“Conservative radio host Lourdes Ubieta left Radio Mambi, an anti-communist station in Miami, which is one of the 18 stations a Soros-linked group will acquire in a $60 million deal later this year. The deal is still pending approval from the Federal Communications Commission.
“What I believe is this is about control and about politics,” Ubieta argued on “Fox & Friends Weekend” Saturday. “And they are trying to silence the conservatives’ voices, especially in Spanish.”
The investment group Lakestar Finance, affiliated with Soros Fund Management, has partially funded the creation of Latino Media Network, a new network that will include Radio Mambi. The network and its stations are controlled by staunch Democrat supporters including a former Obama staffer and Clinton campaign employee.
Media personalities and conservatives have criticized the move, with some arguing it is an attempt to silence conservative voices or push liberal agendas on the Hispanic community.
“I believe Soros is not only trying to silence conservative voices, he’s trying to push his regurgitated nonsense from the left on Latinos, on people who are undecided, people who are not sure,” Congressional candidate George Santos, R-N.Y., told Fox News Digital.
While the deal is still waiting for FCC approval, the acquisition has sparked immense controversy with many conservatives slamming the deal as an attempt to push the liberal agenda.
“[Democrats] are intoxicated with their globalist agenda and the woke,” Ubieta said. “For the Latinas, we are awake, you know, not woke. For us is the love of our country because this is our country.””
“A Minneapolis mom was captured on video Saturday confronting Black Lives Matter activists who congregated in her neighborhood to protest the fatal police shooting of a gunman who she claimed tried to kill her and her children.
Arabella Foss-Yarbrough called police last Wednesday night after neighbor Andrew “Tekle” Sundberg allegedly fired his gun into her home as she cooked her kids dinner, leaving bullet holes in her front door, walls and above her bathroom sink, photos show.
Two Minneapolis police snipers shot him dead Thursday morning after a long standoff. A pistol with an extended magazine and several bullet casings was found in his apartment, the New York Post reported.
“This is not a George Floyd situation. George Floyd was unarmed. This is not OK,” Foss-Yarbrough launched at the protesters who gathered for a march and rally for the man on Saturday, according to the video. “He tried to kill me in front of my kids.””
Things boiled over during Saturday’s rally and march for Tekle Sundberg, when the 24 year old woman who says he was shooting into her apt. showed up voicing her frustration with those gathering in front of her building on Sundberg’s behalf. @kare11 * video contains profanity * pic.twitter.com/qdi1vbgO7k
“Ignoring the mom’s pleas for peace on her street, the protesters claimed injustice was done and commemorated Sundberg’s death, leaving candles and flowers around his chalked name on the sidewalk, photos from the Star Tribune indicate.
One protester can be heard telling Foss-Yarbrough “this is not the time” as she recounted the terror she and her children felt as bullets slammed into their home.”
——
This seems like the perfect time to expose BLM for the frauds they are.
“Nearly half of the participants of a recent study who were menstruating regularly at the time of the survey reported heavier bleeding during their periods after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. Others who did not typically menstruate — including transgender men, people on long-acting contraceptives and postmenopausal women — also experienced unusual bleeding.
The new study — the largest to date — expands on research that has highlighted the temporary effects of COVID-19 vaccines on menstrual cycles but until now focused primarily on cisgender women who menstruate.
Although the vaccines have largely prevented deaths and severe disease with few reported side effects, many medical experts initially brushed aside concerns when women and gender-diverse people started reporting erratic menstrual cycles after receiving the shots.
To get a better sense of these post-vaccination experiences, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis distributed an online survey in April 2021 to thousands of people across the globe. After three months, the researchers collected and analyzed more than 39,000 responses from individuals between the ages of 18 and 80 about their menstrual cycles. All the survey respondents had been fully vaccinated — with the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson vaccines or another that had been approved outside the United States. And to the best of their knowledge, the participants had not contracted COVID-19 before getting vaccinated.
The research, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, shows that 42% of people with regular menstrual cycles experienced heavier bleeding after vaccination, while 44% reported no change, and 14% reported lighter periods. Additionally, 39% of respondents on gender-affirming hormone treatments, 71% of people on long-acting contraceptives and 66% of postmenopausal women experienced breakthrough bleeding after one or both of their shots.
“I think it’s important that people know this can happen, so they’re not scared, they’re not shocked, and they’re not caught without supplies,” said Katharine Lee, a biological anthropologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the study’s first author.
Lee cautioned, however, that the study did not compare the results with a control group of people who did not get vaccinated. And it is possible that people who observed changes in their cycles after vaccination may have been more likely to participate in the survey. Still, the findings line up with smaller studies that have reported menstrual changes after vaccination with more robust controls.”
——-
So what is the “vaccine” doing that’s causing it to happen?
Is it permanent?
Is it causing permanent damage?
They never get around to that, because they have no idea, but can’t admit it.
Of course it did, which is why they were never mentioned by experts and the CDC. It wrecked their false narrative.
Of course it did. And anyone with a functioning brain already knew this. It was the media, Democrats, and the "experts" that played dumb. https://t.co/IiVQHoIIGC
— SaySomethingStupid (@AllenJa90708626) July 18, 2022
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“natural immunity . . . offered stronger and more sustained protection from [COVID] infection than vaccination."https://t.co/ZasY96pg3i
“Only 11% of U.S. adults polled stated that they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news, while 16% said the same about newspapers.
Americans’ faith in both media institutions has fallen 5 points from last year.
At its height, 51% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers in 1971.
When Gallup first started asking about television news in 1993, faith was at a record high, with 46% of U.S. adults saying they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence.
Just 5% of Americans now say they have a “great deal” of confidence in newspapers, compared to 46% who said they have “very little” confidence or “none.”
More than half of all Americans, 53%, expressed “very little” confidence or “none” in television news and only 4% reported having a “great deal” of confidence in the platform.
Democrats have consistently expressed the most confidence in newspapers since the survey began in 1973.”
Whoever decided to spell that man’s name has never worked as a teacher, I am thinking. What in the world were they thinking? Thank God for his bravery and clear mind!
“Legal Insurrection readers who have been following the possibility of a lab leak origin for SARS-Cov-2, the virus that is the cause of the covid pandemic, may remember a group called EcoHealth Alliance.
EcoHealth Alliance is a group closely linked to the bat research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In October of last year, the National Institute of Health (NIH) owned up to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened.
In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance — the New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab — for not being transparent about the work it was doing.
NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
The lab mice infected with the modified virus “became sicker” than those that were given the unmodified virus, according to Tabak.
“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” Tabak said.
Now a House appropriations panel has approved an amendment to a major spending bill working its way through Congress that would ban funding for work in China by the group.
The fiscal 2023 appropriations bill for the State Department includes language to restrict any spending in China for the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, a group whose president worked closely on gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan institute. The institute’s work is at the heart of a raging global scientific debate over whether COVID-19 passed naturally to humans from animals or was the result of an accidental leak from the Chinese research facility near the heart of the original 2019 outbreak.
The amendment was drafted by Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, Pennsylvania Republican, and passed on a voice vote by the House Appropriations Committee on June 29. The amendment says the secretary of state can waive the funding ban if the support is found to be in the national security interest.
“It’s deeply concerning that U.S. taxpayer dollars have been funneled to a lab controlled by the Chinese Communist Party that conducts dangerous … research and is the likely origin of COVID-19,” Mr. Reschenthaler told The Washington Times.
“We must ensure that organizations with a history of funding risky experiments in labs controlled by our foreign adversaries don’t receive a single cent of U.S. taxpayer dollars,” he said.
As a reminder, EcoHealth Alliance officials had their fingerprints all over the lab-origin coverup scheme.
EcoHealth President Peter Daszak, a British zoologist, was part of an initial World Health Organization investigative team that concluded it was highly unlikely that the virus behind COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab. WHO has since walked back that conclusion and now views the lab leak theory as a viable origin for the disease outbreak.
Mr. Daszak also organized a letter from a group of scientists published in the medical journal Lancet in 2020 that condemned what the scientists called “conspiracy theories” that COVID-19 came from a lab.
John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, has said several scientists such as Mr. Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, incorrectly claimed there were no live bats, gain-of-function research or military activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“We had intelligence that was telling us that all of those things were occurring there,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.
Also, Judicial Watch has just announced that it received 1651 pages of records from the NIH revealing an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial bat coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The records also show National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) officials were concerned about “gain-of-function” research in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016.”
The current staff shortage at Houston Methodist Hospital is because of staff who got the injections and were infected anyway, and staff who didn’t get the injections and then quit or were fired. The hospital administrators brought this upon themselves…
The first hospital in America to mandate a COVID-19 vaccine for all employees is now facing a staffing shortage from infections.
Houston’s Methodist Hospital has hundreds of employees out of work because they tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19. At the same hospital in 2021, 153 staff members who refused to get vaccinated quit or were fired. Now Methodist leadership is trying to avert a crisis.
“What is worrisome is the climbing number of our employees who cannot work because they are home sick with COVID-19. Almost 400 employees tested positive last week,” Dr. Robert Phillips, the executive vice president and chief physician executive of Houston Methodist, wrote in an internal email on July 12 obtained by The Epoch Times.
“The problem with vaccine mandates is that they are immunologically ignorant by ignoring the powerful effect of natural immunity,” Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor, told The Epoch Times. “Natural immunity has been formally studied in over 200 studies and has been found to be more effective than vaccinated immunity.”
Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, said the science shows the naturally immune should have been retained.
“When Methodist fired nurses who had natural immunity for not being vaccinated, they fired those least likely to spread the infection at the workplace,” he said. “Many nurses have circulating antibodies that neutralize the COVID virus, but they are not antibodies that Methodist hospital recognizes.”
Bridges said, “The patients are suffering in the hospitals, and the little staff they have are overworked due to these shortages. It’s sad that they would rather keep away very healthy, unvaccinated nurses with natural immunity when they need us so badly.”
“Black scholar William Allen has seen a lot of change in his life, and what’s come recently isn’t very promising.
A champion of “black American patriotism,” he saw great hope in Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of unity — until the most famous African American leader ever tore it all up to declare America racist and black people as victims.
“He ended by declaring America hopelessly imbued with racism and could see no future for America other than capitulation on the part of the nonblack to that particular account,” Allen told Secrets.
Allen also saw hope when then-Sen. Barack Obama adopted his line of unity in the future president’s famous race speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. But as president, he fell back to the usual Democratic talking points about black people as victims needing a handout.
“He borrowed it without internalizing what it meant. He borrowed it as a rhetorical trope that could be used to leverage political advantage but not to begin the restorative working culture that was so necessary,” Allen said.
Now, the 78-year-old scholar is pressing his own campaign focusing on the highlights of black America, a positive and patriotic story he believes will eventually end with the acceptance that black people are every bit as equal to white people in the story of the nation’s creation.
“The real story of America is the story of American blacks, not American blacks exclusively, but American blacks as exemplary of what the American promise is,” said Allen, the editor of the new book of essays The State of Black America.
The book, he said, provides an “awakening” to the story not told in the legacy media or by liberal politicians, professors, and preachers. With old tales and up-to-date statistics, his goal is to tell “the true story of the accomplishments of black America” and “repel the great lie” spread in the media, especially the New York Times’s 1619 Project.
“We have cultivated for a very long time, now for more than 50 years at least, a sense of attendant victimhood among American blacks. And that sense is perpetuated today by the poisonous injection of racism with a capital R as the base of our culture,” Allen said.
He compared those 50 years to a slow-growing cancer that can’t be cut out quickly but is targeted by “the chemotherapy of truth.””
“I spoke with the anon poster below, a public school teacher in a Blue city in a Blue state, and examined correspondence from his colleagues and supervisors that left no doubt that his personal account is authentic. He is indeed the sort of committed left-wing partisan who uses terms like “systems of oppression” unironically and who regards “anti-woke” polemicists as cynical hacks and grifters. He also happens to be witness to absurd school policies justified under the guise of “racial equity” that are doing harm to the very kinds of students on whose ostensible behalf they are being implemented. This is of course a familiar dynamic with all of the policies embraced as part of the ideological succession in schools: they enact a brazen form of neo-racism rooted in a fundamental contempt for the ability of black students to meet the same standards as other students and act as if the gutting of the most basic standards for all students will somehow help black students rather than harm all students — with the harm disproportionately being visited on the very students the policies claim to help. There is something poignant about the dilemma he describes, about being unable to communicate to his fellow leftist peers the awful magnitude of the moral abdication to which he is witness and party precisely because it is so extreme that all will dismiss it as right-wing propaganda. It is a dilemma widely shared across a range of liberal institutions in which conscientious actors see destructive practices being entrenched and immunized against critique by the same dynamics which they find powerless to resist because the specter of right-wing reaction makes any self-criticism impossible.
The summer program where I’m currently teaching enrolls about seventy students between the ages of six and twelve. Classes are technically open to any child in the district, but only a few parents actually sign their children up themselves; instead, the vast majority of kids are registered for the program by a teacher who was concerned with their academic performance the previous year. Parents can choose to accept or reject the enrollment, but the acceptance rate is something like 90% – it’s free, after all, and plenty of these parents are already looking for a safe place to send their children while they work during the day.
This “enroll first, ask questions later” approach removes many of the obstacles that keep struggling students from engaging with other summer programs, many of which have complicated application processes and require children to meet certain academic standards. However, it also means many families aren’t particularly invested in the program itself and, as a consequence, both parent and student engagement is lower than it might otherwise be.
Early on, an administrator confessed that this sort of setup could lead to “attendance issues,” which I took to mean some kids showing up late or even skipping class once in a while. Nine of the eleven students in my grade level were absent the first day. The next day, it was ten. By the end of the week, I had one student consistently attending and a few who had been officially withdrawn by their parents – but there were still eight children on my roster who were technically enrolled while having never once shown up.
At this point, I took a look at the waitlist to see if there were any students I could bring in to replace them; the games and activities I’d planned needed more kids anyway, and I knew the waitlist was where families who actually wanted their children to attend usually ended up (students who were just referred by teachers had priority placement). On my lunch break, I walked into the administrator’s office and asked them when I could expect the half-dozen or so children on my grade’s waitlist to be let in.
Immediately, I was informed of something truly absurd: The district is not allowed to remove any student from the program on the basis of non-attendance. A child remains enrolled in my classes until a parent explicitly states they’d like them removed, even if they have never once actually shown up.
Now, when I say the district is “not allowed” to do so, I don’t mean they’re forbidden by some state law or local ordinance. Rather, the district actively embraced this policy as part of their larger equity and racial justice overhaul, and even bragged about doing so in public-facing materials. Their explicit position is that requiring attendance for any district program unfairly victimizes children of color, as does factoring in attendance to any student’s grades during the regular school year. The administrator I spoke to seemed baffled that I would even ask. “I’ll let you know if any parents pull their kids out,” he told me, “but otherwise, your class is technically full.”
As an extra dose of insanity, we can’t even request that the parents of a non-attending student remove their child from the program; doing so, I was told, could “make them feel disrespected” and “communicate to them that their children are not welcome.” We just have to wait and hope they make that decision on their own, risking the occasional hint on a daily absence call that most don’t even pick up.
Over the past week or so, some of the chronically absent have finally been unenrolled. But as the program reaches its halfway point, the number of students who have never once attended but remain on the roster is still larger than the number of students on the waitlist. Today, as I write this, more than a dozen children whose families have actively sought out our help are still sitting at home, unable to attend “full classrooms” of four or five students – who are themselves struggling without peers to work with!
To most people, this sort of policy is absolutely inexplicable. How could it possibly benefit racial justice or equity to keep classrooms half-empty, excluding students who want to attend in deference to those who don’t? The whole thing sounds like the sort of outrageous Kafkaesque fantasy a conservative would invent to satirize the ultra-woke and their bigotry of low expectations. But that’s precisely the problem. After all, what options do you have when so many of the people in charge of our schools have priorities so disordered that merely describing them, no matter how dispassionately, will earn you accusations of strawmanning?
I’ve had liberal friends of mine dispute (to my face!) straightforward accounts of what my colleagues have said. They’ll tell me school districts could never embrace such obviously unworkable policies; what else can I do except shrug my shoulders and say, “I’m sorry, but yes, they can?” They’ll tell me I sound like one of those right-wing grifter types; what else can I do except sigh and tell them the grifters have a point?
This is where I have to stop and make one thing very clear: I’m a leftist. Like, a big one. I hate capitalism, I support abortion on demand, and I unironically use phrases like “systems of oppression” and “the dominant culture.” The last big paper I put together for my undergraduate degree was on critical race theory, for the love of God! I’m not the sort of person who can be easily dismissed as a conservative crank. But plenty of my fellow leftists are still willing to try, on the grounds that anyone who thinks there might be any problem with DEI policies must necessarily be a slack-jawed MAGA troll.
In my short career as an educator, I’ve had countless experiences like this – encounters with colleagues and administrators so surreal that even close friends chided me for exaggerating or “playing into right-wing tropes” when I repeat them. And there’s a sense in which I don’t blame them, because things really are that crazy out here. Let me rattle off two quick examples for now, in case the summer program wasn’t bizarre enough:
1) I once attended a meeting where we brainstormed strategies to increase AP enrollment. When we moved to discuss the gap in enrollment between Black and white students, a senior teacher said that trying to register more children of color for AP classes is inherently racist and that putting greater value on AP classes at all is an expression of white supremacy. To clarify: I don’t mean that a senior teacher expressed a complex set of ideas regarding racial justice that could be uncharitably reduced to those claims. I mean I sat in a room where a senior teacher literally spoke the words Trying to register more students of color for AP classes is inherently racist and Putting greater value on AP classes at all is an expression of white supremacy, to an audience of other teachers who nodded along or otherwise kept quiet.
2) I once attended another meeting – lots of meetings when you’re a teacher! – where we were working to approve a new weekly schedule for students. When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state. Again, to clarify: I don’t mean my colleague had a a more nuanced approach to testing that a dishonest interlocutor could twist to sound like that. I mean my colleague literally spoke those words. (To be fair, one other teacher did speak up and challenge them this time, albeit very politely.)
Now, do those two anecdotes, no matter how explicitly I describe them, sound like something out of James Lindsay’s fever dreams? Yes! Are these things that did, in fact, happen? Also yes! And I just don’t know how to get both of those facts across to the fairly large segment of the American population who believes it could only ever be one or the other. (Honestly, if I were more conspiratorial, I would think progressives were engineering this dynamic on purpose; in reality, I think they just organically stumbled on a level of craziness perfectly calibrated to make their critics seem like loons. Lucky them!)”
“Public trust in the media has hit an all-time low. Common explanations for this crisis of credibility include bias, polarization, and fake news, but these causes are themselves effects of the tectonic, and generally overlooked, shift in the media’s business model. Throughout the twentieth century, journalism relied for its funding predominantly on advertising. In the early 2010s, as ad money fled the industry, publications sought to earn revenue through subscriptions instead of advertising. In the process, they became dependent on digital audiences—especially their most vocal representatives. The shift from advertising to digital subscriptions invalidated old standards of journalism and led to the emergence of post-journalism.
Everything we once knew about journalism depended on the model of the ad-funded news media. Advertising accounted for most of the news industry’s revenue during the twentieth century.
This business model provided a selective advantage to certain kinds of media. Since the revenue from copy sales was not sufficient to maintain news production, news outlets needed to attract advertising. As a result, media that relied mostly on the reader’s penny, such as the formerly influential working-class press, eventually lost out in the marketplace. The mass media that oriented themselves around the “buying audience”—the affluent middle class—received money from growing advertising and thrived.
In political economy, this selective effect is called “allocative control.” The ad money did not tell the media what to do; it just chose the media that encouraged its audience to buy goods. Media critics Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argued that it affected the mechanism of discourse formation, as the media maintained a context favorable for consumerism and political stability, and thereby “manufactured consent.”
This business model was extremely successful. By the end of the twentieth century, the news media had reached the apex of their 500-year history. Even regional newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun possessed several well-staffed foreign bureaus. Never were the media as rich and influential as in their golden age, just 25 years ago. Plenty of journalists still on the job remember those glorious days.”
Under the ad-based model, media capital represented a significant social force. It protected its interests, its market value, and therefore its independence. The abundance of money enabled newsrooms to develop an autonomy secured by the division between news production and ad-sales departments—a “glass wall” between ads and news. Preselected by ad money, news organizations geared toward affluent audiences became influential to the point that their autonomy determined their market value.
Ad money carried the risks of advertisers’ pressure in news production, which would have undermined newsroom autonomy, a source of reputation and therefore capitalization. So professional standards were elaborated to protect journalism from advertisers and establish the credibility of news coverage. Credibility was seen as a professional virtue but also as a commodity. “The theory underlying the modern news industry has been the belief that credibility builds a broad and loyal audience, and that economic success follows in turn,” declared the American Press Association in its 1997 “Principles of Journalism” statement.
Thus, paradoxically, the allocative control of ad money determined the allegiance of mainstream media to corporate elites (hence, “corporate media”) but also sustained high-quality journalism. Newsroom autonomy was protected by the standards of objectivity, nonpartisan and unbiased reporting, attention to the arguments of all parties involved, investigative rigor, the separation of fact from opinion, and other guarantees enshrined in the ethical and professional codes of news organizations.
The same set of professional standards that was meant to secure credibility and independence from ad money turned journalism into a public service. “The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society,” claimed the American Press Association’s statement. “Commitment to citizens also means journalism should present a representative picture of all constituent groups in society. Ignoring certain citizens has the effect of disenfranchising them.”
The only entity to which journalism was called to be biased against, even meticulously so, was power. This was a part of the credibility code, too. Endowed with these principles, initially rooted in ad funding, journalism evolved in the twentieth century as the “watchdog of democracy,” positioning itself above partisan party struggle.
Finally, the media’s dependence on advertising determined their attitude toward their readers. If the audience was supposed to be affluent, mature, and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment when reporting—they were to present the naked facts and the positions of both political sides to the public to judge. Hypocrisy and professional arrogance, of course, had always had a place in the profession: journalists have long seen themselves as a kind of priestly class. Nevertheless, leaving judgment to readers (or at least pretending to do so) was one of the fundamental virtues of ad-funded journalism. And since publications wanted to broaden their audience, not narrow it, they served reader preferences by downplaying, rather than emphasizing, potentially divisive issues.
All of this cooled the political activity of the public. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Democracy, media historian Robert McChesney described the low degree of participation in elections as “democracy without citizens.” If the medium is the message, then the message of the ad-funded news media was “buy!”—not “vote!” or “protest!” This might have seemed to be bad for democracy, but polarization in society was at a low point, while the influence and prosperity of the mass media were at an all-time high. The political tranquility of the public was a side effect—detrimental or benevolent, depending on one’s perspective.
The Internet broke this idyll. It turned out that the ad-based model relied not on the content attracting an affluent audience but on the monopoly over ad delivery that the Internet simply destroyed. The ad-based media business achieved power and prosperity over the course of 100 years; it collapsed in just ten.
The collapse started with the classifieds. At their peak in 2000, classified ads brought in $19.6 billion, about one-third of newspapers’ revenue. As Craigslist, eBay, and others killed this market, classifieds revenue plummeted to $2.2 billion in 2018. Corporate advertising was next. Suddenly, firms found that they could reach their desired audience online directly and precisely with full control over content, context, and targeting.
Google and Facebook delivered the fatal blow. It became obvious to advertisers that old media had offered them a costly and inefficient method of carpet-bombing their targeted audiences. By contrast, Google and Facebook knew the preferences of billions of individuals and provided personally customized delivery of ads to each of them. In 2013, Google alone made $51 billion in ad revenue. That year, American newspapers’ ad revenue was $23 billion, and the global newspaper industry collected $89 billion in ad revenue. The Google-Facebook duopoly surpassed 60 percent of the share in the U.S. digital ad market in 2018. It became increasingly clear that old media had little chance of competing with digital platforms.
Ad revenue in the U.S. press hit rock-bottom in 2013, falling below the level of 1950, when the industry started measuring the print ad market. In 2016, the Newspaper Association of America stopped reporting newspapers’ annual ad revenue: this source of revenue had basically ceased to exist. Residual advertising in print media, both offline and online, lost its industrial scale and any commercial meaning. Today, advertising contracts in the media often resemble charity from ideologically aligned businesses.”
Like I told my children: I feel like I am Alice in Saturday Night Live Land. You can’t make so much of this up. Like the ‘scientists’ who don’t want to give a sex to any skeletons found because we don’t know the pronoun preference. Romans is so true when we are told if we give up the truth, we will believe anything. paraphrased.
Conservative radio hosts have a problem with capitalism?? Owners of media have a political agenda?? and right wing media is surprised?? Seriously the irony is too much. People own media for two reasons, first and foremost, profit and second control the spread of ideas. FOX and right wing talk radio have done both brilliantly. The irony of a right wing talk show host complaining on Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News network about political agendas of ownership is amusing. Soros is the ultimate capitalist, he wants to change the nature of talk radio so he buys talk radio networks; now all he has to do is turn a profit while getting across his political agenda. He should take a page out of Murdoch and focus on outrage.
Of course as a later link shows to be successful media had to sell ads. And herein is the cycle; get people outraged, they tune in, sell ads, make profit and spread more outrage based on your political ideas, people listen, etc etc.
The police have lost “the room”. No matter the circumstances, it will be difficult for anyone to believe their version of events especially in minority areas. Anyone who is shot will be a martyr first and maybe discredited later. Even when witnesses collaborate the police, it won’t be enough. The police have to publicly re-invent themselves (defund, disband and then reassemble) in order to regain the entire community’s confidence.
Good guys with a gun still doesn’t make sense. Three people are dead and more are injured. The gunman managed to shoot 24 rounds before he was killed. He had approx 100 rounds with him. Those who say he could’ve killed more with the remaining 75 rounds need to realize he legally acquired that many rounds, the AR-15 rifle was capable of firing 24 rounds in just a few minutes. Gun control, assault weapon bans, maximum clip sizes, etc could’ve help prevent yet another mass shooting.
Jan 6th whining is amusing. A comedy show being invited in by staffers is not equivalent to rioters who were obviously not welcomed and were told to leave in more than one — barricaded doors and even gun shots.
Medicine has been accursed of ignoring both women and minorities in terms of research, testing and developing new techniques, cures, etc. Any history of western medicine will confirm that white men viewed medicine from their own perspective and thus made outlandish claims about women’s bodies that the local midwife/herbalist (ie witch) knew was nonsense. And for black women, it was even worse. Standard theory and practise was to consider blacks as having a higher pain tolerance and thus pain management during child birth was rarely a consideration for black women. These ideas were/are fairly common in my own life time. We tend to think we are past these biases but every now and then something happens to remind us.
Almost everyone of my female colleagues complained the vaccine changed their cycle; well some didn’t complain as it shorten and lessen it for a while. This was fairly common knowledge by the time most of them receive the second shot. In fact it was mentioned on the brochure I received after my second shot. However, my daughter and her friends experienced no change. My guess is age and/or use of birth control had some difference in vaccine side effects. The point, though, is yet again the medical establishment neglected half the population. (no wonder some of black female friends have no trust in the medical system)
Of course, natural immunity works better than a vaccine but there’s even more risks. You need to get sick. From what we know, there are long term effects from covid especially if you had a serious case — weakened immune system, organ damage, breathing issues, etc.
Trust in the media is decline — does this include FOX and talk radio? Maybe Soros can fix this. Who’s response for the decline in trust? The media disparaging each other. Competing for the outrage-advertising cycle; its easy to get more eyeballs if you criticize your competitors. In that way, the media market kills its own reputation.
Personally, my trust in polling has declined so I’m not sure if I can trust any poll (which is reported the media) which tells me something unless of course I’m predisposed to it.
Notice its Democratic staffers who unionize first and lead further union drives. Conservative underlings are more tolerant of exploitation; thinking its temporary and soon they will be able to use the system of exploitation to their advantage.
AJ — I”m not sure what the elderly man’s point is. He asserts today’s scholars are too divisive yet they don’t say anything too different than him. He wants to point out African Americans can succeed in America and progress is happening. The writers of 1619 and other scholars are saying the same thing — African Americans are ardent supporters of the Constitution and what it promises. They only want to make sure African Americans can use the Constitution and the American experience in the same way as whites. When I read 1619 my overall impression was the writers believed in and wanted the American dream, however, they thought to remove the remaining stumbling blocks one must think historically and understand the origins of the legal system, banking, gov’t programs, etc and how it limited African American opportunities. Older generations look to their own youthful activism with nostalgia and of course view current activism with a critical eye but in reality its all about the same thing — improving society for those who live it.
I’m also not sure what the teacher is trying to say. A series of anecdotes don’t really demonstrate what he or the columnist alleges — neo-racism or contempt for African American intelligence. The issue of attendance has surfaced for option summer and Saturday programs in my district. Students are not taken off the rolls unless the parent explicitly states they are withdrawing. If removed without warning, a parent will make all sorts of excuses for non-attendance and accusation of admin’s motivations when their kid finally shows up and there’s no room. Nothing to do with colour — just admin covering themselves. Entirely selfish of the parent but its quite common. People tend to treat these programs as free babysitting. However, if a child doesn’t show up, attendance should be taken and contact made with parent. Once contact is made, they can be asked if they wish to withdraw.
As for the last two incidents, I take it the teacher is new to the profession and didn’t detect the cynicism in the older teachers’ comments. They are mocking both testing and rating by racial groups. People tend to see teaching as a left wing optimistic/activist profession but in reality teaching leads to cynicism and to a certain degree of social conservatism. His anecdotes do make me thankful my contract limits meetings to once a month for 70 mins in length. I gladly pay my union dues just for that part of the contract.
Wandering Views 
When you can’t compete with conservative radio, you have to find other ways to defeat the ideas it’s pushes.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/conservative-latina-radio-host-slams-soros-funded-liberal-media-takeover-im-not-going-to-be-silenced/ar-AAZowlL?ocid=mailsignout&li=BBnb7Kz
“Conservative radio host Lourdes Ubieta left Radio Mambi, an anti-communist station in Miami, which is one of the 18 stations a Soros-linked group will acquire in a $60 million deal later this year. The deal is still pending approval from the Federal Communications Commission.
“What I believe is this is about control and about politics,” Ubieta argued on “Fox & Friends Weekend” Saturday. “And they are trying to silence the conservatives’ voices, especially in Spanish.”
The investment group Lakestar Finance, affiliated with Soros Fund Management, has partially funded the creation of Latino Media Network, a new network that will include Radio Mambi. The network and its stations are controlled by staunch Democrat supporters including a former Obama staffer and Clinton campaign employee.
Media personalities and conservatives have criticized the move, with some arguing it is an attempt to silence conservative voices or push liberal agendas on the Hispanic community.
“I believe Soros is not only trying to silence conservative voices, he’s trying to push his regurgitated nonsense from the left on Latinos, on people who are undecided, people who are not sure,” Congressional candidate George Santos, R-N.Y., told Fox News Digital.
While the deal is still waiting for FCC approval, the acquisition has sparked immense controversy with many conservatives slamming the deal as an attempt to push the liberal agenda.
“[Democrats] are intoxicated with their globalist agenda and the woke,” Ubieta said. “For the Latinas, we are awake, you know, not woke. For us is the love of our country because this is our country.””
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The next outrage to be outraged about?
No.
“Minneapolis Mom Confronts BLM Protesters after Apartment Shooting: ‘Not a George Floyd Situation’”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/minneapolis-mom-confronts-blm-protesters-122418182.html
“A Minneapolis mom was captured on video Saturday confronting Black Lives Matter activists who congregated in her neighborhood to protest the fatal police shooting of a gunman who she claimed tried to kill her and her children.
Arabella Foss-Yarbrough called police last Wednesday night after neighbor Andrew “Tekle” Sundberg allegedly fired his gun into her home as she cooked her kids dinner, leaving bullet holes in her front door, walls and above her bathroom sink, photos show.
Two Minneapolis police snipers shot him dead Thursday morning after a long standoff. A pistol with an extended magazine and several bullet casings was found in his apartment, the New York Post reported.
“This is not a George Floyd situation. George Floyd was unarmed. This is not OK,” Foss-Yarbrough launched at the protesters who gathered for a march and rally for the man on Saturday, according to the video. “He tried to kill me in front of my kids.””
“Ignoring the mom’s pleas for peace on her street, the protesters claimed injustice was done and commemorated Sundberg’s death, leaving candles and flowers around his chalked name on the sidewalk, photos from the Star Tribune indicate.
One protester can be heard telling Foss-Yarbrough “this is not the time” as she recounted the terror she and her children felt as bullets slammed into their home.”
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This seems like the perfect time to expose BLM for the frauds they are.
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They make the criminal into the victim for politics and money.
Gross.
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What happens when “safe and effective” is neither?
“Largest Study to Date Shows How COVID Vaccines Affect Periods”
Temporary they say. Sure, like safe and effective, right?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/largest-study-date-shows-covid-144335058.html
“Nearly half of the participants of a recent study who were menstruating regularly at the time of the survey reported heavier bleeding during their periods after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. Others who did not typically menstruate — including transgender men, people on long-acting contraceptives and postmenopausal women — also experienced unusual bleeding.
The new study — the largest to date — expands on research that has highlighted the temporary effects of COVID-19 vaccines on menstrual cycles but until now focused primarily on cisgender women who menstruate.
Although the vaccines have largely prevented deaths and severe disease with few reported side effects, many medical experts initially brushed aside concerns when women and gender-diverse people started reporting erratic menstrual cycles after receiving the shots.
To get a better sense of these post-vaccination experiences, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis distributed an online survey in April 2021 to thousands of people across the globe. After three months, the researchers collected and analyzed more than 39,000 responses from individuals between the ages of 18 and 80 about their menstrual cycles. All the survey respondents had been fully vaccinated — with the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson vaccines or another that had been approved outside the United States. And to the best of their knowledge, the participants had not contracted COVID-19 before getting vaccinated.
The research, published Friday in the journal Science Advances, shows that 42% of people with regular menstrual cycles experienced heavier bleeding after vaccination, while 44% reported no change, and 14% reported lighter periods. Additionally, 39% of respondents on gender-affirming hormone treatments, 71% of people on long-acting contraceptives and 66% of postmenopausal women experienced breakthrough bleeding after one or both of their shots.
“I think it’s important that people know this can happen, so they’re not scared, they’re not shocked, and they’re not caught without supplies,” said Katharine Lee, a biological anthropologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the study’s first author.
Lee cautioned, however, that the study did not compare the results with a control group of people who did not get vaccinated. And it is possible that people who observed changes in their cycles after vaccination may have been more likely to participate in the survey. Still, the findings line up with smaller studies that have reported menstrual changes after vaccination with more robust controls.”
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So what is the “vaccine” doing that’s causing it to happen?
Is it permanent?
Is it causing permanent damage?
They never get around to that, because they have no idea, but can’t admit it.
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Of course it did, which is why they were never mentioned by experts and the CDC. It wrecked their false narrative.
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The 2 tiered justice system strikes again.
One set of rules for Jan6ers, another for connected liberals.
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Yep.
Over 3 million illegal invaders in the last year and a half, and that’s just the ones they caught.
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Just keep doing what you’re doing media, it’s working so well for you.
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https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/polling/americans-less-confident-ever-media-poll?utm_source=sf&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twjs
“Only 11% of U.S. adults polled stated that they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in television news, while 16% said the same about newspapers.
Americans’ faith in both media institutions has fallen 5 points from last year.
At its height, 51% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers in 1971.
When Gallup first started asking about television news in 1993, faith was at a record high, with 46% of U.S. adults saying they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence.
Just 5% of Americans now say they have a “great deal” of confidence in newspapers, compared to 46% who said they have “very little” confidence or “none.”
More than half of all Americans, 53%, expressed “very little” confidence or “none” in television news and only 4% reported having a “great deal” of confidence in the platform.
Democrats have consistently expressed the most confidence in newspapers since the survey began in 1973.”
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Silence peasants!
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Ouch.
But they will just keep doing what they do and cranking out material no one wants to read/view.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/394817/media-confidence-ratings-record-lows.aspx
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Enjoy!
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Whoever decided to spell that man’s name has never worked as a teacher, I am thinking. What in the world were they thinking? Thank God for his bravery and clear mind!
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Sure, now, after the horse has left the barn, the town, the state, and was last seen boarding a flight to Europe. They had to be sued to get answers.
“Congressional Panel Approves Funding Ban for EcoHealth Alliance, Group Linked to Wuhan Bat Research
Judicial Watch reviews NIH records revealing there was an FBI inquiry into grant directed to research at Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/07/congressional-panel-approves-funding-ban-for-ecohealth-alliance-group-linked-to-wuhan-bat-research/
“Legal Insurrection readers who have been following the possibility of a lab leak origin for SARS-Cov-2, the virus that is the cause of the covid pandemic, may remember a group called EcoHealth Alliance.
EcoHealth Alliance is a group closely linked to the bat research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In October of last year, the National Institute of Health (NIH) owned up to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened.
In a letter to Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) on Wednesday, a top NIH official blamed EcoHealth Alliance — the New York City-based nonprofit that has funneled US funds to the Wuhan lab — for not being transparent about the work it was doing.
NIH’s principal deputy director, Lawrence A. Tabak, wrote in the letter that EcoHealth’s “limited experiment” tested whether “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model.”
The lab mice infected with the modified virus “became sicker” than those that were given the unmodified virus, according to Tabak.
“As sometimes occurs in science, this was an unexpected result of the research, as opposed to something that the researchers set out to do,” Tabak said.
Now a House appropriations panel has approved an amendment to a major spending bill working its way through Congress that would ban funding for work in China by the group.
The fiscal 2023 appropriations bill for the State Department includes language to restrict any spending in China for the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, a group whose president worked closely on gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan institute. The institute’s work is at the heart of a raging global scientific debate over whether COVID-19 passed naturally to humans from animals or was the result of an accidental leak from the Chinese research facility near the heart of the original 2019 outbreak.
The amendment was drafted by Rep. Guy Reschenthaler, Pennsylvania Republican, and passed on a voice vote by the House Appropriations Committee on June 29. The amendment says the secretary of state can waive the funding ban if the support is found to be in the national security interest.
“It’s deeply concerning that U.S. taxpayer dollars have been funneled to a lab controlled by the Chinese Communist Party that conducts dangerous … research and is the likely origin of COVID-19,” Mr. Reschenthaler told The Washington Times.
“We must ensure that organizations with a history of funding risky experiments in labs controlled by our foreign adversaries don’t receive a single cent of U.S. taxpayer dollars,” he said.
As a reminder, EcoHealth Alliance officials had their fingerprints all over the lab-origin coverup scheme.
EcoHealth President Peter Daszak, a British zoologist, was part of an initial World Health Organization investigative team that concluded it was highly unlikely that the virus behind COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab. WHO has since walked back that conclusion and now views the lab leak theory as a viable origin for the disease outbreak.
Mr. Daszak also organized a letter from a group of scientists published in the medical journal Lancet in 2020 that condemned what the scientists called “conspiracy theories” that COVID-19 came from a lab.
John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence, has said several scientists such as Mr. Daszak and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, incorrectly claimed there were no live bats, gain-of-function research or military activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“We had intelligence that was telling us that all of those things were occurring there,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.
Also, Judicial Watch has just announced that it received 1651 pages of records from the NIH revealing an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial bat coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The records also show National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) officials were concerned about “gain-of-function” research in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016.”
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Fauci and our govt were complicit.
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The current staff shortage at Houston Methodist Hospital is because of staff who got the injections and were infected anyway, and staff who didn’t get the injections and then quit or were fired. The hospital administrators brought this upon themselves…
https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-large-texas-hospital-faces-staff-shortages-despite-covid-19-vaccine-mandate_4602092.html
The first hospital in America to mandate a COVID-19 vaccine for all employees is now facing a staffing shortage from infections.
Houston’s Methodist Hospital has hundreds of employees out of work because they tested positive for the virus that causes COVID-19. At the same hospital in 2021, 153 staff members who refused to get vaccinated quit or were fired. Now Methodist leadership is trying to avert a crisis.
“What is worrisome is the climbing number of our employees who cannot work because they are home sick with COVID-19. Almost 400 employees tested positive last week,” Dr. Robert Phillips, the executive vice president and chief physician executive of Houston Methodist, wrote in an internal email on July 12 obtained by The Epoch Times.
“The problem with vaccine mandates is that they are immunologically ignorant by ignoring the powerful effect of natural immunity,” Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and professor, told The Epoch Times. “Natural immunity has been formally studied in over 200 studies and has been found to be more effective than vaccinated immunity.”
Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine, said the science shows the naturally immune should have been retained.
“When Methodist fired nurses who had natural immunity for not being vaccinated, they fired those least likely to spread the infection at the workplace,” he said. “Many nurses have circulating antibodies that neutralize the COVID virus, but they are not antibodies that Methodist hospital recognizes.”
Bridges said, “The patients are suffering in the hospitals, and the little staff they have are overworked due to these shortages. It’s sad that they would rather keep away very healthy, unvaccinated nurses with natural immunity when they need us so badly.”
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This one is for HRW.
“Black scholar predicts 30 years to erase ‘big lie’ of ‘1619’ victimhood”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/washington-secrets/black-scholar-predicts-30-years-to-erase-big-lie-of-1619-victimhood
“Black scholar William Allen has seen a lot of change in his life, and what’s come recently isn’t very promising.
A champion of “black American patriotism,” he saw great hope in Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of unity — until the most famous African American leader ever tore it all up to declare America racist and black people as victims.
“He ended by declaring America hopelessly imbued with racism and could see no future for America other than capitulation on the part of the nonblack to that particular account,” Allen told Secrets.
Allen also saw hope when then-Sen. Barack Obama adopted his line of unity in the future president’s famous race speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. But as president, he fell back to the usual Democratic talking points about black people as victims needing a handout.
“He borrowed it without internalizing what it meant. He borrowed it as a rhetorical trope that could be used to leverage political advantage but not to begin the restorative working culture that was so necessary,” Allen said.
Now, the 78-year-old scholar is pressing his own campaign focusing on the highlights of black America, a positive and patriotic story he believes will eventually end with the acceptance that black people are every bit as equal to white people in the story of the nation’s creation.
“The real story of America is the story of American blacks, not American blacks exclusively, but American blacks as exemplary of what the American promise is,” said Allen, the editor of the new book of essays The State of Black America.
The book, he said, provides an “awakening” to the story not told in the legacy media or by liberal politicians, professors, and preachers. With old tales and up-to-date statistics, his goal is to tell “the true story of the accomplishments of black America” and “repel the great lie” spread in the media, especially the New York Times’s 1619 Project.
“We have cultivated for a very long time, now for more than 50 years at least, a sense of attendant victimhood among American blacks. And that sense is perpetuated today by the poisonous injection of racism with a capital R as the base of our culture,” Allen said.
He compared those 50 years to a slow-growing cancer that can’t be cut out quickly but is targeted by “the chemotherapy of truth.””
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“Yes, Things Are Really As Bad As You’ve Heard
A Leftist Schoolteacher Struggles To Say Aloud the Things He Regularly Witnesses That Are So Outlandish They Sound Made Up By Right-Wing Provocateurs”
https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/yes-things-are-really-as-bad-as-youve
“I spoke with the anon poster below, a public school teacher in a Blue city in a Blue state, and examined correspondence from his colleagues and supervisors that left no doubt that his personal account is authentic. He is indeed the sort of committed left-wing partisan who uses terms like “systems of oppression” unironically and who regards “anti-woke” polemicists as cynical hacks and grifters. He also happens to be witness to absurd school policies justified under the guise of “racial equity” that are doing harm to the very kinds of students on whose ostensible behalf they are being implemented. This is of course a familiar dynamic with all of the policies embraced as part of the ideological succession in schools: they enact a brazen form of neo-racism rooted in a fundamental contempt for the ability of black students to meet the same standards as other students and act as if the gutting of the most basic standards for all students will somehow help black students rather than harm all students — with the harm disproportionately being visited on the very students the policies claim to help. There is something poignant about the dilemma he describes, about being unable to communicate to his fellow leftist peers the awful magnitude of the moral abdication to which he is witness and party precisely because it is so extreme that all will dismiss it as right-wing propaganda. It is a dilemma widely shared across a range of liberal institutions in which conscientious actors see destructive practices being entrenched and immunized against critique by the same dynamics which they find powerless to resist because the specter of right-wing reaction makes any self-criticism impossible.
The summer program where I’m currently teaching enrolls about seventy students between the ages of six and twelve. Classes are technically open to any child in the district, but only a few parents actually sign their children up themselves; instead, the vast majority of kids are registered for the program by a teacher who was concerned with their academic performance the previous year. Parents can choose to accept or reject the enrollment, but the acceptance rate is something like 90% – it’s free, after all, and plenty of these parents are already looking for a safe place to send their children while they work during the day.
This “enroll first, ask questions later” approach removes many of the obstacles that keep struggling students from engaging with other summer programs, many of which have complicated application processes and require children to meet certain academic standards. However, it also means many families aren’t particularly invested in the program itself and, as a consequence, both parent and student engagement is lower than it might otherwise be.
Early on, an administrator confessed that this sort of setup could lead to “attendance issues,” which I took to mean some kids showing up late or even skipping class once in a while. Nine of the eleven students in my grade level were absent the first day. The next day, it was ten. By the end of the week, I had one student consistently attending and a few who had been officially withdrawn by their parents – but there were still eight children on my roster who were technically enrolled while having never once shown up.
At this point, I took a look at the waitlist to see if there were any students I could bring in to replace them; the games and activities I’d planned needed more kids anyway, and I knew the waitlist was where families who actually wanted their children to attend usually ended up (students who were just referred by teachers had priority placement). On my lunch break, I walked into the administrator’s office and asked them when I could expect the half-dozen or so children on my grade’s waitlist to be let in.
Immediately, I was informed of something truly absurd: The district is not allowed to remove any student from the program on the basis of non-attendance. A child remains enrolled in my classes until a parent explicitly states they’d like them removed, even if they have never once actually shown up.
Now, when I say the district is “not allowed” to do so, I don’t mean they’re forbidden by some state law or local ordinance. Rather, the district actively embraced this policy as part of their larger equity and racial justice overhaul, and even bragged about doing so in public-facing materials. Their explicit position is that requiring attendance for any district program unfairly victimizes children of color, as does factoring in attendance to any student’s grades during the regular school year. The administrator I spoke to seemed baffled that I would even ask. “I’ll let you know if any parents pull their kids out,” he told me, “but otherwise, your class is technically full.”
As an extra dose of insanity, we can’t even request that the parents of a non-attending student remove their child from the program; doing so, I was told, could “make them feel disrespected” and “communicate to them that their children are not welcome.” We just have to wait and hope they make that decision on their own, risking the occasional hint on a daily absence call that most don’t even pick up.
Over the past week or so, some of the chronically absent have finally been unenrolled. But as the program reaches its halfway point, the number of students who have never once attended but remain on the roster is still larger than the number of students on the waitlist. Today, as I write this, more than a dozen children whose families have actively sought out our help are still sitting at home, unable to attend “full classrooms” of four or five students – who are themselves struggling without peers to work with!
To most people, this sort of policy is absolutely inexplicable. How could it possibly benefit racial justice or equity to keep classrooms half-empty, excluding students who want to attend in deference to those who don’t? The whole thing sounds like the sort of outrageous Kafkaesque fantasy a conservative would invent to satirize the ultra-woke and their bigotry of low expectations. But that’s precisely the problem. After all, what options do you have when so many of the people in charge of our schools have priorities so disordered that merely describing them, no matter how dispassionately, will earn you accusations of strawmanning?
I’ve had liberal friends of mine dispute (to my face!) straightforward accounts of what my colleagues have said. They’ll tell me school districts could never embrace such obviously unworkable policies; what else can I do except shrug my shoulders and say, “I’m sorry, but yes, they can?” They’ll tell me I sound like one of those right-wing grifter types; what else can I do except sigh and tell them the grifters have a point?
This is where I have to stop and make one thing very clear: I’m a leftist. Like, a big one. I hate capitalism, I support abortion on demand, and I unironically use phrases like “systems of oppression” and “the dominant culture.” The last big paper I put together for my undergraduate degree was on critical race theory, for the love of God! I’m not the sort of person who can be easily dismissed as a conservative crank. But plenty of my fellow leftists are still willing to try, on the grounds that anyone who thinks there might be any problem with DEI policies must necessarily be a slack-jawed MAGA troll.
In my short career as an educator, I’ve had countless experiences like this – encounters with colleagues and administrators so surreal that even close friends chided me for exaggerating or “playing into right-wing tropes” when I repeat them. And there’s a sense in which I don’t blame them, because things really are that crazy out here. Let me rattle off two quick examples for now, in case the summer program wasn’t bizarre enough:
1) I once attended a meeting where we brainstormed strategies to increase AP enrollment. When we moved to discuss the gap in enrollment between Black and white students, a senior teacher said that trying to register more children of color for AP classes is inherently racist and that putting greater value on AP classes at all is an expression of white supremacy. To clarify: I don’t mean that a senior teacher expressed a complex set of ideas regarding racial justice that could be uncharitably reduced to those claims. I mean I sat in a room where a senior teacher literally spoke the words Trying to register more students of color for AP classes is inherently racist and Putting greater value on AP classes at all is an expression of white supremacy, to an audience of other teachers who nodded along or otherwise kept quiet.
2) I once attended another meeting – lots of meetings when you’re a teacher! – where we were working to approve a new weekly schedule for students. When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state. Again, to clarify: I don’t mean my colleague had a a more nuanced approach to testing that a dishonest interlocutor could twist to sound like that. I mean my colleague literally spoke those words. (To be fair, one other teacher did speak up and challenge them this time, albeit very politely.)
Now, do those two anecdotes, no matter how explicitly I describe them, sound like something out of James Lindsay’s fever dreams? Yes! Are these things that did, in fact, happen? Also yes! And I just don’t know how to get both of those facts across to the fairly large segment of the American population who believes it could only ever be one or the other. (Honestly, if I were more conspiratorial, I would think progressives were engineering this dynamic on purpose; in reality, I think they just organically stumbled on a level of craziness perfectly calibrated to make their critics seem like loons. Lucky them!)”
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“How the Media Polarized Us
The shift from ad revenue to the pursuit of digital subscriptions has turned journalism into post-journalism.”
https://www.city-journal.org/how-the-media-polarized-us
“Public trust in the media has hit an all-time low. Common explanations for this crisis of credibility include bias, polarization, and fake news, but these causes are themselves effects of the tectonic, and generally overlooked, shift in the media’s business model. Throughout the twentieth century, journalism relied for its funding predominantly on advertising. In the early 2010s, as ad money fled the industry, publications sought to earn revenue through subscriptions instead of advertising. In the process, they became dependent on digital audiences—especially their most vocal representatives. The shift from advertising to digital subscriptions invalidated old standards of journalism and led to the emergence of post-journalism.
Everything we once knew about journalism depended on the model of the ad-funded news media. Advertising accounted for most of the news industry’s revenue during the twentieth century.
This business model provided a selective advantage to certain kinds of media. Since the revenue from copy sales was not sufficient to maintain news production, news outlets needed to attract advertising. As a result, media that relied mostly on the reader’s penny, such as the formerly influential working-class press, eventually lost out in the marketplace. The mass media that oriented themselves around the “buying audience”—the affluent middle class—received money from growing advertising and thrived.
In political economy, this selective effect is called “allocative control.” The ad money did not tell the media what to do; it just chose the media that encouraged its audience to buy goods. Media critics Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argued that it affected the mechanism of discourse formation, as the media maintained a context favorable for consumerism and political stability, and thereby “manufactured consent.”
This business model was extremely successful. By the end of the twentieth century, the news media had reached the apex of their 500-year history. Even regional newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun possessed several well-staffed foreign bureaus. Never were the media as rich and influential as in their golden age, just 25 years ago. Plenty of journalists still on the job remember those glorious days.”
Under the ad-based model, media capital represented a significant social force. It protected its interests, its market value, and therefore its independence. The abundance of money enabled newsrooms to develop an autonomy secured by the division between news production and ad-sales departments—a “glass wall” between ads and news. Preselected by ad money, news organizations geared toward affluent audiences became influential to the point that their autonomy determined their market value.
Ad money carried the risks of advertisers’ pressure in news production, which would have undermined newsroom autonomy, a source of reputation and therefore capitalization. So professional standards were elaborated to protect journalism from advertisers and establish the credibility of news coverage. Credibility was seen as a professional virtue but also as a commodity. “The theory underlying the modern news industry has been the belief that credibility builds a broad and loyal audience, and that economic success follows in turn,” declared the American Press Association in its 1997 “Principles of Journalism” statement.
Thus, paradoxically, the allocative control of ad money determined the allegiance of mainstream media to corporate elites (hence, “corporate media”) but also sustained high-quality journalism. Newsroom autonomy was protected by the standards of objectivity, nonpartisan and unbiased reporting, attention to the arguments of all parties involved, investigative rigor, the separation of fact from opinion, and other guarantees enshrined in the ethical and professional codes of news organizations.
The same set of professional standards that was meant to secure credibility and independence from ad money turned journalism into a public service. “The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need to function in a free society,” claimed the American Press Association’s statement. “Commitment to citizens also means journalism should present a representative picture of all constituent groups in society. Ignoring certain citizens has the effect of disenfranchising them.”
The only entity to which journalism was called to be biased against, even meticulously so, was power. This was a part of the credibility code, too. Endowed with these principles, initially rooted in ad funding, journalism evolved in the twentieth century as the “watchdog of democracy,” positioning itself above partisan party struggle.
Finally, the media’s dependence on advertising determined their attitude toward their readers. If the audience was supposed to be affluent, mature, and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment when reporting—they were to present the naked facts and the positions of both political sides to the public to judge. Hypocrisy and professional arrogance, of course, had always had a place in the profession: journalists have long seen themselves as a kind of priestly class. Nevertheless, leaving judgment to readers (or at least pretending to do so) was one of the fundamental virtues of ad-funded journalism. And since publications wanted to broaden their audience, not narrow it, they served reader preferences by downplaying, rather than emphasizing, potentially divisive issues.
All of this cooled the political activity of the public. In his 1999 book Rich Media, Poor Democracy, media historian Robert McChesney described the low degree of participation in elections as “democracy without citizens.” If the medium is the message, then the message of the ad-funded news media was “buy!”—not “vote!” or “protest!” This might have seemed to be bad for democracy, but polarization in society was at a low point, while the influence and prosperity of the mass media were at an all-time high. The political tranquility of the public was a side effect—detrimental or benevolent, depending on one’s perspective.
The Internet broke this idyll. It turned out that the ad-based model relied not on the content attracting an affluent audience but on the monopoly over ad delivery that the Internet simply destroyed. The ad-based media business achieved power and prosperity over the course of 100 years; it collapsed in just ten.
The collapse started with the classifieds. At their peak in 2000, classified ads brought in $19.6 billion, about one-third of newspapers’ revenue. As Craigslist, eBay, and others killed this market, classifieds revenue plummeted to $2.2 billion in 2018. Corporate advertising was next. Suddenly, firms found that they could reach their desired audience online directly and precisely with full control over content, context, and targeting.
Google and Facebook delivered the fatal blow. It became obvious to advertisers that old media had offered them a costly and inefficient method of carpet-bombing their targeted audiences. By contrast, Google and Facebook knew the preferences of billions of individuals and provided personally customized delivery of ads to each of them. In 2013, Google alone made $51 billion in ad revenue. That year, American newspapers’ ad revenue was $23 billion, and the global newspaper industry collected $89 billion in ad revenue. The Google-Facebook duopoly surpassed 60 percent of the share in the U.S. digital ad market in 2018. It became increasingly clear that old media had little chance of competing with digital platforms.
Ad revenue in the U.S. press hit rock-bottom in 2013, falling below the level of 1950, when the industry started measuring the print ad market. In 2016, the Newspaper Association of America stopped reporting newspapers’ annual ad revenue: this source of revenue had basically ceased to exist. Residual advertising in print media, both offline and online, lost its industrial scale and any commercial meaning. Today, advertising contracts in the media often resemble charity from ideologically aligned businesses.”
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Like I told my children: I feel like I am Alice in Saturday Night Live Land. You can’t make so much of this up. Like the ‘scientists’ who don’t want to give a sex to any skeletons found because we don’t know the pronoun preference. Romans is so true when we are told if we give up the truth, we will believe anything. paraphrased.
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Fauci is complicit.
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Conservative radio hosts have a problem with capitalism?? Owners of media have a political agenda?? and right wing media is surprised?? Seriously the irony is too much. People own media for two reasons, first and foremost, profit and second control the spread of ideas. FOX and right wing talk radio have done both brilliantly. The irony of a right wing talk show host complaining on Rupert Murdoch’s FOX News network about political agendas of ownership is amusing. Soros is the ultimate capitalist, he wants to change the nature of talk radio so he buys talk radio networks; now all he has to do is turn a profit while getting across his political agenda. He should take a page out of Murdoch and focus on outrage.
Of course as a later link shows to be successful media had to sell ads. And herein is the cycle; get people outraged, they tune in, sell ads, make profit and spread more outrage based on your political ideas, people listen, etc etc.
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The police have lost “the room”. No matter the circumstances, it will be difficult for anyone to believe their version of events especially in minority areas. Anyone who is shot will be a martyr first and maybe discredited later. Even when witnesses collaborate the police, it won’t be enough. The police have to publicly re-invent themselves (defund, disband and then reassemble) in order to regain the entire community’s confidence.
Good guys with a gun still doesn’t make sense. Three people are dead and more are injured. The gunman managed to shoot 24 rounds before he was killed. He had approx 100 rounds with him. Those who say he could’ve killed more with the remaining 75 rounds need to realize he legally acquired that many rounds, the AR-15 rifle was capable of firing 24 rounds in just a few minutes. Gun control, assault weapon bans, maximum clip sizes, etc could’ve help prevent yet another mass shooting.
Jan 6th whining is amusing. A comedy show being invited in by staffers is not equivalent to rioters who were obviously not welcomed and were told to leave in more than one — barricaded doors and even gun shots.
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Medicine has been accursed of ignoring both women and minorities in terms of research, testing and developing new techniques, cures, etc. Any history of western medicine will confirm that white men viewed medicine from their own perspective and thus made outlandish claims about women’s bodies that the local midwife/herbalist (ie witch) knew was nonsense. And for black women, it was even worse. Standard theory and practise was to consider blacks as having a higher pain tolerance and thus pain management during child birth was rarely a consideration for black women. These ideas were/are fairly common in my own life time. We tend to think we are past these biases but every now and then something happens to remind us.
Almost everyone of my female colleagues complained the vaccine changed their cycle; well some didn’t complain as it shorten and lessen it for a while. This was fairly common knowledge by the time most of them receive the second shot. In fact it was mentioned on the brochure I received after my second shot. However, my daughter and her friends experienced no change. My guess is age and/or use of birth control had some difference in vaccine side effects. The point, though, is yet again the medical establishment neglected half the population. (no wonder some of black female friends have no trust in the medical system)
Of course, natural immunity works better than a vaccine but there’s even more risks. You need to get sick. From what we know, there are long term effects from covid especially if you had a serious case — weakened immune system, organ damage, breathing issues, etc.
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Trust in the media is decline — does this include FOX and talk radio? Maybe Soros can fix this. Who’s response for the decline in trust? The media disparaging each other. Competing for the outrage-advertising cycle; its easy to get more eyeballs if you criticize your competitors. In that way, the media market kills its own reputation.
Personally, my trust in polling has declined so I’m not sure if I can trust any poll (which is reported the media) which tells me something unless of course I’m predisposed to it.
Notice its Democratic staffers who unionize first and lead further union drives. Conservative underlings are more tolerant of exploitation; thinking its temporary and soon they will be able to use the system of exploitation to their advantage.
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AJ — I”m not sure what the elderly man’s point is. He asserts today’s scholars are too divisive yet they don’t say anything too different than him. He wants to point out African Americans can succeed in America and progress is happening. The writers of 1619 and other scholars are saying the same thing — African Americans are ardent supporters of the Constitution and what it promises. They only want to make sure African Americans can use the Constitution and the American experience in the same way as whites. When I read 1619 my overall impression was the writers believed in and wanted the American dream, however, they thought to remove the remaining stumbling blocks one must think historically and understand the origins of the legal system, banking, gov’t programs, etc and how it limited African American opportunities. Older generations look to their own youthful activism with nostalgia and of course view current activism with a critical eye but in reality its all about the same thing — improving society for those who live it.
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I’m also not sure what the teacher is trying to say. A series of anecdotes don’t really demonstrate what he or the columnist alleges — neo-racism or contempt for African American intelligence. The issue of attendance has surfaced for option summer and Saturday programs in my district. Students are not taken off the rolls unless the parent explicitly states they are withdrawing. If removed without warning, a parent will make all sorts of excuses for non-attendance and accusation of admin’s motivations when their kid finally shows up and there’s no room. Nothing to do with colour — just admin covering themselves. Entirely selfish of the parent but its quite common. People tend to treat these programs as free babysitting. However, if a child doesn’t show up, attendance should be taken and contact made with parent. Once contact is made, they can be asked if they wish to withdraw.
As for the last two incidents, I take it the teacher is new to the profession and didn’t detect the cynicism in the older teachers’ comments. They are mocking both testing and rating by racial groups. People tend to see teaching as a left wing optimistic/activist profession but in reality teaching leads to cynicism and to a certain degree of social conservatism. His anecdotes do make me thankful my contract limits meetings to once a month for 70 mins in length. I gladly pay my union dues just for that part of the contract.
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https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/more-than-100-florida-churches-file-lawsuit-to-leave-united-methodist-church/
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