while the city DOE says all families who have requested devices for remote learning have gotten them, the parents who are suing in Manhattan Supreme Court say poor kids and those who don’t speak English are still not getting “free and reliable Internet service or reliable, working iPads and laptops.”

“Untold numbers of low-income students, and especially low-income students of color, in New York City have been deprived and continue to be deprived, of the sound basic education that is their right,” the group of anonymous parents claim in the litigation.

Some of the children whose parents are fighting in court did not receive any devices for months into remote learning, according to the court papers. //

A July audit by the City Comptroller’s office found that as of March, the DOE was still reviewing 19,425 student requests for tablets, 16,000 of which dated to 2020, while 3,045 students were mistakenly sent more than one remote learning device.

The city has handed out more than 650,000 Internet enabled devices and more than 27,000 hot spots, and schools have bought more than 400,000 devices, said a DOE spokeswoman who called the city’s distribution of remote learning devices “robust.”

Our national elite is united enough to have the vices of a ruling class, but not the virtues. In particular, they are cohesive enough to be perceived as oppressive by much of the populace, but they are rarely gracious and conciliatory when needed. They know how to make enemies, but not friends.

Culturally and ideologically, America’s elites have consolidated into a regime, with Big Tech, the legacy media, academia, Big Business, the entertainment industry, and, of course, the leaders of the Democratic Party, all singing from the same hymnal, even if they sometimes squabble over the key. But many citizens refuse to join in. //

The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us. Thus, hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets warning that some villain or other — Donald Trump, Fox News, Facebook misinformation, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even local leaders and parents — is a Threat to Our Democracy! By democracy, they mostly mean the wishes of the ruling class. //

But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us. Thus, hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets warning that some villain or other — Donald Trump, Fox News, Facebook misinformation, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even local leaders and parents — is a Threat to Our Democracy! By democracy, they mostly mean the wishes of the ruling class. //

The regime has similarly decreed that racists — by which they mean anyone who won’t repeat the dogmas of critical race theory and “anti-racist” hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo — should be suppressed throughout public education, academia, and even the business world. Similar trends abound throughout the centers of entertainment, finance, culture, and even the newly woke military.

There is nothing democratic about this. Indeed, it is the elites who threaten our democracy, such as when corporate media colluded with Big Tech to censor accurate reporting about Biden family scandals, or Big Business imposes economic sanctions on red states over everything from election laws to LGBT issues. The hypocrisy of it all rankles.

Woke capital’s CEOs wave rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners at home while using slave labor abroad. Democrats and supposed policy experts pushing to ban misinformation are often leading disseminators of it, from the Russian collusion hoax to the dismissal of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin. //

Elites are inevitable; their legitimacy and continuity is not. Ours lack the virtue and wisdom needed for good governance and leadership. Instead of expertise, they offer incompetence, malice, and herd-like conformity to self-serving ideological fads. Hopefully, political defeat and cultural failure will force a reckoning.

Unlearning money avoidance is hard. Don't waste time on regrets.

When you stumble — and we all do — Brewer says it's important to lead with curiosity, not criticism, because the latter option isn't productive.

Instead of falling into a pattern of self-judgment with constant "review and regret" every time you impulse-shop or avoid the utility bill, Brewer suggests approaching mistakes with a growth mindset. What could you learn from your misstep? What is it telling you?

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Select Committee plans its colonoscopy-like partisan investigation, few have been held to account for the violent riots that laid waste to a once vibrant, dynamic Minneapolis and many other cities. According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association report in 2020, an estimated 574 violent riots took place in the weeks after Minneapolis burned, resulting in damage of up to $2 billion.

Pelosi made sure the capital was locked down and surrounded by the National Guard and coils of concertina wire, city leaders and governors left citizens at the mercy of thugs hurling Molotov cocktails, helpless as their homes and businesses burned to the ground.

America’s preeminent revisionist historian Nikole Hannah-Jones perfectly encapsulated the elitist mentality in a June 2020 CBS interview: “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” //

In his Tuesday op-ed, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “What happened last Jan. 6 was much bigger and more important than politics.” Of course it was, because it was about the elitist political and corporate media establishment. They continue to inflate the severity and lasting effects of the Jan. 6 riot because they have an outsized idea of their own influence and importance. The disparity of concern and reaction is telling: when their lives are inconvenienced, it’s a national disaster; when our lives are destroyed, they hand us a shovel.

Any suggestion of a threat to America’s credentialed class is presented as an affront to democracy and a sin equal to the worst treason in our nation’s history. Meanwhile, the destruction of dozens of cities and thousands of lives in middle America has been accepted as a necessary airing of grievances, a reactionary event in the name of social justice that inflicted pain on those who probably deserved it anyway.

It is an iteration of the divide between those who see themselves as rulers and the people over which they rule. It extends from the leftist media that needs to perpetuate democracy’s threat to fight off the ratings implosion since President Trump left office, to sanctimonious politicians who view the public as nothing more than the masked, faceless unwashed who should be grateful that the 2020 riots exposed their racist ways and now can correct them.

Oh, and about our "Virginia" reference in the headline. Most readers will know what we're talking about. For those who don't, and for those who might enjoy re-reading it, here's a link to the Newseum's posting of the New York Sun's 1897 editorial known as "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."

You can’t learn from your experiences if you can’t remember them in some capacity. As a child, you may have burned your hand by touching a hot lightbulb, or ran too fast down a hill and fell hard after you tripped over your own feet. These experiences teach you simple lessons. Don’t touch a hot lightbulb, and pace yourself when moving quickly down a hill.

Human collective experience is just like that. It’s imperative that we remember the mistakes we make in the past in order to avoid making them again.

In fact, one of the most important lessons we’ve learned is about this lesson in particular, and it was best put by George Santayana when he said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” //

You’ve likely noticed the deletion of various parts of our history, or at the very least, the attempt at completely rewriting it. For instance, the “1619 Project” is an attempt at reimagining the history of the United States with more of a focus on slavery than every other aspect of our story that brought this nation to what it is today. If the people who push this monstrosity were given their way, they would actually achieve the opposite of raising awareness about the evils of slavery and racism.

The founding fathers created their nation in a time when slavery was so embedded into culture that it would have killed it if they had immediately done away with it, but they, being men who truly believed in freedom and opportunity for all, set things in motion that would slowly poison slavery to death and eventually see the nation cast it off. To be sure, it’s a moment that came to fruition under President Abraham Lincoln, who later said that he was finishing what the founders had started.

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2020/07/02/lincoln-debunked-dems-n245192 //

Perhaps it won’t take well, but future generations will be so far removed from the concept because we’ve taken the lessons out of the picture by completely stripping it from other forms of media.

In other words, we lose the lesson. We have nothing to learn from, and thus no one should be surprised when, at some point in the future, repeating the sin becomes a reality.

That slavery is a sin needs to stay right where it is. Moreover, how we dealt with that sin in the past also needs to stay fully intact.

We as a nation eliminated a great evil and at great cost, and that should never be forgotten. We should never forget why we eliminated it too.

What Jan. 6 showed us is that democracy really is delicate and bringing it to the brink has consequences.

Cable news anchors and other journalists in Washington act like that’s a truism only one side needs to hear and it’s not theirs, but the opposite is true.

History didn’t start on Jan. 6. The riot did not happen in a vacuum. And what preceded it wasn’t just Donald Trump telling his supporters that the election was rigged. It was months of discord and discontent instigated and inflamed by the very media who now swear that they’re the ones who understand just how sensitive our self-governance can be. //

Yeah, the riot in the Capitol building was disgusting and inexcusable. But in American democracy, recognizing the disgusting and inexcusable is supposed to go both ways. When it doesn’t, there are consequences.

Everyone has their breaking point. That’s not something that’s going to be only afforded to one side. Unfortunately, the media don’t want to learn that lesson of Jan. 6.

Have Democrats found the issue on which they can break what’s left of Senate traditions and parlay a 50-50 split into partisan domination? It’s far from clear that anything will be enough to move the two recalcitrant members of their caucus — Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., — to change their minds about voting to change the chamber’s rules that require a majority of 60 in order to invoke cloture and end filibusters. But if anything will do it, it might be the claim that passing their game-changing federal voting rights bill is the only way to defend American democracy against Republican insurrectionists. //

with their ambitious spending plans blocked, Democrats are pivoting in the new year to a renewed effort to pass something that is likely even dearer to the hearts of their left-wing base: changing voting laws to make it easier for Democrats to win elections. They are tying the “nuclear option” on the filibuster and passage of voting bills to their attempt to turn the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot into a festival aimed at demonizing all Republicans as “insurrectionist” traitors who present a threat to democracy.

With their cheering section in the corporate media treating “Insurrection Day” observances as if it were a new national holiday and more important than 9/11, they’ve created more leverage that could shift their two holdouts. If it does, that would allow Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote to transform the electoral landscape in a manner that will end federalism for all intents and purposes and give federal bureaucrats unprecedented power to help Democrats win elections.

Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York’s Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps

word is that they finally awarded their first contract for the tests yesterday. They still don’t have the website through which you could order the tests ready yet, and the tests wouldn’t be available to be shipped to people for several more weeks yet, according to White House officials. Then the 500 million tests wouldn’t all be available at once — when tests become available. They’ll be doled out over months. This means they’ll basically be out of tests quickly, and then doled out with an eyedropper afterward because 500 million for the whole country isn’t much of anything.

Translation? If you care about tests, you’re not going to get any real solutions from Joe Biden. So, this sounds like it’s going to continue to be a problem, especially for schools and/or businesses who may require testing, if you can’t find the tests.

The thing that gets me about all this is that they’ve had months to work this out and still haven’t figured it out.

Think about this for a moment. President Donald Trump was able to get multiple vaccines developed, up, and ready for distribution in record time from March to December of 2020 — a feat that usually takes years — through a unique private-public partnership.

Joe Biden can’t even get a test distribution plan together for tests that have been long developed in more time, despite promising more testing before he came in.