Category Archives: rights

Domestic Terrorists

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They aren’t the parents who object, however vociferously, to the misbehaviors of school boards, even though the National School Boards Association and Biden-Harris’ Attorney General Merrick Garland overtly claim so.

On the contrary.

If Garland—and through him, President Joe Biden (D) and Kamala Harris (D) of the Biden-Harris administration—think mothers and fathers vociferously protesting the misbehaviors of school boards are domestic terrorists, then he needs, also, to investigate those school boards’ acts of terrorism.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they wear masks all through the hours of school, which various pediatricians and child development experts have shown stunts those children’s development by strongly inhibiting their socialization and delays their ability to learn the nominal subjects of their lessons.

The school boards’ terrorism of forcing those children to hate themselves and each other over the color of their skin.

The school boards’ terrorism of actively abusing children by demanding they be injected with experimental and unapproved for routine use vaccines.

But, no, nor Garland nor Biden nor Harris have any interest in protecting the rights—or the obligations—of parents or of protecting those children.

Those Progressive-Democrats are interested only in extending their political power and stifling those with the impudence to demur from their abuses.

Essential Services

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A Florida bill is starting to make inroads on defining what services are essential in an emergency.

State Senator Jason Brodeur (R, Sanford) filed Senate Bill 254 on September 17. It stipulates that “emergency orders may not expressly prohibit religious institutions from regular religious services or activities.”
On Thursday, state Representative Nick DiCeglie (R, Indian Rocks Beach) filed a House companion, House Bill 215, which reiterates that an emergency lockdown or shutdown order must apply equally across businesses and religious institutions.

The bill, a shockingly concise one-pager, says

An emergency order…may not expressly prohibit a religious institution from conducting regular religious services or activities. However, a general provision in an emergency order which applies uniformly to all entities in the affected jurisdiction may be applied to a religious institution if the provision is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest and is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

I’ll go them one further. Keeping our economy open and running is an essential service. Unless bombs are falling, there is no emergency that justifies shutting down, damaging our economy, destroying businesses, destroying livelihoods, even lives.

On the contrary, an open and operating economy is the best means of dealing with the emergency because that keeps operational the ability to generate the weal and mechanisms necessary to bring the emergency quickly and efficiently to a favorable conclusion.

 

The bill can be read here (the bill actually spills onto a second page by one line).

In Which I Disagree

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This time, I disagree with a Koch family and their Stand Together Foundation and their stance on teaching Critical Race Theory in our schools. They oppose the idea of government bans on speech in general, arguing that even unpopular speech must be protected.

Leaders inside the network of right-leaning organizations built up by the billionaire Koch family are saying they oppose government bans on the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools despite not agreeing with what is being taught.
Evan Feinberg, the executive director of Stand Together Foundation, a Koch-affiliated organization, said that “using government to ban ideas, even those we disagree with, is also counter to core American principles.”

Feinberg, et al., are right as far as they go, and it is difficult to draw a line between what is unpopular, even hateful, speech that must be protected, and speech that is plainly dishonestly done and so legitimately subject to ban. CRT, though, is so blatantly dishonest that it clearly is on the wrong side of that broad gray area.

CRT insists that America is inherently and inescapably racist and that blacks are intrinsically incapable of succeeding—they’re permanently victims, solely because they’re black—and that whites are never anything but oppressors, solely because they’re white. From that, CRT pushes the distinctly racist ideology of identity politics.

Teaching CRT is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater when there is none, akin to committing slander, akin to lying in advertising or contracts. Those limits on free speech are properly applied, and so are the bans on teaching CRT.

Invasive IRS

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In an exchange between Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis (R) and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that occurred during Tuesday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing, Lummis decried Yellen’s proposal to have banks report to the IRS the (allegedly aggregated) “inflows” and “outflows” to/from all accounts larger than $600.

Yellen’s response was to describe the already extensive invasion of personal financial data the IRS demands and to pooh pooh the added reporting because it’s only two additional pieces of easily ascertained information onto the 1099-INT form.

And:

the IRS has a wealth of information about individuals if you work at a job where you get labor income

Invasion, isn’t enough, though. Yellen added that Government has a $7 trillion tax gap between what Government will collect in taxes and what folks allegedly will owe over “the next decade.”

…there are a class of partnerships, businesses, high-income individuals who have opaque sources of income that the IRS doesn’t have direct information about, and that’s where the tax gap is, not low-income people.

Yellen then justified the $600 threshold with this—and she actually was serious:

so that individuals can’t game the system and have multiple accounts.

Sure. Because a family with a $400,000 annual income—President Joe Biden’s (D) threshold for being Evil Rich—is going to set up 650+ bank accounts just to hide that. Or a business in a cash-intensive industry—bars, restaurants, construction companies, et al.—are going to incur the added expense of setting up myriads of $600 accounts in order to disguise their finances.

This is the cynicism of the Biden-Harris administration regarding us average Americans.

Whose Kids Are They?

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And who are the real parents? Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (D) claims schools, worse than being merely ex loco parentis (which is bad enough), are actually the parents themselves, at least during school hours and while homework is being done at, you know, home. At Tuesday’s debate with Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, McAuliffe said in all seriousness:

I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach[.]

McAuliffe also bragged about a bill he vetoed that would have acknowledged that parents have the right to veto books.

I’m not going to let parents come into schools, and actually take books out, and make their own decision[.]

Not even about the sexually explicit material in the library that parents would have been notified was present under the vetoed bill.

Parents being barred from telling schools what they should teach also includes, under McAuliffe’s claim of who controls children, parents having no ability to block racist CRT teaching; or teaching children that America is systemically racist; or teaching children that blacks have no hope because they’re black and so permanently victims and whites have it all because they’re successfully permanent oppressors; or teaching children that boys can be girls and girls boys; or schools insisting that it’s OK for biological boys to have access to girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, athletic endeavors, and vice versa.

By extension, too, McAuliffe seems to be exposing himself to opposing home schooling or any other form of school choice—since by making those choices, parents would be “telling schools what they should teach.”

This is how extremist the Progressive-Democratic Party has become.