got a lot more than they bargained for.
They bought themselves an epic backlash, where physical safety is now on virtually everyone’s lips.
That’s why we don’t see much of the “defund” brigades these days. Maybe they’re also afraid of walking on our streets.
David Suissa is editor-in-chief and publisher of Tribe Media Corp, and “Jewish Journal.” He can be reached at davids@jewishjournal.com.
This article was first published by the Jewish Journal.
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Savor the Democrats’ Humiliation
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Source: AP Photo/Susan Walsh
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There’s no sense in pretending that we don’t take pleasure in the total failure of our Marxist-curious party of the left. Through a combination of outright fraud, procedural irregularities, plus the total support of the garbage establishment and its failed institutions, the Democrats took power by the thinnest of margins and have proceeded to fail on a level comparable to Heaven’s Gate, New Coke, and the Weekly Standard. There’s no shame in enjoying their total rejection by all decent Americans. In fact, you should enjoy it without hesitation or mercy, especially since it means more than just us cons getting our jollies.
The Democrats’ “Biden is FDR and not just a desiccated, pervy old weirdo” dreams have died. Their dreams of five trillion in handouts to bums and donors have died. Their dreams of enshrining their ability to cheat in elections have died. The Democrats can’t even shatter norms, like the filibuster, competently.
So much fail in so little time. The Latinx community – which the Dems put all their faith in as part of an unstoppable future majority, is rejecting them, in large part because Democrats are the kind of people who use the word “Latinx” unironically. Some foreigners, seeing the Democrats’ weakness and stupidity – it’s not just Commander-in-Chief Crusty who is the problem – are chomping at the bit to chomp off pieces of other countries because they know that the Dems put the “feck” in “feckless.” The rest are invading our country through what used to be a border. Inflation is up, the market is down, and November 2022 is approaching just over the horizon like a Tongan tsunami.
Noted dead white guy Samuel Johnson, who believed that there are only two genders, once observed, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It’s an apt analogy here, both because it evokes the fact that the Democrats have gone all-in on the side of the criminals as the crime rate rockets up, and also because it demonstrates just how intractably stupid the Democrats are. They ride in the little cart heading toward their November 8th date with the electoral noose, but their minds are not concentrated on that. Instead they are concentrated on fake insurrections and telling us how CRT is not taught in schools yet must absolutely continue to be taught in schools.
This is unsustainable, and normal people would know it, but normal people are not quasi-Marxist pagan fanatics who drove actual religion out of their lives and let commie nonsense fill the void. They can’t stop it, even if they wanted to stop it, because their collection of bizarre obsessions is not merely an ideology but a substitute for actual faith. Progressivism is their god. Unfortunately for them, it’s a false god. It’s a political golden calf, except they oppose the gold standard because it wouldn’t let them print all the cash they want to spend, and Dems are leery of cattle because their Swalwellian flatulence causes global warming, which is another facet of their fake, foolish faith.
But then again, no cow ever scored with Fang Fang, so advantage steak.
Sucks for the Dems that they have no choice but to stagger on toward ruin, accumulating ever more failures and disgraces, all the while doing the impossible and making the Republican Party look good, if only in comparison. But this is more than just a bad electoral cycle. Everyone has up years and down years. This is something much worse. This is a head-first dive into a cesspool with their eyes and mouths wide open.
Their pain is actually the manifestation of their destruction as a whole new generation gets to see what we Boomers/Gen Xers saw happen under Jimmy Carter. The Biden misadministration is the hot stove of politics – a generation just got burned going for the guy without the mean tweets. That won’t happen again, at least for the ones who aren’t dumb. For the ones who are dumb – many of them the same lackwits for whom the “voting rights” nonsense was designed to facilitate their voting – they’ll keep putting their palms on the burners and being surprised when they smell singed hand. “I voted for Biden and someone broke into my car, plus I caught COVID though I quadruple mask and quintuple vaxx, and then I got drafted to go fight to protect Hunter’s investments in Ukraine! How did this happen? Also, Biden 2024!”
The Democrats always fail, always. They hate normal Americans, they screw up the economy, they coddle criminals, and they sometimes marry their brothers. When you give these morons authority, they will mess everything up – magnificently. Name a functioning institution in our society that works even adequately. I am not even talking about working well. I am merely talking about doing its most basic job in a competent manner. Don’t worry, I’ll wait right here, re-reading War and Peace.
There isn’t one. There is no competently-run institution left in America. Academia is broke. The military is broke. The NFL is broke. Even Safeway is broke – you can’t even be sure you’ll find milk on the shelves anymore. And what’s the one thing our institutions have in common? They are run by the left, and the Democrats are the party of the left.
So, our delight in watching them be publicly humiliated is not merely just a fun way to pass the time. It is also a recognition that this botch job the Democrats have done on America is going to turn a huge chunk of people against them for good. A year ago, Republicans were -7 in party identification. Today, they are +7, a tectonic +14-point swing. That signals doom, and it’s going to be hilarious.
Now, there will be invertebrate Republicans who will look at this situation and instinctively seek a way to foul-up our good fortune. Fungi like Miracle Whip Mitt will think that now is the time to reach across the aisle to help our friends on the left. This is stupid. The squishes probably think it is unseemly to kick your opponent when he is down, but when he is down, he is the most vulnerable and you can do the most damage.
And we want to damage these pinko jerks before they Marx-up our country forever.
We want socialism destroyed. Not tamed, not moderated, crushed. Wiped out. Nuked from orbit, because that is the only way to be sure.
When we are done, we want the Democrat Party terrified of even hinting at support for anything remotely like the socialism they are currently swapping spit with. This is a bloodsport, a matter of either us and freedom winning, or us acquiescing to a jack-booted, lib-fascist future forever. We choose freedom. And that’s why we celebrate and savor the total humiliation of the Democrats. Keep it up, losers!
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https://pjmedia.com/columns/ke
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