Today's news in a nutshell
July 6th edition
ELECTION
Jan 6th
Identity of Ashli Babbitt Killer Confirmed — Careless Capitol Police Lieutenant Is Being Protected by Democrats, Pelosi and Deep State FBI
Defund the Police Who did it?
Biden
Obama’s White House Doctor Demands Biden Take Cognitive Test: ‘There’s Something Concerning Happening’
Wake Up Calls
Brittany Spears is going to represent those who have been victims and open the eyes of the sleepers
Latest news:
Britney Spears’ Longtime Manager Resigns, Says Spears Will ‘Officially Retire’
CNN Says "Tucker Carlson Is The New Alex Jones"
Signs of Times
IRS in chaos: Nearly 35 million tax returns are STILL unprocessed and just 3% of phone calls are being answered as Americans try for months to get through to a human on the other end
WORLD
Afghan troops are filmed laying down arms as US general overseeing NATO exit says he's shocked by how quickly they've surrendered to the Taliban and 1,000 are caught fleeing the country
Deutsche Bank culls Dublin workforce
Zimbabwe Joins Growing Number of African Countries Rejecting Coronavirus Vaccines
Large Explosion Rocks Iranian Oil Field Near Iraq Border, Leaving Multiple Dead
Tesla Reportedly Asked Chinese Government To Help Censor Social Media Posts Critical Of The Company
Dutch crime reporter Peter R. de Vries shot in Amsterdam
(pedo)
THE EPOCH TIMES
Wikipedia Co-founder Warns: ‘Wikipedia Is More One-Sided Than Ever’
Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, warned that the online encyclopedia is “more one-sided than ever” in light of the website’s entries for Black Lives Matter, the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump’s two impeachments, and other contentious topics.
Sanger, in particular, took issue with how some Wikipedia entries are sourced.
“In short, and with few exceptions, only globalist, progressive mainstream sources—and sources friendly to globalist progressivism—are permitted,” he wrote in an article on his website.
Several centrist news outlets such as The Daily Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, and The Weekly Standard are sometimes allowed to be sourced, he said, but Wikipedia editors are “careful never to leave the current Overton Window of progressive thought.”
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which take more top-down approaches to content moderation, Wikipedia, which turned 20 years old earlier this year, largely relies on unpaid volunteers to handle issues around users’ behavior, editing entries, and other aspects of the site’s management.
Wikipedia has 230,000 volunteer editors who work on crowdsourced articles and more than 3,500 “administrators” who can take actions such as blocking accounts or restricting edits on certain pages, according to a Reuters article.
Sanger suggested that Wikipedia’s editors have “systematically purged conservative mainstream media sources” because its editors “do not want what they dismiss as ‘misinformation,’ ‘conspiracy theories,’ etc., to get any hearing. In saying so, they (and similarly biased institutions) are plainly claiming exclusive control over what is thinkable. They want to set the boundaries of the debate, and they want to tell you how to think about it.”
Sanger noted that Wikipedia has banned Fox News’ political reporting, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail from being used as sources.
According to a Wikipedia page on the sources that can be used, other conservative websites such as Breitbart, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, The Gateway Pundit, and Newsmax are also banned.
“Many mainstream sources of conservative, libertarian, or contrarian opinion are banned from Wikipedia as well, including Quillette, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller,” he added. “Those might be contrarian or conservative, but they are hardly ‘radical’; they are still mainstream. So, how on earth can such viewpoints ever be given an airing on Wikipedia? Answer: often, they cannot, not if there are no ‘reliable sources’ available to report about them.”
“It is not too far to say that Wikipedia, like many other deeply biased institutions of our brave new digital world, has made itself into a kind of thought police that has de facto shackled conservative viewpoints with which they disagree,” Sanger wrote in a conclusion on his website. “Democracy cannot thrive under such conditions: I maintain that Wikipedia has become an opponent of vigorous democracy.”
But democracy, he argued, “requires that voters be given the full range of views on controversial issues, so that they can make up their minds for themselves.”
“If society’s main information sources march in ideological lockstep, they make a mockery of democracy. Then the wealthy and powerful need only gain control of the few approved organs of acceptable thought; then they will be able to manipulate and ultimately control all important political dialogue,” Sanger said.
Sanger and Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia—of which Sanger gave it its name—in 2001. Sanger left the project the next year and he has, for years, criticized the website.
The Epoch Times has contacted Wikipedia for comment.
Preschool, Kindergarten Enrollment Drops 13 Percent Nationally
Public school enrollment in 2020–2021 fell by 3 percent nationally compared to a year earlier, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), with pre-K and kindergarten jointly seeing a sharp 13 percent drop.
The stark numbers represent the largest year-over-year decline in enrollment since the start of the century, with the drop concentrated among the youngest learners, the NCES figures show.
Pre-K saw a 22 percent decrease, kindergarten enrollment fell by 9 percent, grades 1–8 experienced a 3-percent drop, and grades 9–12 saw enrollment rise by 0.4 percent. The figures are preliminary, with the final results expected to come next spring.
NCES Acting Commissioner Peggy Carr said in a statement cited by K–12 Dive that the figures are “preliminary but concerning,” noting that the enrollment drops were “widespread and affected almost every single state and every region of the country.”
The agency’s enrollment figures reinforce the view that disruptions to in-person learning related to the COVID-19 pandemic drove many families to switch to private schools or homeschooling.
With the pandemic increasingly showing signs of tailing off, school districts across the United States are hiring additional teachers in anticipation of what is expected to be one of the largest kindergarten classes ever as enrollment rebounds.
Robin Lake, an education researcher and director of the nonpartisan think tank Center on Reinventing Public Education, told K–12 Drive that surveys indicate that school districts can expect a “flood of young kids” next fall, posing a logistical challenge as they plan funding, staffing, and space.
Educators are also bracing for many students to be less academically prepared than usual, due to lower preschool attendance rates.
“The job of the kindergarten teacher just got a lot harder,” said Steven Barnett, senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University.
Barnett co-authored a report that found that the number of 4-year-olds participating in preschool fell from 71 percent before the pandemic to 54 percent during the pandemic.
Kindergarten isn’t required in most states, and in normal times, parents sometimes “red-shirt” children who would be young for their kindergarten class to give them an extra year of developmental readiness. This year, even children nowhere near the cutoff age were held out of school because of health concerns and pandemic-related disruptions.
Among them was the daughter of Christina Neu, who works in retail in Wichita, Kansas. Neu held her daughter back, even though she has a December birthday and already would be relatively old for her class because the entry cutoff is the end of August.
“There was a little bit of fear, not wanting her to have to deal with kind of an unknown there,” Neu said, noting that her eldest daughter, who is 8 years old, had just been diagnosed before the pandemic with 26 different food allergies, and her immune system already was in overdrive. “We wanted to make sure that, as a family, we were being smart and being safe.”
School districts are taking a range of approaches to prepare for the expected flood of young learners.
In Orange County, Florida, there are estimates that the incoming kindergarten class will be 17 percent larger than in fall 2020, and officials are planning a five-and-a-half-week transition program this summer at some of its neediest schools.
In Minnesota, the St. Paul district is anticipating nearly 22 percent more kindergartners than in fall 2020. The district plans to do testing over the summer to identify any special needs that have been missed, such as vision problems and speech delays, said Lori Erickson, a veteran kindergarten teacher who now coordinates the district’s pre-kindergarten program.
Still, it remains uncertain just how large kindergarten classes will be in the fall. The increase could be offset by parents who decide to wait an extra year to send 5-year-olds to kindergarten or opt for homeschooling because of safety concerns.
Regardless, education leaders say they expect to be addressing the effects of the pandemic for years.
Parent Who Criticized CRT at Illinois School Board Meeting Speaks Out
“Critical race theory” (CRT) and ideologies related to it have become embedded in U.S. school systems. The doctrine that America is fundamentally racist so all social interactions must, paradoxically, be viewed racially has created a polarizing “culture of intimidation” that can lead to peer and teacher-led shaming of those who disagree, say angry parents.
Increasingly, parents are organizing and speaking out at school board meetings about what is being done with their tax dollars and to their children. For example, a group called Purple for Parents, says it is “dedicated to empowering parents to get involved in their children’s education, taking charge of their rights as taxpayers and having access to the best schools the state has to offer.”
Anti-CRT Speech Goes Viral
Few parents have had the mesmerizing effect of 39-year-old Ty Smith, who spoke out against CRT at a school board meeting in Bloomington, Illinois, in early June. His one-liners like: “How do I have two medical degrees if I’m sitting here oppressed?” and “How am I now directing over folks that look just like you [white] guys in this room right now? How? What kept me down? What oppressed me?” went viral in a social media video that, at least temporarily, upset the CRT apple cart.
Smith, the father of 17- and 19-year-old sons and a physical therapist assistant and orthopedic physician assistant, was soon discovered and interviewed on major TV channels, though he is far from a new media voice. His YouTube channels, Modern Renaissance Man and MRM Ministry, and Saturday radio show “Cancel This,” have already earned him thousands of followers.
The Epoch Times interviewed Smith about whether his life had changed after the blizzard of media attention his school board comments produced. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I run a health clinic and have to direct my employees.”
Smith, who says he grew up poor and on welfare in Decatur, Illinois, with no father and three brothers said he saw the sham of white anti-racist theories like CRT back when he was a child. “As a teenager, I experienced the same talk from activists—calling us downtrodden and disadvantaged. It is true but it is all talk. There must have been 30 people in my life when I was young who talked like that but never came into the hood. Where are they today?”
Smith says he asked some activist students in the Bloomington District 87 system where he spoke in June if they would like to visit where he grew up and see the actual situation in poor black neighborhoods, which has not changed. They all declined, he said. “My old neighbors would have told the CRT activists that it wasn’t the white people that held them back; it was their own bad decisions like having too many kids too early in life.”
The CRT activists are “players,” Smith said, a term heard in the “hood.”
“A player wines and dines a woman and fills her head with what she wants to hear. When he gets what he wants he is gone. The CRT activists are doing the same thing—just building people up for the votes.”
Don’t Call it Hardship
Two terms that Smith doesn’t appreciate being associated with racism are “hard” and “hardship” because they have negative connotations that suggest barriers that can’t be overcome. “I went to college from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., then practiced track from 1 to 3, then worked in a furniture warehouse from 4:30 to 11 and then went home to my sons. While I was rocking them to sleep, I had a book in the other arm. It was not ‘hard’—it was time-consuming.”
Smith says he feels the same about school subjects like calculus and trigonometry—everyone has “potential” and can learn them. “Personally, I am a visual learner so I learn best looking at pictures. I did not realize how well I could learn until I got to college because in high school I mostly did sports. Everyone can learn and what they call attention deficit I call boring teaching.”
Smith said too many parents, both white and black, are not involved with their children’s learning and should be. “If a mom is young and working, she probably is more interested in the kid doing homework and getting good grades than in looking at what is being taught. The same could be said of grandmas who might also just say, ‘do what they tell you.'” The result, says Smith, is shocking content becoming part of the curriculum.
Explicit Sexual Education Taught Too Early
Parents should especially be aware of a proposal in Illinois, called SB 818, that could require sex education at too early an age, said Smith. According to Ralph Rivera of the Christian Pro-Family Alliance, the proposed legislation could teach children as young as eight about “romantic sexual feelings, masturbation” and “the potential role of hormone blockers on young people who identify as transgender.”
Smith condemns such teaching and materials like the sex education book for children “It’s Perfectly Normal” used in some schools. Teaching children who are too young to even be able to give consent that “sexual stimulation is good not bad” sets the stage for sexual activity between children “before it naturally develops,” he said. Predators and molesters could easily tell children such acts are “normal” and that they should not tell their parents on the basis of such teachings, says Smith. “When I was growing up they taught us that no one should touch your private areas ever—what happened to that? Who is driving this new agenda?”
A Good Father, Son, and Parent
Smith said he had several sources of role models to help him succeed in life without a father in the home: “Through the Holy Spirit and my church I had a path and direction and I also had mentoring from my coach and athletic director.” Smith also participated in an after-school program that gave students exposure to different trades they might later want to pursue later in life, such as auto mechanics.
Reiterating that white people and CRT do not explain the downtrodden state of some black communities, Smith also brought up the example of his wife: “My wife got her Bachelor’s degree from a historically black college where all the students, faculty, administration, and staff were thriving and black. When hearing that black people can’t get ahead, she would just say, ‘are you blind?'”
Smith also gave the example of his mother: “My mother had children young and even picked cotton in Tennessee when she was a girl but she was also able to get a Bachelor’s degree and work as a school site administrator.”
Even health problems prevalent in the black community such as obesity and high blood pressure cannot be blamed on whites or “food deserts,” says Smith. “Every Aldi and Shop and Save has fresh, healthful produce—if you eat Twinkies or Ding Dongs all day guess what happens?”
Laws Should Support Families
Laws that remove food stamps and financial subsidies from a single mother if there is a man in the house (and surprise checks by authorities) should be illegal, says Smith. “Let a couple have a year of benefits and build some wealth. Don’t penalize strong families.” So-called “affirmative action” has done more harm than good when it comes to the black family, he said.
Smith also says he believes there should be a law that if a man leaves a woman with a child and has no plan to stay with her, he has to get a job and support her. When asked to address the common complaint that there are “no jobs out there” he replied, “That is complete BS! There are no jobs because you ain’t looking for jobs!” he said. “It’s like saying there is no sun outside because you’ve got your curtains shut.”
A Final Irony
Reacting to the dramatic success of Smith’s anti-CRT school board meeting remarks, some liberal sites immediately tried to label Smith an actor, a GOP operative, or a “mole.” One person on Twitter wrote the “right wing media is trying to pass this guy off as some random concern[ed] parent. I bet this is a publicity stunt for [the] YouTube channel.”
The thinking behind such allegations is telling, says Smith. “What does it say about those who called me a GOP troll?” Smith asked. “That a black man could not have come up with my platform on my own? That is more racist than all the things they call racist.”
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