China Has Been Exposed For What It Is: A Bitter Unfriendly Player On The World Stage Finally: The anger of a dear, long time friend and fellow memo reader:
"Where are the demonstrators and outrage? Where is Pelosi? Schumer?
87 shootings in Chicago yesterday-- 11 dead
New York and Atlanta are not far behind.
Really smart to de-fund and demean the police?
The hypocrisy of the Democrat leadership is staggering. Where is Biden's outrage? This should bring protesters into the streets since most of the victims are black. But where are they?
The truth is they don't give a damn because they cannot blame it on Trump. The cowardly and moronic Democrat mayors ii these cities do nothing except speak out against the police and encourage violence.
B Burning L Looting M Murder
How can anyone stand for such hypocrisy. F---"
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No one should take away anything from those who accomplish much and elevate themselves as well as others. I have five black writers who I admire and Williams is one as are: Sowell, Riley, Steele and Woodson. In the op ed below, I would add to what Williams has written that only could those he praises and highlights have accomplished what they did because they lived in "evil" America.
It is obvious the once respected NYT's does not agree with Williams. Their support of the 1619 Project is clear evidence because it teaches dependence and victimization . It encourages a mentality that has ravaged black society. Why would this be the paper's objective? It can only be to accomplish a sinister goal like the destruction of America because they have concluded our nation is evil and their distortion of the news, the twisting of the intent of conservative thinking, their total alignment with the radical Democrat Party and their unabashed hatred of Trump are overwhelming and undeniable evidence.
The families who founded the paper were intellectual German Jews and obviously endured prejudice. To escape their circumstances and to elevate themselves into New York Society they basically abandoned their links to Judaism and became Episcopalians through intermarriage etc. I do not trust those who abandon who they are though I understand circumstances can force such behaviour.
I am no psychiatrist but to further cleanse themselves they have become anti-Israel, even, at times, anti-Semitic and certainly Trump Haters. In doing so, they have abandoned any semblance of journalistic objectivity. In a more subtle way, one I cannot explain, they have aligned themselves with those who seek the destruction/ the remaking of America as if they can out-perfect the accomplishments of what our founders achieved.
Whether the remnants of the family founders, who still occupy critical positions at The NYT's, comprehend what has happened is also something I cannot explain just as I cannot explain how The Democrat Party has allowed itself to become subservient to and the handmaidens of radicals. Erosion of great institutions, even structures, takes long periods but it happens. It occurs with institutions when they abandon their principles and with structures when their maintenance ends.
The re-writing of a nation's history accompanied by the destruction of its visible history is only the beginning but lays the foundation for other destructive acts which are intended to accelerate the process.
America , as I have said, is under attack but not because of what happened to Mr. Floyd. His murder was, as I also said, simply a convenient match to light, trigger the bonfire which has been planned and building for decades.
So why America? Because we are the Horatio, because of our documents, because we have flourished as a nation accomplishing what our detractors thought we never could.
America proved capitalism, in combination with freedom, has brought untold riches, benefits, discoveries and accomplishments which have served the entire world and stand as a beacon against those who seek a different approach to governance. Socialism and Communism, dictatorships all have failed to match American achievements despite our faults and failures.
There is nothing written in The Bible, Shakespeare or Socrates that says America will/must survive. Like a classic car our republic needs continual care and maintenance. We have allowed those who have other goals to attack our undercarriage. The rust of inattention has set in and the luster has gone from a once gleaming shine. Being the cynic that I am, I fear the enemy is winning. We have enjoyed the ripe fruit of success but allowed it to lull us into abandoning what made us great , ie. an independent spirit, a love of freedom, a willingness to defend ourselves from all enemies foreign and domestic, a thirst for a solid education, a love of country and our uniqueness . To be an America has a special meaning.
We have allowed radicals, anarchists,haters to imply to be an American means evil, privilege and racial bias. To this I say bull shit but I also recognize the accusations can be effective when you lose your will and lack the motivation to fight back for that which is still worthy.
Franklin was omniscient when he said "we have a republic if we can keep it."
Many whites are ashamed, saddened and feel guilty about our history of slavery, Jim Crow and gross racial discrimination. Many black people remain angry over the injustices of the past and what they see as injustices of the present. Both blacks and whites can benefit from a better appreciation of black history.
Often overlooked or ignored is the fact that, as a group, black Americans have made the greatest gains, over some of the highest hurdles, and in a shorter span of time than any other racial group in history.
For example, if one totaled up the earnings and spending of black Americans and considered us as a separate nation with our own gross domestic product, we would rank well within the top 20 richest nations. A black American, Gen. Colin Powell, once headed the world's mightiest military. Black Americans are among the world's most famous personalities, and a few black Americans are among the world's richest people such as investor Robert F. Smith, IT service provider David Steward, Oprah Winfrey, and basketball star Michael Jordan. Plus, there was a black U.S. president.
The significance of these achievements cannot be overstated. When the Civil War ended, neither a slave nor a slave owner would have believed such progress would be possible in less than a century and a half — if ever. As such, it speaks to the intestinal fortitude of a people. Just as important, it speaks to the greatness of a nation in which such gains were possible. Nowhere else on earth could such progress have been achieved except in the United States of America.
The issue that confronts us is how these gains can be extended to about one-quarter of the black population for whom they have proven elusive. The first step is to acknowledge that the civil rights struggle is over and won. At one time, black Americans did not enjoy the constitutional guarantees as everyone else. Now we do. While no one can deny the existence of residual racial discrimination, racial discrimination is not the major problem confronting a large segment of the black community.
A major problem is that some public and private policies reward dependency and irresponsibility. Chief among these policies is the welfare state that has fostered a 75% rate of out of wedlock births and decimated the black family that had survived Jim Crow and racism. Keep in mind that in 1940 the black illegitimacy rate was 11% and most black children were raised in two-parent families. Most poverty, about 25%, is found in female-headed households. The poverty rate among husband-and-wife black families has been in the single digits for more than two decades.
Black people can be thankful that double standards and public and private policies rewarding inferiority and irresponsibility were not a part of the 1920s, '30s, '40s and '50s. If there were, then there would not have been the kind of intellectual excellence and spiritual courage that created the world's most successful civil rights movement. From the late 1800s to 1950, some black schools were models of academic achievement. Black students at Washington's Dunbar High School often outscored white students as early as 1899. Schools such as Frederick Douglass (Baltimore), Booker T. Washington (Atlanta), P.S. 91 (Brooklyn), McDonogh 35 (New Orleans) and others operated at a similar level of excellence.
Self-destructive behavior that has become acceptable, particularly that in predominantly black schools, is nothing less than a gross betrayal of a struggle, paid with blood, sweat and tears by previous generations, to make possible today's educational opportunities that are being routinely squandered. I guarantee that blacks who lived through that struggle and are no longer with us would not have believed such a betrayal possible.
Government should do its job of protecting constitutional rights. After that, black people should be simply left alone as opposed to being smothered by the paternalism inspired by white guilt. On that note, I just cannot resist the temptation to refer readers to my "Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon," which grants Americans of European ancestry amnesty and pardon for their own grievances and those of their forebears against my people so that they stop feeling guilty and stop acting like fools in their relationship with Americans of African ancestry.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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Dov would never be hired by The NYT's: In Memoriam: For Ellen, My Precious Wife of Twenty Years, the Love of My Life — Part 1 of 2
Now Revealing Why Sometimes I Seem to Have Disappeared for Weeks at a Time
By Dov Fischer
In my nearly three years of writing for The American Spectator, I have been blessed personally to have won a deeply devoted readership of many, many thousands. For me that relationship imposes on me a responsibility as well — always to be thoughtful, to be honest and ethical; to do my best to report properly, recite facts accurately, and to analyze them meaningfully; never to split infinitives nor to use the objective case when the nominative is called for, never to end sentences nor even phrases with a preposition (except in the prior phrase), and somehow, even in the most aggravating of times, to be entertaining and interesting, even throw in some puns for those of my readers who scour the articles in search of the more esoteric ones. (None so far.)
In the course of my writing, a real personal relationship has evolved between my readers and me. I read every comment ever posted — Hi, Beverly Gunn, George P Burdell III, Luca Brasi, iWildwood, Moshe Ben Avram, SUBVET, Dustoff, jdondet, Jim Mullin, PolishKnightUSA, Al Adab, and trolling Karma Boy — and I truly learn from readers, even as I endeavor to share some thinking. That kind of mutuality creates a sense of bonding, almost like family of sorts, except I don’t have to put any of you through private college as I did my four darlings — which is why, actually, I have come to love my TAS family far more than I do my own kids. As that sense of family has grown, I have received emails from many of you during time periods when I seemingly have disappeared. People actually write me with worry and concern: “Rabbi, are you OK?” “Dov, I’m worried; you haven’t been infected by COVID, have you?” “Rav, are you still there?”
In almost all cases when I disappear for a few weeks, the reason tends to be simple: Jewish holy seasons. I am a congregational Rav (Orthodox rabbi), and I cannot begin to describe how Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Shmini Atzeret/Simchat Torah consume my September and October, and even some of my late August, as I must prepare for those special times amid the resumption of the new law school Fall term. Yikes! In similar fashion, the advent of the eight days of Pesach (Passover) takes over two to three weeks of my April. However, lately, I have had to scale back my writing a bit these past four months because of the hardest, most challenging experience of my life. You are my family, so I share: The love of my life, my wife Ellen, was fading.
Ellen had been complaining about splitting headaches and was acting a bit uncharacteristically as the Summer of 2017 approached. In July 2017 she was diagnosed with the most horrible and essentially incurable of diseases, Glioblastoma Multiforme IV (GBM), the disease that took John McCain, Ted Kennedy, Beau Biden, Ethel Merman, Bert Convy, Tug McGraw, and that strikes three people out of every 100,000. As with McCain, Kennedy, and most others, 85 percent of all those stricken die within 12-15 months of diagnosis. Only ten percent last three full years. Ellen at least was blessed to be among the ten percent. That meant it was I, too, who was blessed — even more.
The thing about GBM is that they can cut only so much, only so far. With breast cancer, for example, they may cut well beyond the lump, even doing a mastectomy. But they can’t do a decapitation. They cannot eradicate all the cancer cells in the brain, even with radiation and chemotherapy, so the cells reproduce. Ellen had her first tumor resected (removed as much as possible) in September 2017. She underwent a “gamma knife” and then a standard radiation protocol. She then went on the standard first course of treatment, a pill called Temodar, that controlled the cancer cells from reproducing for a year. Eventually those cells figure out how to bypass the Temodar obstruction. Her regular MRI tests confirmed that her GBM tumor returned in late October 2018, and it was resected early that December. In both cases, she bounced back remarkably. Within a day after surgery, each time I got my Ellen back as though nothing ever had been awry. With Temodar now useless, she next went onto a new chemotherapy protocol, a cocktail of two infusions, carboplatin and avastin. A year later, in the Fall of 2019, she began having a noticeably halting gait. It turned out that her brain was not sufficiently draining out the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that we all create daily and that lubricates, cleans out, and refreshes our brains. Therefore, the CSF was building up in her head, a condition called “hydrocephalus.” To treat it before it became perilous, a shunt was installed inside to act as an auxiliary drainpipe. However, she had to go off her chemo meds for several weeks before and after the shunt procedure because the chemo severely compromises the immune system and also obstructs wounds and incisions from healing. While off the chemo for just shy of two months, her tumor returned, this time spreading to the frontal lobe.
She underwent a third resection in February of this year. However, this time, for the first time, she ran into serious post-operative complications. Her brain suddenly encountered a bit of trouble regulating her sodium, and she developed hyponatremia — low blood salt. (“Hypo” means “low”; “-emia” refers to blood; and natrium is the Latin term for sodium, which is why sodium is “Na” on the periodic chart of elements.) The proper sodium range is 135-145, and she sank perilously low to 125. Nephrologists explain that sodium levels cannot be raised rapidly, so she needed time to recover from that complication. And just as she did, her temperature one night suddenly shot up, reflecting that she had contracted bacterial meningitis. A new antibiotic regimen now was needed, and this lady whose temple had been opened four times before (three resections and one shunt) now needed to be opened so that her bacterially infected shunt could be removed, and again a week later so that a new sterile one could be installed once the bacteria were gone from her CSF. That made six incisions. Alas, having once again been compelled to go months without chemo as she encountered her post-op complications, her tumor returned, and she soon thereafter had to undergo yet a fourth resection, her seventh opening, in May. Again, she worked her way back with incredible determination under the guidance of the home Physical Therapist, Occupational Therapist, and Speech Language Pathologist. But the skin “graft” where the surgeons tried to close her incision after the seventh time gave way, with the skin dehiscence opening the area to bacteria and requiring an eighth surgery at that site to try closing the incision with a skin “flap.” That surgery seemed successful, but 36 hours later it was detected that all the stress on her brain — the tumors, the surgeries, the radiations, the drugs — finally was too much. We waited several days for a miracle and then accepted G-d’s answer that there would be no more miracles but one: unable to recover from the eighth surgery, she would pass gently and calmly one month before the newly returning fifth GBM tumor would have killed her anyway, but horribly and terribly.
And so my darling wife, Ellen, the love of my life, passed away from glioblastoma on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tamuz, shortly before sunset. She was one week shy of 64. And I promised her that I would tell the world that she did not “spend years battling” the disease and did not “lose a long fight with” the disease, but that she lived life with zest alongside the disease. She lived all those remaining three years with gusto and pizzazz, and she even checked out calmly and peaceably only a month before the illness would have caused uncontrollable gagging and truly head-splitting pains, convulsions, and seizures.
At the time of her diagnosis in July 2017, she retired from her career of 31 years at a major university’s department of Audit and Advisory Services as their Manager of Investigations into allegations of high-stakes white-collar fraud. She was both a Certified Fraud Examiner and a Certified Internal Auditor — a real CIA! One of her investigations uncovered such wild stuff that she got written up in the Los Angeles Times and became a star in her field. She was a member of the Editorial Board of the main publication in her field, and she wrote a 30-page account of the investigation that made her famous, which became Chapter One of the leading text in her field of fraud investigations. Every Dean of every department in the university knew her and valued her; every crook feared her. It wasn’t safe to embezzle millions or even thousands or even hundreds when Ellen was within several miles. If the feds had hired someone like her to go after fraud in Washington, America today would have a booming budget surplus that it could use for researching and curing more cancers or, uh, for building more monuments and starting more Mideast wars.
During the three years/36 months from the time she was diagnosed with glioblastoma, she did not “survive” or “battle the disease” but rather lived a completely full life of zest. We ran Torah programs at our home — my weekly Tuesday night Chumash (Bible) class and Sunday morning Women’s Advanced Torah Text Class. On Thursday nights, while I taught my weekly Talmud class, she would be in the kitchen cooking for Shabbat. Every Friday night, we hosted a group of typically between fifteen and twenty Young Adults ages 28-45 — our “Friday Night Shabbat Dinner Group” — for whom she cooked a weekly four-course Shabbat meal. During the meal, participants would catch up with each other on how their respective weeks had gone, and I would teach a bit of Torah or Jewish history, and then we all would sing zmirot (Sabbath dinner songs) and then bentsching (grace after meals). Ellen was central to all of it. With Ellen, we often hosted Shabbat guests traveling through Orange County, housing them and feeding them warmly. Even as she was infected with glioblastoma, we never let others know, and we often instead found ourselves housing and counseling people stricken with their own severe diseases or dealing with other life challenges. Ellen would teach “Kallah Class” to prospective brides whose marriages I would be conducting. Before every major shul program and event, she would make dozens upon dozens of personal phone calls to assure great attendance. Because Orthodox Jews do not travel vehicularly on the Sabbath, we walked together to and from shul every Shabbat morning, 35 minutes each way, for twenty years. On Wednesdays, she would accompany me in the car for the two hours’ rush-hour drive from Irvine to downtown Los Angeles, where I would teach two law classes over the next four hours, and then she would accompany me back home for the 75-minute return drive after rush hour. What a mutual benefit — she became expert in Advanced Torts and in California Civil Procedure, and I got to use the carpool lane!
During that same three-year period, we spent heightened time together. We watched favorite TV shows and streamed favorite movies, and we often went to plays — 10-15 theatrical events annually — and two or three concerts each year (typically a Beethoven or Mozart concert, plus one or two “tribute” concerts of the John Denver/Neil Diamond/Simon & Garfunkel genre). She loved Shark Tank and the Food Network show called Chopped, so I got into both of them, too. Our favorite movie was “Fargo,” and we saw it several times together and could quote and replay whole scenes with each other. She also could quote whole sections from The Producers, like the scene with the lady landlord who had become the “concierge.” Yet this high-stakes fraud investigator never outgrew Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, and she loved when those came to town as live musicals. She also loved Mad Men, Downton Abbey, Upstairs/Downstairs, Fawlty Towers, Better Call Saul, and Seinfeld. Her favorite was Srugim, a wonderful three-year episodic series out of Israel, sometimes very funny, sometimes poignant, that follows five young Modern Orthodox Jewish professional singles, with others coming and going, as they navigate life. These, too, became rituals for us to share. On Friday nights, after dinner, as I would retire to our living room to study and prepare for publicly reading the next day’s Torah portion in shul, Ellen would read alongside me. After reading Barbara Tuchman’s Team of Rivals, this deep American patriot she got absorbed in the whole genre and era of the Civil War and then of the American Presidents, so she became a major expert in both areas. She read the Shaara Gettysburg trilogy beginning with Killer Angels, moved on to reading the great biographies about Washington (Ron Chernow), John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Gordon Wood, Friends Divided), Alexander Hamilton (also Chernow), Ulysses Grant (more Chernow), and I introduced her to the life of James Polk. As she finished each volume, I would do research as her curator to recommend her next book, and it would be waiting for her as a present. With Ellen I could always find something in life to celebrate. She had just finished the Edmund Morris trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt, and I accordingly took her to a performance of Arsenic and Old Lace that both she and I laughed our way through for two hours, even though we each had seen it decades before, but never before with each other. With no kosher eateries in Orange County, we often would drive fifteen minutes to the nearest Krispy Kremes for a donut and coffee, or to the Coffee Bean (which always was kosher until last month) for our regular “dates.” On more special occasions, we would drive up to L.A. once every two or three months to our favorite restaurant, “Shiloh.”
The Talmud says that any Jew who walks four cubits’ distance (approximately six to eight feet) in the Land of Israel has a place in the World to Come. Last July, one year ago, we took the trip of a lifetime to Israel, seeing and visiting every site we ever had wanted to see. I had lived in Israel for two years in the mid-1980s, during my prior marriage, but I had not visited most of those sites, and Ellen had been slated on several prior occasions in her life to visit Israel, but last-minute circumstances had obstructed each prior planned trip. We got a specific room in the King David Hotel that overlooks the Har HaBayit (Temple Mount), davened (prayed) at times in our room facing that site, and we visited Rachel’s Tomb (Kever Rachel), the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs (M’arat Hamachpelah), Gush Etzion, Jews living in the heart of Hevron in liberated Judea, the places in Jerusalem’s Katamon neighborhood where our favorite TV program, Srugim, had been filmed, other sites in Jerusalem, the grave sites in Tiberias (T’veryah) of the Rambam (Maimonides), Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, Rabbi Akiva, his wife Rachel, and Rabbi Meir Baal HaNess. We visited Masada, where Jewish patriots fought Roman legions, the Mount of Olives (Har HaZeitim), and of course the Kotel (Western Wall), including the Kotel Tunnel, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, and the Muslim Quarter. We came back home so psyched that Ellen began teaching herself conversational Hebrew very intensely, and we began watching the nightly TV News on Israel’s Kan Channel 11, available through YouTube.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
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The WSJ remains the best newspaper in America not because they are capitalism oriented but because they still take the road once traveled by other papers that no longer are even worthy of being fish wrappers. The WSJ is not afraid to stand up for America, support a mass media despised president when he deserves to be and they do their best to report the news factually after taking the time to investigate.
Pr Trump at Mount Rushmore
Progressives deride his defense of America’s founding principles.
At Mt. Rushmore, Trump uses Fourth of July celebration to stoke a culture war
The Editorial Board
—Los Angeles Times
Trump Uses Mount Rushmore Speech to Deliver Divisive Culture War Message
Trump pushes racial division, flouts virus rules at Rushmore
—Associated Press
At Mount Rushmore, Trump exploits social divisions, warns of ‘left-wing cultural revolution’ in dark speech ahead of Independence Day
—Washington Post
President Trump delivered one of the best speeches of his Presidency Friday evening at Mount Rushmore, and for evidence consider the echo-chamber headlines above. The chorus of independent media voices understands that Mr. Trump is trying to rally the country in defense of traditional American principles that are now under radical and unprecedented assault.
Dark? In most respects Mr. Trump’s speech was a familiar Fourth of July ode to liberty and U.S. achievement that any President might have delivered in front of an American landmark. “No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America. And no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation,” he said.
Contrary to the media reporting, the America Mr. Trump described is one of genuine racial equality and diversity. He highlighted the central ideal of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” As he rightly put it, “these immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom” that included the abolition of slavery more than a half century later.
Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. also believed this to be true, and Mr. Trump cited them both, as he did other American notables black and white, historic and more recent. There was not a hint of racial division in his words except for those who want to distort their meaning for their own political purposes. In any other time this paean to American exceptionalism would have been unexceptional.
But this year even Mr. Trump’s speech backdrop, Mount Rushmore with its four presidential faces, is politically charged. Each of those Presidents—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt—is under assault for ancient sins against modern values, as progressives seek to expunge their statues and even their names from American life. Mr. Trump’s great offense against the culturally ascendant progressives was to defend these presidential legacies.
Divisive? Mr. Trump’s speech was certainly direct, in his typical style. But it was only divisive if you haven’t been paying attention to the divisions now being stoked on the political left across American institutions. Mr. Trump had the temerity to point out that the last few weeks have seen an explosion of “cancel culture—driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”
Describing this statement of fact as “divisive” proves his point. Newspaper editors are being fired over headlines and op-eds after millennial staff revolts. Boeing CEO David Calhoun last week welcomed the resignation of a communications executive for opposing—33 years ago when he was in the military—women in combat. The Washington Post ran an op-ed this weekend urging that the name of America’s first President be struck from Washington and Lee University.
Any one of these events would be remarkable, but together with literally thousands of others around the country they represent precisely what Mr. Trump describes—a left-wing cultural revolution against traditional American values of free speech and political tolerance. And he called for Americans not to cower but to oppose this assault:
“We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King, when he said that the Founders had signed ‘a promissory note’ to every future generation. Dr. King saw that the mission of justice required us to fully embrace our founding ideals. . . . He called on his fellow citizens not to rip down their heritage, but to live up to their heritage.”
Contrast that with the New York Times’s 1619 project, which derides America’s founding in 1776 and replaces it with a history that distills the country into a slave-owning enterprise that remains racist to the core. Who is really stoking division and a culture war?
Mr. Trump is far from the ideal spokesman for this message given that he has often used the politics of division himself. But liberal elites have created this opening for him by failing to stand up against the radicals who are using the justified anger at the killing of George Floyd as a cudgel to hijack America’s liberal institutions and impose their intolerant political views on everyone else.
No doubt Mr. Trump hopes this theme can restart his election campaign, and for once he gave a speech that was about something more than himself. Stay on script, add a second-term agenda, and he might even have a chance. But whatever the result in November, Mr. Trump’s Mount Rushmore theme isn’t going away. Progressive elites are courting a backlash that will have more than one champion.
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Black should love Biden for keeping them from getting a better education, having choice and being exposed to a solid curriculum instead of mind mush taught in a school where:
order is more important than learning
administrators are more important than teachers
reasoning and learning take a back seat to athletics and drugs
being taught to hate your country is deemed to be patriotic.
choice is denied because unions control you and Democrats
Joe Biden Bows to the Teachers Unions
‘You’ll have an NEA member in the White House,’ he says.
By The Editorial Board
Here’s a place Joe Biden differs from his old boss: President Obama had fraught relations with the teachers unions, including the National Education Association, which in 2014 called (unsuccessfully) for the resignation of Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Mr. Biden, seeking the NEA’s endorsement at a virtual assembly on Friday, pledged his fealty to the union, noting that his wife, Jill, is a member. “When we win this election, we’re going to get the support you need and the respect you deserve,” Mr. Biden said. “You don’t just have a partner in the White House, you’ll have an NEA member in the White House. And if I’m not listening, I’m going to be sleeping alone in the Lincoln Bedroom.”
If a Republican presidential candidate spoke to a special-interest group with that kind of amorous devotion, the caterwauling in the press would never end. Or what about this line from Mr. Biden: “This is going to be a teacher-oriented Department of Education.” Oh, not a student-oriented one?
Mr. Biden didn’t get a question about school choice during the Friday forum, but he has made clear that he believes the union dogma. “No privately funded charter school—or private charter school—would receive a penny of federal money,” he told the NEA in March, when it endorsed him in the Democratic primary.
This is a marked departure. The Obama Administration increased federal funds for charter schools. From 2000 to 2017, the share of public-school students who attended a charter rose to 6% from 1%. Behind these statistics are thousands of stories of children, many of them black and Hispanic, who escaped failing public schools to get a better education.
Mr. Biden seems downright eager to repudiate this record. He told the NEA on Friday that his plan involves “higher salaries for educators,” “universal pre-K,” and “tripling the funding for Title I schools.” He pledged to “double the number of school psychologists and counselors and nurses and social workers in school,” and to “help educators wipe out the burden of their own student debt.”
Teachers first. Put it on a bumper sticker, Mr. Biden, and hope people don’t notice the corollary is that students, and especially poor and minority students, come second. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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