The Washington Post’s lead “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler issued a hit piece against Sen. Tim Scott on Friday targeting him for his black heritage.

Using the guise of a “fact-check,” Kessler spent nearly 30 paragraphs analyzing census documents and other records to try to counteract Scott’s claims that his grandfather left elementary school to pick cotton and “never learned to read or write.”

While the article sets out to prove Scott wrong, it confirms the narrative that the senator has repeated in his book and from the political podium multiple times. While Scott believed his grandfather, Artis Ware, dropped out of school in third grade, Kessler claimed to have uncovered that Ware may have left school in the fourth grade, a slight inconsistency which even Kessler admitted could occur because the records are old.

Despite the slight difference in his grandfather’s age when he left school, Kessler glossed over the fact that Ware worked “55 hours a week” in cotton fields at a young age in order to attack Scott for amplifying his family history “for political consumption.” //

Margot Cleveland
@ProfMJCleveland
HT @ellie_bufkin
"Some enterprising Black families purchased property as a way to avoid sharecropping and achieve a measure of independence from White-dominated society." Could this read any more like "Scott's uppity black family dared not be beholden sharecroppers?"

You can’t win, but that’s all part of the plan.

Reason, rules, processes – these are the foundations of a free society, which is why the cultural left is so dead set against them. A citizen needs to be able to rely on clear rules and fixed processes to vindicate his rights in order to have any rights. But the rights of free citizens – your rights – are an obstacle to the Lil’ Stalins who yearn to rule over us. If the liberal establishment can create a society where you can’t appeal to facts, evidence, or law, then – until the peasants' revolt – its poobahs can wield undisputed, undiluted authority. That’s their dream, a country where you live in terror of them because you can never be sure that what you are doing or failing to do is suddenly going to be criminalized. //

If you can’t rely on the law or the evidence, then you are at the mercy of the whims of the liberal elite. Sure, the cop did the right thing, and the evidence is indisputable that he did the right thing, but it doesn’t matter at all. The cop is wrong and subject to all sorts of sanctions not because he violated any rule but purely because it is useful for him to be guilty of something.

The Rule of Law has become the Rule of Power, which the bad guys possess for the moment. And they are so arrogant about it that they do not even bother to make a straight-faced argument against cops saving black children’s lives. Hey, it’s just a routine kid knife fight – no biggie. We all remember back in the day, hacking up other suburban teens with machetes and scimitars, and how the cops never bothered us. Not allowing black teens to be gutted is worse than Jim Crow – it’s Jim Eagle. Heck, it’s Jim Rodan.

And we all know if that punk planted a shiv in the other girl’s gut on the bodycam tape, the cop would be lynched for not stopping her. You can’t win, which is the idea.

You can’t have a society where normal people can’t possibly prevail by obeying well-established rules. You’re not wrong because you did something wrong but because you're being wrong is handy for the people who hate you. //

This is how our oppressors like it. But this is not how we like it. Normal people can only take getting bopped on the noggin by the southpaw monkey in the Nairobi Trio for so long before they hit back. You cannot have an enduring status quo where one side is firmly bound to rules and obligations while the other gets to make it up as they go along. Eventually, you will inevitably reach a breaking point. And that’s coming. Then the bad guys are going to miss the rules that they still expect to protect them.

New emails uncovered by Judicial Watch’s FOIA request detail how FDA employees were working with buyers to get 'fresh' aborted baby organs for experiments. //

In what should have been a national headline, the exposure of the U.S. government’s involvement in trafficking aborted baby bodies is now even more newsworthy following Friday’s announcement from the White House. At President Biden’s direction, the Department of Health and Human Services reversed the Trump administration’s policy protecting preborn Americans from the callous dehumanization of organ harvesting and further desecration of their bodies in research disguised as “science.”

This sickening decision now gives license to our “best and brightest” government researchers and agencies, those in charge of steering the country towards medical breakthroughs and scientific progress, to use the skin, brains, and eyeballs of children in research that affects all of us and is funded by our money. For this very reason, we must know the full extent of how federal agencies traffic aborted baby body parts. //

FDA Requested Boy Organs to Create Humanized Mice

The FDA went so far as to request organs from baby boys to use in “very important and … challenging” surgeries to create humanized mice. ABR responded that they would do their best but could make no promises due to the “nature of termination procedures,” which mutilate a baby’s body beyond physical recognition. //

If you’ve managed to read to the bottom of this list, you’re no longer wondering why the federal government covered up these documents for so long. But you may be wondering why this story isn’t a national headline and why journalists, many of whom claim to be uncovering humanitarian abuses, still choose to ignore it.

There may be mainstream media silence and gaslighting by medical experts who tell us there’s nothing to see here, but the American people know better. We are no longer immune to the utter depravity of our federal government’s partnership with the corporate abortion cartel and their cowering beneath the guise of science. The truth is on the fighting side.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the New York Times on Sunday that tourists will need to have received both doses of a COVID-19 vaccine to travel to any of the 27 member states of the European Union. “All 27 member states will accept, unconditionally, all those who are vaccinated with vaccines that are approved by E.M.A. [European Medicines Agency],” von der Leyen said.

The three vaccines being deployed in the United States — Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson — have been approved by the E.M.A. European regulators also gave the go-ahead on the AstraZeneca vaccine, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is still reviewing it for approval.

The specifics of how American tourists will have to provide proof of vaccination are still being worked out. Officials in Brussels told the Times a “low-tech solution” will suffice as the United States and international governments work out the kinks of delivering a program “acceptable and readable in the European Union, and vice versa.”

First thing, there's this picture of Nikki Haley and Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner going around Twitter, and people are going "Ugh." She's terrible. She's the worst.

rightwingsavages
@rightwingsavag2
If you could summarize the downfall of the @gop in one photo what would it look like? And why is it this photo? //

And I want you to assume whenever I say Nikki Haley that there's an exclamation point (Nikki!) because she is Jeb! in a skirt. And Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner is also Jeb! in a skirt. Apparently, he's running in the California recall because we need more novelty acts.

Reducing the size of the police force will reduce the number of interactions between the police and the citizenry — but not necessarily between the criminals and the citizenry.

According to a story from Forbes back in February,

A new survey of crime data in 34 of America’s biggest cities found a 30% increase in homicides in 2020, a jump researchers describe as having “no modern precedent” and link tentatively to the coronavirus pandemic and racial justice protests that started over the summer.

While homicide rates calculated from this survey topped 2019’s numbers in every month of the year, the biggest increase came after the May protests, with homicides rising 37% compared to 2019 in June through August (the study notes that this increase is statistically significant even taking into consideration a typical increase in homicides over the summer months).

My time and experience as a participant in the mechanism of the criminal justice system left me with one lasting impression that is not something well enough understood by the citizenry at large.

A function of the freedoms we all enjoy as citizens of this great country is that, for the most part, the police in the United States are not empowered to arrest people in order to prevent crimes. Most exercises of police power in the United States come in the aftermath of crimes that have already been committed, and the arrest is the action that begins the process for establishing guilt and accountability for the illegal acts in the criminal justice system.

One aspect of this freedom is that it incorporates a “risk-reward” calculation in criminal activity — “Is the reward from the criminal conduct such that it is worth the risk that I might get caught and go to jail?”

There is an entire segment of the population of the United States that lives according to this calculation because for them crime is easier than work. It takes less time and is usually more financially rewarding for those who don’t want to learn skills valuable to employers. It leaves much more free time every day of every week to do what they want to do rather than what their employer requires them to do in order to earn a paycheck.

When the risk of apprehension goes down, the risk-benefit calculation weighs even more heavily in favor of criminal behavior as compared to finding a job.

“Defunding the Police” makes the “work” of those who choose crime over employment even easier and less risky. ///

Once crime gets bad enough that politicians have to act, they will swing the pendulum so far the other direction that it may get stuck there: arresting people people to prevent crimes, because the population is so fed up with crime that they will accept ANY solution to make everyday life more safe.

April 16, 2021 at 6:42 p.m. CDT

The National Institutes of Health on Friday removed restrictions that the Trump administration imposed on research using fetal tissue, allowing university researchers and government scientists freer rein to use material from elective abortions when studying diseases and possible treatments.

A brief update for outside scientists from the NIH director’s office said the Department of Health and Human Services was reversing a 2019 decision that had required applicants for federal grants and contracts involving fetal tissue to undergo an extra layer of review by an ethics advisory board.

In a separate notice emailed Friday, NIH told its internal scientific and clinical directors that it was lifting a Trump-era ban on using federal money to buy human fetal tissue for biomedical studies by government employees.

Two black holes; one very warped tango.

Black Hole

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has charted his own course based on the real science, not science according to the Left. This was seen in his decisions to re-open the state’s economy in September 2020, keep schools open, how he protected residents in long-term care facilities, and prioritized Florida’s elderly (and most at-risk group) in the state’s vaccine rollout.

It’s not that DeSantis has been given good advice from advisers. According to Jayanta Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, the Florida governor does the research himself and actually understands the literature.

During an interview with "The Tom Woods Show," the professor said he’s "never met a politician like him" and called DeSantis "extraordinary."

"We had a two-hour conversation, about COVID policies, this is in September of last year … and he had read all the papers I referenced and not just my just my articles, lots and lots of other papers," said the doctor, who also has a Ph.D. in economics. "He knew all the details, it was a remarkable conversation. And then we had this like roundtable on September 25th ... and with DeSantis leading it, and the next day he lifted most of the restrictions all across Florida."

Bhattacharya explained the governor has "intellectual bravery" and is willing "to take a stand." Moreover, if DeSantis wanted to go up against any other governor—or epidemiologist, for that matter, he could, the doctor argued.

"I mean, most, most epidemiologists don’t know the literature as well as he does," Bhattacharya said. "I mean, I just, I don’t have the words… I’ve just been, I’m still stunned by it, I didn’t know anything about him actually, before, you know, basically before September really. I’ve just been very impressed."

On Friday afternoon, Facebook began attaching a ridiculous fact check to my top-read Federalist article of last week titled, “There’s No Way Americans Can Trust The Jury’s Chauvin Verdict.” Anyone who wanted to share the article on Facebook was forced to do so with the opinion-based “fact check” attached, which means Facebook also likely throttled the distribution of the article on its platform. //

This is not a “fact check.” It is a disagreement about what the facts indicate. It is also the naked suppression of ideas based on partisan ideology, using the monopoly power of Big Tech to control what people are allowed to say and discuss. This is a direct attack on Americans’ ability to have a self-governing society, which requires the free expression of ideas, not massive private entities deciding what people are allowed to say and share.

I said nothing illegal and called for no violence. I merely expressed my opinion about a current event of major public attention based on information the “fact checker” could not dispute as false.

Also, the “fact check” isn’t even about my specific article! Facebook attached a “fact check” that specifically argues with another person expressing a similar opinion — “Derek Chauvin did not get a fair trial” — then used it also to throttle my article that no “fact checker” publicly reviewed, all in the name of preventing “misinformation.” That’s ridiculous. It’s an utterly absurd and compromised process. Nobody could believe it is fair or reasonable except extreme partisans. //

Facebook started choking this opinion after more facts emerged that support it. On April 22, an alternate juror in the Chauvin trial, who was included in all the jury duties and treated like the other jurors except for not finally voting in the verdict, told a local news outlet, “I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again and I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.”

She also noted that during the trial rioters came near her home and protesters blocked a local interstate she was driving on. This clearly reinforces the factual basis for the opinion I expressed about the Chauvin trial in the article Facebook choked: “Given the circumstances of the trial, however, it’s extremely hard to believe the jury was solely concerned with either truth or justice. It’s extremely hard, if not impossible, for any thinking person not to have a reasonable doubt about the outcome.”

This juror’s information came out the day before Facebook and USA Today colluded to suppress an opinion supported by these facts. They clearly did so not based on facts, but based on a competing opinion. //

The USA Today article’s entire argument is: “Three lawyers disagree with you, so you’re not allowed to express this opinion.” But the question is not whether “three legal experts” have some opinion. The question is why USA Today is privileging some people’s opinions over those of others, and why Facebook knowingly uses them to do so. Everyone knows the answer is controlling people by controlling their speech.

Everybody also knows that you can get three lawyers to say just about anything you want them to. Their entire profession is based on advocating specific viewpoints in exchange for money.

Restoring genuine beauty in our cities goes hand in hand with any attempt to revive a spiritual nature amongst a people. //

There is no greater public expression of ideology, culture, or society than the architecture that we live with and see daily. President Trump acknowledged this with his executive order to “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” Britain also notes its importance with the inception of the “Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.”

Surprisingly, such attempts to restore and revive classical architecture have spawned a culture war in the field of architecture. Within 100 days of taking office, Joe Biden has already rescinded President Trump’s executive order, striking a victory for modernist and brutalist architectural designs.

This battle, in which classicists argue for more Western-classical buildings instead of contemporary styles, is unique amongst other cultural struggles. Why? Because, at least in this case, “conservatives” are on the offensive.

In the field of architecture, traditionalists are the revolutionaries fighting against the entrenched beliefs and notions of modern architecture. Yet the classical traditionalists also, according to recent polls, can boast vast popular support.

Despite these advantages, however, those who argue for a return to classical buildings face legitimate questions and problems. Primarily, what does a practical program look like, and what benefits does it bring? I discovered such a program when I arrived in Budapest to work at the Committee of National Remembrance, an independent research institution established by the Hungarian Parliament in 2013 that researches Hungary’s communist period.