Government Intrusion

A particularly bad effort by the Progressive-Democratic Biden administration, this one attempts to insert Government between parents and their children, have the children engage directly with Government persons, and block the parents from participating or any sort of oversight at all.

The proximate subject is a CDC-generated

private chat platform that enables teens to discuss—without parental oversight—a range of highly fraught issues, including LGBT challenges, occult topics, dealing with difficult relatives or even finding an alternative “family” through communities that are more accepting.

This Q Chat Space

includes features that enable its teen users to evade parental scrutiny and oversight.
For example, the platform offers two options for text reminders of upcoming chats—discreet or detailed. Detailed reminders include a “Q Chat Space” tag and other identifying information. Discreet reminders, however “are private, they do not include ‘Q Chat Space’ or the name of the chat,” the platform explains. “They only say ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 1 hour.’ or ‘Reminder: You have an online discussion in about 24 hours.'”
At the bottom of the Q Chat Space website, there is a bar with a button reading “Click/tap here for a quick escape…” accompanied by a picture of a person running towards an exit door. Clicking on the button changes the screen to Google’s website.

Jaco Booyens has the right of it:

It is not the role of the CDC or any school environment to educate Americans’ children on gender, sex, sexual conduct, or sexual preference. In fact, this particular site is highly deceiving, encouraging children to hide their activity on the site from their parents by giving them an easy exit button.

There are two major Government crimes in Booyens’ objection: one is that intrusion of Government into parental responsibilities. The other is Government teaching children to not trust their parents, to hide important family matters from them, functionally to lie to their parents, if only by omission.

This is what the Progressive-Democratic Party is trying to do to traditional family structure. We must start the removal process this fall.

The Opposite of Courage

In a Just the News article centered on George Washington University Law Professor, and holder of the university’s Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law, Jonathan Turley’s view that four Border Patrol agents have defamation and denial of due process cases (the four agents face administrative punishments even though the Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigation found they’d done nothing wrong), JtN quoted National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd as saying,

…the president of the United States said that these individuals would pay, and the moment he said that, those investigators had no choice but to find some sort of fault—whether it was criminal or administrative.

On that I must disagree. There’s no doubt the “investigators” might have felt pressure to find a fault, but they also without doubt were not forced to do so. The most pressure that could have been applied would have been to cancel their jobs.

It would have taken a measure of courage to resist the pressure. Choosing their jobs, assuming such a threat was made or implied, over doing the right thing, however, took no courage.

In choosing between doing a right thing and doing a wrong thing, the opposite of courage is cowardice.

What Apology?

First Lady and Edith Bolling President of the United States, Jill Biden, likened Hispanics to (breakfast) tacos. When I was growing up, that was an extremely serious and ugly ethnic slur, and I don’t think it’s gotten any gentler since.

In response to the hue and cry about the slur—and not before, mind you—Biden is being reported by the New York Post as apologizing for her insult.

But Biden isn’t apologizing, actually. Instead, her Press Secretary, Michael LaRosa, tweeted some words in her name:

The First Lady apologizes that her words conveyed anything but pure admiration and love for the Latino community[.]

The First Bigot doesn’t even have the courage, much less the morality, to “apologize” herself, choosing instead to cower behind another.

Regarding “apology” in those euphemism quotes: it’s not even an apology. The surrogate mumbled apologies for the outcome of Biden’s bigotry—words conveyed anything but—but there’s not a syllable of apology for Biden’s bigotry. Not even from the man she was ducking down behind.

This is disgusting.

No Quick Fixes

Some of you may have noticed that the “media industry”—newspapers and broadcast/cable news outlets—is losing credibility.

Only 16% of Americans said they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers in 2022, a 5% drop [or maybe, a 5 per centage point drop] compared to the 2021 findings, according to Gallup. It was the lowest number to give those answers since Gallup started asking about newspapers in 1973.
Television news has Americans even more concerned in 2022, as a dismal 11% told Gallup they have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in the industry. This is down 5% […] from the 16% who were confident in TV news last year, a record-low total.

Joe Concha on the matter:

They can improve the situation by not injecting so much opinion into what should be straight reporting. And also by not automatically and blatantly taking a side on big issues such as the recent abortion ruling, or serving at the pleasure of one major political party like we saw by calling Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. Instead, you might see some trust resorted, but it’s a hard bell to unring

Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor, a global news company that is expected to launch later this year:

We’re hoping that a commitment to transparency and openness to a range of views can help close that gap over time[.]

Hope isn’t much of a solution, here, not when it’s too late even for Concha’s solution: the same crop of dishonest journalists and media outlet editors and publishers would still be in place.

No, the required solution must include—must begin with—a significant fraction, a strong majority, of journalists must be terminated, and all of the media outlet managers and their deputies, and and all of the editors and their deputies, must be terminated, their ties to media “news” outlets completely severed. These are the ones proximately responsible for the distortions and outright lies they write, the editorial decisions they make to publish those stories and to minimize others or to spike them altogether. These are the ones that engage in rewriting their past stories rather than leaving them intact and publishing corrections to them. The incumbents can never be trusted, no matter the bodice-ripping mea culpas that might spill from their lips or pens.

It will take a considerable amount of time to accomplish—the firings needn’t take any time at all, but finding replacements—both capable of reporting and honest enough to do it objectively will take time.

Accused Means Guilty?

The Department of Veterans Affairs has failed again. Kenneth Harrelson, a US Army veteran, medically retired after a bit under five years in, and his family are getting their VA benefits cut off because they’ve been accused of a crime. Conviction be damned; the VA don’t need no stinkin’ conviction.

The federal government plans to suspends or terminate benefits to a military veteran and his family as a result of him being charged in connection with the January 6 Capitol riot.
The Department of Veterans Affairs informed the veteran, Kenneth Harrelson, and his wife in a June 13 correspondence that such actions are the result of the Justice Department telling the agency that Harrelson has been charged with “indicted and charged with Seditious Conspiracy….”

What he loses as a result of the VA’s action—which comes at the request of the Biden/Garland DoJ, to which the VA has no obligation to submit—even though the man is innocent, since no trial has been held and so no conviction is possible:

  • suspend payment of “gratuitous benefits” pending disposition of the criminal proceedings

Even though the VA knows he’s innocent [emphasis added]: If convicted, gratuitous benefits are forfeited…. Gratuitous benefits are things like burial in a national cemetery.

  • suspend “compensation benefit payments” starting Sept. 1, which is the first day of the month following a 60-day due process period

Regardless of whether that due process period includes even the start of his trial, much less its completion and conviction.

Guilty by accusation—off with his benefits. Congressman Louis Gohmert (R, TX) has the right of it on this:

This is what you have when vindictive leftists get in charge of major parts of the government[.]

Happy belated–suspended–Independence Day, guys.

 

Veteranos Administratio delende est.