Florida’s DeSantis Takes Aim at America’s ‘Ruling Class’

President Joe Biden and the “entrenched political class” are ruining America with the help of a corrupt and partisan corporate media, says Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who promised to lead the fight against the current regime.

In a 40-minute speech Thursday to about 800 conservative supporters of The Heritage Foundation and its grassroots partner, Heritage Action for America, the Florida governor tackled a range of issues where Biden and his left-wing allies want to transform America. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

DeSantis reserved some of his strongest criticism for the “elites” and “globalists” who he said have led America astray.

“Biden really represents potentially the culmination of—or, I mean, hopefully, the coup de grâce of—this entrenched political class that has really ruined a lot about our country over the last generation. It’s not limited to just Democrats,” DeSantis said. “There’s a uni-party in Washington, D.C., and they look out for themselves more than the rest of the American people.”

He added: “Our ruling class doesn’t think [there’s] anything distinctive about American citizenship. That’s why they would consider paying reparations to people that came across our border illegally, because they think people have a right to come, regardless of the laws and Constitution of the United States.”

Biden recently acknowledged his administration was considering payments to illegal immigrants who were caught illegally entering the United States. The Wall Street Journal reported the payments could be as much as $450,000 per illegal immigrant.

“You deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance,” Biden said Nov. 6, while disputing the $450,000 figure. “What that will be, I have no idea.”

DeSantis cited Biden’s open border policies, rising gas prices, soaring inflation, supply chain crisis, Afghanistan withdrawal disaster, and COVID-19 failures as some of the “daily humiliations” confronting the current administration.

“He’s failing across the board,” he said, “and I think it’s causing more and more people to look and recognize the failures of leftist governance.”

Despite Democrats’ having control of the White House and Congress, Biden’s party is struggling to enact its agenda. DeSantis said it’s a blessing their numerical margins are so narrow in both the House and Senate. Otherwise, lawmakers would be attempting to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, federalize our elections, and grant D.C. statehood.

“If we go to kitchen tables throughout Middle America, and think about what the families are talking about, they’re not talking about making D.C. a state,” the Florida chief executive said. “They’re not talking about federalizing election procedures. They’re talking about inflation. They’re talking about gas prices. They’re talking about all these other things that are so important.”

The disconnect between the American people and their representatives in Washington has far-reaching consequences, DeSantis warned, and not just domestically. He said Biden’s policies would embolden our foreign adversaries, particularly China.

“These elites have done more than anybody to facilitate the rise of China,” he said. “You look at the next three years. What’s China’s going to do? They watch Biden floundering around. These people are really tough. They’re going to make sure that they exact a huge amount of price based on Biden’s failures.”

Unfortunately, DeSantis said, there’s no accountability in Washington, D.C.—a problem he blamed on media outlets. He singled out Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to Biden and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“If you’re in the club in D.C., there’s no accountability. How the hell else does Fauci still have a job?” DeSantis said. “Part of the reason that’s true is because we have a very corrupt and partisan corporate media in this country, and they really serve as the Praetorian Guard for these elites.”

Several years ago, conservatives could turn to social media to bypass these media outlets. Today, some of those companies—particularly, Facebook, Google, and Twitter—now routinely censor alternative viewpoints.

As governor, DeSantis worked with state lawmakers to hold those companies accountable. The law, signed May 24, gives Floridians the power to sue technology platforms.

“Big Tech is something we have to take head-on, and I’m not somebody who believes that because they’re private, they can do whatever the hell they want to,” he said. “They are hurting our country, and they’re hurting our society.”

DeSantis promised more action to counter the Biden administration and other left-wing politicians. He vowed to stand up for traditional American values and against the teaching of critical race theory in schools.

“We’re not spending tax dollars to teach our kids to hate our country, or to hate each other,” he said. “That is not going to happen here.”

And when Florida enacted election reforms earlier this year, DeSantis made clear he wouldn’t be intimated by the left’s threats or corporate protests. He told CEOs they could become political actors, but would face pushback for doing so.

“The result was the Legislature passed the bill. I signed the bill. The left had a spasm; the media had a spasm. But the businesses didn’t say anything in Florida, because they understood I’m not going to let them smear my people, my legislators, or me with these false narratives,” he said. “Virtue signaling has a cost in the state of Florida, and the cost is me fighting back.”

DeSantis said the results have been positive for Florida—and politically positive for conservatives.

“When I got elected governor November of 2018, there were almost 300,000 more registered Democrats in the state of Florida than Republicans,” he said. “As I stand here before you today, three years later, for the first time in the history of the state of Florida, there are more registered Republicans than Democrats.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/11/15/floridas-desantis-takes-aim-at-americas-ruling-class

********************************************

Only the Rich and Powerful Can Thrive in Lawless San Francisco

In “progressive” San Francisco, safety is for the rich. That’s the reality of what’s happening in the San Francisco Bay Area as bad policy and anti-police attitudes have created a haven for criminality. Like many other urban parts of America, the Bay Area has been hit with a historic surge in violent crime in the last few years.

However, unlike many other parts of the country, the Bay Area has also been hit by a huge uptick in car theft, property crimes, and shoplifting.

One would think that this would necessitate a massive response by city leaders and the police department to counter the crime surge.

Instead, San Francisco attempted to defund the police following the death of George Floyd in May of last year. Unsurprisingly, it now has a major deficit of police personnel and can’t find replacements for a department where over a third of its officers have retired.

I wonder why? Truly, a mystery.

On top of that, San Francisco has a district attorney, Chesa Boudin, whose plan for “radical change” and equality has been mostly to release criminals and not prosecute repeat offenders of serious crimes.

Boudin has been so extreme that dozens of his mostly left-wing prosecutors have quit.

“Chesa has a radical approach that involves not charging crime in the first place and simply releasing individuals with no rehabilitation and putting them in positions where they are simply more likely to re-offend,” prosecutor Brooke Jenkins said to Bay Area NBC affiliate. “Being an African American and Latino woman, I would wholeheartedly agree that the criminal justice system needs a lot of work, but when you are a district attorney, your job is to have balance.”

The result of this slew of policies has been rampant criminality and lawlessness.

In October, CBS San Francisco reported that a group of families in the Marina District, a wealthy San Francisco neighborhood, has banded together to pay for private security in their neighborhood.

“We don’t feel safe in our neighborhood,” said resident Katie Lyons, according to CBS San Francisco. “And we have an alarm, we have cameras on our property, but we want the extra security of having someone have eyes on our place.”

People are understandably trying to protect themselves. Given the level of crime, private security seems like a good investment.

“It’s a nice area down here, people are afraid of what’s been going on,” said special patrol officer Alan Byard. “They want a safe place to raise their kids. In the last year, I’ve had 10 of my clients move out of the city.”

This is not an isolated problem in the Bay Area, which is filled with leaders of the same ideological bent as San Francisco.

My parents, who live in Oakland, have had the same car stolen twice in the last six months, and their neighborhood has been hit with constant burglaries and property crimes. The number of “for sale” signs in front of houses on their street is notable.

It’s not just homeowners, businesses are getting hit hard, too.

Walgreens, a major pharmacy chain, has decided to pull up stakes and will be closing its doors in San Francisco, on account, it says, of rampant unchecked robberies by organized thieves.

The San Francisco Chronicle, which is seemingly eager to tell Bay Area residents that their lying eyes deceive them, ran a “fact check” claiming that “data” doesn’t support the claim that theft is up. The numbers it cited were reported robberies, which at some store locations weren’t elevated compared to previous years. Though at some locations they were, according to the Chronicle’s numbers.

Of course, the Chronicle’s graphs don’t show the unreported robberies. What incentive do stores have to report crimes if nothing gets done to stop them?

According to The New York Times, Walgreens said that in San Francisco, the company spends on security “46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment.”

There could certainly be other factors in Walgreens leaving San Francisco—hardly a business-friendly environment—but typically businesses don’t just waste money on security or close stores en masse for no good reason.

Also, Walgreens has hardly been alone. Other retail stores have been ravaged and are also closing stores in the area.

Despite these attempts to make all seem well, the Chronicle tipped its hand about Bay Area crime when it asked readers if they should just accept high crime as a part of criminal justice reform and focus on barricading their homes.

Somehow, this wasn’t satire.

San Francisco’s mess highlights one of the biggest issues with the anti-police movement. Truly, the middle class, poor, and minorities suffer most. Wealthy people and neighborhoods will find a way to buy their own private security, but everyone else will be left to fend for themselves in a state of fear.

In an article for The Wall Street Journal, columnist Jason Riley perfectly laid out why this catastrophe strikes at the heart of left-wing policies, which are sold as countermeasures to “inequality”:

Tempting though it may be to blame the social dysfunction in poorer communities on heartless business owners or racist cops, the bigger blame surely lies with public policies that condone counterproductive behavior and make successful businesses much more difficult to operate. The fallout from antipolice protests in recent years has been all too predictable, as has the left’s response to it. Large employers quit urban areas after the riots of the 1960s as well, and some of those communities still haven’t fully recovered. Until the rule of law is restored and enforced, they probably never will.

Well said. It appears history is repeating itself.

As I’ve written before, when law and order breaks down—as it has in the San Francisco Bay Area—apart from criminals, only the wealthy and powerful can thrive.

A landscape dotted by wealthy, gated communities surrounded by lawlessness, poverty, and crime is typical in plenty of banana republics. Sadly, we will increasingly have it in the United States if this continues.

What’s happening in San Francisco is a prime example of how to turn something that is very good—a beautiful city in a picture perfect and economically prosperous location—into an undesirable, dangerous environment where residents dream to escape to pretty much anywhere else.

Alas, amid this catastrophe, San Francisco leaders have bigger priorities than making the city a livable place for all residents.

They are too busy looking for people to blame, statues to tear down, and school names to change.

Don’t worry, all will be well. It’s for equality, or something.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/11/15/only-the-rich-and-powerful-can-thrive-in-lawless-san-francisco

********************************************

The Supreme Court Tactic That Aims to Kill Affirmative Action

The plaintiffs who filed lawsuits accusing Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill of racial discrimination in their admissions policies are asking the Supreme Court to hear both cases together, potentially increasing the chances that the justices will issue a sweeping ruling that strikes down affirmative action across higher education.

A group known as Students for Fair Admissions sued both schools on the same day in 2014. Its targeting of both a private and a public university was part of a long-term legal strategy that seeks to overturn a practice that the Supreme Court has upheld in some fashion for more than four decades, as colleges have worked to admit a more racially diverse student body.

The Harvard case has already been heard by a federal appeals court, while the North Carolina case has only reached the district level — with rulings against the plaintiffs in both. But Students for Fair Admissions argues in a petition filed to the Supreme Court on Thursday that the justices regularly fast-track cases where similar issues are already pending before them and should hear the two suits together.

That is what happened almost two decades ago in a ruling that affirmed the very precedent that Students for Fair Admissions seeks to overturn. The court decided to hear two affirmative action challenges at the University of Michigan — one at the law school and one at the undergraduate level — at the same time, bypassing the appeals court in the undergraduate case.

In 2003, those cases, known as Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, resulted in decisions striking down the college’s system for admitting a more racially diverse student body as too mechanical, but affirming the law school’s consideration of race in admissions, allowing affirmative action to continue.

The Supreme Court has tilted more conservative in recent years with the addition of three justices nominated by former President Donald J. Trump. They are considered potentially receptive to arguments against race-conscious admissions practices, emboldening opponents of affirmative action.

But the court has put off a decision on whether to accept the Harvard case until it hears from the Biden administration, whose brief is expected soon. If the justices take the Harvard case, it would make sense for them to consider the North Carolina lawsuit at the same time, some legal experts said — especially as there might be greater public interest in the use of affirmative action at a taxpayer-supported institution.

“It’s possible that the court would feel more comfortable with a case involving a public university,” said Justin Driver, a Yale law professor and expert in constitutional law, adding, “I think this can be seen as trying to force the hand of the Supreme Court to issue a decision invalidating affirmative action sooner rather than later.”

Ilya Shapiro, a constitutional law expert at the Cato Institute, threw some cold water on the strategy. He said he did not believe it would make any difference whether North Carolina was added to the Harvard case because the court was unlikely to treat public universities differently from private ones that accept federal funds. But he said that if he were in the plaintiffs’ position, he would probably pursue the same maneuver to remind the court that if it did not review Harvard’s policy, there was another case coming behind.

The strategy of filing against both North Carolina and Harvard was orchestrated by Edward Blum, a financial adviser who founded Students for Fair Admissions. He has spearheaded more than two dozen lawsuits challenging affirmative action practices and voting rights laws, including a case against the University of Texas at Austin that led to the Supreme Court’s most recent decision supporting race-conscious admissions policies in 2016.

The plaintiffs accused Harvard of using a subjective personal metric to discriminate against high-performing Asian Americans and to create an unspoken ceiling for them in admissions. The argument in North Carolina was more conventional, contending that the university discriminated against white and Asian applicants by giving preferences to Black, Hispanic and Native American applicants. The universities denied those accusations and defended their admissions practices.

The two-pronged attack faltered when the North Carolina case fell behind the Harvard case by about two years. A federal judge ruled for Harvard in 2019, and the appeals court affirmed that ruling in 2020, while a judge did not rule in the North Carolina case until last month — also in favor of the university.

If the justices choose to hear both cases, the court could rule in a narrow way, either upholding the admissions systems at one or the other university or both, or asking for specific fixes, which would have little relevance to higher education as a whole. Or it could rule more broadly, taking on the bigger topic of race-conscious admissions in a decision that would apply across the land.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/us/affirmative-action-harvard-unc.html

*********************************************

The sad reality of gender quotas

Bettina Arndt writes from Australia:

My firefighter quota story has attracted a lot of attention and prompted all manner of interesting correspondence. I thought I would send an update, showing you some of the comments and intriguing news about ongoing battles on the gender quotas front.

First a wonderful story about a fracas currently taking place over the National Jazz Awards. This year this major award focused on jazz pianists and the ten finalists have been announced. Take a look at them here. Horrors, they are all men!

All hell has broken loose at this politically incorrect outcome, particularly since, due to COVID, the competition was judged through blind online auditions. All ten best candidates just happened to be men. Naturally, the very active women in today’s jazz world immediately started complaining, saying it needed to be made “fairer” by removing the blind audition and including a gender quota. Isn’t that pathetic? But, oh, so typical.

Science caves to gender warriors

Scientific American has just published an intriguing story about the most prestigious award given by the world’s largest earth and space science society, the American Geophysical Union. The AGU’s fellow’s award recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to their fields through scientific innovation, breakthroughs and discoveries.

The list of the top five candidates, all nominated by peers after a rigorous process, came in – and they were all men. So, the committee charged with making the final decision about the fellowship wimped out. The fellowship was not awarded.

Gender battles in the police force.

Plenty of policemen have been in touch with me, talking about the impact of gender quotas on the police service. Here are comments from some of them:

“At the police academy back in 1978 all recruits had to pass an aerobic course in a limited time in order to graduate. We all had to train early in the morning for months to get through, unless you were one of the 50% female recruits who weren't required to complete the same standard. Later, after graduating, I was badly beaten by a huge drunk driver I was trying to arrest; the policewoman who was my partner had locked herself in the police van.”

Another one who has been in the force for 12 years talked about declining physical standards:

“We used to have large fences in the obstacle course but a lot of the girls trying to join did not have the upper body strength to get over the fence, so they just removed the fence from the course. Hmm, I’m pretty sure they will have to jump fences in real life and the bad guys run just as fast if it’s a female officer chasing them.”

He also mentioned other ways the training has changed:

“The actors who play the role of bad guys at the academy used to call us horrible names and really go to town on us during scenarios because that's what happens in real life. But a few of the girls complained about being called "a cunt" or being told that they were going to be raped. So, the actors are not allowed to say things like that anymore. Well. I’m sorry but on the road, you’re going to have the worst things said to you and you need to get over it! It’s your job to take it and remain professional.”

Various people alerted me to the interesting fact that six months ago Queensland’s corruption watchdog, the Crime and Corruption Commission found thousands of men had been discriminated against as a result of the Qld police department’s 50 per cent gender target. Different standards were found to apply to male and female applicants with men forced to reach “artificially high” cut-off scores and female applicants approved despite failing physical and cognitive tests. Funnily enough, the gender quota was introduced under a male police commissioner Ian Steward, but scrapped by a female one – Katarina Carroll, when she was appointed in 2019.

Thoughts from the trenches

Finally, random thoughts/comments from a variety of people, including many dealing with these gender issues in their workplaces - mostly gathered from my YouTube channel where I posted the firefighter video:

“A couple of decades ago I was a controller in the Rural Fire Service. It was notable that two occasions I had to call ambulance to female firefighters who had either collapsed or were close to collapse. In a crew returning from a hazard reduction a lightly built young woman of about 18-22 was very faint, lost muscle tone, went deathly pale. The whole crew and truck were out of the game while the group captain responded to the ambulance. Very embarrassing for her but potentially dangerous on the fire ground with half a dozen strong fit young men withdrawn.”

“Early this year, near our local shopping centre carpark, my husband noticed two female ambulance officers obviously struggling to lift patient up into their ambulance. They were grateful when he went across the road and helped them lift the stretcher (with a strapped on fairly solid male) up and over the deep gutter and up into the ambulance. He said the two youngish women were of rather slight builds and quite obviously just did not have the combined physical strength to get the stretchered patient up into their vehicle.”

“I've been a firefighter for 23 years. In reality, half the guys on my department have a hard enough time doing the job when it comes to a serious working fire. And as you get older it gets harder to perform. In my younger years it was exciting fighting fires but the past couple I have been on were taxing on my stamina. You have to have a maniacal attitude and be in shape to be able to get the job done when the sh*t hits the fan. This ain’t no reality show or TV series.”

“Women will be killed by this change in rules, or members of the public. Will there end up being civil suits against the government for allowing people that aren’t competent to do the job? I am a woman & have worked in the fishing, plumbing, and manual labour industries and I know I am unable to do physical tasks that men can do. Does that mean because I am a woman all of us should be put at risk by attempting a task that I cannot safely do? That is a blatant OHS issue that as an employer I could be prosecuted for, but the government is allowed to breach it because it’s woke.”

“It's also about camaraderie. The other firefighters want to make sure they can trust the capabilities of the other members of their team. They're trusting those people with their lives.”

“About time! I've noticed a huge gender gap in the statistics between men and women killed on the job. More women in dangerous jobs should close that gap significantly.”

“The women won’t be in dangerous jobs- they will be in admin, communications, etc, because they will be too much of a liability to their colleagues and themselves to be actually on the front line. They will, however, get paid the same, if not more.”

That’s it, folks. I hope you enjoyed reading this lively correspondence, often from people who told me they wouldn’t dare talk publicly about these taboo topics.

https://thinkspot.com/discourse/OJuqOX/post/bettina-arndt/the-sad-reality-of-gender-quotas/bvZtjy

****************************************

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)

*****************************************