Front Row left to right: Stella, me, Lynn, Blake
Back row left to right: Brian, Abby, Dagny, Max, Tamara, Daniel
And:
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Biden pledged to heal the racial divide but instead has chosen to widen it, He has become his party’s leader in devising messages which his bleeding sheep follow. He cannot respond without dumb cards in his pocket, cannot even rally democracies against tyranny in Cuba, stands mute against the Taliban, believes he can pacify Iran and has proven totally useless along with his cackling help mate.
Bear Bryant used to hold up a bag of Golden Flake Potato Chips in one hand and a Coke in the other and the caption read what a pair says the Bear,
Sort of fits Biden and Lady Ha Ha.
And:
The Texas Legislature just voted to purchase a lot of diapers so when their friends in the Democrat Party return they can be properly outfitted. The problem is the supply chain is clogged with back orders.
Finally:
When Trump walked out of The White House, I predicted, within a year, we would come to miss our "Broadway" Joe Namath , Jimmy Cagney type president.
At the time of his election Trump was what we needed, a common sense, non political type who could reverse the trend we had been on for decades and he proved he could.
His undoing was too many tired of his brash vulgar unorthodox street style of management and personality
The issue now becomes will he choose to run again?
Though we need his abilities now more than ever, I believe he will be too old and the Trump Haters and mass media have so effectively put the bad mouth on him, because he threatened their power, he would again be harassed.
We have so dumbed down our level of what we find acceptable, as an alternative, we are likely to find comfort in more bumbler types like Biden. Lamentably, I find it distressing that even Stacey Abrams is acceptable, among the radicals and Trump Hating crowd.
Trump still commands acceptance among enough Republicans that his endorsement remains both sought after and effective if he can put aside his rhetoric about the election being rigged, even if there is evidence it was because of many state shenanigans that altered rules prior to the actual vote count..
The current administration’s contempt of Trump has backfired and their desire to hold onto power, at any cost has proven expensive, not only to their ambitions but also to the best interests of the nation. Our border has been pierced, our streets flow with blood, our very national security is at risk, law and order is constantly breached, and you, by now, should know the rest if your eyes are open as your hearts bleed for what is happening to America, if you care.
Time will tell whether there are enough Neanderthals, deplorables and un-intimidated sailors to right the ship of state. 2022 will provide an important clue.
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This is what liberal insanity has come to:
A Witch Trial at the Legal Aid Society
Maud Maron was a model public defender. Then she was forced out of her job because of her political views and her race.
By Bari Weiss
If you google “bleeding heart liberal,” Maud Maron might well turn up as the first hit. Every cause liberals are supposed to fight for, every group they are supposed to champion, every candidate they are supposed to support — well, that was Maron’s not so atypical life and career. Until recently.
A New York City native, Maron lived her early years in subsidized housing when her father walked out on her mother, who was a pediatric nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. Her mother remarried, the family moved to Pennsylvania, and Maron returned to the city for college. While a student at Barnard, Maron was a clinic escort for Planned Parenthood. Later, she went to Cardozo Law School knowing she wanted to be a public defender. There, she was a student of Kathleen Cleaver, the former Black Panther who was then a visiting professor. (Cleaver calls Maron her “excellent research assistant” on the first page of this published paper about Mumia Abu-Jamal.)
After Maron graduated from Cardozo in 1998, she joined the Legal Aid Society, where she represented the most disadvantaged people in Manhattan. She left in 2006, after the birth of her first child, and then rejoined the nonprofit in 2017, working in the Bronx. “I had always intended to go back. It just took longer than I thought because I wound up having four children over a decade. But when my youngest was 18 months I went back to work,” Maron told me over the weekend. “For me, being a public defender is more than a job. It’s who I am.”
Maron and her husband, an Argentine immigrant, chose to send all of their children to public schools. In 2017 and, again, in 2019 she was elected to the local Community Education Council — the equivalent of a school board. Then, two years ago, she decided to run as a Democrat for City Council in lower Manhattan. Maron had always been politically involved: she was a poll watcher for John Kerry in Pennsylvania during 2004 and contributed many times to Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016.
In short, Maron is exactly the kind of lawyer you’d imagine Legal Aid would put on the cover of its brochures. But today the public defender is filing suit in the Southern District of New York against the organization to which she has dedicated her career.
The suit, which you can read here, claims that Maron was “discriminated against on the basis of race” by her employer, Legal Aid Society, and her union, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. It claims that both defendants “published knowingly false statements in furtherance of ideological and political motives divorced from the core functions of Ms. Maron’s employment.” In other words: it says she was forced out of her job because of her political views and her race, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
“None of this would have happened if I just said I loved books like White Fragility, and I’m a fan of Bill de Blasio’s proposals for changing New York City public schools, and I planned to vote for Maya Wiley for mayor. The reason they went after me is because I have a different point of view,” she said.
That difference came out most starkly in education, and in Maron’s role on the school board and as a candidate for city council she was outspoken in her views.
“I am very open about what I stand for. I am pro-integration. I am pro-diversity. And also I reject the narrative that white parents are to blame for the failures of our school system. I object to the mayor’s proposal to get rid of specialized admissions tests to schools like Stuyvesant. And I believe that racial essentialism is racist and should not be taught in school,” she told me.
This apparently didn’t sit well with some of her colleagues.
The trouble began in late 2019, when Maron’s boss, Tina Luongo, informed her she was being investigated following a complaint from members of the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus and Attorneys of Color of Legal Aid. “I knew the accusations were baseless,” Maron said. “It had everything to do with them deeming me an enemy of their politics and trying to go after me at work.”
A former colleague of Maron’s said: “It was McCarthyism. That is the only word to describe it.” Like several others I spoke to, this lawyer requested anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions.
After an investigation that entailed reviewing all her case files and interviewing her direct supervisors, which the lawsuit details, Maron was cleared in January 2020. If she were someone else — a little more politically astute, a little less principled — maybe she would have understood the episode as a warning to shut up. But on July 23, 2020, Maron published an Op-Ed in the New York Post under the headline “Racial obsessions make it impossible for NYC schools to treat parents, kids as people.”
Here’s how it opened:
I am a mom, a public defender, an elected public-school council member and a City Council candidate. But at a city Department of Education anti-bias training, I was instructed to refer to myself as a “white woman” — as if my whole life reduces to my race.
Those who oppose this ideology are shunned and humiliated, even as it does nothing to actually improve our broken schools.
Though facing severe budget cuts, the DOE has spent more than $6 million for the training, which defines qualities such as “worship of the written word,” “individualism” and “objectivity” as “white-supremacy culture.”
That’s when things at work blew up. Three days after she published the piece, the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus put out a lengthy statement saying that “Maud Maron has no business having a career in public defense, and we’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.” It declared: “Maud is racist, and openly so,” and offered no evidence to back up the charge. It said that this veteran public defender was a “prominent opponent of equality” and a “classic example of what 21st century racism looks like.”
The statement said that Maron “is one of many charlatans who took this job not out of a desire to make a difference, but for purposes of self-imaging.” It claim
ed: “She pretends to favor integration while fighting against it and denying the existence of racism in education.”
The statement also accused Maron of being terrible at her job. “No public defender can legitimately claim to be a proponent of racial justice if they are lax in how they do the work,” it said, adding that “we know for a fact that Maud's commitment to zealous representation of poor people of color is questionable at best.”
One former colleague told me that the accusation of racism in an organization like Legal Aid “is the equivalent of calling someone who works at a Jewish organization anti-Jewish. It becomes impossible to work there.” Never mind that several lawyers who worked alongside Maud told me that the allegations were absurd.
“She was beyond terrific,” said James Chubinsky, Maron’s former supervisor. “When she joined the Bronx Division I didn’t understand why she wasn’t coming as a supervisor, given her resume. She handled the toughest cases and arraignments, she did an enormous amount of work, and she went out of her way to engage the less experienced lawyers in the cases she was handling,” said Chubinsky, who spent the past 41 years at the organization, until he retired a year-and-a-half ago. “Any suggestion that she was anything other than a top-flight lawyer that the Legal Aid Society should be damn proud to have on their staff is a crock.”
Another former co-worker told me: “She was a great colleague. I’ve known her for two decades. She was very caring toward her clients and a very good attorney.” Did they ever see her exhibiting racist behavior or expressing racist views? “Definitely not. Not at all.”
But this lawyer wasn’t willing to defend Maron on the record. Chubinsky said he understands why: “Everybody is scared to death of the r-word,” he told me. “They live in dread that they are insufficiently radical and so they fall in line behind the most radical members of the union. There is a silent majority that keeps their heads down. A couple of lunatics rattle the cage, and the people at the top fall in line,” Chubinsky told me.
That appears to be what happened in Maron’s case. The official, verified Twitter account of the Legal Aid Society, @LegalAidNYC, retweeted the statement from the black lawyers’ group without comment. “The viciousness of the statement and the bizarre decision of Legal Aid to amplify what they knew was false was awful. But the worst part was the silence of all the people who know better, who know that there is absolutely nothing to this,” Maron said.
The organization remained silent while Legal Aid lawyers like Rigodis Appling tweeted statements like this:
And this:
Four of Maron’s colleagues wrote a piece in Gotham Magazine accusing her of “segregation activism” and compared her to the white mobs that opposed the Little Rock Nine. (Appling, and various others I reached out to at Legal Aid, did not respond to requests for comment.)
Maron said it was not easy to find a lawyer to take her case: Challenging activists who claim the mantle of antiracism carries tremendous professional risks these days. “Part of me would have loved to walk away from the whole thing,” she said. “But these ideologues have tried to ruin my name and my career and they are going after other good people. Not enough people stand up and say: It is totally wrong to do this to a person. And this is not going to stop unless people stand up to it.”
“If you had asked me when I became a mom what I thought were the pressing concerns my kids would face I probably would have said climate change, maybe ending the Iraq war,” she said. “I am so shocked that what I worry about now is creeping totalitarianism in America.”
“Defense lawyers are charged with defending citizens accused of a crime. You can do that as a liberal or a conservative and still be an excellent defense lawyer. You can certainly have different views about how to structure admissions to selective schools in New York. The idea that now you have to agree with the leftmost position in your office or be chased out is just wrong.”
This is so obviously true. And yet somehow liberals like Maron have come to be regarded as turncoats in their avowedly liberal institutions.
“It was becoming intolerable,” Chubsinky said of the intolerance that had taken root at Legal Aid. “We talked about all of this behind closed doors. Because you can’t talk about this with the doors open. It’s a really oppressive environment for anyone who isn’t radical, including, by the way, those attorneys of color who don’t share these lunatic views like ab
olishing the police or saying that it's necessarily racist to arrest people for misdemeanor crimes.”
“So many of us have sat through trainings and listened to equity consultants say things we knew were not true. But it is easier to keep silent and discuss the absurdities in confidence with trusted colleagues and friends than to speak up or object in front of everyone,” said Maron. “The bill for that silence is coming due now.”
“I was embarrassed that I didn’t stand up for her. But I was scared. Everybody is scared of that label,” a former colleague told me.
“Nobody should have to endure what Maud endured,” Chubinsky said. “It’s outrageous.”
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If you want to understand why the Maud Maron saga is not just her story but one of the stories of our age, Andrew Sullivan’s most recent column offers a compelling summary of the “radicalization of the American elite against liberalism.” Don’t miss it.
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Maud Maron and I have never met in person, but we both sit on the advisory board of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. The organization will be supporting her as she pursues her case. You can, too.
Meantime, we need more people like Maud Maron to stand up for common sense. If you have had a similar experience in your workplace, we’re interested in hearing from you. Please write us: tips@honestlypod.com
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No, I mean what I said!
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Jason Riley is spot on:
Critical Race Theory Is a Hustle
It may resemble a serious academic discipline, but it’s really just a fancy argument for racial preferences.
By Jason L. Riley
A majority of American fourth- and eighth-graders can’t read or do math at grade level, according to the Education Department. And that assessment is from 2019, before the learning losses from pandemic school closures.
Whenever someone asks me about critical race theory, that statistic comes to mind. What’s the priority, teaching math and reading, or turning elementary schools into social-justice boot camps?
Given that black and Hispanic students are more likely to be lagging academically, it’s a question that anyone professing to care deeply about social inequality might consider. Learning gaps manifest themselves in all kinds of ways later in life, from unemployment rates and income levels to the likelihood of teenage pregnancy, substance abuse and involvement with the criminal-justice system. Our jails and prisons already have too many woke illiterates.
Wealthier parents will make sure their kids receive a decent education, even if it means using private schools or hiring tutors. But the majority of children are relegated to the traditional public-school system, where progressives now want to prioritize the teaching of critical race theory. In addition to being a horrible idea, the timing couldn’t be worse. As the country rapidly diversifies—for more than a decade, U.S. population growth has been driven primarily by Asians and Hispanics—liberals want to teach children to obsess over racial and ethnic differences. What could go wrong?
Recently, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, announced that they had jumped on the bandwagon. At its annual meeting earlier this month, the NEA adopted a proposal stating that it is “reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.” More, the organization pledged to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric” and issue a study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” There was no proposal vowing to improve math and reading test scores, alas.
Meanwhile, the NEA’s sister outfit, the American Federation of Teachers, has joined forces with Ibram X. Kendi, an activist-scholar who openly embraces racial discrimination against whites. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” Mr. Kendi asserted in “How to Be an Anti-Racist.” Sadly, that sort of circular drivel is what passes for deep thinking on race today. Mr. Kendi spoke at an AFT conference last week, and the union announced that it will donate copies of his writings to schools, AFT members, educators and youth mentors.
Critical-race ideology is also entering the classroom via the New York Times “1619 Project,” which claims that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and earned its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize. In a forthcoming book, “Woke Racism,” the humanities professor John McWhorter argues that proponents like Mr. Kendi and Ms. Hannah-Jones have mostly been given a pass because they’re racial minorities, they’re on the left, and criticizing them is politically incorrect.
“On the issue of the Revolutionary War, Hannah-Jones’s claim is simply false, but our current cultural etiquette requires pretending that isn’t true—because she’s black,” Mr. McWhorter writes. “Someone has received a Pulitzer Prize for a mistaken interpretation of historical documents about which legions of actual scholars are expert. Meanwhile, the claim is being broadcast, unquestioned, in educational materials being distributed across the nation.”
Mr. McWhorter is right to point out the racial double standards at work in elevating shoddy pseudoscholarship. He’s also correct in noting the general cowardice of his colleagues in the academy. There is no shortage of books about slavery or America’s founding, and none of them have been written by Ms. Hannah-Jones. To what, other than her race and politics, does she owe all this deference?
And while Mr. Kendi is using trendier language—“antiracism,” “implicit bias,” etc.—critical race theory amounts to little more than a fancy argument for affirmative action, and always has. The theory comes out of the legal academy, and early proponents argued that race, ethnicity and gender should be used as academic credentials in hiring and promoting professors. It’s less a serious academic discipline than a hustle. It posits that racial inequality today is the sole fault of whites and the sole responsibility of whites to solve—through racial preferences for blacks. It’s employed by elites primarily for the benefit of elites, though in the name of helping the underprivileged. Ultimately, it’s about blaming your problems on other people—based on their race—which might be the last thing we should be teaching our children.
And:
Air Force Academy acknowledges teaching critical race theory
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Do we keep yielding to more sucker punches?
Biden and the Mullahs: "Feeding the Crocodile"
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Revealed: Mahmoud Abbas’s Preconditions for Negotiations with Israel
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How Palestinian Leaders Are Deceiving Americans
by Bassam Tawil
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Iran’s Brooklyn terror plot is a crucial test for Biden
Finally:
You may disagree but I suspect the nation is getting tired of Wokeness, Critical Race "Weariness," Black "Lies" Matter, and all the crap radical lefties have been spouting. I also believe the nation is not happy with the jokers who are running the show in the White House, nor those in the Pentagon.
I believe what we are experiencing is a calm before a larger eruption and before it is behind us all hell may break loose. There is only so much anarchism Bubba's are going to take.
While at Tybee I finished a very long book entitled: "The Free World: Art and Thought In The Cold War" by Louis Menand.
It is a kaleidoscope of what events and people impacted our culture and thinking after the Second World War. The book brought back many memories of those whose names became household ones and caused me to come away with several thoughts.
What we are experiencing is not new. Radical youth with ideas seeking change come and go and their impact can be significant. From an historical standpoint prominent East and West coast university student body and faculty members have frequently been connected with many of the former movements and outcries for change. Prominent universities have been Columbia, Michigan and Berkley.
After Viet Nam, universities , unlike in the past, became targets of radicals who occupied administrative offices, disrupted campus life and defied authority.
Rather than build upon what America had achieved many sought radical change, some even sought to establish their own nation within our nation.
Each time we go through these upheavals racial discord is generally a root cause and/or the basis of the discord and we hear the same message but one could conclude technology has, perhaps, allowed those engaged in the current disunity to be more effective, the mass media more biased and incompetent and the contempt for police has reached unheard of levels..
Virtually every volcanic upheaval is clothed in an intellectual premise, eventually the bubble up spreads and attracts those bent on destruction, runs it's course and ends but not before significant and cathartic tragedies occur and I have no doubt what we are witnessing will follow the same path.
The critical issue is whether progress eventually is made or wounds remain open which simply set the stage for more deferred heartache.
Th elite can always find something wrong, to change, to make better to go to war over. Discontent is an unending human condition and desire.
I believe it is too early to tell how the current lava like explosion will end.
Something to chew on:
Supremacists.
Two days ago, the United States of America held its 244th birthday party. There was no party on the day of its birth. A bunch of white male supremacists went home or to a pub, or some other lodging, physically exhausted and quietly in fear for their lives, having signed their death warrant — a document that conclusively branded them traitors. Their futures were clear. Win a war or visit the hangman. Their prospects were just a tic above hopeless. G. Washington was in NY, entrenched for battle on the Brooklyn Heights. By accepted military standards, his “army” was poorly trained, poorly equipped and lacking discipline. In stark contrast, Brit General Howe had 32,000 crack troops. They fronted GW and the East River loomed at his rear. Howe’s admiral brother meanwhile commanded the largest expeditionary force Britain had ever dispatched — 10,000 sailors on 30 warships, with 1200 guns and as many as 500 supporting vessels. But for three happenings, the battle of Brooklyn should have relegated the United States to nothing more than a skirmish footnote in world history. Happening No. 1: Although his army battered the bewildered and beleaguered Americans, Howe didn’t want to lose Brit lives needlessly as he did at Bunker Hill. He decided to back off and wear down the enemy toward a less bloody conclusion. A foregone conclusion, you might say. Happening No. 2: Simultaneously, Washington conceived an audacious retreat in the dead of night — using small vessels to make repeated round trips across the East River, ferrying more than 9000 troops. Happening No.3: But that strategy would have failed had the weather not cooperated with favorable winds in the darkness, followed by a sudden, thick fog that shrouded the early daylight crossings. Thus, thousands of white supremacists on one side escaped certain annihilation by thousands of white supremacists on the other side. You don’t know if anyone celebrated America Sunday with knowledge of the Brooklyn Heights miracle. And you don’t know how many that did celebrate truly believe in America’s goodness — in Her essential virtues that radiate from the Founding principles of The Declaration and The Constitution. But one thing you do know — not all the WOKE, CRT, BLM, CANCEL CULTURE, REVISIONIST, FASCIST BULLSHIT in the world will change REALITY and TRUTH; ergo, a handful of white supremacist males were responsible for creating the United States of America. Thousands of primarily white supremacist males were responsible for defeating England and achieving independence. Hundreds of thousands of primarily white supremacist males defeated the United Kingdom a second time in the War of 1812. Hundreds of thousands of primarily white supremacist males fought and died in America’s Civil War to abolish Slavery and preserve the Union. Millions of primarily white supremacist males planned, financed, invented, designed and built America’s vaunted infrastructure, industry and educational institutions. Millions of primarily white supremacist males fought two world wars to defeat the despots of world tyranny. Millions of primarily white male supremacists built the freest most prosperous country on this earth, extending opportunity to all Americans. NO CANCEL CULTURE BS can cancel that fact. Ungrateful, ignorant millennials and zillennials, as well as militant feminists, are perfectly free to spew their hatred of white males. It was white males, after all, who gave them that right in the very beginning. Who else? No one else was around then to take up the challenge. Minority ethnicity didn’t seem interested in sailing west to create a new nation. Feminine voices were consumed by more important matters on the home front. Therefore, with time on their hands, a handful of evil white guys had the audacity to suggest that “all men are created equal” — a belief worth dying for. They happened to be the only ones interested in the concept of individual freedom. Most of their neighbors thought they were nuts. So did a few of the Founders. John Dickinson of Delaware was against separation and refused to sign his name. The arguments were fierce. At times, it seemed independence was a mission impossible. But, finally, the original Congress came together. They conceived and gave birth to a new nation. They fought an impossible war, and won. And, with all its faults, America thrived because white male supremacists placed in writing the covenant for individual liberty. So, America haters, have at it with all the hypocrisy you can muster as you live and profit from America’s blessings and benefits. Sit back with your devices, complain like losers, as do-nothings usually do; and relish Marxism as your salvation. This is your time. You own the Washington playing field. Take over. Take solace in having a USA central governing body that is mired in depravity, degeneracy and delinquency, light years removed from July 4, 1776.
Ed. Note:
Before anyone freaks out, minorities were represented in America’s wars — African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and many other ethnicities. America’s illustrious story is the story of all its people, regardless of race or gender. The attempt to falsely characterize this country’s history and foment racism is a Marxist ploy, steeped in group identity. Parents, take note and heed — your children are in Communist crosshairs — at school.
www.conventionofstates.com
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 Is the tide beginning to turn, even in the Democrat Party? | . |
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