Larry Elder: Making California Great Again

 

Three weeks ago, Larry Elder was in Glendale, California sitting behind the microphone of his nationally-syndicated Salem Radio Network talk show. Upstate in Sacramento, Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) was lounging with his rich liberal friends, anticipating an easy win in the September 14th recall election.

And across the country—at the governor’s mansion in Albany—Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) was happily polishing his Emmy Award and checking the mailbox for more royalty checks for his book American Crisis, which offers his “leadership lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.”  (Of course, that supposes your concept of “leadership” includes mandating that nursing homes across the Empire State be forced to accept elderly COVID-positive hospital patients into their facilities, essentially dooming them and many other residents.)

But a mere three weeks later, caretakers at the governor’s mansions in both Sacramento and Albany are quietly preparing the banker’s boxes and moving vans which will likely be needed as a result of events about to unfold in the exciting days ahead.

First in the whack-a-mole game is Cuomo, who at this point is the linear equivalent of a dead rodent in the kitchen mousetrap: the only question left is who will get tapped to go in, pick him up, and flush him down the toilet. New York’s Democratic attorney general Letitia James led a months-long investigation featuring 179 witnesses which concluded Andrew had sexually harassed at least seven current and former state employees.  “Statesmen” (a/k/a weasels) from the New York Democratic Party—including Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and Bill DeBlasio—mugged for the cameras, throwing him overboard and calling for Cuomo to resign.  Instead, the Gov sent his attorney to attack the investigation as “biased” while he relaxed by an Albany swimming pool accompanied by his pretty blonde secretary. Next stop for him? Impeachment and removal. Good riddance.CARTOONS | Steve Kelley View Cartoon

As for Gavin Newsom, his “Cinderella story” in California politics may be headed to an unhappy ending… thanks to The Sage From South Central.

Until Larry Elder tossed his hat into the race, the Recall Election—forced by 1,718,000 signatures on petitions statewide—left Newsom with little reason for concern, as he could raise unlimited  amounts of cash to fight for retaining his office while “challengers” (mostly unknowns and also-rans) are limited to spending $10-million each. In expensive media markets like Los Angeles and San Francisco, $10-million would not get you very many 30-second spots in the Svengoolie monster movie show late at night on ME tv.

But suddenly, Newsom’s worst nightmare has emerged: encouraged by powerful supporters like megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs and others, Larry Elder has rocketed to the top in September 14th’s ballot. There are 46 candidates running and whichever one receives the most votes will become California’s 41st governor just 7 days after the Recall results are official. 

As of now—with 23% of the vote and rising—the next governor appears to be Larry Elder. He has electrified the contest, raising $4.5-million dollars in just 19 days and eclipsing all other candidates in “earned” media: extensive free coverage in the Los Angeles Times, FOX News channel, The Wall Street Journal, TV news outlets across the state and—surprise—on Talk Radio. At every turn, he asks audiences to “toss something into the tip jar” which continues to make his newly-minted campaign coffers swell.

The Orange County Register gives plenty of credit to Elder’s incredible charisma and smooth delivery, but the newspaper also gives credit to the clumsy attempt by Newsom’s cronies in the Secretary of State’s office to block Elder from next month’s ballot. The Register suggests that clumsy and failed effort “instantly propelled him into the pole position over more traditional candidates.”

Further proof of Elder’s surging popularity came Thursday, when the Los Angeles Times reported that Governor Newsom attacked Elder during a Zoom call to volunteers. Playing the juvenile game of not actually naming his opponent (kind of like Joe Biden always referring to Donald J. Trump in terms like “the previous administration”) a panicked Newsom called “the frontrunning candidate”—a/k/a Larry Elder—a major Trump supporter, a threat to abortion rights, a climate change denier and other hackneyed props pulled from the standard hysterical Democratic Party playbook. Unfortunately, Newsom was unable to use Party Trick #1—that his opponent is “a racist”—since Larry happens to be an African-American.

Elder—whose skyrocketing chances statewide are the real reason behind Gavin Newsom’s pathetic broadsides—is already acting like a governor, ignoring Newsom’s personal attacks and sticking to the issues that actually matter to Californians. 

My sources tell me Larry plans to challenge Newsom on his renewed mandates for face masks and for customers to prove vaccination before entering restaurants and concerts. If Newsom—like Joe Biden—wants to use the term “a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Elder will ask why Newsom doesn’t mandate that California require production of cards with vaccine proof on one side, and Voter ID information on the other. Wrestling with why one is “racist” but the other isn’t should send Newsom spinning like that robot on the old TV show Lost In Space blaring “Danger! Danger!” with sparks flying out of his $500 haircut.

There’s still a month to go until the Recall election, and as we learned over these past three weeks, anything can happen. But the winds of change are clearly being felt across California: Saturday, the state’s Republic Party leaders opted to decline endorsing any candidate on the September 14th ballot. That decision was a blow to more “traditional” hopefuls like former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer or 2018 nominee John Cox.

But it also signaled the GOP may sense there’s a new sheriff in town, one whose command of the issues and skills as a debater might just propel him into the Governor’s office. That—as Kreskin might predict—is when the real fireworks will begin.

Johnny Can't think

If it seems that young people these days believe absurd things, that they utterly lack both the ability and the inclination to reason logically—well, it’s not your imagination. Today’s college graduates can’t think, or at least don’t think, because they’re not being taught to.

This sad reality, though long suspected, became clear in 2011, with the publication of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by scholars Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. After a four-year study of more than 2300 undergraduates at selective universities across the country, they concluded that a sizeable percentage of them improved little if at all as critical thinkers.

Since then, numerous studies and surveys by organizations like Noel-Levitz, the Association of American Colleges and Universities,The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Payscale have confirmed Arum’s and Roksa’s thesis. Employers consistently report that new hires fare poorly in writing and critical thinking—essentially, two sides of the same coin.

Meanwhile, colleges and universities not only claim to be teaching critical thinking; they shout it from the rooftops—even as the end users of their “products,” employers, complain that skill is in short supply. Why the disconnect?

The answer, I believe (and as I argue in my bookThink Better, Write Better) is that what institutions of higher learning are teaching these days under the banner of “critical thinking” really isn’t—or at least it isn’t what employers mean when they use the term. Organizations want people who can be objective and analytical, using logic and reason to solve problems. That’s what the term “critical thinking” means to them, and what it has meant to most of us for decades. It’s certainly what I was taught in college.

Today, however, that is not at all what colleges and universities mean—or perhaps I should say, what most professors mean. “Critical thinking,” for them, is a Marxist exercise in “critique,” what Marx himself called “the ruthless criticism of all that exists.” It seeks not to solve problems but to break down, or “deconstruct,” all aspects of society, beginning with but not limited to language.

The shift began in the 1980s, as a new form of literary criticism knows as “deconstructionism” caught on in English departments across the country. Inspired by the Frankfort School of Marxist thought and popularized by far-left philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, deconstructionism posited that language has no inherent meaning; thus, literature can be understood only in the context of the reader’s experiences. In other words, it is impossible to ultimately interpret a literary work. It means whatever the reader thinks it means.

That is, perhaps, at least a mildly interesting literary theory. It may even contain some truth, since everyone does experience a work differently, and no two people can agree fully what it means (which is not the same as saying it doesn’t mean anything). If nothing else, deconstructing provides an amusing way for otherwise nonproductive eggheads to spend their days debating semantics.

The problems began when the theory infected other disciplines, starting in the 1990s–first the social sciences and ultimately (as we see today) the hard sciences. It’s one thing to deconstruct a poem, quite another to deconstruct human biology. It’s fine for literary scholars to argue about what a novel means, but engineers should probably know how to calculate the strength of a structure. The latter has a definite answer; it should not be subject to “deconstruction.”

And yet that is exactly what we are seeing today, with all this talk about gender (actually, sex) being “fluid,” cries that math is racist, and the push for affirmative action in medicine and other scientific fields.

Remember that deconstruction, as the name implies, is not about building up; it’s about tearing down. It not about “criticism,” in the sense of objectively evaluating the good and bad; it’s about “critique,” which focuses solely on the bad. It’s not about solving problems; it’s about complaining about them and blaming others for them.

It also, of necessity, privileges emotion over reason. Something is bad because someone thinks it’s bad—or, more to the point, theyfeelit’s bad. They don’t like it. It offends them in some way, perhaps because it doesn’t seem fair or equitable. Math is certainly like that. Not everyone is good at it, and those who are possess certain advantages over their math-challenged fellows. That’s bad because it’s not fair. And so math must be critiqued. It must be deconstructed.

The same is true of biology. Men have certain inherent physical advantages over women? That’s not fair! It makes some people feel bad. Gender must therefore be deconstructed. Little do they realize that, in tearing down the edifice of biological sex, they are destroying the very foundations of civilized society—marriage, family, child-rearing, the transmission of time-tested traditions. They don’t think that way, because they don’t think at all. They merely emote.

The solution, of course, is for colleges, universities, and even high schools to go back to teaching classical critical thinking skills: logic, reason, dispassionate observation, hypothesizing, experimentation. But that is probably not going to happen anytime soon.

Meanwhile, as a parent, you should look for private schools, at all levels, that do teach those skills—like Hillsdale College and New Saint Andrews College in Idaho. I’m sure there are others. You can also talk with your kids regularly about what they’re learning, do your best to counter the Marxist nonsense, and try to model effective critical thinking in both word and deed. You can also share books like Jordan Peterson’s12 Rules for Lifeand Scott Newstock’sHow to Think Like Shakespeare. Read them together and talk about them afterward.

Because, if there’s one upside to the fact that most young people can’t think, it is this: If your son or daughter does learn to think, there’s a good chance they’ll be running things one day, once this rudderless airplane that is deconstructionism finally careens into the mountainside of reality.

 

Biden Picked a Fight and DeSantis Just Delivered a Knock Out

The White House has been attacking Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis for weeks and has become increasingly aggressive over the past few days. 

Press Secretary Jen Psaki has regularly gone after DeSantis from the briefing room, and during an event outside of the White House Thursday afternoon, President Joe Biden took a swipe by pretending not to know who DeSantis was. 

Here is the president responding to my question about ?@GovRonDeSantis? using Biden's words against him to say DeSantis is "getting in the way" over COVID rules. President Biden: "Governor who?" Watch. pic.twitter.com/mmjznTsLcf

— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) August 5, 2021

When asked to respond to the attacks during an event on Friday, DeSantis said he doesn't blame Biden for not remembering him. He then listed all of the issues Biden is failing to properly address. 

"I guess I'm not surprised that Biden doesn't remember me. I guess the question is, what else has he forgotten? Biden's forgotten about the crisis as our southern border, I can tell you that. Biden has forgotten about the inflation that is biting the budgets of families all throughout our country. Biden has forgotten about the demonstrators who are fighting for freedom down in Cuba. Biden's even forgotten about the Constitution itself, as you saw with what he did with this moratorium," DeSantis said. "And I can just tell you, I'm the governor who protects parents and their ability to make the right choices for their kids' education. I'm the governor who protects the jobs and education and businesses in Florida by not letting the federal government lock us down. I'm the governor who answers to the people of Florida, not the bureaucrats in Washington." 

Watch: 

 

The Battle Over Critical Race Theory Just Got A Lot More Relevant in Virginia

Virginia Democrats on Tuesday killed a bill which would have curbed the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. The issue has been particularly heating up in Fairfax and Loudon, counties in Northern Virginia. 

Andrew Romeo, the communications director for Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) commented on this move from Virginia Democrats, which includes those who may be vulnerable. 

"House Republicans in Virginia are fighting to keep politics out of the classroom and for children to be taught to judge others by the content of their character. House Democrats? They continue to take their cues from the teachers’ unions funding their campaigns and refuse to stand up to the far-left’s efforts to indoctrinate the commonwealth’s students. Virginia families will be horrified to learn that the extreme liberals running Richmond yesterday opposed an effort to stop the politicization of public school curriculum in the commonwealth once and for all and will punish them in November," he said in a statement.

One of those vulnerable Democrats is Del. Joshua Cole, of the 28th district. As RSLC exposed, Cole shared a clip of statements from Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

For the people who missed it….. https://t.co/Vpu2X9S38T

— Delegate Joshua Cole (@JoshuaCole) July 7, 2021

Last month, Weingarten slammed critics of CRT and vowed to engage in fighting legal battles to defend teachers who incorporate the teachings. The union has funds set aside for such legal battles.

In June, The Federalist reported on a survey of 400 respondents from Public Opinion Strategies, paid for by FightForSchools.com and N2America. It specifically addresses Fairfax and Loudon:

Data shows 50 percent of the 400 respondents have an unfavorable view of critical race theory, while only 42 percent have a favorable one. The divide was even greater among a few demographics. 79 percent of women 55 and older affirmed the negative view, as did 81 percent of Independent voters 55 and older and 59 percent of public-school parents.

...

Half of voters indicated they oppose critical race theory being taught in public schools, with 86 percent of Republicans, 57 percent of Independents, and nearly one-quarter of Democrats concurring.

By a ratio of more than two-to-one, respondents replied they would be “much less likely” to vote for an official who backs the doctrine. Only 16 percent of those polled said they would be “much more likely” to both vote for someone supporting critical race theory and seek it to be taught in public schools.

The issue is also heating up in the closely watched Virginia statewide races.

While Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin has been addressing the issue since even before he became the nominee, the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe has dismissed it as "another right-wing conspiracy" and "totally made up by Donald Trump and Glenn Youngkin." McAuliffe had been asked by a woman, who pointed out that "it's all of the conversation with the news in Virginia." She also McAuliffe asked "what are you going top say to all of those people?"

Youngkin has vowed to outlaw CRT on "day one," should he be elected. 

The Republican also addressed the issue during a Thursday interview with Todd Piro's "Fox & Friend First." Piro referred to Virginia as "ground zero" on this issue. 

"Critical Race Theory has moved into our school system, and we have to remove it. It's a political theory, it's not an academic curriculum," Youngkin pointed out. 

During the interview, which played an audio clip of the above conversation, Piro asked Youngkin if he indeed "create[d] CRT as a way to win this election." In response, Youngkin said "it's pretty laughable" and warned that "we've watched faculty being taught how to in fact use Critical Race Theory as a basis for teaching." 

When it comes to McAuliffe's comments, Youngkin pointed out how "it's something my opponent once again doesn't understand."

The vote didn't come as a surprise statement for Del. Jason Miyares, of the 82nd district. "I’m disappointed but not surprised that the bill to curb Critical Race Theory was voted down by the left-liberal monopoly in Richmond. Rather than unite us, CRT is an extreme, left-wing perspective that teaches children to learn to hate their country. The academic left is attempting to push this extreme radical worldview on Virginia's youth and unfortunately Richmond liberal politicians had a golden opportunity to stand up to the most extreme members of their own party and choose to remain silent," he said in a statement for Townhall.

Miyares is the Republican nominee for attorney general, and connected the issue to that race as well. "As the son of an immigrant, I could not be more grateful for the freedoms and opportunities this nation and state have provided the Miyares Family.  Critical Race Theory aims to instill the very opposite emotion into our youngest generation and in order to stop it, it is vital to have a check and balance on the radical left in the Attorney General’s office," he continued.

In the Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) system local leader Michelle Leete last month at a rally declared "Let them die!" about opponents of CRT. She was forced to resign from her positions with Virginia PTA and Fairfax PTA, though she remains vice president of the local NAACP. 

In June, there was an arrest at a Loudon County school board meeting after school board members left mid-meeting and it was declared by police an unlawful assembly.

 

Senate Democrats Kill Proposal to Provide Americans with Inflation Transparency

 Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) has been hard at work educating his constituents about the risks of government spending and inflation, and encouraging his fellow senators to do the same. On Wednesday night, however, Democrats defeated his proposal for a rules change which requires bills passed by Senate committees to include inflationary impact statements for the sake of transparency.

    Tonight, Democrats blocked my simple proposal to provide transparency about how government spending impacts inflation - saying it would be "too much work" for the government.

    This is exactly why Americans are fed up with Washington. pic.twitter.com/AEX49nkFQ0
    — Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) August 5, 2021

In sharing concerns his constituents have with inflation, the senator also reminded his colleagues that "inflation is a tax, a tax that hurts our families on low and fixed incomes the most."

Scott likened raising the debt ceiling to raising the limit on your credit card each month, with no plan to pay it off. "It's irresponsible and it's no way to operate," the senator said. "You would never run your business or family the way Washington runs. It's wasteful and dysfunctional."

"Too many in Washington believe the lie that inflation is impossible, debt doesn't matter, and spending has no consequences," which is why, Scott said, his rule change is so necessary.

Scott's request for unanimous consent was objected to by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) on account of how it would be "too much work" for the Senate.

Inflation concerns will almost certainly come to affect Democrats in the 2022 midterms. On Monday, RealClearPolitics published Susan Crabtree's "Dems Brace for Inflation Attacks During August Recess."

As a July 28 press release from Scott's office shared that Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) had introduced a companion bill in the House.

Rep. Banks is also the chair of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), which frequently raises awareness about inflation, including through their own proposed budget.

Sen. Scott and the RSC have come out heavily against the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which, although supposedly bipartisan, includes many liberal proposals.

    Planning a cookout this year? Ketchup on the news. According to the Farm Bureau, the cost of a 4th of July BBQ is down from last year. It’s a fact you must-hear(d). Hot dog, the Biden economic plan is working. And that’s something we can all relish. pic.twitter.com/7h9qLauIbC
    — The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 1, 2021

Over the 4th of July weekend the White House was mocked for a tweet celebrating the claim that Americans saved 16 cents on popular cookout items this year, even though, as Spencer highlighted, it looked to be the most expensive Independence Day in years thanks to inflation.