Daily Archives: January 11, 2022

Despite officials at Riverside Unified School District claiming critical race theory is not taught in the California district, public records, as well as a cursory glance at the districts website, proves such claims are blatant lies.

According to records of the minutes taken at two local school board meetings, one of which was held on July 15, 2021 and another on August 5, 2021, multiple public employees at Riverside Unified School District claimed that critical race theory was not taught in the school district. Superintendent Renee Hill is one such public employee.

The records note that during the meeting on July 15, Hill addressed various topics that seemed to be on the minds of some RUSD stakeholders. First, she said, RUSD does not teach Critical Race Theory. The divisive theory was discussed again during the August 5 meeting, when community members spoke on CRT during the public comments section of the meeting. It was directly after these public comments that Board of Education member Tom Hunt also lied about the presence of CRT in the district.

The minutes records noted that Hunt addressed the fact that there are rurmors floating around that RUSD is teaching critical race theory, but they are not. A company was hired to work with RUSD staff in order to enhance ethnic relations, and this has created a misconception, because the design for Ethnic Studies is not critical race theory. Hunt said there is fake news happening across the nation, including Riverside.

The Local Control and Accountability Plan revealed the district spent a whopping $942,103 on programs for cultural proficiency training, culturally responsive teaching, and other programs that frequently feature the themes of CRT.

One hired to deliver such trainings was Epoch Education, which, according to the districts LCAP, was commissioned to train as many as 400 administrators in cultural proficiency. On August 15, 2020, Assistant Superintendent Jacqueline Perez gave a presentation to the board that outlined the districts partnership with Epoch Education, as well as their strategic plan to advance CRT.

The presentation, which can be downloaded and accessed through the meetings records, left no room for doubt regarding the presence of CRT in the district. One slide, labeled Superintendent Call To Action, demands that the board reflect on your own mindset on race and privilege. It also says that an equity champion Explore[s] Whiteness [sic] as Property through Critical Race Theory.

Its also evident that these themes are intended to affect the instruction of students. For one thing, the presentation quickly transitions to a conversation on the new ethnic studies curriculum the district will be teaching. The presentation also features an Equity, Access, and Community Engagement Division graphic that includes District Student Equity Leaders, further evidence that the student body is directly involved in equity initiatives that are explicitly rooted in CRT.

While public records offer ample proof that CRT is being taught at Riverside Unified School District, even a cursory glance at their websites Equity, Access, and Community Engagement Resources page disproves the claims of Hill and Hunt.The resources page links to an academic article called The Integration of Response to Intervention and Critical Race TheoryDisability Studies: A Robust Approach to Reducing Racial Discrimination in Evaluation Decisions.

Particularly striking was a link to a pdf entitled Transforming Our Public Schools: A Guide to Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education, which preached the need for culturally responsive education.

The guide discusses what culturally responsive education would tangibly look like and encourages teachers and administration to receive anti-bias trainings on race, power, and privilege. The guides glossary includes CRT buzzwords like oppression, decolonize, intersectional, privilege, and liberation.

The document was created by the NYC Culturally Responsive Education Working Group and the Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative (EJ-ROC) at the NYU Metro Center. Their website prominently features a CRT toolkit that explains how leftwing school administrations and teachers can defend CRT against the right, whom they claim are amping up their racist strategies. The document also uses the term culturally responsive sustaining education virtually interchangeably with CRT and even cites the aforementioned Transforming our Public Schools guide.

A reading guide for Robin DiAngelos White Fragility is linked by the district as a resource under professional development. It presents a list of discussion questions for each chapter, such as what are some examples of white feminism? It also doubles down on DiAngelos assertion that it isnt enough for white people to be nice and that, in fact, racism depends on white people simply being nice.

A document called Justice in June showcased a calendar, with each day featuring an article, video, podcast, or an action item for those who want to be an active ally. One such action item reads Help reallocate city budgets by defunding the police. Robin DiAngelos White Fragility, as well as Ibram X. Kendis How to be an Antiracist, both prominent texts in the critical race theory movement, are also promoted by the document.

Key Equity Terms and Concepts were also promoted on the districts website. The glossary perpetuates the lie that white people cant be victims of racism, arguing in the definition of the term that Racism differs from prejudice, hatred, or discrimination because it requires one racial group to have systematic power and superiority over other groups in society. It also contends that racism exclusively targeted those who are racialized as non-white, as means to uphold white supremacy.

The blatant lies from Hill and Hunt are in no way unique. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers union, denied the divisive theory was taught in public schools after she bragged about teaching it.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in America, also claimed that CRT is not taught in K-12 schools despite hosting a critical race theorist to conduct a training for staff members and even hosting the director of UCLAs Center for Critical Race Studies to give input while they crafted their ethnic studies curriculum.

The persistent presence of CRT in public schools coupled with the dishonesty that surrounds it may drive some parents to support measures that would grant them more authority over their childrens education, such as a recently announced school choice initiative in California.

Neither Hill nor Hunt responded to requests for comment.

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California School District Lies About Teaching Critical Race Theory - The Federalist

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis understands the media better than any other governor in America. By redefining what it means to run a conservative governorship in the COVID era, DeSantis has become a mascot on the right and a villain on the left. Or in other words, a prime target of a hostile media establishment that was eager to prop up Andrew Cuomo and Stacey Abrams.

DeSantis, therefore, is no stranger to dubious reporting from propagandists who masquerade as objective crusaders for the truth, whether it be a made-up scandal from 60 Minutes or an NBC hit piece that complained about DeSantis vaccinating holocaust survivors. On Thursday, DeSantis displayed his understanding of the corporate press with a free master class on how to approach lynchpin issues.

On the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riot, DeSantis went on a tangent about the Democrats obsession with the roughly two-hour turmoil which Vice President Kamala Harris equated to Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attacks on 9/11 in the same morning.

I think its going to end up being a politicized Charlie Foxtrot today, DeSantis said. I dont expect anything good to come out of anything that Pelosi and the gang are doing. I dont expect anything from the corporate press to be enlightening. I think its going to be nauseating, quite frankly.

DeSantis went on to raise issue with the federal governments secrecy surrounding the events Democrats claim are so important to probe while investigations instead have focused on private citizens who have no connection to the chaos.

I do think that if you have this Jan. 6 Committee, why do we not know some of the people who we know were really involved in orchestrating this? They got pulled off the most-wanted list, DeSantis said, in reference to new reporting that the FBI silently stripped names from its website on the same day The New York Times revealed agency informants were in the crowd.

I think that this is something that has really been used for political narrative and posturing purposes. I dont think its been effective, DeSantis added. People here in Florida, they care about inflation and they care about gas prices and education and crime. There is an obsession with this amongst the D.C., New York journalist class and again I think its because it allows them to spin a narrative that they want to spin.

Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

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Ron DeSantis Gives Master Class On How To Respond To Propaganda Press Over Dem Hoaxes - The Federalist

Three hundred emails and more than 50 phone calls in just eight weeks: either I had been targeted by a spam factory, or someone desperately needed my help.

It was a cry for help, from a young man who is too much like me. I fell for one of the biggest medical frauds in history in April 1983 when I agreed to what they call sex change surgery.

This young man was in his mid-20s and, in the spring of 2021, concluded that he had one great hope in life: to be a husband and father with a family of his own. For him lets call him Adrian that conclusion was not easily reached. Sexually abused as a child, diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and assailed with relentless post-traumatic stress disorder, his life has been hard.

His mother recently passed; his father rejected him after his forays into drugs, homelessness, and gender-confused behaviors; his older brother died only months ago. Adrians life had been in deep despair for some time.

Then came an unexpected answer: doctors and therapists told him his mental chaos was driven by gender dysphoria. Swiftly following that diagnosis, the doctors and therapists affirmed his social transition to female and prescribed feminizing hormones. His rebirth into a trans identity was praised and celebrated by new circles of friends.

But changing behavior and dosing hormones didnt help. There was a next step, and he took it. Making no effort to address his multiple, serious psychiatric disorders, one of Americas largest health-care providers sent him to the surgeons who, after a brief consultation, assured him that excising his healthy organs and fabricating female-appearing genitalia would resolve his mental distress.

That was March 2021. A scant five months later, he reached out to me, extremely upset, and wanting to restore what had been inalterably taken from him. All I want is to be a husband and a father, he said, I want to detransition.

His hundreds of emails and phone calls were one extended plea to restore his male reality. It resonated painfully with my own experience of suffering regrettable, unnecessary surgery. Yet having successfully gone back to life as a male allowed me to provide comfort and encouragement to Adrian that his life, too, can get better, although detransitioning is neither easy nor quick.

When I agreed to so-called sex change surgery in 1983, I had suffered 25 years of psychological distress, confused about my gender identity. Twenty-five years and no escape, until I sought out the advice of top experts in the novel field of gender identity, a surgeon and a gender therapist. They assured me that realigning my male body to confirm my female feelings would heal my broken psyche.

This promise of a medical miracle was incredibly encouraging. But its reality played out differently: it took me eight years living as Laura to rediscover the truth. Sex is who I really am; gender is simply a feeling. No hormones, no surgery, and no feeling will ever be strong enough to undo the truth of being irrevocably male or female, which is established at conception.

The promise of being a true woman was a lie; the promise of improved mental health was fiction. The day I returned to understanding that I was a man began a long journey back to objective reality.

Psychosis and despair dogged me for much of that time. The physical toll and complications of the sex change surgery wore at me. Yet I would not relent in restoring reality as best I could. With the grace of a good woman who became my wife and a God who would not leave my side, today I am a sound and healthy male.

I wish that my story and suffering were unique. But they are not, and for many years my role has shifted to helping others detransition from a misperceived gender identity and to restore a life grounded in their male or female reality.

These surgeries amount to fraud in so many ways. Medical doctors and surgeons have never objectively proven the effectiveness of any gender-affirming technique in relieving the mental stress termed gender dysphoria of a trans-identifying person.

For Adrian, the future it offered was a fraud. Nothing was said about his impending, permanent sterility, or the true burdens and impacts of having to take cross-sex hormones for the rest of his life. No effort was made to deal with the mental health issues detected and diagnosed by the providers own staff before clearing him for surgery.

If this sounds like malpractice to you, it sounds like it to me, too. Thankfully, Adrian is now working with an attorney to gain justice. But Adrian hopes for more than that that exposing the dangerous, ineffective treatments to the public eye and legal liability will protect the next Adrian, or the next Laura, from making the mistake of a lifetime.

That mistake was believing the doctors tale that counterfeit womanhood would be a real solution. And counterfeit it is. Adrians breast implants are purely cosmetic; they will never serve the motherly function of breastfeeding. His bottom surgery is no more a gateway to a womb and new life than a cul-de-sac is a freeway on-ramp. Where once was a man with the great hope of fathering and raising a child, surgeons left a faux woman lacking any capacity to procreate.

Adrian and I are scarcely alone in having erred so deeply, been misled so wildly, and working so hard to restore our true selves after suffering devastating gender affirmation surgery. When I wrote Trans Life Survivors, I had to sift through hundreds of similar, agonizing stories to focus on a manageable number of 30 detransitioners stories.

Thousands of sex change regretters like Adrian are not counted in the medical literature. No regret database exists where regretters officially can make their complaints known to researchers or even to their own medical providers.

Medical researchers say regret is rare, based on junk science. They fail to disclose that up to 90 percent of trans-identifying people included in research studies have been lost to follow-up, according to the book Principles of Transgender Medicine and Surgery. Any conclusion about the percentage who regret is based on the 10 percent or so that could be found: hardly a meaningful number.

Consider this: my wife and I have spoken directly to, exchanged emails with, and sat directly across from thousands of sex-change regretters. Adrian is just one among the thousands I have had the pleasure of knowing personally. Not one has ever been included in any systematic, rigorous research.

Why do so many sex change regretters contact me? Its because I was among the first to speak out through my website sexchangeregret.com and ask others for their stories. More than 2 million visitors in the last seven years have come to the website to read the stories of sex-change regret.

We thought we were following the science to find healing, not knowing that gender identity ideology is unhinged from sound, controlled, reliable research. Now we know better. With Adrian and others courageously seeking not just personal healing but reform through the legal system, there is hope that these wayward, dangerous transgender treatments will soon fall away into a dark corner of history.

If you, like Adrian and myself, regret your so-called transition, feel you were misled by the idea, and want to detransition, or even file a medical malpractice case against a medical provider or therapist, drop me a note at sexchangeregret@yahoo.com and we will do all we can to help you get your life back. Just remember you do indeed count with me.

Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.

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He Wanted A Family. Trans-Crazed Doctors Left Him Hopeless And Sterile - The Federalist

Americans are starting to feel the increasing collateral damage from our unprecedented, ineffective, and ill-advised Covid lockdowns. It was known before March 2020 that lockdowns would cause lifelong and avoidable damage to billions, yet the worlds ruling classes who claim to have earned their place atop a meritocracy strenuously demanded such damage be inflicted especially on children and other vulnerable people.

This ruling class used all their massive financial, communications, and government powers to ensure these tragic outcomes, even though anyone who was an actual expertor, like me, just someone who reads and has common sensepredicted this false cure would hurt worse than the disease.

Now that people are beginning to more deeply feel the foreseeable evil consequences of ruling class responses to a novel virus, that ruling class is pulling what propaganda experts call a limited hangout. Thats admitting to bits of the truth in order to re-establish yourself as a credible authority while attempting to keep the whole truth hidden.

So we have outlets such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, which have throughout the Covid era worked as government butt-coverers, now publishing articles admitting that lockdowns and continued rolling blackouts of school instruction is irrevocably damaging Americans, especially children and even more especially the poorest. The kids, as I pointed out in April 2020 and numerous times thereafter, will never as a generation recover.

Now that the damage is done, major corporate media organizations have decided to pivot to acknowledge just enough of the truth to cover their complicity. The Atlantic, for example, last week published an article titled Americas Covid Rules Are A Dumpster Fire (It took you two years to figure out what was apparent within the first month?).

CNNs Brian Stelter recently did a segment acknowledging the foreseeable mental health crisis from lockdowns that is causing suicides, ruining marriages, putting formerly perfectly normal kids into rocking fetal positions, and erasing the credibility of formerly mostly ignored public health experts at institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Stelter made multiple statements that have gotten numerous conservatives punished by and erased from social media, such as that Covid zero isan impossibility and the CDC has turned into a punchline.

Where was Stelter a year and a half ago, when data reflecting the exact same outcomes were also plentiful? Heck, Stelter was still legitimizing Covid panic one month ago, when CNN and other news organizations reinstituted lockdown measures amid omicron panic they helped inflame. Six months ago, Stelter was indicating Fox News had blood on its hands for reporting less hysterically than all the other major media organizations about Covid.

Clearly, Democrats are becoming ensnared by their own trap, and theyre trying to get out with this public reversal of their messaging. The limited hangout is afoot.

Brave NYT truth-teller David Leonhardt also recently published an article and an accompanying tweetstorm on the topic.

The number of E.R. visits for suspected suicide attempts by 12- to 17-year-old girls rose by 51 percent from early 2019 to early 2021, according to the CDC, he tweeted.

Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the viruss spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit, he noted in the article.

No sh-t, Sherlock. So why did The New York Times run hit pieces on Trump medical advisor Scott Atlas for being one of the few scientists courageous enough to point this long-ago known data out more than a year ago, when the damage could have been mitigated? Why did Stanford University colleagues and formerly respected medical journals, boosted by corporate media attack campaigns, try to discredit Atlas and colleagues such as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for saying things The New York Times, Atlantic, and CNN are admitting now?

Why did the CDC punish world-renowned vaccine scientist Dr. Martin Kulldorff for publicly disagreeing with them on vaccine safety? Why does Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook shadowban nearly every Federalist article on anything touching Covid-19, and why did they spend two years on massive information suppression campaigns against scientists, politicians, podcasters, and just ordinary citizens who had some questions, contrary data, and objections to elites demanded Covid response?

Because it was politically expedient to sacrifice science, Americans civil rights, human lives, and the worlds future then, and it is not politically expedient to face the consequences for that choice now. And they think nobody can or will hold them accountable for their deadly and despicable lies.

All the misery these too-late admittals underscore appears to be true, but it also could have been prevented. CNN and The New York Times not only did nothing to help prevent this kind of irreversible damage, they willingly, even gleefully, participated in this completely unwarranted mass abuse of Americans. The left lied, children committed suicide.

The corporate lefts morally abominable Covid propaganda operation demands justice. The people who could and should have known, and in fact likely did know, that lockdowns would harm millions of innocents while not protecting the vulnerable can never be trusted again.

Did any of these people tell the truth back when it could have saved the generation that comprises the worlds future? Nope. They not only watched it happen, they cheered it on and viciously ostracized all who told the truth.

All these people have erased all their moral authority and their claims to expertise. The same goes for all the education experts and leaders who didnt spend the last two years screaming at the top of their lungs that school shutdowns are a stupid, scientifically unwarranted, and evil idea. Yes, thats basically all of them.

Experts who knowingly allow mass child abuse because they dont want to harm their careers are not experts, they are cowards. They deserve not one ounce of public trust or even to retain their jobs. They certainly should have no public funds nor authority over any portion of the upbringing of American children.

Not one parent or elected official should give these education and public health experts the time of day. In a time of dire need, these keepers of the nations children and controllers of billions in public funds piled American children on a funeral pyre, lit it on fire, and cheered as it burned. Requiring that they find a more honest line of work would be an act of mercy.

These experts and leaders have shown themselves to be grossly incompetent at discharging their crucial public trust and duties. They should be relieved of those duties as soon as possible. If state lawmakers will not do it, citizens must. If they do not, they are also complicit cowards and also deserve to be sanctioned and socially shamed for their willingness to sacrifice the most vulnerable for their personal comfort.

For a long time now, American parents have registered deep dissatisfaction with the public schools they feel forced to stick their kids in. Even before lockdowns, unscientific and education-damaging forced masking in schools, ridiculous repeated quarantines of healthy kids, and rolling brownouts of in-person schooling, polling shows most American parents wish they didnt feel like the public schools in their ZIP code were their only option.

After all this incompetence-imposed life chaos, the current surge of parent outrage at local school board meetings is only the tip of the spear. As more evidence emerges of the unnecessary harms we knew beforehand would result from lockdowns, public anger will only grow. It wont be limited to schools, either.

If more exciting school board meetings, primaries for craven politicians, and parents yanking funding from schools that dont serve them are what it takes to run every one of these moral cretins out of every position of power theyve abused throughout their careers, then go, Americans, go. Do it for the kids. Our future will remember who stood up for the truth, lives, and liberties, and who made billions of precious humans needlessly suffer.

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Those Who Brutalized Children To Grab Power Aren't Experts, They're Evil - The Federalist

Nothing can separate the geniuses behind Reno 911 from their own brilliance. From Bush to Biden, every iteration of the show is consistently hilarious. Reno 911!: The Hunt For QAnon extends the franchises long record of greatness, and thats despite todays crippling pressures of groupthink.

Few comedic offerings have mocked the absurdity of post-Obama politics with much success. Its Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a holdover from the Bush era, which explains its ability to skewer right and left without forcing some vapid and ritualistic partisan endorsement. Reno 911! premiered two years earlier, all the way back in 2003, lampooning both sides of the culture wars just as they began congealing. The Q-centric film on Paramount+ retains that strength at a time when most comedy writers feel compelled to couch satire of the left with cheap signals of their progressivism.

The Hunt for QAnon also retains another key feature of the show from its Comedy Central days. Unlike most modern comedy, Reno (and Sunny) is perfectly comfortable as satire. Its absurd, its offensive, its crass, and its not going to take you on an emotional journey.

The Hunt For QAnon relies on some easy tropes and swings lazily at some low-hanging fruit, but the grand Q conspiracy, for all its insanity, is objectively hilarious. It always should have been seen as such, instead of breathlessly treated as a threat to national security, which helped the web of theories metastasize into something bigger.

Writers Robert Ben Garant, Keri Kenney, and Thomas Lennon (who you know as Junior, Wiegel, and Dangle) let us relax and see the grifty Q movement for what it isa collection of crazies, cynics, and disaffected people looking to make sense of a bizarre world.

Spoilers ahead.

The moment its clear they still get it comes when a Q cruise the officers are on turns out to be absolutely loaded with undercover law enforcement. Basically nobody in our political establishment or popular culture concedes this is a real part of the narrative. But, as always, Reno 911! is here to save the day.

Like Reno 911!: Miami, The Hunt For QAnon is a low-budget, low-logic romp, casting the shows best guest stars in new roles, taking the characters out of their usual environment into something even stranger. Its just fun. Its not trying to be anything other than fun. Doing that and doing it well is a lost art.

Even Quibi couldnt dull the spirit of Reno 911! When a new, bite-sized version of the show premiered on Jeffrey Katzenbergs ill-fated streamer, it was like the team hadnt missed a beat. The same is true of The Hunt For QAnon.

Given all the time elapsed since the show first hit the airwaves, the consistency of the humor and the characters is absolutely remarkable. Nothing from new formats, the politics of the Trump era, or the pressures of the Biden era has made so much as a dent in the quality of Reno 911! Thats pretty cool.

While I do have a very legitimate complaint about Terrys absence from the movie, it harkens to a freer time in comedy and culture, where 1) generally liberal comedians felt comfortable breaking boundaries and mocking everything that deserved mockery and 2) people put money behind comedy for the sake of comedy, not comedy delivered with a half-baked emotional subplot. If streamers can fund these niche projects to lure niche audiences, the next step is to make sure more artists are willing to make them.

Emily Jashinsky is culture editor at The Federalist. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young Americas Foundation. Shes interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including Fox News Sunday, Media Buzz, and The McLaughlin Group. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center and a visiting fellow at Independent Women's Forum. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

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'Reno 911!: The Hunt For QAnon' Is A Work Of Art - The Federalist

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosis January 6 Commission was supposed to help Democrats hold onto their slim majority during tough 2022 midterm elections. Instead, it stumbled out of the gate, failed to gain legitimacy among the public, and has been plagued with serious legal and ethical problems.

Pelosis decision to politically exploit the riot at the Capitol was a no-brainer. Democrats nearly lost the chamber in 2020 when Democrats took control of the Senate and presidency. The presidents party almost always loses significant numbers of House seats during midterm elections. The only time that didnt happen in recent history was 2002, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Pelosi understandably felt her best bet to preserve power was, with a massive assist from left-wing media, to somehow turn disgruntled Donald Trump supporters riot at the Capitol into the next 9/11.

There were massive problems with the scheme. For one thing, Republicans had immediately and vociferously denounced the riot. This was a far cry from the Summer of Violence, when Democrats and their media enablers cheered as leftist groups destroyed sectors of cities throughout the country, resulting in some 15 times more injured police officers, 23 times as many arrests, and estimated damages in dollar terms up to 1,300 times more costly than those of the Capitol riot.

Democrats did not condemn these serious and lengthy attacks on the White House, federal courthouses, police buildings, private businesses, and homes. Instead, they joined with the rioters in calling for the defunding of police and other radical measures.

The riots were the result of a deeply destructive lie, pushed by top Democrats, that the country and its policing are irredeemably evil and racist. Whats more, any and all attempts to quell the siege of federal buildings were condemned in the most hysterical terms by Pelosi and other Democrats.

Kamala Harris, then a senator from California and the Democrats vice-presidential nominee, supported bailing out rioters who destroyed much of Minneapolis. Pelosi pooh-poohed the destruction of federal statues and historical markers. Republicans had consistently opposed political violence, beginning in the summer of 2020, but Democrats had not.

Still, the plan might have worked had Pelosi put together a decent committee. Yet she made several critical errors if she hoped it would be taken seriously.

Consider, first, how Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy managed a similarly important committee with a confidence that Pelosi has lacked.

Democrats threw together their first impeachment of President Trump in 2019 after their long-promised Russia collusion impeachment fell apart due to lack of evidence. Democrats and their media enablers had been claiming for years that Trump was an illegitimate president, and some Republicans had helped them in their general efforts to oust him. McCarthy had a difficult task, knowing that Republican voters werent nearly so weak as some of their leaders and would desert the party if it helped Democrats impeach President Trump.

McCarthy was constrained by Democrats avoidance of the Judiciary Committee as the venue for the impeachment investigation. Pelosi was concerned that Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-New York, didnt have what it would take to run impeachment. Impeachment was instead run through the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.

That committee included a few Republican members known for opposing Trump, such as Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas. He and Mike Conaway, also of Texas, had already announced they werent running again. Some were urging McCarthy to remove Hurd and replace him with someone else. But McCarthy let everyone who wanted stay, while also encouraging any members who enjoyed performing oversight of the intelligence community but didnt want to take part in an impeachment circus to step away temporarily. When Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Arkansas, graciously agreed to such a move, McCarthy replaced him with Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

Even that choice showed McCarthys confidence, since both McCarthy and Jordan had run for the top leadership spot not long prior. Jordan had also successfully helped block McCarthy from becoming speaker a few years prior. But once McCarthy was made Republican leader, he made Jordan the top Republican on the Houses Oversight and Reform Committee, even over the objections of his supporters on the Steering Committee.

The diverse Republican group on the Intelligence Committee ran an effective opposition, even with Schiff and Pelosi manipulating the proceedings for maximum gain. In the end, Republicans held together, with not a single member of the conference voting to impeach Trump over his phone call with the Ukraine president. It was significant that conservatives and moderates all agreed the charges didnt pass muster. In the Senate, only Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah fell for the impeachment trial as led by Schiff, leading to Trumps first acquittal.

By contrast, Pelosis roster management has been something of a disaster.

Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi is not even pretending to aim for impartiality and is not well versed in due process. He filed a lawsuit against Trump months before Pelosi chose him as her chairman. And he recently told rabid MSNBC conspiracy theorist Rachel Maddow that if you invoke your constitutional rights against being forced to testify, you are part and parcel guilty of crimes.

Pelosi picked Schiff for the committee despite or perhaps because of his years of fabulism and lies concerning the Russia collusion hoax. Schiff falsely claimed for years that he had secret evidence that Trump had colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election, leaked fake Donald Trump, Jr. emails, fabricated the transcript of a 2019 phone call between former President Donald Trump and Ukraines president, and lied about his interactions with the so-called whistleblower behind House Democrats first impeachment of Trump.

Far from protecting members from the politicized committee, Pelosi also harmed a few vulnerable members by putting them on it. Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Florida, was viewed as a rising star in the party, even being floated in May as a tough potential opponent for Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. But a few weeks ago, she announced she would not even try to win re-election for her House seat.

Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia is also facing a tough re-election race, in a district the Republican governor-elect just won. Her seat is being targeted by Republicans. Being part of a uniparty probe with ethical problems can not be helping.

Pelosis fatal error, however, was blowing up her own committee by taking what she herself admitted was the unprecedented step of removing the Republican ranking member and another top member from it. Pelosi said that she would not allow Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, a distinguished Afghanistan veteran and leader of the Republican Study Committee, from serving. She also banned Jordan, now ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi later claimed the members concerns with the integrity of the 2020 election were the reason. But that made no sense, since she appointed Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, and he objected to Trumps election in 2017. Pelosi herself objected to President George W. Bushs election in 2004 and said there was no question that the 2016 election was hijacked.

The resolution establishing the committee requires the committee to follow House rules on the ranking member and minority party representation. But since Pelosi removed the ranking member, its subpoena and deposition activities are at best questionable, and at worst illicit.

Worse, the committee has been falsely claiming to witnesses to have ranking representation. Pelosis hand-selected co-chair is Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is expected to lose her re-election bid in a few months. The Republican Party of Wyoming does not recognize her as a member, and she lost her Republican leadership position last year because of her vindictive obsession with fighting Trump, whose less interventionist foreign policy she regularly opposed during his time in office.

Known for being a primary pusher of the false Russian bounties claim, Cheney has falsely been presented as the ranking member of the committee. She is not. She was chosen even before the Republican-appointed members were removed by Pelosi.

After Pelosi removed the choices of the Republican conference, she added another hand-selected Republican to represent her Democratic conference. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, also announced he would decline to run for re-election, rather than face defeat from his voters. No Republican-appointed member serves on the committee.

Pelosi wanted to run the commission as a star chamber, and thats precisely how its being run. Its being used to persecute political opponents, violate due process, and obtain the private communications of Republican members, citizens, and journalists. It has been exposed for repeatedly fabricating evidence. And Pelosi herself has blocked the release of evidence implicating her office in mishandling security at the Capitol.

Pelosi is expected to step down from Congress following her lame-duck term and expected loss of the majority in November. Her handling of her J6 Committee shows she has lost her leadership skills and lacks the confidence necessary to run such a political operation.

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Pelosi Owns The J6 Commission, And That's Why It Failed - The Federalist