Tuesday, August 27, 2019



Educating Youth on the Dangers of Socialism

Socialism’s growing popularity among young people in this country should be a major concern for Liberty-loving Americans. President Donald Trump loudly promises that America will never be a socialist country. Many conservative politicians and media pundits are inclined to agree with him. But ridiculing socialist ideas and simply counting on America to always remain a federal republic just because it always has been one will not defeat socialism in the United States.

Socialism is popular because the Left is adept at controlling the narrative. This may be a hard fact to face, but face it we must. The Left controls public education, the news media, and the entertainment industry. For the last couple of generations, leftists in these venues have altered the perceptions of what America is to millions of young people. Now that they have reached a point of critical mass, they are looking to convince these same young people to cast aside our great republic in favor of a socialist regime.

A new organization has stepped into the fray to challenge this assault. Young Americans Against Socialism set up shop just last week with the goal of spreading the truth about socialism, in part by sharing true stories of the young people who have lived it.

YAAS was founded by Morgan Zegers, the 22-year-old daughter of an Iraq War vet who ran for the New York State Assembly in 2018 to help stop the downward economic spiral of her home state. Zegers gained a great deal of media attention for her ultimately unsuccessful effort and was named a Rising Star of the New York GOP and the New York Young Republicans.

Zegers’s strategy is to use two of the Left’s powerful tools against them: emotion and social media. Social media is the most obvious place to have this conversation because that is where Zegers will find her target audience. The Left relies on emotion because it produces quick and powerful responses and because it clouds reason and judgment, two concepts that are Kryptonite to any socialist idea. The videos YAAS will post on social media recount emotional stories of young people who have directly suffered under socialism and have blessedly escaped its clutches.

Zegers will also use social media to set the record straight about socialism. Among the myths to be dispelled are the so-called heroism of the prolific murderer Che Guevara, why the Left insists on incorrectly categorizing Scandinavian countries as socialist, what really happened to oil-rich Venezuela, and how capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in world history.

Given her youth and her dedicated social-media strategy, Zegers is in a better position to change the narrative than a news pundit that young people probably won’t even watch. It’s exciting to see another group dedicated to pushing back against socialism’s appeal to America’s youth. It’s been a long time coming, and as Zegers argues, we must push back because Liberty is worth fighting for.

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How LGBTQ Groups Are Quietly Dismantling Norms, Changing Education

Virtually every week, there seems to be another issue that preoccupies the country.

But while our attention is focused on President Donald Trump, Google, Charlottesville, Russia, impeachment, Jeffrey Epstein, the next elections, racism, a trade war with China, the #MeToo movement, or something else, LGBTQ organizations are quietly going about their work dismantling ethical norms, making a mockery of education, ruining innocent people’s lives, and destroying children’s innocence.

If you think this is overstated, here are some examples:

The LGBTQ Dismantling of Women’s Sports

Last month, a transgender weightlifter won multiple gold medals at the 2019 Pacific Games in Samoa. Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand won two gold medals and a silver in the three heavyweight categories for women weighing more than 87 kilograms, or 192 pounds. Hubbard is physically male.

Last year, two biologically male sophomores at different Connecticut high schools competed in the female division of the state open track and field competition. They came in first and second place in the 100- and 200-meter dashes.

Because the Western world cowers before LGBTQ demands, no matter how unfair they are to women athletes, men who deem themselves female must be allowed to compete against women. They almost always win.

The Dismantling of Male and Female—Even at Birth

As reported by the Associated Press: “Parents also can choose (gender) ‘X’ for newborns. New York City is joining California, Oregon, and Washington state in allowing an undesignated gender option on birth certificates. A similar provision takes effect in New Jersey in February.”

What percentage of Americans believe children are lucky if born to parents who will not identify them at birth as male or female? On the other hand, how many of us think such parents are engaged in a form of child abuse?

The Dismantling of Children’s Innocence and Parental Authority

The Associated Press also recently reported that “California has overhauled its sex education guidance for public school teachers, encouraging them to talk about gender identity with kindergartners.”

Tatyana Dzyubak, an elementary school teacher in the Sacramento area, objected: “I shouldn’t be teaching that stuff. That’s for parents to do.”

But parents and parental authority have always been a thorn in the side of totalitarian movements. Therefore, dismantling parental authority is one of the primary goals of the left, of which LGBTQ organizations are a major component.

Libraries in major urban centers now feature Drag Queen Story Hour—drag queens reading stories to preschool-age children. (Read, for example, the laudatory New York Times article “Drag Queen Story Hour Puts the Rainbow in Reading” from May 19, 2017.)

A few weeks ago, the popular actor and TV host Mario Lopez told Candace Owens:

If you’re 3 years old and you’re saying you’re feeling a certain way or you think you’re a boy or a girl, whatever the case may be, I just think it’s dangerous as a parent to make that determination then: ‘OK, well, then you’re going to be a boy or a girl,’ whatever the case may be. … I think parents need to allow their kids to be kids, but at the same time, you gotta be the adult in the situation.

For sensibly and respectfully saying what any loving parent of a 3-year-old should say, he was so forcefully condemned by GLAAD and PFLAG, two of the biggest LGBTQ organizations, that, knowing his livelihood was on the line, he immediately recanted.

In the style of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he “recanted” everything he said and acknowledged how much he still has to learn about parents allowing 3-year-olds to determine their gender.

The Dismantling of Educational Norms

CNN reported last week:

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law a bill that ensures the contributions of LGBTQ people are taught in public schools. …

[The bill states] ‘In public schools only, the teaching of history shall include a study of the roles and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the history of this country and this State.’

Equality Illinois, the state’s largest LGBTQ civil rights advocacy organization, supported the bill and said the curriculum can have a ‘positive effect on students’ self-image and make their peers more accepting.’

Once the purpose of teaching history is changed from teaching what happened to “having a positive effect on students’ self-image,” history is no longer about what happened; it is propaganda. But rewriting history is not a problem for the left.

As a famous Soviet dissident joke put it: “In the Soviet Union, the future is known; it’s the past that is always changing.”

I note almost every day that truth is a liberal value and a conservative value, but it has never been a left-wing value. This is just one more example.

The Dismantling of Reality

David Zirin, sports editor of The Nation: “There is another argument against allowing trans athletes to compete with cis-gender athletes that suggests that their presence hurts cis-women and cis-girls. But this line of thought doesn’t acknowledge that trans women are in fact women” (italics added).

Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in a letter to USA Powerlifting: “The myth that trans women have a ‘direct competitive advantage’ is not supported by medical science.”

Sunu Chandy of the National Women’s Law Center: “There’s no research to support the claim that allowing trans athletes to play on teams that fit their gender identity will create a competitive imbalance.”

How can these people say such lies? Because lying is not an issue when truth is not a value.

LGBTQ organizations care about lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders as much as communists cared about workers. They use them as a cover for their real agenda: dismantling civilization as we know it.

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Chinese 'cash cows' For Australian universities

I think this is a false alarm. Chinese kids are coming to Australia not at the behest and expense of the Chinese government but at the behest and expense of their rich Chinese parents.  So the politics are unlikedly to affect anything

Australia’s universities are taking a multi-billion-dollar gamble with taxpayer money to pursue a high-risk, high-reward international growth strategy that may ultimately prove incompatible with their public service mission. Their revenues are booming as they enrol record numbers of international students, particularly from China. As long as the China boom continues, the universities’ gamble will look like a success. If and when the China bubble bursts, taxpayers may be forced to step in to clean up the mess.

The CIS Analysis Paper The China Student Boom and the Risks It Poses to Australian Universities published this week pulls together data from universities, state and Commonwealth agencies, foreign governments, international organisations, and press reports to present a full picture of the risks being taken by Australian universities in enrolling unprecedented numbers of Chinese students.

While the report was being researched, ABC’s Four Corners came out with its own investigation into international students, ‘Cash Cows’ (aired May 6, and now available online). The documentary uncovered weak international admissions standards at Central Queensland, Southern Cross and Murdoch, but our report shows that the potential exists for similar problems even at highly respected institutions like Sydney, Melbourne, ANU, UNSW, UTS, Adelaide, and Queensland.

Even more worrying, these seven universities have become so reliant on Chinese student money that it may pose a serious financial risk to the universities’ continuing operations. At these seven universities, Chinese students seem to account for more than 50% of all international students. All seven have higher proportions of international and Chinese students than any university in the entire United States. And they rely on Chinese student course fees for anywhere from 13% (Adelaide and ANU) to 22-23% (UNSW and Sydney) of their total revenues.

The University of Sydney alone seems to generate more than half a billion dollars in annual revenue from Chinese student course fees.

Chinese enrollments are particularly unstable because of macroeconomic factors like the slowing of China’s economy, the lack of full convertibility of the Chinese yuan, and fluctuations in the value of the yuan versus the Australian dollar.

Australian universities, and particularly the seven leading universities spotlighted in our report, should act now to mitigate the risk of a sudden revenue collapse by raising admissions standards and reducing international student enrollments. They should make, publish, and implement plans to reduce their reliance on international students (and Chinese students in particular) to manageable levels, with targets set both for the university as a whole and for individual programs.

Australia’s universities are taking massive financial risks in pursuit of international student revenues. As the world’s leading banks in 2008, they must be aware that they are ‘too big to fail’. As public and publicly-accountable institutions, they enjoy an implicit guarantee that if things go wrong, the government will come to the rescue. The government should step in now to ensure that the universities change course before it is too late.

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