Tag: propaganda

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education and schooling ideological culture

Kids Paid to Propagandize

Pravda, propaganda, education, government spending

“You get paid good.” 

So said one student when asked “Why should students join CFJ?”

How well-​paid? $1,400, for learning to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice.” 

Parrot left-​wing propaganda, that is.

The activist group Californians for Justice has paid at least 78 public high school students a total of around $100,000 to take CFJ’s ideological training. Another $20,200 has gone to parents for participating.

The training apparently does not include lessons in independent thinking or assessing alternative viewpoints, such as the view that “social justice” is typically a euphemism for collectivist injustice.

One teacher, who preferred to remain anonymous lest she lose her job, told The Free Press that it’s helpful to know what students think “would help them learn better, but” the students were “obviously reading scripts that have words that they don’t know how to say.” One trainee advised this teacher that students would “come to class on time if we built relationships with them.”

Another teacher in the district, agreed that “CFJ is not helping students find their own voices.… They’re teaching them parroting … the exact opposite of how you empower children.” 

The focus on “racial justice” is manifested in CFJ’s own recruiting: its website reports that CFJ has “trained hundreds of youth of color in Long Beach to be community leaders and organizers.” Why only “of color”?

The training is not funded by strictly voluntary donations, of course. Long Beach Unified School District has been subsidizing it, using taxpayer dollars. The district has already given CFJ nearly $2 million.

The whole operation stinks to high heaven. But they’re “paid good.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy social media

One for the Memory Hole?

Osama, letter, censorshiip, Tik Tok

An important historical document. Though published all over the Internet, it was most linked-​to where it was housed by The Guardian, the British newspaper.

But it has been taken down by The Guardian. This is what it says on the page where it formerly resided:

Removed: document

This page previously displayed a document containing, in translation, the full text of Osama bin Laden’s “letter to the American people”, which was reported on in the Observer on Sunday 24 November 2002. The document, which was published here on the same day, was removed on 15 November 2023.

The transcript published on our website had been widely shared on social media without the full context. Therefore we decided to take it down and direct readers instead to the news article that originally contextualised it.

Just like the news media, claiming their coverage provides full context, but deprecating the primary source document itself!

Orwellian.

In an article on Thursday, “TikTok ‘aggressively’ taking down videos promoting Bin Laden ‘letter to America,’” The Guardian explains some of the background of the current fracas. Youngsters on TikTok and elsewhere had recently discovered Osama bin Laden’s letter — which Representative Ron Paul has often famously referenced — and were expressing their surprise, interest, and judgments on social media. Many of them were awful takes, of course, as is common among the young … and others. 

But remember the keywords: free speech.

Under pressure from politicians, bureaucrats, Jewish activist groups, and conservative influencers, the free speech of users of Tik Tok and X (to name just two) were abridged, disallowed from expressing their opinions of — or even quoting — the late terrorist.

TikTok explained itself on X: “Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism. We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.”

Discussing the letter is not, of course, “supporting” “terrorism.”

Yet Osama’s letter has been scrubbed from most websites that had published it. It can nevertheless be found, by paying subscribers, at scribd​.com — at least it could as of Sunday.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Accountability crime and punishment

The Bums’ Rush

Gavin Newsom, Ji Jinping, China, San Francisco, propaganda

Californians have long been talking about cleaning up San Francisco from the waste laid to the city by its well-​compensated bums along with coddled criminals, entitled inebriates, and the happy homeless. 

And then last week it happened. The city got cleaned up and scrubbed down. Darn quick.

All it took was the arrival of the President. 

Of China.

Xi Jinping touched down just days ago for the Asia-​Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, at which our own Somnambulant-​in-​Chief also teetered around, so the clean-​up crews worked overtime to make a good impression.

There’s been a lot of speculation about it all. Couldn’t those who have been creating this filthy and dangerous environment on the streets of San Fran have been dealt with (and not pampered) a long time ago?

Many have remarked: so it’s Xi whom San Francisco Democrats really look up to? Not their own citizens? Everyday San Franciscans don’t matter? Only The Eastern King of Genocidal Totalitarianism?

“Is the president embarrassed,” a reporter asked National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Monday, “that an American city needs to go through a total makeover to be presentable for his out-​of-​town guests?”

No real answer.

But what did the city do, exactly?

Moved the homeless out of the way, first. 

And then the streets were hosed off, the graffiti sanded or painted over.

Arguably, corralling the homeless from sector to sector of the city would be one way to disincentivize squatting, as would arresting and trying street-​dwellers for public drug use and excretion — for some things must be kept private, not engaged in helter-skelter. 

Things like defecating. 

Sexual intercourse. 

Shooting up.

Years ago, no one had to explain this to anyone.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people national politics & policies

He Is the Eggman

Joe Biden, age

Humpty Dumpty was a good egg. 

Well, that’s what we tend to think, but the original nursery rhyme doesn’t specify an eggman (goo goo g’joob) at all. And says nothing about his character. 

All the rhyme says? He had a great fall, and the king’s forces — masculine and equine — couldn’t make him whole.

This was brought to mind with yet another pratfall by President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., along with yet another stream of journalistic puffery trying to make the octogenarian seem like a good egg — and the falls insignificant.

That was the general tenor of Adele Suliman’s Washington Post article, “Biden isn’t the only politician to fall: Why we can’t look away,” last Friday. Ms. Suliman provides a history of stumbling pols, which she relates to Biden’s most recent tumble, at the Air Force Academy after his commencement speech.

But it’s the New York Times that went all out, with four authors explaining our shared Biden moment: “The two Joe Bidens coexist in the same octogenarian president: Sharp and wise at critical moments, the product of decades of seasoning, able to rise to the occasion even in the dead of night to confront a dangerous world.”

Yet, also, Biden’s “a little slower, a little softer, a little harder of hearing, a little more tentative in his walk, a little more prone to occasional lapses of memory in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has reached their ninth decade or has a parent who has.”

The article has been roundly ridiculed, but the problem is, if anything, underplayed. 

Now is not the time to be worrying about an eggman president.

It’s our eggshell republic that should be on our minds.

Goo goo g’joob.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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international affairs

Here-​at-​Home Problem

China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, censorship, propaganda

The China problem is “not just a distant ‘over there’ problem,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R‑Wisc.) recently argued. “As the spy balloon incident as well as the illegal CCP police stations on American soil illustrate, it’s a ‘right here at home’ problem.”

It’s also a just-​north-​of-​us problem. Canada is currently expelling a Chinese diplomat and dealing with the fallout over China’s interventions in Canadian politics, along with big financial gifts to a foundation for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s father.

An article in The Globe and Mail nonchalantly explained the reasons China is engaged in trying to control the speech of every one of the planet’s inhabitants. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has many international goals:

  • “build acceptance abroad for its claims on Taiwan, a self-​ruled island that it … reserves the right to annex by force.”
  • “play down its conduct in Xinjiang, where the office of former UN Human Rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet last year said China has committed ‘serious human-​rights violations.’”
  • “generate support for a draconian 2020 national-​security law to silence opposition and dissent in Hong Kong.”
  • “quell foreign support for Tibet, a region China invaded and annexed more than 70 years ago, and to discourage opposition to Beijing’s militarization of the South China Sea and sweeping maritime claims in the region.”

Having committed a long list of crimes against humanity, the CCP understandably demands that everyone keep their mouths shut. 

Rep. Gallagher believes the U.S. should improve “our deterrent posture across the Taiwan Strait” and communicate “in clear terms that we will not stand idly by while the CCP continues to increase its aggression internationally” — while President Biden has repeatedly pledged U.S. military support for Taiwan.

But for some reason, Biden has never discussed the prospect with the American public. 

As if it weren’t our concern, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
ideological culture too much government

Public TV Vetoed

Public TV, television, state media, propaganda

One shouldn’t need the latest ratcheting-​up of the culture wars to oppose what we call, in America, “public radio and TV.” Taxpayer-​subsidized broadcast media is a bad idea. Period. Full stop.

Defund NPR. Defund PBS. No more state-​run or ‑subsidized media.

And, thankfully, that point was made by Governor Kevin Stitt when he vetoed the Oklahoma legislature’s renewed funding for the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority. 

“OETA, to us, is an outdated system,” he told Fox News. “You know, the big, big question is why are we spending taxpayer dollars to prop up or compete with the private sector and run television stations?”

But he didn’t stop there. “And then when you go through all of the programing that’s happening and the indoctrination and over-​sexualization of our children, it’s just really problematic, and it doesn’t line up with Oklahoma values.”

What this implies is that wasting taxpayer money on “public supported” media was fine with Republicans like Stitt. Until a really flagrant violation of their sensibilities.

Sure, the current gender and “critical race theory” nonsense that taxpayer-​subsidized media pushes is beyond the pale.

But so is the smug establishment progressivism of “public media” culture more generally.

The whole point of taxes and government spending is to promote the general welfare, or so the standard theory runs. But there’s nothing “general” about the extreme sectarianism of “public radio and TV,” with less well-​to-​do taxpayers subsidizing the far wealthier public media audience.

It would have been far more inspiring had Governor Stitt dared oppose factional subsidies prior to the latest culture war strife. Indeed, maybe we wouldn’t be now enduring CRT and transgenderism and other aspects of cultural Marxism had conservatives actually stuck to republican principles long ago. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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