In a curious alignment of political machines, both the Massachusetts House and the House of Representatives in Congress independently passed their own “CROWN Acts,” which both would, as WPRI’s Kayla Fish puts it in the case of Massachusetts, “prohibit discrimination based on a person’s hair.” Naturally, the bill is being sold in racial terms, but one of the twins who inspired the legislation describes it as much farther reaching:
“This would protect all hairstyles: straight hair, dyed, dreads, braids, everything,” Deanna [Cook] told Boston 25. “Hair should not affect whether you get a job, or whether you are going to be successful at an interview.”
The messaging on the national bill is more disciplined, with emphasis on its titular acronym: “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.” With that framing, the request is certainly reasonable that everybody in a pluralistic society should accept differences in standards for what constitutes formal or respectable styles for racial or ethnic groups whose bodies have different tendencies, as with hair.
We should not lose sight, however, of the essential action, here, which isn’t encouragement toward tolerance but the passage of a law. As a function of law, this legislation advances the principle that government can telling all private organizations what they can value — what they can think is important. From the smallest independent store to the largest national corporation, activists and politicians will be telling Americans in every industry that they are forbidden from believing that hair style matters to the functioning of their businesses.
If we’re to be responsible citizens of a free country, we must also invert the question of why companies should have standards for something as seemingly superficial as hair and ask whether government should be involved in something so seemingly superficial and subjective.
The United States has lost an important value — perhaps its most foundational. The principle used to be that we were free to make our own determinations for ourselves and for our organizations, with the government stepping in only when absolutely necessary and in limited circumstances. Woke progressives are ascendent in their campaign to make the United States of America a non-free country, wherein government sets standards from which people and organizations can only deviate when absolutely necessary and in limited circumstances.
Just so, this seemingly minor and morally obvious issue is furthering a profound change in our society. Consider the main axis of my circular political spectrum, which divides the left from the right in terms of where they believe morality should reside. Until this point in history, America has been to the right on this question, meaning that American law is structured (and American society is formed) such that morality is determined by the individual and fostered by the culture. A country of the left would hold that the government should codify morality, so that anything that is moral must be written into the law and immoral actions must also be illegal.
That is where our country is going, and history has proven again and again that down this path lies misery and death on a massive scale.
Featured image by 1MilliDollars on Unsplash.
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Does the headline of this post seem unreasonable? I can’t decide. I wrote it to illustrate a point about the unreasonable activism of woke progressives, but as I considered whether to go with it or not, the statement began to look like a pretty straightforward description of events.
The “fascist” is Jennifer Lima, who is a member of the North Kingstown School Committee. The fascism is her effort to harm a business for allowing parents in her district to schedule an event on its premises. (Her crew managed to get the event canceled, although the parents involved managed found another venue.)
The incriminating word in the following quotation is the “but” that retroactively erases her disclaimer of respect for civil rights:
“Everybody of course has their First Amendment right to speak and to share, you know, their thoughts on things. But I was disappointed in Brewed Awakenings that they had hosted this and that they were posting it on social media because that indicates support,” demonstrator Jennifer Lima said.
As the featured image of this post shows, Lima wasn’t just “disappointed.” She protested outside of the business calling it a “bigot academy.” In case you’ve been smart enough to pay minimal attention to cultural developments over the past few years, that’s a pretty severe accusation these days, and taking action to deprive others of their livelihood based on mere association with people whose ideas one dislikes is fascistic.
That is why roping Toray Plastics into a story about one of its employees seemed like it might be unfair (let alone noting that the company has received over a half million dollars from the state government for programs that may or may not have benefited her). In the limited context of trying to illustrate a point, however, I think a little edginess is justified. If anything, I’m being more fair than Lima, inasmuch as I’m only observing the connection, not accusing Toray of endorsing her fascism. On that count, the company’s PR department has not responded to my inquiry, but we can safely assume that the similarity between her titles as Political Organizer and Demand Supervisor is a pure accident of language.
Our community (broadly speaking) needs to back away from the edge of escalation. There have always been — think Salem witch trials — and will always be people like Jennifer Lima, who become so intoxicated with their own righteousness that they think any level of aggression justified for the good of humanity. They only become dangerous when others begin to react to their ravings as if they are reasonable… and especially when they begin to take government offices.
Featured image from Nicole Solas on Twitter.
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Whether in a fictional battle of good and evil or real-life politics, when the dark side is ascendant, we have an unfortunate tendency to ascribe to it a competence it does not have. Sure, a cabal of elite globalists may scheme on behalf of a Great Reset, but… they’re nuts. In the long run, their scheme will not work — we know this — and there’s no reason to assume they will succeed in implementing a plan that is sure to fail.
This truism can be difficult to feel because pathologies can be effective in a limited scope. Progressives have undeniably conquered education, which gives them a tremendous amount of influence. That the field of education was vulnerable to nonsense, however, does not make nonsense any more rational. Thus, in reading and in life, one might notice a peculiar confusion among younger adults. They’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated into an incoherent set of beliefs that is actually contrary to the values it claims to uphold, and they can’t help but learn from the more subtle, but more persistent, teacher of reality.
One bit of evidence is a VICE article on which I commented for Accuracy in Media. Seeking an explanation for the political establishment’s turn against work-from-home policies, Katie Way finds no villain as obvious as capitalism. Click the link for the full response, but as I write, to the contrary, “the ideology that wants everybody on an orderly treadmill from home to train to work to cafeteria/restaurant is socialism.”
Conservatives need only find a way to clear the fog of indoctrination from the eyes of the young, and “America’s political landscape would change overnight.”
Featured image by David Clode on Unsplash.
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If your feelings toward Donald Trump are negative, put them aside and imagine this situation with a non-establishment presidential candidate you would support. If your feelings toward him are positive, then just read on:
American Bridge said Trump was using his Save America PAC — registered as a political committee in support of multiple candidates — as a vehicle for his own 2024 ambitions, and that he must register his PAC as a presidential campaign committee in order to comply with the law.
That would subject him to tighter campaign-finance regulations, including a $2,900 limit on individual political contributions until the 2024 general election.
I’ve noted this before, but no direct political donation (particularly if it must be reported) can possibly match the value and degree of corruption implicit in a network of established players who have embedded their contributions in their (quote, unquote) non-political activities. A company that pays Hunter Biden for no-show work, largely entailing communication with his father or for neophyte artwork (1) cloaks the amount of its contribution, (2) is unlimited in the amount it can give, and (3) is acting on inside information about the politician’s intentions.
These propositions are true in the more-common and less-brazen situation in which politicians secure lifetime sinecures from special interests whose causes they advanced while in office. If the network is sufficiently established, there doesn’t even have to be a direct transaction; a narrow aristocracy simply maintains itself by internal and exclusive rules.
Campaign finance laws ensure that no candidate can announce early enough to compete with that level of institutionalized corruption by appealing to people who can afford to pay more than $2,900 in direct political contributions, but not the equivalent of a lifetime annuity.
The more one considers the actual functioning of our political and social systems, the more these audacious reversals of reality come into view. Campaign finance laws are sold as limits on corruption, but they make the system inevitably more corrupt. Advocates insist that their objective is to reduce the ability of moneyed interests to buy elections, but their policies ensure that nobody can compete with truly moneyed interests when it comes to buying politicians.
Featured image by Jon Tyson on Unsplash.
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According to Jack Perry’s uncritical recitation of the Anti-Defamation League of New England’s warning about an increase in “white supremacist propaganda,” Rhode Island is seeing a dangerous increase. By their own standards, though, the ADL and the Providence Journal are contributing to the threat. Consider the last line of the article:
“By using propaganda to spread hate, a small number of people can have an outsized impact, giving the appearance of larger numbers and affecting entire communities,” the report says.
Exactly. Post a few stickers around, and the ADL and Projo will tell people far and wide that you’re growing in popularity.
What precisely are we talking about, here?
Rhode Island had 78 incidents of white-supremacist propaganda in 2021, up from 61 in 2020 and 19 in 2019, the report says. …
About 70 of the Rhode Island incidents involved the Patriot Front distributing fliers with messages such as, “America First,” “For the nation, against the state,” “Not stolen, conquered” and “Reject poison,” according to the ADL.
All but eight of the “incidents” were fliers (aka free speech) with some variation of these stickers. The puzzling part, to me, is why the ADL and Perry would include the “reject poison” tagline as an example of white supremacist propaganda. Of itself, it is only a message not to do drugs. Is that “white supremacy”?
The inclusion of a pro-health message is illustrative of the dangerously muddled thinking of progressive activists. Anybody who actually reads the article (rather than merely reacting mindlessly, as is probably intended) will be confused. Rejecting poison is a good idea. “For the nation, against the state” could be the motto of patriotic libertarians. Many people take “America First” to be a statement wholly in opposition to handing our sovereignty over to a global cabal. Of the provided examples, only “Not stolen, conquered” is objectionable on its face.
American progressives are in a strange place, indicative of the fundamental dishonesty of their own rhetoric. They promote the notion of a growing white supremacist threat that requires good people to be on edge and willing to compromise their civil rights like free speech and donate money to progressive causes, so they have incentive to join in the effort of promoting the propagandists. Implicit in their warning is the assumption that white people, writ large, have an innate hatred and bigotry that can easily be drawn out with goofy images deployed by strange people.
Putting aside that insulting (and racist) assumption, if progressives really believe it, they should consider the danger of their attempts to bring attention to themselves by bringing attention to it. I suspect, however, that they don’t believe it but rather are sowing division and fear for self-interested reasons.
Featured image from the Parker County Sheriff’s Office on Weatherford Democrat.
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Just as he was out and about regularly reporting on Antifa/BLM protests in the Providence area, just as he was covering large protests against Governor Dan McKee’s vaccine mandate for health care worker, John DePetro has travelled to Poland and the Ukraine border to provide live, on-the-scene reportage.
So many young children from Ukraine being swept up by their parents and carried through a busy train station in Poland after traveling days on packed trains to leave their bombed out neighborhoods. Our first week has been both eye opening and heartbreaking to watch as Putin decided to bomb Ukraine and destroy the lives of millions of people while destroying the peace we enjoyed. The people I have met and interviewed are hard working people who love their country and their President. One might think people would have harsh words for their leader after their country had been attacked but the only words of hate are directed at Putin. It is disgraceful the way some Americans blindly follow the propaganda of Russia and China and root for their own country to fail while sharing misinformation to aid the enemy. Worse, conservative hosts are being shown on Russian state-TV praising Putin and bashing Biden. Troubling to see so many people confused as to what news is real and which news is foreign propaganda.
That last sentence strikes home in a not-quite-ironic way. Imagine for a moment that it was just about any other media personality from Rhode Island who had traveled around the world to provide this sort of coverage, whether somebody from the mainstream journalist clique or one of the progressive journalists who are so well received by the mainstream. The journalists of the Ocean State would be having him or her on as a recurring guest. They’d be applauding. They’d be encouraging funding.
But if you don’t listen to DePetro’s radio show or read Anchor Rising, you’d have no idea that anybody from the Rhode Island news universe is over there.
The blacklist is real. For most of the people who claim to keep you informed, who brings you news is at least as important as whether you receive it.
No doubt, many of those mainstreamers would nod along while (accidentally) reading DePetro’s complaint about Americans’ falling for foreign propaganda. What we really need, however, is for them to realize that they’re producing domestic propaganda that is of an identical character.
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It’s interesting how topics bubble up in the constant flow of information in which we swim, these days. Yesterday, I came across Martha Rosenberg’s interview with women’s health advocate Mike Gaskins, whose research has investigated the science and politics with which the birth-control pill became a cultural mainstay:
Several years ago, I heard a lecture by an autoimmune disease expert who explained how endocrine disruptors that mimic natural estrogen play a crucial role in the condition, but when I asked him about the pill specifically, he said it played no role “at all.” In fact, he said it had never been linked to any of the diseases.
Later, I went online and discovered a study that found a significant link between the pill and the autoimmune disease lupus. I thought the expert must be unaware of the study, until there was a quote from him in that very article saying it didn’t mean women should stop taking the pill. I became interested in why the medical community seems eager to downplay the pill’s risks and began my research.
The “expert’s” response feels very much like the doggedly insistent proclamations we’ve been getting about COVID vaccines.
Earlier today, I was listening to an episode of the Jordan Peterson podcast with his wife and daughter, and the conversation turned unexpectedly toward the women’s terrible experience with the pill and how it changed their personalities starkly for the worse.
Maybe the political health establishment became so brazen with COVID that people are beginning to question other campaigns, too.
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The amazing thing about Sarah Doiron’s report on the staged protest of the state Department of Education by teachers union members is that it doesn’t say why the state took control of their schools. The audacity is nothing short of shocking:
More than 100 teachers marched the streets of Providence Monday afternoon to demand the state end its takeover of the capital city’s school district.
The state took control of Providence Public Schools in 2019, and Providence Teachers Union President Maribeth Calabro argues nothing has changed since then.
“It’s stunning that things are worse, not better,” Calabro said. “If state leaders say otherwise, they’re not being honest.”
Let’s review. The Institute for Education Policy at Johns Hopkins School of Education conducted a study finding that Providence schools were failing their students with an intolerable mess. In perhaps the single instance of real integrity of his entire time in office, Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza insisted that the state must use its authority to implement a “transformational” contract with the union as the only way to fix the travesty.
The union dug in. The state government (in which the unions hold a majority share of corruption) and Department of Education attempted to play nice. And here we are.
Now the union has flipped the script, making it the state’s fault that it didn’t force the union to comply with what needed to be done. The media is reporting the event as straight news, going back to its preferred pro-union script. Doiron actually lets union president Maribeth Calabro go unchallenged in her rhetoric about “our kids.” No. The union did this to your kids, and now it is hiding behind them.
Worst of all, nobody of any stature is pointing out the obvious.
I learned an acronym from the world of addiction and abuse the other day that describes the union’s strategy perfectly: DARVO. Deny the behavior. Attack the accuser. Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender.
This problem is not going to be fixed until something happens to shake the very soul of Rhode Islanders. (Apparently the Johns Hopkins study was not enough.)
If you are unfortunate enough to have children in the Providence schools, do anything you can to get them out. If you are considering moving to Providence and have or may have children, go elsewhere unless you are confident you can afford private school throughout your children’s education.
Abusive thugs who win a victory like this don’t say amongst themselves, “That was a close one. We better fix things in a way we like before we’re forced to fix them in a way we don’t like.” Rather, they learn that their psychological abuse technique works.
Parents must realize that the government and people of Rhode Island do not have their backs, or at least they don’t have the ability to do anything about the abuse.
Featured image by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The governor we have and those who’d like to be
- Gas tax politics
- Republicans in the second district
- The madness of current politics across the board
Featured image by Tengyart on Unsplash.
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I’ve been trying to figure out which is the case: Either politicians have developed such thorough contempt for the people that they assume we’re complete fools whom they can deceive with impunity or we’re allowing people to gain public office whom a healthy civilization would have kept well away from the controls.
The problem goes all the way up to the most powerful offices in our country, but for local flavor, I have in mind a series of tweets from Democrat state representative Brianna Henries:
On Wednesday, the Labor committee is hearing a bill I introduced to raise the minimum wage to $19, end the tipped minimum wage, and tie future minimum wage increases to the consumer price index. I want to share why this bill matters to me
I currently manage a makeup store and have worked in retail or as a makeup artist my entire career. I know for many Rhode Islanders, low wages has meant tough decisions between rent and utilities, gas and groceries
For everyone talking about inflation right now: if the minimum wage grew with inflation for the past thirty plus years, Rhode Islanders would be making $24 an hour today. We are being ripped off with wages this low.
This bill also eliminates the tipped minimum wage, which is $3.89 an hour in Rhode Island. I was disappointed when my colleagues refused to raise it last year when we passed the $15 minimum wage.
The most obvious problem is that she’s just making stuff up. Thirty years ago, in 1992, Rhode Island’s minimum wage was bumped up 20-cents to $4.45. Increased by inflation, that would be $8.86 in 2022. In actuality, the minimum wage is currently $12.25. So, it’s beat inflation by about 40%.
This error (or lie) points to the more profound show of ignorance (or deceit). The model Henries apparently applies to the economy is something like a permanent nonage. Somewhere out there, the true grownups do the work and run our society, and they’re supposed to give us lifelong kids a fair allowance. Why is it people who complain about the “patriarchy” seem like they would actually prefer to live under one… or at least some kind of “archy” that consolidates power in somebody else’s hands?
The vision of the economy that progressives promote (whether or not they actually believe it) is so simplistic it boggles the mind. Employers aren’t sitting on big piles of cash that they refuse to give to workers. If they were, other employers could swoop in and take advantage of that inefficiency, whether by poaching employees or luring away customers, to put them out of business. To the extent that corrective isn’t possible, it’s because government is imposing rules to make competition impossible.
Policies like a $19 minimum wage will only make the problem worse. New businesses will not be able to compete, and established businesses will invest in automation that puts employees out of work.
Who benefits? Well, ideologues like Henries for one, because they’ll turn around and take advantage of the people’s pain in order to sell them another political solution that will only make things worse.
Featured image by Jennifer Uppendahl on Unsplash.
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