The San Francisco School Board met on May 22, 2018 with a goal of ridding the school system of any signs of racism. It took two actions which showcase how liberals view Zionism as a racist endeavor.
The board decided to establish a panel to rename schools in the district which are “named for historical figures who engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In January 2021 the panel put forward its recommendation to rename 44 schools, including those named after George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln, among others.
Abraham Lincoln school in San Francisco school district to be renamed
Upon announcing the selection of the schools to be renamed, School Board President Gabriela López said “we are working alongside the rest of the country to dismantle symbols of racism and white supremacy culture.” The fact that she endorsed renaming schools named after Lincoln who led the United States in a bitter civil war to end slavery did not seem to make her consider her actions or comment. Lopez added in an interview that “the criteria was created to show if there were ties to these specific themes, right? White supremacy, racism, colonization, ties to slavery, the killing of indigenous people, or any symbols that embodied that. And the committee shared that these are the names that have these ties.“
It is therefore curious – or telling – that at the same May 22 school board meeting, the school board voted to permit the actively anti-Zionist Arab Resource and Organizing Committee (AROC) to begin teaching Arabic and “cultural empowerment” to students in the schools. AROC’s anti-Zionist activities included blocking Israeli boats from docking and calls to destroy Israel with chants “from the river to the sea.” The group calls Israel an “apartheid” state that engages in “colonialism,” outright lies and smears which dovetail perfectly with the woke San Francisco School Board. These are the messages that San Francisco wants taught to its schoolchildren.
The reality is that schools in Gaza and the West Bank – seemingly strongly supported by AROC – promote its own form of “cultural empowerment” and are named after terrorists like Dalal Mughrabi, who led the murder of 37 civilians, including 12 children, in a bus hijacking. The murder of those civilians and young children are seemingly viewed as “anti-colonialism” “resistance” for the woke of San Francisco.
The Martyr Dalal Mughrabi Center with the logos of the Palestinian Authority, UN Women and The Norwegian Representative Office to the PA
When Belgium learned of its donor dollars going to fund Palestinian Arab schools after murderers, it froze funding which made the Palestinian Authority change the name. Alas, it took less than a month for the PA to then name two schools after the same terrorist.
San Francisco is stripping its schools of the names of American presidents who were instrumental in bringing democracy to America and the world, while simultaneously tacitly approving the naming of schools after the murderers of Jewish children, in hiring AROC to promote a twisted version of Arab “cultural empowerment.” Even the anti-Semites in Belgium do not stoop so low.
San Francisco is not only canceling America’s founding fathers but is simultaneously endorsing terrorism against America’s principal ally in the Middle East, the only Jewish State. It does this with the misguided woke self-righteousness of believing Israel shares the same “imperialist” and “racist” attitudes as the Unites States of America.
The generals of the Intersectional Army have begun a carpet gaslighting campaign and it is incumbent on all decent people to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
President Joe Biden has opted to ignore his own past comments by proposing to hire into his administration someone who attacked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In November 2015, Biden berated Israel about aprospectivemember of the Israeli administration who had said derogatory things while he was a private citizen, about US President Obama (that his actions are akin to “modern anti-Semitism”). Biden waved his finger and scolded Israel: “There is no excuse, there should be no tolerance for any member or employee of the Israeli administration referring to the president of United States in derogatory terms. Period, period, period, period!”
Yet today, Biden has proposed hiring Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, to a senior post in the U.S. State Department. Duss has a long history of anti-Israel and anti-Netanyahu statements including his criticism of the Abraham Accords which ushered in normalization agreements between Israel and several Muslim Arab countries. Duss’s 2020 tweets read:
“Netanyahu is right at home among these authoritarian rulers, who openly express disdain for liberal principles and incite against internal enemies supposedly plotting against them.“
“It was unsurprising that Netanyahu’s advocates would hail the deal, since they’re all basically racists who see despotism as Arabs’ natural state. What was disappointing was seeing how many liberal Democrats who should know better joining in.“
Duss had called Netanyahu a racist several times before, including his 2019 tweet:
“Netanyahu’s racist campaign now includes this ad about how he disrespected the first black president in his own house,” seeking to inflame the Black community against Israel.
In 2017, Duss said that U.S. President Donald Trump and Netanyahu were two racist peas in a pod in a tweet:
“Let’s be fair: Trump is America’s Netanyahu. Bibi has been a racist demagogue his entire career. Trump just makes it safe to point this out.“
Matthew Duss, Israel critic, being considered for position in Biden Administration’s State Department
Netanyahu pulled his candidate from assuming a role in the Israeli government so as to not to offend a key ally. Should Biden welcome a fierce critic of Israel who has insulted the leader of Israel many times into his foreign policy team, he is either a hypocrite or doesn’t view Israel as an ally anymore.
January 6, 2021 was a spectacle in Washington, D.C. when protesters stormed the U.S. Capital building which was convening to certify the results of the presidential elections. The overrun of the capital came just as Democrats won two Senate run-off seats in Georgia giving the party full control of Congress. One person was shot and killed and members of Congress needed to be escorted to secure rooms as the building was put in lock down. A curfew was imposed on the city.
U.S. Capital building stormed by pro-Trump protestors, January 6, 2021
People bemoan that the United States has become a Banana Republic which cannot peacefully hold elections or have a transition of power. They wonder how a powerful and wealthy country could descend into such chaos. Quickly pointing to President Donald Trump as the instigator for the event is a missed opportunity to expose the root causes of the mayhem. The danger of not exploring it is the casual dismissal of needed changes to society that go beyond January 20th when Trump leaves office and when the world moves passed the pandemic, hopefully in the coming months.
The instigating reasons include the notion that there is theft, the normalization of violent protest and the breakdown of trust and respect. All of this in the backdrop of a broader move to extremist views by many Americans and the relatively newer belief that government actually matters.
On Stealing
People become enraged when they feel deeply wronged, especially when it comes to something being stolen. If rights, liberties, lands or votes are viewed as being stripped away, then people will actively resist such wrongs.
President Donald Trump actively fed the narrative that peoples’ votes were being stolen which was the reason he lost the election, with “Stop the Steal” exclamations. He told his supporters to not even bother voting in the Georgia Senate run-off, as the system wouldn’t let their voices be heard.
This is not new, as Democrats often make claims of “voter suppression.” A conspiracy theory came out of Hillary Clinton’s mouth four years ago when she said as she lost “they were never going to let me be president.” Her backers believed her and held “Not My President” rallies during Trump’s early months in office.
The United Nations also promotes the notion of theft when it comes to Israel. It uses racist language that Israelis are “stealing Arab land” as if dirt can be inherently “Arab” (imagine someone saying that Alabama is inherently “white”). It established a special agency, UNRWA, which promises to enable millions of Arabs to “return” to Israel, actively fueling anger at the Jewish State.
Normalizing Violent “Protests”
The world actively promotes Palestinian “resistance” and normalizes terrorism. The 2% War which began in September 2000 killed and maimed thousands of Israeli civilians is commonly called the “Second Intifada” meaning “uprising,” softening the crimes of the murderers. Left-wing media states that Palestinians are only “resorting to violence” even when all their foundational charters and glorification of terrorists are plain to see.
In the United states, when the Black Lives Matter protests burned cities to the ground the media said that the protesters were “mostly peaceful” despite the videos of massive looting and scenes of charred buildings. The public seemingly gave a pass to the anarchy. When anarchists seized downtown Seattle and declared their alt-left caliphate with a concocted flag, the police were ordered to not engage.
Normalization by definition creates a new normal.
The Loss of Trust and Respect
There has been a continued erosion in the trust of institutions in the United States over several years. Blacks and liberals have distrusted the police for a long time but the nature of distrust has broadened and deepened.
The Internet is a great tool in allowing people to connect and find areas of interest but its use has had broad ramifications for businesses and society.
The personalization capabilities of search engines has allowed people to narrowly focus on topics and points of view that interest them. Such model and migration of eyeballs has shifted advertising dollars from television and newspapers to online giants like Google and Facebook. It forced the legacy media to pivot their businesses from neutral providers of information to highly-biased disseminators of propaganda. The media’s business model became #AlternativeFacts. When the Internet giants then followed suit during this election and shut down opinions which it found offensive, there became a deep resentment to all of the media.
Amid this backdrop, liberal society endorsed the idea that people’s perceptions of race and gender trumped science, undermining the foundation of truth. Even language became “weaponized” as people received daily addenda to the dictionary.
As the foundations of language and science were being shaken, woke society came after America’s founding fathers and institutions.
Kneeling for the national anthem, and the blitzkrieg of tearing down statues of Jefferson and Washington and renaming buildings and institutions were taken by many Americans as not protests but a profound disrespecting of America. The nation’s capital building became a symbol to either defend or mock.
A Move to Polar Extremes and Suddenly Government Matters
Moderate politicians have been forced out of both the Democratic and Republican parties for the past twenty years. The primary system has favored those who can activate a loud loyalist base and targets politicians who have preferred bipartisanship. The test of party purity advanced more extreme right-wing and left-wing politicians, who resemble the talking points of narrow slices of extremist ideology fed on social media and the Internet.
As bipartisan politicians leave Congress and state houses, extremist opinions and laws get enacted. This leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of the minority as the majority advances its agenda without fear of being voted out of office. When a blue state sees a red state dramatically limiting abortion access, it passes laws allowing for legal abortion up until birth, essentially blessing infanticide.
Extremism doesn’t exist in a vacuum; each side feeds the other. Both sides see that government matters as they adopt extremist laws so it drives people to the polls, with the 2020 presidential election having the biggest turnout in 120 years.
Path Forward
There is not one single thing that needs to be done to become a more perfect union and a more perfect planet. The change of administration and broad vaccinations that are underway will certainly help, but much more needs to be done, as the storming of the U.S. Capital building has been years in the making.
Leaders must stop promoting false narratives of “theft.” While there was certainly a media frenzy against Trump (as there was in 2016), there is no proof of massive voter fraud. Republicans must loudly denounce Trump’s comments, not just Democrats. In other parts of the world, we similarly need to stop inflammatory language such as saying “Arab land” which undermines a chance for peace and the UN promoting the notion that Israel is a “colonialist enterprise.”
Don’t normalize violence and calls for violence. Watching U.S. cities burn and Palestinians blowing up buses and pizza stores and then excusing those actions as “justice” and “natural protest” encourages more violence. Denounce the violence, arrest perpetrators and strip those who call for such actions of any funding.
Build Trust and Respect. It will be difficult for the media to turn back the tide and become neutral providers of information, and social media’s business model is built on giving people what they crave. As such, it is important that the source of all articles and information be included with articles. People understand that Fox tilts right and MSNBC tilts left and can thereby understand that they are only presented with half of the story. Regarding respect, people must understand that revolutions produce counter-revolutions and consider that a casual disrespect of someone or something will likely come full circle.
Embrace the Center. While people encourage the idea of a “wide tent” and talking to the “other side” it must be acknowledged that the fringe must remain on the fringe and not have seats of power. People in the right-of-center and left-of-center can have constructive dialogues of compromise while those at the polar extremes can only battle. If the extreme right or left are aiming to “primary” an incumbent in your district, understand that a vote for such politician will leave them off any committees of significance in the capital.
The capture of the nation’s capital did not happen in a vacuum and it is incumbent on all of us to take actions to reverse course on multiple fronts.
The two senate races in Georgia on January 5 are not as much about the four candidates as a vote for the nature of the next two years of the entire country.
With the Democrats now in control of both the House and Executive branch, the Senate is the last place where Republicans have a chance of establishing balance in Washington. With a win of either seat, Republicans will be able to stop a runaway government controlled by a Democratic Party that has veered into progressive lunacy.
On January 4, nine-term Democrat Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (MO) closed a prayer by ending it with “AMEN AND A-WOMAN,” seemingly showing his woke bona fides. The ridiculousness of trying to be gender-neutral aside, which the Democrats have pledged to enforce, the word “Amen” has nothing to do with gender. It comes from the Hebrew words “El Melech Ne’eman,” which are truncated as “Amen” in both Hebrew and English. It essentially means “so be it.”
Democrat Rep. Emanuel Cleaver reciting a prayer on January 4, 2021
We know the passions of the progressive wing ranging from abolishing ICE and opening borders, defunding the police, anti-two parent families, transferring wealth to people whom they believe deserve it more, reparations, cancelling $50,000 of student loans, etc.
But that is seemingly the opening salvo.
If the Democrats win both senate seats tomorrow, one can easily imagine them making many changes. The House of Representatives will be renamed the “Locale of Representatives” so as to not to offend the homeless. The state of Georgia which was named for the King of England George II, to “GeorgeX” to refrain from giving any gender-preference.
And the nation’s capital city formerly known as the “Washington, District of Columbia” will henceforth be a state called the “Douglass Commonwealth,” named after Frederick Douglass.
My grandparents were poor Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side of New York City. They opened a small clothing store across the street from their apartment and did their best to make ends meet.
One day, a group of local boys came to their store and asked them to pay for “glass insurance” to make sure that the glass in the front of their store did not break. My grandfather declined as the windows had never been cracked. The next day, the front windows were shattered.
Such is the nature of extortion: to get people to pay for items lest you destroy their property and livelihoods. It has gone mainstream among the woke.
The attack on property and persons can be seen among many in the Black Lives Matter protests taking place across the United States. The destruction of stores and assaults on people with calls to “defund the police” and to yell “Black Lives Matter” are not outbursts of rage but targeted violence to extort money and support. The intimidation enables less violent calls for White people to hand over their homes to Black people.
The threats to livelihoods can be seen in various forms including from lawsuits, new government laws and woke corporate initiatives.
Consider the Colorado baker who would not design a custom wedding cake for a gay couple’s wedding. While he was willing to sell them any item in the store, he declined to create something which celebrated an event which stood against his religious beliefs. The State of Colorado sued him in a case that got the attention of the federal Department of Justice as the man’s life and livelihood came crashing down around him.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pushed bills that would require private companies to change the composition of their boards to include more women or minorities as well as cap the salaries of executives or face fines. The Oscars, which are not simply an awards show but a ticket to boost sales, has called for a new diversity standard for any movie to even be considered for an award. A film like ‘1917’ about British soldiers in World War I which was nominated for ten Oscars would have needed to insert ahistorical figures of women and minorities to meet the new woke standard.
Meet my demands, or I will hurt your livelihood and/or damage your person and property.
The immediate battle locale is Georgia, which is having two new elections for senators which will determine the balance of power in Washington on January 5th. The Democrats raised 55% more money than Republicans, much from out of state including progressive strongholds of California and New York. Those funds are being used to blanket the airwaves to drown out any non-Democratic voices. It is the last hurdle as the Democrats seek to control every part of Congress to obviate the need for bi-partisanship and enforce an alt-left agenda upon the entire country.
A decade before my grandparents had the windows of their clothing store in New York City smashed, they lived in Vienna, Austria where they saw the city destroy their family’s stores, synagogues and kosher restaurants. The Nazis in the 1930’s wanted to get rid of every Jew, while local hooligans in the 1940’s just wanted to extort money. America will soon see the depth of Socialist power which will determine whether alt-left progressives simply move to seize the property of the right or to drive them completely out of business and the country.
Just today, Israel’s special coronavirus cabinet decided to place new restrictions on people coming from the United Kingdom, Denmark and South Africa. Non-Israelis are prohibited from entering Israel while Israelis will be forced to spend two weeks in quarantine.
Israel joined Italy, Netherlands and Belgium in banning entry of people from the UK after a new more contagious strain of COVID-19 was detected in Britain. Israel has thus far been the only country to also add Denmark and South Africa to the banned country list. The 501.V2 mutant variety has been detected in those other countries as well, which seems to be more severe in young adults than the prior strain.
To date, Belgium and Italy have been the worst hit countries, with 1,597 and 1,139 deaths per million people, respectively. The UK and United States are both near the 1,000 deaths per million milestone, while Denmark and Israel are much lower at 178 and 335, respectively.
Israel’s “Anglo ban” has not yet produced the vocal outrage from progressives that happened when President Donald Trump placed a ban on China early in the coronavirus pandemic or in the early days of his administration when he blocked entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries which did not have appropriate safety protocols to monitor terrorists, or in “building a wall” along the southern border to curtail the flow of illegal immigration. Maybe it is because these three countries are perceived to be “White.” Whatever the reason, a country that is often in the crosshairs of global condemnation will welcome the pause in criticism as it battles a severe spike in positive infection rates.
Progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continue to advocate for “open borders” and to “abolish ICE” in their desire to welcome millions of immigrants into the country to add to the physical working class and hopeful union members. Meanwhile, the reality of the need to be able to secure borders for the protection of citizenry has never been more apparent.
On December 16, 2020, The New York Times editorial board elected to give its entire opinion page to long-time journalist Thomas Friedman to discuss a topic he knows nothing about: rural America.
The one-time foreign affairs correspondent presented his bold idea that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris should become the czar of rural America and bring broadband to bridge the “connectivity gap.” He wanted this accomplished not so much for the benefit of rural America but to put on a show that Democrats care about these lagging Americans, so those red states might loose a touch of their rosy glow and prevent Democrats from getting trounced in the next election cycle.
What Friedman failed to understand and convey in the editorial was that the Trump administration committed billions of dollars to bring broadband to rural America.
Friedman further noted that Harris “is a natural bridge builder to a more inclusive America.” Maybe Freidman is not aware that non-partisan GovTracks observed that Harris was the least bi-partisan U.S. senator. She also scored as the most extreme leftist in her voting record, even more than proud Democratic-Socialist Bernie Sanders and closeted Democratic-Socialist Elizabeth Warren.
But don’t let history get in the way.
The Times will have its urban readers believe that rural Americans are waiting for Democrats to save them, but all Friedman’s editorial really showed was his ignorance and contemptible view that non-urban Americans are just pawns for progressive politics.
Both the political right and left are coming after the large social media platforms due to their powerful influence over society. The right has complained about the censorship executed by the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for silencing conservative voices while the left has voiced concern about these perceived monopolies destroying competition. The left has mostly been dismissive about the idea that the corporations have a left-leaning disposition, and if they do, they are nonplussed. If corporations are allowed to contribute to election campaigns (see Citizens United v. FEC which the left abhorred), they should similarly be free to share or block content.
As to the question of whether shadow-banning is real, consider this blog of FirstOneThrough which has a right-of-center orientation to American and Israeli politics.
On a typical week, Facebook would account for over 10 times the number of referrals to an article as search engines. That pattern was relatively consistent whether there were few or several posts.
But the pattern broke during the election cycle.
Weeks Ending
FB Average
Search Average
Ratio
Dec 13
672
58
13x
Nov 8
181
56
3
Sep 20
823
60
13
Aug 2
538
48
11
Jun 14
926
71
14
Impact of Facebook Shadow Banning on views of First One Through blog
During the seven week cycle before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the blog remarkably went from getting roughly 13 times as many views from Facebook than search engines to only 3 times as much. The change was completely the result of a sharp decline in Facebook readership, as the volume produced from search engines remained constant.
That meant that fewer people had a chance to read the analysis of a vocal Libertarian and Zionist leading up to an important election. Once the election passed, Facebook permitted viewership patterns to return to normal (as of the following five weeks).
How and why did this happen?
Did a liberal reader flag the October 1 article “Vote Harvesting,” a completely true first-hand account of watching how a local election official can influence who gets to vote? Did Facebook decide on its own that posts from a writer who penned on September 25 “NY Times Tries Hard to Paint Obama/Biden as Pacifists and Trump as Mercenary” is an opinion to be silenced? Did an anti-Israel agitator do their utmost to flag a blogger who wrote on September 27 about the vile anti-Semitic Hamas Charter and how former Democratic U.S. President Jimmy Carter backed the Hamas terrorist group?
Whatever the origin of shadow ban, it clearly happened.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Facebook and Twitter’s actions around the closely contested election on Tuesday, Nov. 17, 2020, in Washington. | Bill Clark/Pool via AP
If Facebook wants to present itself as a biased platform like MSNBC or Fox News, that’s fine. A private platform can take whatever form it chooses. While it may be annoying when a media company like The New York Times pretends to be unbiased and not left-leaning, the tilt is well known and consistent. Only people living in a liberal bubble believe it to be a neutral and factual publication.
However, what kind of platform swings alt-left for just moments in time like during an election season? If the analysis presented by a blogger is offensive, then make it clear for that person to take their business and opinions elsewhere. Always.
What was done by social media in this instance was clear election-meddling, and on the grandest of scales due to the enormous power of social media. (\According to Pew research, 43% of Americans got their news from social media in 2018, a number that surely went up by 2020. That growing figure is despite a majority of people (57%) being skeptical of what they read.
In 2008, Barack Obama and his supporters were very effective in using social media, especially relative to John McCain supporters according to Pew Research. Obama voters surpassed McCain voters in posting content online (26% vs. 15%) and engaged politically on social media (25% vs. 16%) to yield a very successful outcome. But now, the social media companies themselves are keeping the gap in favor of Democrats by blocking the distribution of conservative posts.
Shadow banning in social media is very real and can easily tip presidential elections that are decided by less than one percent of voters in a couple of states. It is frightening and appalling that we no longer have to only fear the actions of foreign actors in the conduct of our democracy but the large social media platforms themselves.
Hamas is the rabidly anti-Semitic terrorist group which runs Gaza and touts itself as simply a “resistant group” while pro-Palestinian media calls it a “militant group.” The group actively tries to recast itself as a legitimate political party and voice of Palestinians as it won 58% of the parliament in elections held in 2007. Its supporters go so far to call it a “social justice” movement, so as to allow more funds to flow into its coffers, such as former head of the UK’s Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn who said:
“The idea that an organisation that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labelled as a terrorist organisation by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake and I would invite the government to reconsider their position on this matter and start talking directly to Hamas and Hezbollah…”
The main governmental sponsors of Hamas are Iran, Qatar and Turkey. Iran makes no secret of its desire to destroy Israel, making its support understandable. Biden has made clear that he intends to reengage with Iran and end the crippling financial sanctions imposed by President Trump.
Saudi Arabia just previewed that it is going to resolve the blockade it imposed on Qatar as a “gift for Biden,” as described by an advisor in the region. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt had all cut diplomatic ties with Qatar due to its support for terrorism. That is seemingly coming to a close.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden meets with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, March 9, 2016. (Flash90)
Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the Hamas celebrated Biden’s win and said “We call on President-elect Joe Biden to make a historic correction to the discriminatory American policy toward the Palestinian people that has caused instability in the region and the world.” It would appear that Hamas is not just looking for direct aid from a Biden government but is very hopeful that indirect funds will flow via the terrorist group’s sponsors in Iran, Qatar and Turkey, and possibly even from the European Union which curtailed sponsoring Palestinian terrorism during President Trump’s term.
Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer (NY) and Elizabeth Warren (MA) proposed that a new Joe Biden administration immediately cancel student debt upon taking office. They proposed cancelling $50,000 for all borrowers of federal student loans while Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) proposed cancelling all student debt.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn in July 2019, well before the pandemic. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
This initiative has great appeal to progressives whose economic mission is to transfer wealth to lower income people. It also goes directly to big Democratic donors.
The Education Industry is Democrats Big Money Donor
Democrat Joe Biden out-raised Republican Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election by 48% ($1.38 billion to $864 million). While the legacy liberal media lies that small donors made up Biden’s base, according to the non-partisan OpenSecrets.org calculations, Biden was all about big money. Libertarian Jo Jorgenson had 68.6% of her donations come in small amounts followed by Trump with 45.0%. Biden was third with only 39.3% coming from small donors.
The big money to the Biden campaign came from the usual Democratic loyalists like lawyers and lobbyists ($83 million in total, almost all to Democrats). The Education sector was even bigger, with over $110 million being contributed to the presidential campaign, of which 94.2% went to Democrats. To give a sense of scale, the hedge funds and private equity industry gave a total of $55 million – HALF as much as the education sector. The oil and gas industry gave $16 million.
Why would the education industry pour so much money into a presidential campaign? Isn’t it struggling to keep up? Don’t they always ask for more money as though cash strapped? If money is so tight, how do schools “donate” more money to an election campaign than the hedge fund, oil and gas, casino and gambling industries combined?
The education industry gave more money to the 2020 presidential campaign than the hedge fund/private equity, oil and gas, and the casino/ gambling industries COMBINED.
source: opensecrets.org
Public SchoolsK-12
The giant and powerful teacher unions are the big contributors. According to Open Secrets, “two organizations account for practically all of the contributions made by teachers unions: The National Education Association (about $20 million in 2016) and the American Federation of Teachers (almost $12 million). Both groups — which compete for members, but also collaborate with each other through the NEA-AFT Partnership — are consistently among the organizations that contribute the most money to candidates and political groups.” The NEA is seemingly transparent about their partisan spending, showing on its website that 96% of its funds go to Democrats. AFT is a 1.7 million member organization headed by Randi Weingarten who makes no bones about trying to use her influence to enact liberal priorities on matters like climate change and universal healthcare.
The payoff scheme is pretty straightforward: Democrats work to empower unions whether in committing to only hire union labor or the ability to collect fees from members. In turn, the union leaders give money to Democrats and push their members to vote for their candidates. These paid-for local Democratic politicians now negotiate the contracts of the people who just helped give them their jobs, a much more loyal base than exists among taxpayers. The Democratic politicians give the unions favorable pay increases and the best healthcare and pension benefits found in the country, far superior than non-unionized citizens.
The cost for K-12 public education has ballooned under this corrupt money transfer scheme where Democratic politicians pour taxpayer money into unions who in turn pour money back into their election campaigns.
According to the US Census Bureau, the per pupil cost to educate public school students consistently rises more than inflation. In 2016, the average cost for a pubic school student was $11,763 while in 2013 it was $10,724, a 10% increase in just three years. That’s OVER THREE TIMES the 3.0% inflation of the consumer price index in that time period.
The ramp in expenses is due to a variety of items including building state-of-the-art facilities and professional-quality ball fields as well as a range of inclusion and enrichment programs for students who need more help. But the biggest costs are the teacher salaries and benefits. In 2016, 88% of the $665 billion of U.S. public school costs were in “Current Spending” of which 65% was for salaries and 35% for benefits.
Teachers’ unions focus on their core constituents – the teachers – not the students. The unions protect even the weakest non-performing teachers, making it almost impossible to fire anyone. Employees of the public education system have health and retirement plans which are the envy of CEOs of large corporations. Teachers and administrators get to retire in their 50’s with amazing benefits throughout retirement while fellow citizens must work into their 70’s. Of course, there are summers off and the occasional sabbatical, unique to the education industry. It is estimated that between 2001 and 2018 the proportion of the educational budget that went to retired teachers grew from 7.5% to 14.4%. Those fixed liabilities keep growing and are crowding out funds for children. The teacher unions prioritize their own early retirees over children and the future.
Teacher unions prioritize their own early retirees over children and the future.
Free K-12 public school is not so free to taxpayers. It is one of the major wealth transfer schemes in America where the wealthier people who own homes shoulder 65% of the costs of public school via property taxes. The wealthy and religious, who are much more likely to send their children to private school, are effectively taxed twice by paying for the services for a second time.
Public and Private Colleges
The inflated costs for education do not stop at high school and Democrats’ fingerprints are here as well.
From 1998 to 2018, the inflation for a vast range of items was 56%. The items with the highest inflation were hospital services (+211%) and colleges (+184%). A year of college today costs an average of $26,820 for in-state public college, $43,280 for out-of-state, and $54,880 for private colleges.
The cost for these degrees is beyond the budget of most people, so they apply for grants, scholarships and student loans. If it were not for the loans, many could not attend school or be forced to attend a lower cost community or in-state school.
The student loan market now stands at $1.6 Trillion. Roughly 66% of borrowers who attended public college have an average loan balance of $25,550. Graduates of private non-profit colleges have more debt, with 75% owing student loans averaging $32,300. The biggest borrowers are for private for-profit colleges where 88% of graduates have debt averaging $39,950.
Note the trend lines. The facts continue to paint an interesting story.
According to a Pew study, the number of poor and non-White people attending college increased significantly between 1996 and 2016, with the share of college students from poor households going from 12 percent to 20 percent over those 20 years, and non-White students jumping from 29 percent to 47 percent. The greatest growth occurred in private for-profit colleges, where 58 per cent of undergraduates were non-White in 2016.
The private for-profit colleges run a very different program than local colleges. As described in The Best Schools, “For-profit colleges often have higher acceptance rates than their non-profit counterparts. Many for-profit schools have an open admissions policy, meaning that they admit all who apply and meet specific, noncompetitive criteria, regardless of grades, test scores, etc. Typically schools with open enrollment only require that applicants have a high school diploma or GED certificate. For students who might struggle to gain admission to schools with competitive admissions requirements, a for-profit college might provide an open door that leads to further academic and career success.” As students with poor grades want to be able to get good jobs that often come with a college degree, they buy their college degrees at these for-profit institutions.
More poor and non-White students attending these schools are increasingly defaulting on the loans they take out for tuition. According to a report by the U.S. Department of Education, “Looney and Yannelis (2015) found that, between 2000 and 2014, the substantial increase in borrowers and the doubling of loan default rates were associated with attending for-profit, and to a lesser extent, 2-year and other nonselective institutions. Among students attending 2-year institutions who borrowed, for-profit students borrowed four times the amount borrowed by their peers who attended public colleges (Belfield 2013).”
The higher default rates are not only associated with the more expensive tuition costs at the for-profit colleges. The same report noted “on average, employment and earnings are higher for students who attend public or nonprofit institutions (Liu and Belfield 2014; Deming, Goldin, and Katz 2012). Six years after beginning their programs, students who ever attended for-profit institutions were more likely than students who attended only public and nonprofit institutions to be unemployed or out of the labor market, and they earned less than students with similar student characteristics and school completion rates did (Liu and Belfield 2014).”
The private for-profit college industry is seemingly taking advantage of everyone: the poor and non-White communities by awarding degrees at a high cost with seemingly lower ultimate earnings, and the American taxpayers who fund the loans to these students which are not being paid back.
Enter Democrats.
Rather than fight to remove the accreditation of these private for-profit colleges which fail everyone or refuse to give student loans to students with poor grades (or cap the loan amounts at a minimum as the poor grades are the underlying reason many apply to the schools), Democratic politicians are making the grand generous offer – WITH YOUR MONEY – to bail out people with high student debt because most of them are non-White. Far-left Rep. Ayana Pressley (MA) was clear in that point when she argued that cancelling student loan debt will “close the racial wealth gap.” The scheme also keeps these for-profit colleges afloat as they need the students and tax-payer funded student loans to pay their shareholders. Democrats need these institutions around to keep churning out degrees for people with poor grades who cannot get accepted to other colleges.
Knowing that the student demand is there and the loans are available, colleges have little incentive to cut costs including terminating the system of professor tenure and sabbaticals as well as renegotiating teachers’ pension largess. There is also no reason to turn away applicants with poor grades as the American tax-payers fund the farce. Democrats join the joke as they hand-out money and college degrees to loyal constituents – the education industry, the poor and non-White communities.
The education industry is a runaway freight train and Democratic politicians are gleefully throwing away the brakes.
First One Through 