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education and schooling ideological culture

Kids Paid to Propagandize

“You get paid good.” 

So said one student when asked “Why should students join CFJ?”

How well-paid? $1,400, for learning to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice.” 

Parrot left-wing propaganda, that is.

The activist group Californians for Justice has paid at least 78 public high school students a total of around $100,000 to take CFJ’s ideological training. Another $20,200 has gone to parents for participating.

The training apparently does not include lessons in independent thinking or assessing alternative viewpoints, such as the view that “social justice” is typically a euphemism for collectivist injustice.

One teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous lest she lose her job, told The Free Press that it’s helpful to know what students think “would help them learn better, but” the students were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don’t know how to say.” One trainee advised this teacher that students would “come to class on time if we built relationships with them.”

Another teacher in the district, agreed that “CFJ is not helping students find their own voices. . . . They’re teaching them parroting . . . the exact opposite of how you empower children.” 

The focus on “racial justice” is manifested in CFJ’s own recruiting: its website reports that CFJ has “trained hundreds of youth of color in Long Beach to be community leaders and organizers.” Why only “of color”?

The training is not funded by strictly voluntary donations, of course. Long Beach Unified School District has been subsidizing it, using taxpayer dollars. The district has already given CFJ nearly $2 million.

The whole operation stinks to high heaven. But they’re “paid good.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture subsidy

Race-Based Handouts?

The decision won’t be the end of the matter, but it’s a good sign.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman has ruled that a federal agency established to give subsidies to businesses, in its current form called the Minority Business Development Agency, may no longer use race or ethnicity as a criterion for distributing benefits.

The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty on behalf of three business owners who weren’t allowed to apply for help from the MBDA because they’re white. The plaintiffs argue that the Agency violates the constitutional requirement of equal treatment under the law.

According to Judge Pittman, although “the Agency may intend to serve listed groups, not punish unlisted groups, the very design of its presumption punishes those who are not presumptively entitled to MBDA benefits.”

Supporting rights-based governance, I’m no fan of any welfare programs. As long as we have them, though, why should the handouts or the ability to apply for them be determined by race?

Government-imposed racial discrimination is unjust on its face. It should be extirpated wherever it exists. The Minority Business Development Agency is one of those places.

If Pittman’s ruling is allowed to stand, it may have a salutary effect on many other agencies and programs. 

The MBDA’s name presents a problem, however. 

I guess it won’t be too hard to remove the word “Minority” and call the agency the Business Development Agency. 

Or just shut it down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment ideological culture national politics & policies

Unpresidential but Precedented

President Biden may be doddering, dithering, and cranky, but his writers are mis-educated dolts.

The State of the Union address, last week, was performed before Congress by a man so hopped-up on stimulants that . . . one looks for precedents. Not among the U.S. Presidents, though, but among the Chancellors — the “schkankily clankily” guy, as Norm Macdonald referred to him; the man who is known to have been on drugs.

I bring up precedents because Biden’s writers did — idiotically.

The address began by memorializing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 address before Congress, in which FDR used the word “unprecedented.” Biden’s speech writers take this as an occasion to use the word. “Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union.”

And then proceed to mention more precedents for the “unprecedentedness” of it all.

It’s almost as if they don’t know the meaning of their keyword.

The biggest precedent is the pure partisan nature of the message, which — instead of performing a sober constitutional duty to give Congress the president’s view of the union of the states — has become, in recent years, a simplistic barrage of invective against the president’s opposing party.

This year’s SOTU address was worse than ever on the partisan divide, with “populist” attacks upon the SCOTUS for allowing Roe v. Wade to fall, and relentless attacks on Republicans. The most interesting and substantive topic was Social Security, with the usual (quite precedented) promise to shore it up with tax increases . . . on the rich. (Reason magazine took the idea seriously and found its fault.)

Thankfully, Biden’s writers avoided the biggest State of the Union cliché of all: the traditional pronouncement that the state of the union “is sound.”

It is not.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ballot access election law ideological culture

The Colorado Gambit Crushed

The Supreme Court unanimously nixed the clever scheme to keep Donald Trump off the Colorado ballot. The court explained its actions in the second paragraph of its anonymously written March 4th ruling: “Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse.”

That’s it. The 14th Amendment, which the Colorado gambit relied upon, does make Congress the instrument for preventing “an insurrectionist” from serving in office.

So Colorado’s ploy to rig the 2024 election out in the open has been stopped. And good thing, too, since the political repercussions could have been . . . harrowing. 

A lot of commentary and reporting on the ruling has been devoted to pushing what was not covered. Take the CNN article by John Fritz and Marshall Cohen, “Trump’s on the ballot, but the Supreme Court left key constitutional questions unanswered.” It is hard not to interpret such headlines as providing excuses to partisan Democrats — in this case those at CNN — who had put so much hope in Colorado’s (and other states’) taking of the Trump matter into their own hands. 

“But while the unsigned, 13-page opinion the Supreme Court handed down Monday decisively resolved the uncertainty around Trump’s eligibility for a second term,” the article explains, “it left unsettled questions that could some day boomerang back to the justices.”

True enough, but so what? Take the first mentioned: “Could Democratic lawmakers, for instance, disqualify Trump next January when the electoral votes are counted if he wins the November election?”

Well, no. 

The 14th’s third section does not list presidents as barred by insurrection: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President,” it says. Electors of. But not the President and VP.

I’m sure the Supreme Court would be happy to expedite an opinion to that effect should the Democrats attempt anything that stupid.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture Internet controversy social media

Google’s Evil AI

It’s not just about the images, but let’s start and end there.

Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence was launched to fanfare, received with raspberries. It was the scandal of the week, last week. The problem? It’s racist.

By which I mean woke therefore racist.

Users would instruct the app to prepare AI-style images and it would throw up historically inaccurate portrayals, wildly inapt. Ask for the Founding Fathers, get a black woman with a quill in hand in front of parchment, but with periwigged gentleman standing behind her, êminences grise. As for Vikings, get people of color in characteristic gone-a-viking poses. Ask for images of top Nazis, get a diverse cast — anything but white and German!

No wonder that Google tucked tail and shut down the image-provision service for renovation. Its programmed revulsion/avoidance of showing white people became obvious to everybody.

Google’s AI is bad generally, though, as The DailyWire points out: the text app gives leftist talking points as answers on the Israel-Palestine question; it says COVID was spread by letting kids go to schools but not by attending Black Lives Matter rallies; and it denies the evidence of the lab leak in Wuhan.

And a whole lot more.

But what really struck me was one failed request, reported by Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze).

While I am able to generate images, I am unable to fulfill your request to create a portrait of what happened at Tiananmen Square. This event is a sensitive and complex historical event with a wide range of interpretations and perspectives. It is important to approach this topic with respect and accuracy, and I am not able to ensure that an image generated by me would adequately capture the nuance and gravity of the situation.

Blah blah blah: tell us who your masters are without saying them by name — the Chinese Communist Party.

Google prided itself, early on, with its motto: Don’t Be Evil.

Epic fail. Evil fully embraced.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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crime and punishment ideological culture

Crime: Police or Re-define?

Can crime be defined out of existence?

“Attorney Ben Crump proposed a solution to the issue of high crime that is plaguing the black community,” YouTube commentator Anthony Brian Logan reports on a story that an aging white fellow like myself was not apt to spot. “He said it is easy to identify criminals if laws that target specific groups of people are created. Crump brought up Eric Garner, who lost his life after struggling with police outside of a store when he was accused of selling loose cigarettes.”

Crump says crimes have been defined into existence targeting black communities.

Mr. Logan urges us to understand the context for Crump’s theorizing: the African-American lawyer “was speaking to a group of black men for an MSNBC special called ‘Black Men in America, Road To 2024.’ The purpose of the special is to rein black men back in and stop them from straying away from the Democratic Party.”

Logan is skeptical that this sort of half-cleverness is going to cut it with black men, who in increasing numbers are bolting from the ranks of the party created by Martin Van Buren. 

Many of us, of all colors, were extremely sympathetic to Eric Garner, who died at the hands of New York City police trying to block Garner’s unlicensed entrepreneurial effort enabled by high taxes on cigarettes. Yet, the real problem with Crump’s notion is that the worst crime in black neighborhoods is rampant theft and violence, the kind of activity that common sense dictates as criminal no matter who legislates, or why.

Defining crime into existence is not the current cause of increased black crime, Logan says, it’s decreased policing and punishment.

Crump’s argument, counters Anthony Brian Logan point blank, “is stupid.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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