Federal Judge Sides With DeSantis on Mask Mandate Ban

On Sept. 15, a Miami federal judge handed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis a victory when he ruled against the parents of students with disabilities in a lawsuit over public school mask mandates.

Twelve parents from eight Florida school districts whose children have special needs sued the governor and the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) over a DeSantis executive order (pdf) that allows parents to opt out of student face coverings. The eight school boards, Alachua, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange, Palm Beach, Pasco, Miami-Dade, and Volusia, were also named in the suit for implementing the governor’s order. The federal suit argued that their children were at elevated risk of becoming ill or dying from COVID-19 if other children came to school without facial coverings.

In Judge K. Michael Moore’s decision, he denied the parents’ request for a preliminary injunction against July’s executive order, which was the catalyst for the Florida Department of Health to issue a rule (pdf) requiring school districts to allow parents to opt out of any student mask mandates. Thus far, 13 school districts have defied the governor’s order. Two counties, Broward and Alachua, have been fined for noncompliance, while others are under investigation by FDOE.

Moore found that the parents hadn’t exhausted all “remedies” at their respective schools to accommodate their children’s needs before bringing a lawsuit.

One of the attorneys for the parents, Matthew Dietz, said he isn’t sure if an appeal will be filed and hoped that the Biden administration would step in and bring forth some sort of remedy instead.

“We are disappointed in the decision of the court and are evaluating our options at this point,” Dietz said in an emailed statement. “We would hope and expect federal education officials and the U.S. Department of Justice will weigh in on the rights of children with disabilities to be safely integrated into their local schools.”

Recently, the U.S. Department of Education announced a grant program that provides funding for school districts in Florida (and elsewhere) that lose money for issuing “anti-coronavirus practices,” such as mask mandates. State officials were warned by the federal agency that they would be investigating whether the state’s ban on mask mandates violates federal civil rights laws that protect students with disabilities.

In the past, DeSantis has insisted that the new Parents Bill of Rights law gives parents the authority to decide whether their children should wear face coverings to school.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/federal-judge-sides-with-desantis-on-mask-mandate-ban_4000757.html

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Wokeness: An Evil of Our Age

History is replete with examples of nations, successful and not-so-successful alike, that abruptly committed suicide.

The ancient polis of Corcyra devoured itself in a bloody conflict as a collective madness took hold of the island city-state during the Peloponnesian War.

The Jacobins in 1793 hijacked the French Revolution and turned a movement toward a constitutional republic into a totalitarian, year-zero effort to destroy the past and ensure equity for all—or else. The Reign of Terror—and eventually Napoleon—followed.

The effort to force war-weary Czarist Russia to reform into a constitutional monarchy ended up being kidnapped by a small but lethal clique of Leninist Bolsheviks. What ensued was the destruction of Russian life—and millions of corpses—over the next 70 years. Ditto Mao Zedong’s various murderous resets culminating in the cannibalistic “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s final tab was 60-70 million deaths of his fellow Chinese.

French, Russian, and Chinese wokists all toppled statues, canceled out the nonbelievers, wiped away history, tore down monuments, and declared themselves the purest of all generations in their year zero—before getting down to the business of dividing up the spoils and settling scores.

Most of these bloodbaths started out with the supposedly noble idea of delivering social justice, equity, and fairness before they inevitably went deadly and feral. We should be just as worried about our own woke pandemic.

Mythological

Start with the idea that “wokeness” is an ideology divorced from reality. Nearly all of its premises are complete distortions.

Between 2017 and 2020, minorities had made the greatest gains in employment in U.S. history. Women currently represent about 60 percent of all college students.

Recent wage gains for minority middle-class Americans outpaced those of the white working- and middle class. The latter were underrepresented in college enrollments and as graduates—but vastly overrepresented (at twice their percentage of the general population) in the toll of combat dead in Afghanistan and Iraq. Asian-Americans and a dozen other ethnic groups outpace so-called whites in per capita and household income. “White privilege” is usually a sloppy term that applies mostly to the white elites who use it to smear others.

America was in our sixth decade of “affirmative action,” the euphemism of ensuring equity of result by calibrating race and gender—but not class—in hiring and admissions. Proportional representation and disparate impact continued or were even enhanced. But they became increasingly selective as entire fields from the Postal Service to professional sports were somehow exempt from racial set-asides applied to others. Quotas disappeared when the marginalized were “overrepresented” in a field.

The historical reparatory effort of the massive programs born out of the Great Society continued to address the baleful legacy of slavery that had ended over 150 years ago, as well as Southern Jim Crow laws that had largely disappeared 40-50 years ago, and the fumes of such racial toxicity. So, Martin Luther King’s “content of our character” rather than the “color of our skin” was still embraced as the melting-pot ideal of the Civil Rights movement that had fought for integration and full assimilation into American society. Meanwhile, intermarriage has never been more common.

The desperate Left had therefore been forced to invent adjectives and phraseology like “systemic racism” and “microaggression” and “whiteness” given the vast majority of Americans did not feel or express or act out on “racism.”

In other words, wokeness created the mythology that the nonwhite were worse off than ever before—a typical revolutionary fabrication to evoke the sort of hysteria necessary for an otherwise unpopular agenda. But then again, we live in an age where we were assured Hunter Biden’s lost laptop was “Russian disinformation”, the Steele dossier was iron-clad proof of something, and a pangolin or a bat birthed COVID-19.

The wrongful death of George Floyd in police custody—despite his later angelic deification, Floyd was in fact a felon with a history of violence toward women, arrested in the act of passing counterfeit U.S. currency—was the work of a cruel rogue cop and his incompetent enablers. Otherwise, data and statistics did not show that African American males were dying while in police custody in numbers greater than their proportions of those yearly arrested. Nor were they the victims of some pandemic of interracial hate crimes. Indeed, blacks statistically were more likely to commit rare violent interracial crimes than were others, including targeted hate crimes against other ethnic and racial groups.

Elite-Driven

Another great lie was the propaganda that the woke movement was a grass-roots movement. Yet statue-toppling, vandalism, Trotskyism, and cancel culture remain largely the work of college students, upper-middle class white coastal elites, celebrities, and privileged minorities in the media, academia, law, the corporate world, entertainment, and professional sports.

In a reductionist sense, much of the woke movement became a battle among elites to leverage diversity czars in universities, reparational quotas in administrative hiring and college admissions, and a sort of racialized intramural reseating among first-class passengers on the corporate and government Lido deck.

While wokeists harangued New York and Hollywood for more nonwhites in TV commercials, thousands of young African American males continued to be slaughtered in the inner-cities, as schools in those places resisted reform and remained indifferent to the poor quality of education offered residents. Because the culpable municipal officials—hard-Left diversity mayors, neo-Marxist district attorneys, and “reformist” police chiefs—were themselves woke, no one cared about derelict governance. And so, the killing continues unabated, surrealistically unremarked upon by the wokest.

Class considerations were suppressed, given that the beneficiaries of wokeness were not necessarily previously poor and oppressed. In our racialized madness, billionaires like LeBron James, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, and Beyonce, multimillionaires like the Obamas and Colin Kaepernick, and moneyed political, corporate, entertainment, military, and sports grandees—play-acted oppression and victimization from their villas and privileged perches, in perfect Marie Antoinette fashion. All they lacked was fake peasant garb and a village at Versailles.

The architects themselves of wokeness mostly cashed in on the supposedly toxic capitalist system that they had so harangued as the ground zero of “systemic racism.” So, BLM cofounder and self-described “cultural Marxist” Patrisse Cullors is now “retired”—and the savvy owner of four new homes, residing in nearly all-white tony Topanga Canyon, with a new $35,000 security gate. How else could she best use her black privilege to direct her multimillion-dollar war against “white privilege”?

Professor Ibram X. Kendi (neé Henry Rogers), whose “antiracist” new industry calls for racism to stop racism and discrimination to end discrimination, now charges his corporate and university clients a reportedly $20,000 penance fee for a phoned-in Zoom chat. (He apparently has no discount rate for the poorer of his clients). Kendi no doubt took Lenin to heart (“Capitalists will sell us the rope to hang them with.”) when he hawks his video indulgences at $333 a minute.

The cultural revolutionary Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates was customarily already one step ahead and has moved on from the woke movement to a multimillion-dollar career writing black-themed comic books or adapting them to the big screen. Barack and Michelle Obama, long ago known for their cinematic creativity, leveraged a $50 million “consulting” movie deal with Netflix, whose founder is best known in California for his efforts to fund the campaign against Larry Elder, including commercials starring . . . Barack Obama.

Racist

Wokeness took the Obama-era mantra of diversity and simply shed any pretense that it was not racist. Remember, after 2009 our elites institutionalized the new-old idea that anyone claiming not to be white was suddenly part of a new inclusive oppressed class, one at war with the racial oppressors.

“Diversity” was a clever update of the previously failed Jesse Jackson idea of a victimized rainbow coalition that would aggregate, and force-multiply collective grievances against white male victimizers.

Suddenly, ethnic groups with higher per capita incomes than so-called whites were victims. There were no requisites to being “diverse” other than claiming nonwhite status. Wealthy Punjabi immigrants, Chilean aristocrats, illegal aliens fleeing racist Mexico, Nigerian doctors—anyone rich or poor, resident or citizen, victimized or not—was presto! “diverse” and thereby eligible for reparatory claims in hiring and admissions.

Many liberal whites wished to get in on it and got caught at it—whether Ward Churchill with this entire Native American tribal garb, or, on the cheaper side, Elizabeth Warren with her “high” cheek bones or racial fabulists Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King. After all, if gender is “constructed,” then naturally race, too, could become a construct.

All this is dangerous because we are now logically headed to DNA-categorized ID badges reminiscent of yellow Star of David patches. Here once again Elizabeth Warren had been in the lead—claiming that her boomeranged DNA results showing a tiny drop of Native American lineage were thus proof that she was an indigenous victim after all—and so in her troubled mind truly had been deserving as the first Native American law professor at Harvard. Given this nonsense, one would think a distracted America has no real debt and is in possession of a secure border, a thriving economy, a brilliantly educated youth, and only friends abroad.

Why is Wokeism Deadly?

Wokeism is a lethal distraction. As General Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and Chief of Naval Operations Michael Gilday lectured the nation on the various nefarious strains of white rage, whiteness, and white supremacy, the Taliban was systematically gobbling up Afghanistan. Meanwhile their boss in the White House quoted his woke military experts in order to lie there was no danger of a general collapse. No general objected. Apparently, Biden even phoned the Afghan president in a sordid attempt to leverage him likewise to lie that all was well. The ubiquitous Alexander Vindman was not listening in this time around.

In a traditional Islamic society, what were woke Americans doing bragging about gender studies programs at an Afghan university, flying pride flags at the U.S. embassy, and encouraging honorific George Floyd street murals? All that is usually the haughty cultural imperialism of would-be winners, not the virtue signaling of a defeated and humiliated diplomatic and military cohort fleeing toward the exits.

Think of this for a second: as the U.S. bureaucracy invested trillions in Afghanistan to virtue-signal against supposed George-Floyd type racism, its media appendages said nothing back home as the black candidate for the California governorship was the target of an egg-throwing woman wearing a gorilla mask. What a grotesque reminder that empires flounder abroad as they rot at home.

So these distractions never sleep, even amid the greatest defeat and loss of global deterrence in U.S. military history since Vietnam. True ideologues that they are, even our defeated on the battlefield are unfazed in their wokeist creed.

As Kabul suffered its end of days, our bemedaled wokists were still lecturing the country about the gender ratios of the Afghan refugees on U.S. flights out, the culturally sensitive food awaiting them, and a new idea of a soft Taliban—or the notion that the medieval gangsters who had defeated the Pentagon were not really all that bad, but more likely “partners” in a shared agenda of seeing us skedaddle by August 31. Will they say that in six months?

Woke indemnity blinds us to racism and classism. Gavin Newsom, of French Laundry repute, is the epitome of a white-male mediocrity leveraging his rich family friends to elevate himself by quid pro quo favoritism. Joe Biden has voiced the most racist rants of any presidential candidate or president in the last 50 years (just recently he referred to his own senior black official as “boy”). Both bought woke insurance that inoculates them against their hypocrisy—or perhaps further fuels their own class and racial biases with an efficacy rate much more impressive than COVID vaccinations.

The creation of the blanket term “whiteness” is racist to the core. It imputes to anyone considered not sufficiently pigmented some sort of conspiratorial evil, regardless of individual character, beliefs, family history, or ideological outlook. It is incoherent since it blames the United States, and everything in it, for whiteness, and then demands that the nonwhite south of the equator from Africa to Asia be given instant access to this supposedly failed white contaminated miasma. Scarier still for the wokist, whiteness is just the new face of the old racist “blackness,” in which racists imputed to individual blacks supposedly collective pathologies in order to justify discrimination against a single individual.

Once the neo-Confederate idea of color triumphs, then there is no logical reason why “blackness,” “brownness,” “yellowness,” “redness” and every sort of pigmentary category should not be used to condemn individuals for their supposed membership in a taboo racial tribe, massaged and negatively stereotyped for contemporary advantage. We are headed back to 1840 not ahead to 2040.

If Something Can’t Go On Forever, It Will Stop

Finally, wokeism is unsustainable. We are already seeing large numbers of the supposedly “nonwhite” pushback against the wokeist trajectory, knowing that such a racialist monster may soon devour them, too. Drawing artificial racial Mason-Dixon lines inside millions of multiracial families, after the initial grifting subsides, will only incur anger at those who drew them. When Confederates embraced the one-drop, one-sixteenth rule, there was unanimous later agreement that it was not just abjectly racist, but lunatic; when the woke borrow such racial distillery it too will eventually be rejected as the crackpot hatred that it is.

There are probably some 100 million white males of the lower- and middle classes. Most feel little if any identity with the woke upper-middle class and wealthy bicoastal white male elite of some 20-30 million. If anything, a trucker from Boise has more in common with a Mexican-American sheriff in Modesto than he does with a woke techie in Menlo Park.

So, what is truly evil is the current woke trademark of loud privileged whites who scapegoat the losers in the globalist game as racist (or in the Obama-Hillary Clinton-Biden patois of “clingers,” “deplorables,” “irredeemables,” “dregs,” “chumps”), mostly out of elite condescension, virtue-signaling guilt, and pathetic contextualizing their own privilege by projecting their unearned status onto supposedly distant cultural losers.

There will be a substantial political correction to the madness, mostly because without one there is no longer a confident America abroad that advances and protects the interest of a free world challenged by nightmarish Chinese Communism.

Such racist selectivity would destroy a meritocratic and productive free market economy at home that fuels the Left’s massive government redistribution.

The victory of woke would guarantee that as Americans went full pre-modern and pre-civilizational, we would look in the mirror, straining to redefine and recategorize ourselves, and then search out which particular tribal band offers us the best protection from the roving mobs—and each other.

Even the Chinese apparat could not invent a more evil, more macabre way to destroy the United States.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13758&omhide=true

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Labeling The Founding Documents ‘Offensive’ Is Just The Beginning Of The National Archives’ Spiteful Plans

Words matter, and few words have mattered more in the history of the United States than those contained within the U.S. Constitution, Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, and other founding-era documents stewarded by the National Archives.

Protecting and celebrating the most important works in U.S. history isn’t only important because the Constitution and Bill of Rights, as well as other documents in the National Archives, are still legally binding, but also because they tell a story of who we are as a nation and what it means to be American. Today leftists, including many officials in the Biden administration, are actively working to rewrite that story, and to undermine every part of America’s exceptional past.

Trigger Warnings On the Constitution

One notable example is the National Archives’ decision to post a “Harmful Language Alert” banner above documents in its digital archives, including the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. According to the Archives’ warning, its documents include many “outdated, biased, offensive, and possibly violent views and opinions,” as well as documents that “reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes.”

Since the National Archives contains more than 100 million records, there are bound to be some that are offensive. But rather than identify prominent documents that are indeed offensive as such, the Archives chose to issue a “Harmful Language” warning across the board, knowing full well the documents read most often on its website and in its halls are founding-era materials like the Constitution.

You might be tempted to chalk up the Archives’ warning label to pure laziness. Being woke and accurate is hard when you’re in charge of maintaining millions of records, I’m sure. But it’s worth noting that the warning label emerged from the National Archives’ radical Task Force on Racism, which has developed dozens of other plans meant to give the impression that America’s history is full of racism, hatred, and violence, rather than highlight the nation’s incredible achievements.

Rewriting Historical Records

In a 105-page report issued by the task force in April 2021, the National Archives suggested it, like the United States, is full of “structural racism,” including “a Rotunda in our flagship building that lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [black, indigenous, people of color], women, and other communities.” Since the report’s release in April, Archivist of the United States David Ferriero has “accepted the recommendations in full.”

The report further stated other examples of structural racism at the Archives are “legacy descriptions that use racial slurs and harmful language to describe BIPOC communities.” According to the task force, the Archives must revise these descriptions as part of a long-term program to transform its exhibits, archival information and descriptions, and policies.

Alongside obviously offensive language, the report included many harmless or historically accurate “slurs” to be purged or “recontextualized,” such as “crippled,” “elderly,” “handicapped,” “slave,” and “Eskimo.” Following the recommendations of the report, descriptions will be altered to remove not only overtly racist language but also “information that implies and reinforces damaging stereotypes of BIPOC individuals and communities while valorizing and protecting White people.”

The Archives further says its website and catalog must be changed because their descriptions “over-describe the records and achievements of White men by using more extensive, superlative, and subjective language.”

‘Recontextualizing’ the Rotunda

Additionally, the Archives will transform its famous Rotunda to “create a more inclusive and historically accurate tribute to the nation’s founding.” Its “Reimagine the Rotunda” plan includes “contemporary views on the men who framed the founding documents and their participation in and positions on slavery,” new sculptures, and a “recontextualizing” of the murals now in the Rotunda.

The report also suggested new, intense diversity training courses for its employees. Although it isn’t clear exactly what those training courses may entail, a look at the task force report’s glossary reveals some of what National Archives employees could experience in the near future.

For example, the task force defines “White Privilege” as “The unquestioned and unearned set of advantages, entitlements, benefits, and choices bestowed on people solely because they are White.”

Even more disturbingly, the Archives says “White Supremacy Culture” is the “dominant, unquestioned standards of behavior and ways of functioning embodied by the vast majority of institutions in the United States. These standards may be seen as mainstream, dominant cultural practices; they have evolved from the United States’ history of white supremacy.”

By rewriting America’s history and “recontextualizing” her founding documents and the people who created them, Joe Biden’s National Archives is seeking to undermine the founders of our country and the values they fought — and in some cases, died — to establish and defend.

Undermining American Ideals

This is vitally important, because if America’s founding, Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence become nothing more than additional examples of “structural racism” and “white supremacy culture,” then why should we protect them today? Why should we care about the “rights” they allegedly aim to protect?

This, not racial justice, seems to be the real reason for the Biden administration’s efforts. We can and should honor the legacies of black Americans, women, and all other groups of Americans, as well as recognize that in the past, some groups were horribly abused and mistreated — often by government.

But rather than see the civil rights advancements of the last two centuries as an extension of the principles of the founding era, the Biden administration, including the National Archives, is obsessed with demonizing our nation and “recontextualizing” seemingly every positive event in history as further proof of structural racism or other forms of bias. Furthermore, they often ignore that many of the Founding Fathers — including some Southern slaveholders — happily believed their efforts would someday result in the liberation of all people.

The founding of the United States wasn’t only the creation of a new country, it was the expression of a radical idea that has inspired the birth of countless freedom movements around the world: that all people are endowed with inalienable rights granted not by government, but by a higher power.

The National Archives Is Destroying Its One Job

Of course, America has not always lived up to this ideal. Women were not granted the right to vote until the 20th century. Black Americans were unjustly enslaved and then segregated, before being granted the rights they deserve. Jewish Americans, Irish Americans, Chinese Americans, Catholic Americans, and various other groups faced intense discrimination at one point or another in our history.

The United States has never been and will never be a perfect place, because it is composed of imperfect people. But the ideals that have served as the foundation of the American way, ideals that are clearly articulated in documents like the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence, are about as perfect as mankind has ever devised.

Instead of trying to undermine American values, the leaders of the National Archives should fulfill their agency’s mission of promoting them — and the people who worked and suffered to create the greatest country the world has ever known. If they fail to do so, Congress should demand the president find new leaders who will.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/16/labeling-the-founding-documents-offensive-is-just-the-beginning-of-the-national-archives-spiteful-plans/

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Federal Judge Hands Biden Administration Crushing Legal Defeat

A federal judge has denied Joe Biden’s emergency request to block the Texas abortion ban that has saved almost 2,000 babies from abortion,”

“United States District Judge Robert Pitman in a one page decision this afternoon denying Biden’s request to block the law while the lawsuit against it continues,” the website reported.

“[T]his case presents complex, important questions of law that merit a full opportunity for the parties to present their positions to the Court,” Judge Pitman, an Obama appointee, wrote. “Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED that the United States’ Opposed Motion for Expedited Briefing Schedule, (Dkt. 13), is DENIED.”

The Supreme Court in early September handed the organized left a stunning moral and legal defeat by essentially upholding Texas’ Heartbeat Law. A number of the state’s abortion providers had brought lawsuits over the legislation, which gives expectant mothers six weeks to decide whether or not to terminate the life of a developing child.

As National Review notes, the 5-4 decision “came down along ideological lines, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s three liberal justices dissenting.”

“The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue,” the court’s majority wrote. “But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden.”

“In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit,” the decision said. “In particular, this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law, and in no way limits other procedurally proper challenges to the Texas law, including in Texas state courts.”

The decision forestalls an October hearing of a Mississippi case that could determine the constitutionality of the issue, which was purportedly addressed by Roe v. Wade in what is considered by several legal scholars to be a flawed and questionable decision.

I am sure this will not in any way stop Biden and his team of government overreach in other areas of our lives but thankfully, they were stopped this time.

https://dailyheadlines.net/federal-judge-hands-biden-administration-crushing-legal-defeat/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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