A college student named Olivia posted a viral TikTok video in which she revealed she received a zero on her final assignment based on woke ideology, not the content of her work merely because she used the term “biological woman” in her project.
Olivia does not reveal her last name, nor does she identify her woke college or professor, but in her now-viral TikTok video, she tells her followers that she got a zero because she used the term “biological woman” as a description. She said her professor told her that the term was “exclusionary” and perpetuates “heteronormativity.”
— Right Side of History™️ (@xxclusionary) May 22, 2023
SIDEBAR: WTH?
In other words, “We’re here, we’re queer, deal with it!”
The student even noted that the professor told her that her paper was good except for that one verboten term.
“Olivia, this is a solid proposal,” Olivia said the woke teacher allegedly wrote. “However, the terms ‘biological women’ are exclusionary and are not allowed in this course as they further reinforce heteronormativity.”
The student called the grade thoroughly “the most biased grade ever” and said her project “is about transgenders competing in biological women’s sports. How am I supposed to do my final project if I can’t use the word ‘biological women,’ but that’s what my project is about?”
Since that first video, Olivia has posted several follow-ups to explain what is happening in her school.
“This is exactly the issue nowadays. It is not OK or acceptable to be a biological woman,” Olivia said in one video. She said she was told in a meeting with her professor that “it’s transphobic to use the term ‘biological woman’” and that doing so is “implementing T.E.R.F. ideology, which is trans-exclusionary radical feminism,” which the professor said means “women who fight for women’s rights but exclude trans because they think that women’s rights are being affected by trans people.” Olivia then quipped, “Which is literally true.”
Olivia also said she took her case to the school’s Office for Equal Opportunity.
In yet another clip, Olivia said that the rules in her class actually said outright that what the professor did was not proper. Her syllabus says students “will not be graded on the content of your opinions, so long as your opinions do not create emotional and/or mental harm for your diverse classmates or espouse bigoted or anti-scientific views.”
The student said that in her estimation she was using the term in a “scientific” sense, not a political or “emotional” one.
That doesn’t make sense!
Olivia also said the professor insisted that she alter the point of her paper to focus on “women” not “females” so that it satisfies the professor’s political goal of saying anyone can be a woman.
“I know what she’s trying to say, but it doesn’t work because for my project, if I change the wording, it would be … ‘women’s rights and opportunities are being affected because women are competing in women’s sports.’ That doesn’t make sense,” Olivia said.
Who is the real sucker here?
Many people on social media were energized by the school’s political attack on Olivia. But host Jesse Kelly had an extremely important point, saying, “Who is the real sucker? The communist professor?” and adding, “Or the upper middle class Republican parents paying six figures to have their daughter ‘educated’ by said professor?”
Kelly is right. Parents and students who are paying these colleges tens of thousands and sometimes going decades into debt as these crooked, left-wing schools peddle this anti-American ideology that passes for “education.”
It’s bad enough that these extremist, left-wing ideals so permeate our system of higher education, but what is worse is that these biased schools are not even permitting the opposing ideas to be heard. College should be a place for the free exchange of ideas, not a place of stifling bias and indoctrination.
This garbage is happening all over the country. Just this month a boy in Massachusetts was censured by his school for daring to wear a T-shirt that states his personal beliefs about the gender discussion.
Olivia deserves much credit for standing her ground, for keeping her videos centered on the issues, and for not using her platform as a weapon against her school and professor.
Regardless of how you view yourself or how you mutilate yourself, if you have a “Y” chromosome, you are a male. (This does not include those EXTREMELY rare individuals born XXY rather than XX or XY.) — TPR
Share the post "College Student Got a Zero on Project for Two True Words: ‘Most Biased Grade Ever’"
Woke corporations, ever committed to ESG and DEI initiatives, have long advanced leftist propaganda without consequence. However, transitioning a once-beloved beer into a symbol of radical gender ideology and making a mockery of womanhood was for many Americans the last straw.
Investor’s Business Daily reported that the market value of Anheuser-Busch InBev has dropped $15.7 billion since April 1 on account of the Bud Light boycott. That figure is based upon data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.
The unforced error that drew the ire of Bud drinkers was the company’s partnership with transvestite TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney, whose activism has involved “normalizing the bulge” among other transvestites and promoting transgenderism.
This politicization and the corresponding baggage the brand picked up as a consequence prompted outrage. That outrage was tactically and effectively channeled.
While some former drinkers ultimately used Bud Light for target practice, many elected to avoid it altogether, such that cases of the light beer languished on store shelves and went untouched at sporting events.
Jared Dinges, beverage analyst at JPMorgan Chase, revealed to clients that Bud Light sales were down more than 23% as of the week ending May 6, reported Investor’s Business Daily.
“We believe there is a subset of American consumers who will not drink a Bud Light for the foreseeable future,” said Dinges. “We believe a 12% to 13% volume decline on an annualized basis would be a reasonable assumption.”
While Anheuser-Busch reaps the whirlwind, its competitors have added $3.2 billion in market value.
Reuters reported that Heineken, aware that many Americans are swapping out Bud for other brews, is making forays into the light beer market.
The Dutch brewer is spending $100 million to push Heineken Silver in the U.S., where sales of light beers make up roughly half of the market and generated $118 billion last year. This marketing push entails the provision of over two million free samples at various upcoming events, including the U.S. Open tennis tournament this summer and the Las Vegas Formula One Grand Prix in November.
While Heineken has big aspirations, the boycott’s biggest winner among Bud Light’s competitors is reportedly Molson Coors Beverage, which has seen its shares jump up more than 20% since April 1 — adding roughly $2.2 billion in market value to the stock.
JPMorgan figures the boycott will continue to serve as a fiscal reminder to Anheuser-Busch that the American people don’t care much for its politics, suggesting that its beer volumes will drop by 12% this year.
Dinges said, “We do not expect the lost sales to be recovered in fiscal year 2024.”
TheBlaze recently reported that the former president of Anheuser-Busch, Anson Frericks, predicted it will be a “a long, hot, dry summer for Anheuser-Busch.”
Share the post "Bud Light Boycott Successful, Costs Anheuser-Busch $15.7 Billion in Market Value"
Edward Smith didn’t think the color of his skin had anything to do with it.
He was 23, and he’d come to Canada in 2005 from West Africa. Now, he lived with his mother and sister in Edmonton, the capital of the western province of Alberta.
Racism—overt or systemic—didn’t make him take part in an armed robbery of an Airbnb in July 2019, he said. He’d decided on his own to help his cousin, who had told Smith that the people staying at the Airbnb had robbed him and that he was trying to get his money back. Smith agreed to help, but he didn’t want any guns involved. So they compromised: they’d bring a gun, but it would be unloaded.
Things didn’t go as planned, and Smith was arrested. At his trial, Smith pleaded guilty to the two charges—theft and robbery with a firearm—filed against him.
Since Smith is black, he also submitted an Impact of Race and Culture Assessment, or IRCA—a presentencing report in which “Black and racialized Canadians” can demonstrate how systemic racism led them to commit their crime.
The logic behind Smith’s IRCA was clear: as a black man, it was assumed that he had been subjected to a great deal of hate, and that that hate had limited his job opportunities, housing opportunities, opportunities to build a meaningful and law-abiding life.
Dunia Nur, the activist who wrote Smith’s IRCA, told me the report was meant to help the judge appreciate the convict’s “background” and “history.”
I obtained Smith’s IRCA from Smith himself. Oddly, the four-page report cites no concrete instances of racism—no violence, no untoward remarks, no employers or schools that turned Smith down because of his skin color. Not even any microaggressions.
It also fails to mention that, in a separate incident in January 2018, Smith was arrested and charged with theft, robbery, and kidnapping.
What it does say is that Smith had a rough childhood and adolescence—the refugee camp in Ghana, his father’s absence, immigrating to Canada, his early run-ins with the law. It further notes that “Edward identifies as an African Canadian” who is of “Liberian heritage,” and that he has “a feeling of disconnection with his culture.”
The judge apparently sympathized with Smith. In February 2020, after six months in prison, he was allowed to go free with court-appointed supervision. If he’d been white, he would have been looking at eight years behind bars.
“I didn’t face racism,” Smith admitted to me in a recent phone call. He’s now a sales representative at a debt-collection company. Referring to the IRCA, Smith said, “It was my only way out of this situation. I took full advantage.”
Canada’s first official IRCA was submitted in the now-famous case of R v “X” in 2014—a case in which a 16-year-old black boy in Nova Scotia was charged with attempted murder after shooting his 15-year-old cousin in the abdomen with a rifle. This was not long after Black Lives Matter was formed, in 2013, to protest the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida.
At the time, it was mostly confined to progressive circles in Nova Scotia, which has a higher concentration of African Canadians than any other province. Now, it’s taken for granted among Canadian criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and law professors that the assessments are a necessary tool for curbing the “overrepresentation” of black and indigenous prisoners.
Danardo Jones, a University of Windsor law professor who has written extensively on criminal justice reform, said that when it comes to IRCAs, there is “institutional buy-in.” For now, there are no statistics on the number of IRCAs being filed nationwide or on a province by province basis. Criminal defense attorneys in Ontario estimated that IRCAs run up to $4,500 and that there’s a nine-month waiting list to obtain one.
Canada is at the forefront of a broader movement that seeks to reimagine police, prisons, and the nature of justice—a movement that gained much greater momentum and cohesiveness in the wake of George Floyd’s May 2020 killing in Minneapolis.
“The protests of 2020 marked the new way in which many people thought about criminal justice,” Daniel Fryer, a University of Michigan criminal justice law professor, said. “The thing about the protests of 2020 is that they reached a global audience. Although the problem was at least ostensibly domestic, everyone in the world was watching.”
In the United States, the new thinking was reflected in the push for “decarceration” and the rise of progressive district attorneys—Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, George Gascón in Los Angeles, Alvin Bragg in Manhattan, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and others. Central to the progressive prosecutor movement, Fryer said, was a rejection of “the gladiator, adversarial model.” Instead, he said, “the prosecutor’s role should be to seek justice in society.”
On top of that, a handful of states sought to impose justice from the top down: Virginia and Washington barred police from using choke holds and no-knock warrants. Minnesota adopted a law meant to make police more accountable. California, the country’s progressive laboratory, enacted the Racial Justice Act, which enables anyone convicted of a crime to challenge that conviction on the grounds of racial bias.
But Canada has gone further, insisting that judges explicitly consider race when meting out justice.
As far as Nadia Robinson was concerned, there is nothing fair or just about that. The father of her two boys was killed eight years ago by a driver in Ottawa, and he had gotten off with a lighter sentence because he was black.
“I’m not trying to be a ‘Karen’ in any way, shape, or form,” Robinson, who is white, told me. “I believe that when you do something wrong, you stand up and say you did something wrong.”
I suggested IRCAs were an effort to undo decades, even centuries, of racism that had been baked into the criminal justice system. “You can’t rewrite the past,” Robinson said. Then, she added: “We’re all equal.”
Nadia Robinson. (Dan Aponte for The Free Press) Race-based sentencing in Canada did not emerge in a vacuum.
It started in 1996, when Canadian lawmakers, upset that so many indigenous people were in prison, amended the Criminal Code, hoping to prod judges into considering indigenous people’s history of colonization—and dispensing less punitive sentences. In 1993, aboriginal peoples accounted for 17 percent of prisoners even though they were less than 4 percent of the total population.
In 1999, in R v Gladue—the first case to make its way to the Supreme Court following the amendments to the Criminal Code—what started as a suggestion became the law of the land. The Criminal Code, the Court ruled, “mandatorily requires sentencing judges to consider all available sanctions other than imprisonment and to pay particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders.”
In the wake of that case, courts started to require so-called Gladue reports when sentencing indigenous defendants. Gradually, the idea of building on Gladue reports to acknowledge African Canadians’ history started to gain traction.
Fast-forward to the mid-2010s and the rise of the IRCA. The whole point of the IRCA, Robert Wright, a social worker and early pioneer of IRCAs, told me, was to level the proverbial playing field.
“Some people think we’re trying to get a race-based discount for people,” said Wright, who wrote the first official IRCA, in R v. “X.” IRCAs, he said, are “real tools” that enable judges to “be more thoughtful” and “sentence black people more appropriately.”
Ryan Handlarski, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, added: “How can we pass judgment on a person without at least trying to understand what led them to that place?”
Judge Anne Derrick, who presided over R v “X,” was apparently persuaded by this logic.
“I find that when ‘X’ shot ‘Y’ he was an immature, dependent 16 year old caught up in the dysfunctional dynamics of his community,” Derrick wrote. She sentenced “X” as a minor, giving him two years in prison and another year of supervision at home. Had he been sentenced as an adult—as the prosecutor requested—he would have received a life sentence.
While R v “X” influenced thinking among judges, attorneys, and prosecutors, its impact was limited because it took place on the local, trial court level.
But in 2017, Derrick was promoted to Nova Scotia’s Court of Appeal—where her future rulings would have an automatically binding effect on lower courts across the province.
And then, in 2021, she got her chance—with the case of R v Anderson—to make race-based sentencing the standard across the province.
During a traffic stop in Halifax three years earlier, Rakeem Rayshon Anderson was found carrying a .22-caliber handgun. He was charged and convicted of five offenses related to possession and transportation of a loaded weapon.
Prosecutors asked for Anderson to be given a prison sentence of two to three years. Being African Canadian, Anderson filed an IRCA—co-authored by Robert Wright, who had written the IRCA for R v “X.” The trial judge who heard Anderson’s case gave him a lesser sentence—house arrest and probation—based, in no small part, on the IRCA. (Judge Pamela Williams said as much, adding that the dearth of “Afrocentric services” contributed to her ruling.)
Prosecutors appealed to the Court of Appeal—where now-Justice Anne Derrick was presiding.
Derrick was unsympathetic to prosecutors.
“Even where the offense is very serious, consideration must be given to the impact of systemic racism and its effects on the offender,” Derrick wrote in August 2021, upholding the lower court’s decision.
Brandon Rolle, senior legal counsel at African Nova Scotian Justice Institute and one of Anderson’s attorneys, called the decision “historic,” adding that “this decision will directly impact every African Nova Scotian being sentenced from this point forward.”
I asked Mark Scott, the lead prosecutor in Anderson, what he made of Derrick’s ruling. “People’s culture and background are something that is essential to recognize when you’re looking at a just result,” Scott told me, sounding like a defense attorney. “If you’re going to say that justice has to be colorblind, I think there are people who would disagree with that.”
Chris Rudnicki, a criminal defense attorney in Toronto, told me: “If Justice Derrick’s decision in ‘X’ can be seen as opening the door to systemic considerations in Canadian sentencing, then her majority opinion in Anderson—now sitting as a judge at the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal—can be seen as leading us all through it.”
Since Anderson, federal authorities have tried to nudge the rest of Canada to follow Nova Scotia’s lead. In April 2021, the Department of Justice announced $6.6 million to subsidize IRCAs. Since then, the sense of urgency has grown, with everyone from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Correctional Investigator Ivan Zinger saying more must be done to combat the “overrepresentation” of minority inmates.
This urgency is fueled, in part, by an awareness that over the course of the first two decades of this century—from the first Gladue reports in 1999 to 2020—the percentage of indigenous prisoners has jumped, from 17 percent to more than 30 percent.
To Nadia Robinson, the idea that the man who had killed her partner should be given a lesser sentence because of his race felt “surreal,” she said, as if the people in charge were speaking one language, and she were speaking another.
Robinson’s partner, Andy Nevin, had been riding his bike on the morning of June 28, 2015, when he was killed in a hit and run.
In court, the driver, Deinsburg St.-Hilaire, testified that he’d been out all night at a wedding. It was almost six a.m., and he was speeding home—going almost 20 miles over the limit—when he nodded off. He came to when he heard a thud. He didn’t see anything in his rearview mirror. He said he thought he’d hit a mailbox.
Except that when he got home, St.-Hilaire covered his Ford F-250 pickup truck in a tarp, and, within a few days, he had the hood and side panel changed.
It seemed as though he knew what had happened.
This was what Nadia Robinson couldn’t accept. “If I knew it was my son who did something like that, I’d be like, ‘You need to come forward, you need to tell this family—you don’t hide,’ ” she told me.
After repairing his truck, St.-Hilaire decamped to an airport hotel, hoping to evade the cops. Nine days after the accident, he was arrested.
Later, when he tried to explain why he hadn’t turned himself in, St.-Hilaire noted that he had emigrated at age 7 from Dominica, in the Caribbean. “Being the only black child in his class, and not speaking English proficiently, resulted in Mr. St Hilaire being bullied at school,” according to a court document.
At the trial, Judge Catherine Aitken said she believed the defendant “wanted to do the right thing but did not have the confidence to do so out of fear.” She added: “I also accept that this fear was likely heightened as a result of Mr. St. Hilaire’s experience with racism as a black person growing up in this community.”
Ultimately, Aitken found St.-Hilaire guilty of obstructing the police investigation into the collision but, parroting the defendant, added that his “experiences earlier in life when he was subjected to racism and bullying in the school context” as well as “experiences more recently when he did not feel fairly treated by police officers during traffic stops” were mitigating factors.
It seemed not to matter to the judge that St.-Hilaire, 39, didn’t provide any details about the racism he had suffered: names, dates, comments that were made, pain that was inflicted. Nor did he say how it had affected him over the years.
St.-Hilaire could have wound up spending two years behind bars. Instead, he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and left the courtroom, in November 2018, a free man.
St.-Hilaire hadn’t even filed an IRCA. All that was required to get a lighter sentence was to bring the defendant’s race to the judge’s attention—to obtain “judicial notice,” Danardo Jones, the University of Windsor law professor, told me. “Failure to consider race and anti-Blackness,” Jones said in an email, could lead to a sentence being overturned on appeal.
The Ottawa police chief, Charles Bordeleau, was furious about the sentence and issued a terse statement voicing frustration—something he almost never did. “It’s unfortunate that these comments were made putting into question the professionalism of our members during this difficult investigation,” he said.
Nadia Robinson told me the court’s judgment made her feel like Andy Nevin’s life didn’t matter. Did anyone care that on the morning of his death, he was biking to the new apartment they planned to live in? They were moving out of the dump they’d been in, starting a new chapter. The boys were so excited, she said.
“Are you kidding me?” Robinson said. She was crying. She felt as if she were living a parallel life, a life that wasn’t supposed to happen. Her sons, now 26 and 24, she said, have had a lot of trouble since their father’s death: alcohol, drugs, a seemingly bottomless grief. “My kids are devastated,” she said.
Among prosecutors and even some criminal defense attorneys, it felt as though the country were crossing the Rubicon.
“The judge basically calls the system out for being systemically racist even though the system bends over backwards to be reverse racist,” a prominent defense attorney in Toronto told me.
The attorney, who asked me not to publish his name out of fear of backlash, found it galling that the judge had portrayed St.-Hilaire’s actions during the course of those nine days between the hit and run and his arrest as a “momentary lapse of judgment.”
“The idea that somehow this cover-up had anything to do with racism or this never-demonstrated canard of systemic racism is patently false,” the attorney said. “To use language we’d normally associate with murder, this was not a momentary lapse in judgment but planned and deliberate. That’s what makes the judge’s ruling so egregious, and the idea that the defendant gets some kind of break because of something that happened years ago, something completely unprovable and possibly untrue that has nothing to do with Andy Nevin’s death—that’s absurd. Actually, it’s offensive.”
He added: “This is the scam of scams.” He said that lots of people knew it, and no one would say it openly. Including him. “Criticizing IRCAs would mean career suicide.”
I asked Chris Rudnicki, the criminal defense attorney, whether the subtext of the whole IRCA phenomenon was that black people from poor neighborhoods have less control over the decisions they make.
He emailed back: “In some cases, yes.” He added, “To the extent that systemic discrimination has a material impact on people’s lives—restricting access to housing, education, and employment, for example—it can render them more susceptible to criminal influences. You are more likely to steal a loaf of bread if you’re poor, for example. Or more likely to join a street gang if your school has expelled you. Etc. So a sentencing court will treat a person who has experienced the material impact of systemic discrimination differently than a person who has not suffered that impact.”
(Jason Franson for The Free Press) Edward Smith, who robbed the Airbnb, insisted the problem was never systemic discrimination. It was him. It was his family.
In high school, he’d started stealing candy and clothing from local stores. Partly, he said, this was because his mother, who packed chickens for minimum wage, couldn’t afford to buy him stuff. But mostly, he said, it was because he could. He was a latchkey kid surrounded by other latchkey kids. “It was just me and my friends,” Smith said. “If we were going to make bad decisions, we were going to do it together.”
It was in the summer of 2019 that his cousin asked him to help rob this Airbnb to get his money back. He didn’t ask questions.
So, the three of them—his cousin, some other guy, and Smith—showed up at the Airbnb, and the two other guys had guns, and they robbed the place and got out and drove away before Smith could catch up with them. He got arrested. It turned out his cousin had never been robbed. He just wanted to do some robbing. (He was later arrested, too.)
Smith was happy to have avoided a longer sentence but seemed almost embarrassed by it. “It didn’t have anything to do with race,” he told me for the third or fourth time. (But Temitope Oriola, a University of Alberta sociologist, said it wasn’t uncommon for black victims of racism to deny they had been victims of racism. “They refuse to acknowledge the existence of racism as a particular way of navigating the world and holding onto their sense of self,” he told me.)
Two months after being released from jail, Smith was arrested again, in April 2020, for possession of stolen goods. In September 2022, he was arrested once more and charged with two counts of assault and one count of damaging property, according to court records.
All these charges were subsequently dropped, but that wasn’t the point, the criminal defense attorney in Toronto said. “The police don’t arrest innocent people,” the attorney said. Referring to Smith, the attorney added: “Is he a ticking time bomb and going to keep reoffending? One million percent.”
It seems odd that liberals, who spent decades trying to deracialize society, are now re-racializing it.
Jonathan Simon, a University of California–Berkeley law professor, explained that, when it comes to criminal justice reform, it’s hard to sidestep race.
“The criminal-legal system is the equivalent of a toxic-waste disaster with over decades of institutional focus on communities of color,” Simon said. The public, Smith added, tends to view “crime” and “blackness” as one and the same. “There’s overwhelming evidence from psychologists that blackness and crime are fused in a cognitive way,” he said.
It was necessary to acknowledge that “the criminal-legal system has been jacked up on racism,” so society—in Canada or the United States—can start down the long path of decarceration, Simon said. That was the point of IRCAs, its defenders explained.
John Medeiros, the staff sergeant at the Ottawa Police Department who had overseen the St.-Hilaire case, said he understood why black defendants were skeptical that the system would treat them fairly. There was a long history. There had been discrimination. There had been a great deal of institutionalized oppression.
But he’d been dismayed by the judge’s ruling in the hit and run. According to Nevin’s postmortem examination, the 39-year-old cyclist had been struck from behind and flown into a ditch. He had a laceration on his head, and abrasions on his shoulders, waist, and legs; his spinal cord had been severed, and one of his lungs punctured. The only good news, perhaps, was that he had been killed instantly.
“I don’t think race ought to have been a factor here,” Medeiros told me.
Referring to St.-Hilaire, Medeiros added, “He left a human being on the side of the road, like he drove over a skunk.”
Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Her last article, Trudeau’s Battle Against a Free Internet, examined Canada’s effort to curb free expression online.
Share the post "Left-wing TikTokers mocked for objecting to restaurant’s national anthem: ‘What’s so triggering?’ ‘Outnumbered’ reacts to woke complaints about ‘dangerous’ Star-Spangled Banner"
FOX Business host and former congressman Sean Duffy warned those types of comments may pose a national security risk.
The TikTok video was taken at Rainbow Oaks restaurant in Fallbrook, California, and showed diners standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The video was captioned as “the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in” with commenters claiming the incident is their “worst nightmare” and “feels like a horror movie.”
Duffy said his heart “swells” at the sight of Americans honoring the national anthem, but he issued a somber warning about the state of the country if action isn’t taken to address comments like the ones on the TikTok video.
“This is a national security risk for this country that you don’t have people who love their country, that don’t think their country is great,” he said on “Outnumbered” Wednesday.
“You’ve got all these Marxists in our elementary education, but also in our university system. If this country doesn’t get serious about rooting them out, taking them out to get back to the basic principles that have made this country so wonderful, I do think the country is doomed.”
“Outnumbered” co-host Emily Compagno noted that many of the TikTok users leaving negative comments not American.
Rainbow Oaks restaurant diners stand to salute the flag during the National Anthem. (Fox & Friends First/Screengrab)
“They can say what they want,” Compagno said. “But here to Sean [Duffy]’s point, that’s a mark of honor. That’s a mark of deep pride and respect and gratitude for the foundational elements that this country was founded on and those that sacrificed their lives supporting and defending it.”
She went on to say the voices of true American patriots won’t be silenced by progressive TikTok users.
“That also goes to show that despite the overwhelming pressure that we receive on a daily basis from the woke left, you cannot take away pride, you cannot dampen pride,” she said.
Co-host Kayleigh McEnany called out the callous attitude progressives have toward patriotic American symbols, saying she doesn’t know what’s so “triggering” about the anthem or the flag.
The anthem, she said, is about the heroes that made America great. She recalled Mara Gay of MSNBC and the New York Times saying in 2021 that it was “disturbing” to see American flags on the pickup trucks of Trump supporters.
Rainbow Oaks owner Jeanene Paulino responded to the complaints on “Fox & Friends First,” saying the TikTok user likely posted the video for attention. She assured Fox News she “won’t be stopping” her tradition of playing the anthem.
Share the post "Left-wing TikTokers mocked for objecting to restaurant’s national anthem: ‘What’s so triggering?’ ‘Outnumbered’ reacts to woke complaints about ‘dangerous’ Star-Spangled Banner"
All Forms of Redistribution Are Slavery And every leftist is a kind of slave-owner.
Do I have your attention? Good. It’s time for people on the right to wake up.
At this point, I suspect that a majority of Republicans and conservatives have accepted that the welfare state is okay, but that it should be a lot smaller…
It’s okay to have welfare and Social Security and Medicaid and transfer payments of all sorts—we should just have less of them. They should be managed better. We should tailor them to reduce dependence.
No. No no no no no.
If this describes you, then I am talking to you. And though I will sound intense, I am doing this in solidarity with you, in the hopes of waking you up.
You are wrong. You have accepted a fundamentally evil premise.
You have allowed socialism to colonize your mind, just as it has colonized all of Western civilization.
The original creator of the property, wealth, income, etc. is not the sole claimant upon it.
They (the left, and government) have the authority to control the property and adjudicate between competing claims.
Both claims are not just wrong—they’re moral crimes. In order to explain why, I am going to have to hit you with some philosophy. Don’t tune out! Philosophy—good philosophy—is what made this country. It’s what undergirds the founding documents that you love and the protections they seek to enshrine. If you do not understand the philosophy, then you won’t know why the left is wrong, and why you are wrong to go along with these premies even a little bit.
Start by asking yourself why slavery is morally impermissible. Really think about it. Write your thoughts down. Chances are, you’ll come up with things like this:
Slavery is wrong because it…
forces people to labor against their will,
forces people into an arrangement they did not choose,
forcibly compels a person’s actions and choices,
creates a condition wherein one person is legally “owned” by another,
imposes punishments for resistance or attempts to escape.
You know, intuitively, that those things are morally forbidden. And yet you accept, to one degree or another, practices that, though they may differ by degree, do these exact same things. And you need to stop. Our whole civilization needs to stop.
So why are these things morally impermissible? Here’s where the philosophy really kicks in. Fortunately, it’s easy. It may sound fancy, but it really is just an expression of things that even toddlers know intuitively.
We begin with the reality of free will. Every individual has personal control over his thoughts, choices, and actions.
An individual may be subjected to forcible compulsion, but no external party can actually think, choose, or act for him. Free will is thus naturally exclusive. Free will is a consequence of personhood, and since no one’s personhood can be unmade, it is naturally inalienable.
This leads to a simple argument in which we demonstrate that free will lies at the heart of human self-ownership:
1. Exclusive, inalienable personal control over thoughts, choices, and actions (free will) grants to each individual exclusive, dispositive decision-making power over his own body and life.
2. The primary characteristic of property rights is exclusive, dispositive decision-making power.
.˙. Free will grants to each individual property rights over his own body and life.
Self-ownership is thus an outgrowth of free will. It is the quality of being the exclusive owner of one’s own body and being—of having a property in one’s own person. Let us then define self-ownership as Dispositive decision-making power over one’s body and life (with all the concomitant rights and responsibilities), rooted in (naturally and morally) exclusive, inalienable personal control over thoughts, choices, and actions.
Dispositive decision-making power over one’s body and life, for short.
Here again, just about everyone knows that their self-ownership is real. Savvy lefties understand that self-ownership stands in the way of their primary objective—taking the property of others by force—and thus may use sophistry to try to deny its reality. But they will react just the same as anyone else when their self-ownership is directly violated—because even they know it’s real!
Now let us return to Dinesh D’Souza’s discussion of the flute. It was created by one person: the girl who used her mind and her labor to take a previously unowned thing and convert it. This process is an outgrowth of her free will and self-ownership. Her property rights in her own person have extended to property rights in the thing she made. It is hers…and hers alone. Her property right is grounded in a natural and moral reality.
Where would any other claim come from? The utilitarian claim (the flute should go to the person who would play it the best) and the leftist claim (the flute should go to the person who “needs” it the most) have no such grounding. They are opinions. And actuating those opinions (in the context of a society) requires two things:
The violence required to take the flute from the owner, and
A “legitimate” entity empowered to deploy that violence, i.e., government.
Why do you think the left likes big government so much? They want to use violence to take people’s stuff, and government allows them to do so “legally” and “legitimately.” It also gives them jobs and power, which requires that more stuff be taken by force to fund those jobs and create that power.
Are you catching on yet?
It’s a racket. The racket provides money and power to the left’s operatives and feeds the bottomless narcissism of its virtue-signaling rank-and-filers. It’s not noble. It’s just a modernized and legitimized iteration of the age-old human strategy of taking, by force, that which has been produced by another. It’s nothing more than that, and you should not be supporting it in any form.
So as to keep the main text of this article short, I will put into the footnotes
the arguments for why the initiation of coercive force against self-ownership is itself morally impermissible. We will take those as understood.
Now, return to our list of reasons why slavery is morally impermissible. They all are demonstrably wrong because they all violate one’s dispositive decision-making power over one’s body and life. They all violate self-ownership.
Our system of “legitimized” forced redistribution does the same thing It…
forces you to labor for the benefit of others, against your will;
forces you into an arrangement you did not choose;
forcibly compels your actions and choices;
imposes punishment if you resist or try to escape.
These are all clear. The last one—the concept of “ownership” of the “slave” may seem like more of a stretch, but wargame it out just a little bit…
A slave is kept in his condition by force. So are you. A slave is punished if he resists. So are you. (Try not paying your taxes for a while and watch what happens.) The slave has been forced into an arrangement he did not choose, and so have you. The slave cannot opt out and neither can you. You may enjoy dispositive decision-making power over your body and life in some areas, but not in this one. When it comes to the redistributive state, you are, in essence, a slave. If there is a difference, it is one of degree, not of kind.
Do not fool yourself into believing that “voting” gives you some sort of choice. Voting is nothing but a wish, cast into the wind, and all the incentives of democracy are a gale pushing the whole of society towards more redistribution. Never less. (Search your feelings, Luke—you know this is true.)
The people who run the redistributive state, and those who support it and fuel its continuance, believe that your stuff does not belong to you. They believe that they have a license to forcibly violate your self-ownership—the foundation of your rights as a human person. They believe that they, and their agents in government, have the legitimate right to determine what stuff of yours they steal, and how much, and when, and to whom it will be given, and what punishment you will suffer if you resist.
EVERY kind of redistribution is a species of slavery. (Even when the intended recipient is the most sympathetic of characters.) And EVERY person who actively engages in redistribution, or who empowers those who do, is a kind of slave owner.
Do not mince words. Do not dither about on the margins, wondering exactly how much moral crime is allowable.
We can acknowledge the impact of biology, upbringing, circumstances, external influences, and even luck, but the reality of free will remains. Biology and upbringing can be analogized to the earth beneath our feet, and our external circumstances to the sky above—yet in spite of these, each of us still chooses how we move upon that ground and weather life’s storms. Free will is real!
Ontological/automatic/birthright authority does not exist. All authority must either be granted or imposed upon the unwilling by means of coercive force. Any attempt to refute this claim produces a performative contradiction: Anyone who asserts automatic authority MUST use force to impose it upon anyone unwilling to grant that authority. The same applies when asserting a claim of authority on behalf of another.
The unavoidable use of the claim in the attempted refutation raises the claim to the level of an axiom. The absence of ontological authority is a natural fact. Authority is, in essence, the license to compel the actions and choices of others, and no one has this license as a mere fact of his existence. So…
1. Authority is imposed upon the unwilling by means of the initiation of coercive force.
2. No one has ontological authority (automatic authority as a mere fact of his existence) over any other.
.˙. No one has the ontological authority to initiate coercive force upon the unwilling.
The ontological authority to initiate coercive force against another does not exist, and the initiation of any such force is morally impermissible. As shorthand, then, we will say that the initiation of coercive force is ontologically and morally impermissible.
Relating this back to self-ownership…
The natural facts of reality confer upon the individual a property right—that is, exclusive, dispositive decision-making power—in his own person. Such a right constitutes a just moral claim; it came about as the result of an organic process (birth and life), and its exercise does not inherently coerce any other (save for the natural, temporary, and generally welcomed period during which parents must care for their children). Thus,
1. A naturally exclusive, inalienable property right in one’s own person (self-ownership) constitutes a just moral claim.
2. Violation of a just moral claim is morally impermissible.
3. The just moral claim of self-ownership is violated by the initiation of coercive force.
.˙. The initiation of coercive force against self-ownership is morally impermissible.
Of course, we’ve just dealt with redistribution and welfare here. Later, we’ll have to tackle taxation and government in general. But just focus on this for now. Baby steps!
Share the post "ALL Forms of Redistribution Are Slavery And every leftist is a kind of slave-owner."
A lighted sign adorns the Coca-Cola Store in Las Vegas on Feb. 4, 2021. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Hits: 11
Share the post "Coca-Cola shareholders vote down proposal that targets pro-life states Companies have increasingly come under public scrutiny for alleged political biases."
Coca-Cola shareholders vote down proposal that targets pro-life states. Companies have increasingly come under public scrutiny for alleged political biases. One of the WOKE Groups holding Coke stock wanted Coke to go after pro-life states. Under the false pretense of protecting the mother.
Coca-Cola shareholders recently voted against a proposal to conduct a survey into how state laws restricting abortion impact the company’s business performance.
The proposal was introduced by As You Saw, a nonprofit that promotes ESG policies in corporations. Eighty-seven percent of controlling shares voted against the measure.
Share the post "Coca-Cola shareholders vote down proposal that targets pro-life states Companies have increasingly come under public scrutiny for alleged political biases."
Middle school student allegedly sent home for refusing to change shirt that said ‘There are only two genders’ Liam Morrison addressed school board about his concerns on April 13.
A 12-year-old student was allegedly sent home from school after he refused to change his T-shirt that said, “There are only two genders.”
Liam Morrison, a seventh-grader at Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Massachusetts, said he was taken out of gym class on March 21 and met with school staff who told him people were complaining about the statement on his shirt and that it made them feel “unsafe.” His comments were picked up by popular Twitter account LibsofTikTok.
“Yes, words on a shirt made people feel unsafe. They told me that I wasn’t in trouble, but it sure felt like I was. I was told that I would need to remove my shirt before I could return to class. When I nicely told them that I didn’t want to do that, they called my father,” he explained during a Middleborough School Committee meeting on April 13.
“Thankfully, my dad, supportive of my decisions, came to pick me up. What did my shirt say? Five simple words: There are only two genders. Nothing harmful. Nothing threatening. Just a statement I believe to be a fact,” he said.
Morrison added that he was told his shirt was “targeting a protected class” and was a “disruption to learning.” “Who is this protected class? Are their feelings more important than my rights?” he asked. “I don’t complain when I see Pride flags and diversity posters hung throughout the school. Do you know why? Because others have a right to their beliefs, just as I do,” he said.
“I was told that the shirt was a disruption to learning. No one got up and stormed out of class. No one burst into tears. I’m sure I would have noticed if they had. I experience disruptions to my learning every day. Kids acting out in class are a disruption, yet nothing is done. Why do the rules apply to one yet not another?”
Liam Morrison, 12, reads a statement during a Middleborough School Committee meeting on April 13. (YouTube / Middleborough Educational Television)
The student said “not one person” directly told him they were bothered by the words on his shirt and that other students had told him they supported his actions.
Morrison told the committee he felt like the school was telling him it wasn’t OK for him to have an opposing point of view and that he didn’t go to school that day to “hurt feelings or cause trouble.”
“I have learned a lot from this experience. I learned that a lot of other students share my view. I learned that adults don’t always do the right thing or make the right decisions. I know that I have a right to wear a shirt with those five words. Even at 12 years old, I have my own political opinions and I have a right to express those opinions. Even at school. This right is called the First Amendment to the Constitution,” he stated.
Middleborough School Committee members hear concerns from 12-year-old Liam Morrison after he was allegedly sent home for refusing to change his shirt. (YouTube / Middleborough Educational Television)
“My hope in being here tonight is to bring the School Committee’s attention to this issue. I hope that you will speak up for the rest of us, so we can express ourselves without being pulled out of class. Next time, it may not only be me. There might be more soon that decide to speak out.”
Share the post "Middle school student allegedly sent home for refusing to change shirt that said ‘There are only two genders’"
Didn’t see this coming. Spielberg blasts revising old films for modern audiences, admits ‘mistake’ in editing guns from ‘E.T.’
Legendary director Steven Spielberg recently blasted the idea of revising old films for modern audiences and their sensitivities.
During an interview with TIME Magazine, the “E.T.” and “Jurassic Park” director claimed that old films should not be updated for the modern lens and claimed that directors who do so are committing “censorship.”
Spielberg also expressed his regret for editing guns out of a recent release of his classic sci-fi adventure film, “E.T.,” claiming it was a “mistake.”
Director Steven Spielberg speaks to TIME Magazine about censorship. (Screenshot/Mediaite)
The director spoke with the outlet’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal during TIME’s “100 Summit” on Tuesday. The two discussed filmography, with Felsenthal eventually asking the filmmaker whether there are any films he would have like to have done differently or go back and change based on where he is now.
“Looking back at your body of work… are there films you would edit, that looking back at them, something you would’ve done differently? As an editor, I feel that way about some TIME covers – Not yours!” the journalist asked.
“But is there a sense of – I know at one point you took some guns out of ‘E.T.’ and then regretted it,” he continued.
Spielberg cut in, admitting that revising the beloved film was wrong.
“That was a mistake. That was a mistake,” he said, adding, “I never should have done that because ‘E.T.’ was a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily or being forced to peer through.”
Stephen Spielberg attends the 95th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on March 12, 2023 in Hollywood, California. (Getty Images)
He noted why he initially revised it, telling Felsenthal, “’E.T.’ was a film that I was sensitive to the fact that the federal agents were approaching a bunch a kids with their firearms exposed. And I thought I would change the guns into walkie-talkies.”
Spielberg claimed he made the changes due to his evolving views, but ultimately realized he should have left the movie alone.
“I should never have missed with the archive of my own work, and I don’t recommend anybody really do that,” he said.
He then voiced the importance of leaving the films as they are, saying, “All our movies are a kind of measuring – a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like, and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.”
The Time editor-in-chief asked if Spielberg’s standard applies to other forms of artistic media. Felsenthal specifically mentioned publisher Puffin UK updating an edition of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie & The Chocolate Factory” to feature fewer offensive words found in the original text.
After mentioning it, Speilberg declared, “Nobody should ever attempt to take the chocolate out of Willy Wonka! Ever! And they shouldn’t take the chocolate or the vanilla, or any other flavor out of anything that has been written.”
He added, “For me, it is sacrosanct. It’s our history, it’s our cultural heritage.” Felsenthal asked, “Warts and all?” to which Spielberg replied, “I do not believe in censorship in that way.”
Roald Dahl, the author of several popular works, including Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Tony Evans, E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service)
Spielberg blasts revising old films for modern audiences, admits ‘mistake’ in editing guns from ‘E.T.’ | https://www.foxnews.com/video/6326205137112
Share the post "Oh My! Didn’t see this coming. Spielberg blasts revising old films for modern audiences, admits ‘mistake’ in editing guns from ‘E.T.’"
Winning. Anheuser-Busch InBev has changed its marketing leadership after a disastrous marketing decision, Ad Age reported.
Woke Bud Light Vice-President of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid has taken a leave of absence weeks after the company was criticized for its partnership with a transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Todd Allen, VP of global marketing for Budweiser, will replace Alissa Heinerscheid as vice president of marketing for the brand, Ad Age reported.
The comfort food-style restaurant chain Cracker Barrel, known for its overwhelming amount of ornamental knick-knacks and vintage signs plastered on the walls, is in some social media trouble today. Folks on the internet are claiming Cracker Barrel is racist.
What’s the meaning behind Cracker Barrel?
According to Southern Living, “cracker-barrel” was coined in 1916 because of barrels containing soda crackers — a popular item for sale at country stores. Customers at said country stores would hang around the barrels as a kind of ritual (kind of like the trope of employees gossiping near the water cooler). The first Cracker Barrel location opened in 1969 in Lebanon, Tenn., and it derived its name from the cracker-barrel community experience back in the day.
According to Dictionary.com, “cracker-barrel” means “of or suggesting the simple rustic informality and directness thought to be characteristic of life in and around the country store.”
But some Twitter users have also pointed out that the term “cracker” might have another, more racist connotation. According to NPR, the term “cracker” was used in the mid-18th century to refer to poor white people in states like Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia.
“It is suspected that it was a shortened version of ‘whip-cracker,’ since the manual labor they did involved driving livestock with a whip,” historian Jelani Cobb told the outlet.
But in the late 1800s, writers from the northern USA region referred to some southerners as “crackers.”
Oh, Please!
“[Those writers] decided that they were called that because of the cracking of the whip when they drove slaves,” historian Dana Ste. Claire told the outlet, though he noted those the term would be applied to weren’t typically wealthy enough to own slaves.
Users on Twitter also claimed that a “cracker barrel” was the barrel used to hold whips, though there is currently no historical evidence to back up that claim. [See the above screenshot from a Twitter post.]
Back in 2015, someone named Ryan Koch, who lived in Iowa, started a petition to change its name because he believed Cracker Barrel to be “racist” toward white folks. Per the Change.org petition, Koch wrote, “I say all European Americans start protesting C****er Barrel. It uses an offensive slur, and it is deeply offensive and mocks our long and proud heritage.” He later clarified the post was “satire.” Ummmmm, OK.
In a tweet, one user claimed you can even see a whip in the logo, going from the first R in “barrel” to the K in “cracker.”
While it’s currently unclear whether or not there is any historical evidence to that claim, the company has since removed the connecting line from the R to the K in the logo.
Cracker Barrel’s PR team reportedly told Pop Icon that the logo was meant to “invoke nostalgia,” and was inspired by “an older gentleman who sat on the front porch during the summer.”
Has Cracker Barrel ever been racist?
So, while it seems like the name of Cracker Barrel isn’t inherently racist, it sounds like a lot of Black customers have experienced racism at the restaurant locations, which is horrifying.
In 2004, there was a filing and settlement of a racial discrimination lawsuit against Cracker Barrel after finding evidence of racist behavior and discrimination in at least 50 locations across the U.S. According to CBS News, 21 people filed a $100 million federal lawsuit against the chain. At the time, a spokesperson for Cracker Barrel stated, “ Our mission is pleasing people, and that means all people. We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind.”However, evidence suggests that Cracker Barrel definitely knew what was happening and wasn’t doing anything about it. Attorney David Sanford stated, “It can’t be the case that Cracker Barrel doesn’t know about it. We have enough evidence right now to suggest that Cracker Barrel, to the very highest level, is responsible.”
According to CBS News, the lawsuit includes statements from Black customers who stated they were forced to wait while white customers were seated right away. One specific person said that she arrived at Cracker Barrel at 9:48 p.m. and was told that she couldn’t be served because the restaurant was about to close. However, she then saw four white men were allowed in. “We had hungry children, and he still refused to serve us,” the person said.
“There are perhaps thousands more African-Americans who have been denied service, treated rudely by servers and hosts, and subjected to racial slurs at Cracker Barrel restaurants,” attorney Grant Morris said.
Hopefully, the chain learned from their (sic) mistakes and has implemented a zero-tolerance policy among their (sic) staff. Nobody deserves to go to a restaurant and be discriminated against — period.
If you are looking for ways to donate your time or money to Black Lives Matter and other antiracist organizations, we have created a list of resources to get you started. [bolded in original]
Well, that last paragraph lets you know where this clueless white woman who posted this on DISTRACTIFY stands on the political spectrum.
It would seem she is so far gone that she doesn’t proofread her articles before submitting them. A number of commas are missing and misusing their for its. I left those in with the notation hat they are in the original.
Chapman is located 30 miles from LA. A private Liberal Arts school.
Share the post "Gimme a break: Cracker Barrel Is Under Fire for Its “Racist” Name"