Connect with us

Government

Lack Of Attention Allowed Special Interests To Take Over Schools: Journalist Luke Rosiak

Lack Of Attention Allowed Special Interests To Take Over Schools: Journalist Luke Rosiak

Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The…

Published

on

Lack Of Attention Allowed Special Interests To Take Over Schools: Journalist Luke Rosiak

Authored by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times,

Investigative journalist and author of the book Race To the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education, said he started to notice a disturbing trend of special interest groups taking over the public schools to implement their radical agenda prior to the pandemic, which they only advanced further during the lockdowns.

“I basically saw that something was coming, that schools mattered, and that no one was paying attention to them. And because of that, special interests had really started colonizing these schools,” Rosiak told host of American Thought Leaders Jan Jekielek in a recent interview. “It was almost everywhere.”

Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak author of Race-to-the-Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education in Washington on April 5, 2022. (Matthew-Pearson/Conservative Partnership Institute)

Funders, teachers’ unions, and associations are working together to inculcate an extreme ideology in public schools in the name of “equity” or critical race theory (CRT), which was partially exposed when children were home during the pandemic.

“So, I mean, one of the most important concepts to understand is equity,” said Rosiak, they don’t call it CRT.

“But almost every school district in the country is on record supporting equity, and equity is a very bad thing. It means equal outcomes by race.”

He likened the equity agenda to communism, saying, “that means forcing equal outcomes by either bringing the top performers down or by just rigging the stats.”

The stated goal of communism is to eliminate any economic disparities, having everyone be equal, no matter the effort.

In the name of equity, during Barack Obama’s second presidential term, the Department of Justice sent a letter to every school district telling them they will “be investigated unless your discipline rates were the same for all races,” said Rosiak. As a consequence, discipline was severely limited, and learning in classrooms was impacted.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, right, and President Barack Obama during an announcement in the State Dining Room of the White House to announce Holder was resigning, on Sept. 25, 2014. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

The 2014 DOJ letter states: “Regardless of the program adopted, federal law prohibits public school districts from discriminating in the administration of student discipline based on certain personal characteristics.”

“The Departments initiate investigations of student discipline policies and practices at particular schools based on complaints the Departments receive from students, parents, community members, and others about possible racial discrimination in student discipline,” the letter reads.

Rosiak has found that special interest groups running schools have installed equity departments, which have authority over all school policies, to ensure their equity agenda is advanced.

“But what they do is they implant the equity stuff above it all,” Rosiak said. Every decision from every department has to then be cleared by the equity department because of its impact on race, he said.

Two of those equity groups are called Policy Link and The Government Alliance on Race and Equity (“a national network of government working to achieve racial equity and advance opportunities for all”), which are two nonprofits many school districts use.

Rosiak said that instead of implementing rigorous academic programs, district and teacher union heads are pushing for equity initiatives that lower the bar for students. Some of these actions include lower testing requirements or getting rid of certain types of tests altogether.

“So essentially, yeah, in pursuit of equity, they have stopped measuring things, they started cooking the books, they started orienting everything around the lowest common denominator,” said Rosiak.

“We’re not even trying to get them to be smart, because it’s better for the teachers to look like they’re succeeding, and that they’re not failing these kids, and they’re not creating these disparities.”

Students leave Stuyvesant High School, one of the nine specialized public high schools in New York City, on March 25, 2014. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

He said New York City’s Stuyvesant High School is a school where standardized testing was required for merit-based entry and kids had to be skilled but because of pressure from racial equity activists, they stopped using the standardized test.

“And it (merit-based entry) was really a way to keep the elites from capturing the school. And the merit, was the great equalizer, and it brought this very rigorous school to the middle class and the working class,” said Rosiak.

“Don’t use the exam to get into the math school, because asking kids to answer math questions is not a good way to determine whether they know math.”

Rosiak said all this effort is to make the schools look like they are not failing to teach, the one million students in New York, especially minority students. This is even more outrageous when you know that each student cost the NYC taxpayers, $29,000 per year.

“So why did they care so much? What happens to these 20,000 kids at the specialized schools? And the answer is because it’s the optics, when you look at Stuyvesant, what you see is sort of a big picture of how kids are doing in New York City as a whole.”

The equity framework being pushed by schools puts subjective truth above objective truth, said Rosiak.

“A society can’t function on some philosophical framework that rejects objectivity, but that’s what CRT does. It positions ‘lived experience’, which is just whatever you say it is, and how you feel. So that’s what ‘counter storytelling’ is.”

According to Columbia University Storytelling (page 142) Project Curriculum, “Counter stories are new stories that we deliberately construct to challenge the stock stories, build on and amplify resistance stories to interrupt the status quo and work for change.”

In counter story-telling, “subjectivity, preempts objectivity, but only if it furthers critical race theory. So, in other words, both of our feelings matter, but our feelings only matter if they serve the ends of CRT. And if your lived experience is something that doesn’t help advance the CRT takeover, then your lived experience doesn’t matter,” Rosiak added.

During the pandemic, school officials pushed through more of this agenda including, converting letter grades to standards-based assessments.

“And so, they have all these different schemes that they had always been wanting to do for like 10 years, and during coronavirus you see them, ramming them through all at once,” he said.

“We can’t do the tests, and therefore, we can’t have gifted and talented and magnet schools because there are no tests. We’re not going to do letter grades because a lot of kids are just being totally failed by remote learning.”

Wealthy Foundations Funding School Associations

“So, there are radical ideologues that have taken over all of the associations, and the groups that are doing that are basically the philanthropic foundations like the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation,” said Rosiak.

The foundations, work with the teacher’s associations to further the funders’ racist agenda and hide the fact that the teachers/schools are failing students, which Rosiak calls the “alliance of convenience”.

“When there is a jurisdiction that does these radical policies, the associations can then replicate it all over the country,” said Rosiak. “What they do is they say it’s best practices because another district has done it. But it doesn’t actually have to be effective.”

Rosiak said the evidence he has found, points to the fact that the wealthy elite class wants to preserve their status.

“So, it was basically social Darwinism…,” said Rosiak. “One of the things they may want to do is preserve the status quo of the elites at the top, and then this permanent black underclass, the best way to preserve a permanent black underclass is to completely refuse to educate them properly.”

An example Rosiak gives, of this ideology is schools labeling habits that help high achievers, as being a part of white supremacy.

“And so, when they say things like blacks can’t show up on time, or can’t be expected to get the right answer or worship of the written word, that’s a function of whiteness, like these are insane, racist ideas that are just saying blacks aren’t good enough. It’s horrible.”

These foundations have always given out money and propagated their ideas but more recently they have consolidated their efforts, Rosiak said.

Celeste Fiehler protests outside the Desert Sands Unified School District board meeting in La Quinta, Calif., on Oct. 5, 2021. (Courtesy Celeste Fiehler)

“I think of it as like a multi-headed monster, it brings together all the foundations and it actually serves as a vehicle through which they can all coordinate.”

He said one of these ventures is called the HUB project.

“And so, they do things like they run fake news, websites that purport to be like a local news source covering maybe your local school board election, but it’s really a completely contrived thing for the purposes of pushing these political ideas.”

Rosiak urges parents and any taxpayer who cares, to start going to school board meetings and questioning schools and hold these groups accountable for the poor and skewed education children are receiving.

“Because paying an average of $17,000 per student per year, which is what we pay, and getting an average of 36 percent literacy among 12th graders 24 percent proficiency in math, that’s a completely untenable reality. And once we realize it, something’s going to have to change.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 04/16/2022 - 19:30

Read More

Continue Reading

Government

Mistakes Were Made

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…

Published

on

Mistakes Were Made

Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,

Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.

Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”

This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.

Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.

OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.

No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!

OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.

For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.

Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”

Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”

And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.

Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.

And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …

And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …

And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …

And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”

And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …

Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”

Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …

… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 23:20

Read More

Continue Reading

Government

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A…

Published

on

Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A Harvard Medical School professor who refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine has been terminated, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.

Martin Kulldorff, epidemiologist and statistician, at his home in Ashford, Conn., on Feb. 11, 2022. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, was fired by Mass General Brigham in November 2021 over noncompliance with the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate after his requests for exemptions from the mandate were denied, according to one document. Mr. Kulldorff was also placed on leave by Harvard Medical School (HMS) because his appointment as professor of medicine there “depends upon” holding a position at the hospital, another document stated.

Mr. Kulldorff asked HMS in late 2023 how he could return to his position and was told he was being fired.

You would need to hold an eligible appointment with a Harvard-affiliated institution for your HMS academic appointment to continue,” Dr. Grace Huang, dean for faculty affairs, told the epidemiologist and biostatistician.

She said the lack of an appointment, combined with college rules that cap leaves of absence at two years, meant he was being terminated.

Mr. Kulldorff disclosed the firing for the first time this month.

“While I can’t comment on the specifics due to employment confidentiality protections that preclude us from doing so, I can confirm that his employment agreement was terminated November 10, 2021,” a spokesperson for Brigham and Women’s Hospital told The Epoch Times via email.

Mass General Brigham granted just 234 exemption requests out of 2,402 received, according to court filings in an ongoing case that alleges discrimination.

The hospital said previously, “We received a number of exemption requests, and each request was carefully considered by a knowledgeable team of reviewers.

A lot of other people received exemptions, but I did not,” Mr. Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Kulldorff was originally hired by HMS but switched departments in 2015 to work at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is part of Mass General Brigham and affiliated with HMS.

Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls,” an HMS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “Hospital-based faculty, such as Mr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to maintain an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School.”

HMS confirmed that some faculty, who are tenured or on the tenure track, do not require hospital appointments.

Natural Immunity

Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, Mr. Kulldorff contracted COVID-19. He was hospitalized but eventually recovered.

That gave him a form of protection known as natural immunity. According to a number of studies, including papers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, natural immunity is better than the protection bestowed by vaccines.

Other studies have found that people with natural immunity face a higher risk of problems after vaccination.

Mr. Kulldorff expressed his concerns about receiving a vaccine in his request for a medical exemption, pointing out a lack of data for vaccinating people who suffer from the same issue he does.

I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency,” Mr. Kulldorff wrote in an essay.

In his request for a religious exemption, he highlighted an Israel study that was among the first to compare protection after infection to protection after vaccination. Researchers found that the vaccinated had less protection than the naturally immune.

“Having had COVID disease, I have stronger longer lasting immunity than those vaccinated (Gazit et al). Lacking scientific rationale, vaccine mandates are religious dogma, and I request a religious exemption from COVID vaccination,” he wrote.

Both requests were denied.

Mr. Kulldorff is still unvaccinated.

“I had COVID. I had it badly. So I have infection-acquired immunity. So I don’t need the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times.

Dissenting Voice

Mr. Kulldorff has been a prominent dissenting voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, countering messaging from the government and many doctors that the COVID-19 vaccines were needed, regardless of prior infection.

He spoke out in an op-ed in April 2021, for instance, against requiring people to provide proof of vaccination to attend shows, go to school, and visit restaurants.

The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune,” he wrote at the time.

Mr. Kulldorff later co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of people at high risk while removing restrictions for younger, healthy people.

Harsh restrictions such as school closures “will cause irreparable damage” if not lifted, the declaration stated.

The declaration drew criticism from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who became the head of the CDC, among others.

In a competing document, Dr. Walensky and others said that “relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed” and that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity(3) and mortality across the whole population.”

“Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades,” Mr. Kulldorff later said in an EpochTV interview. “I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.

Surveys indicate that people have less trust now in the CDC and other health institutions than before the pandemic, and data from the CDC and elsewhere show that fewer people are receiving the new COVID-19 vaccines and other shots.

Support

The disclosure that Mr. Kulldorff was fired drew criticism of Harvard and support for Mr. Kulldorff.

The termination “is a massive and incomprehensible injustice,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, an ethics expert who was fired from the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine because he had natural immunity, said on X.

The academy is full of people who declined vaccines—mostly with dubious exemptions—and yet Harvard fires the one professor who happens to speak out against government policies.” Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote in a blog post. “It looks like Harvard has weaponized its policies and selectively enforces them.”

A petition to reinstate Mr. Kulldorff has garnered more than 1,800 signatures.

Some other doctors said the decision to let Mr. Kulldorff go was correct.

“Actions have consequence,” Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a Canadian doctor, wrote on X. He said Mr. Kulldorff had “publicly undermine[d] public health.”

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 21:00

Read More

Continue Reading

International

“Extreme Events”: US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In “Large Excess Over Trend”

"Extreme Events": US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In "Large Excess Over Trend"

Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021…

Published

on

"Extreme Events": US Cancer Deaths Spiked In 2021 And 2022 In "Large Excess Over Trend"

Cancer deaths in the United States spiked in 2021 and 2022 among 15-44 year-olds "in large excess over trend," marking jumps of 5.6% and 7.9% respectively vs. a rise of 1.7% in 2020, according to a new preprint study from deep-dive research firm, Phinance Technologies.

Algeria, Carlos et. al "US -Death Trends for Neoplasms ICD codes: C00-D48, Ages 15-44", ResearchGate, March. 2024 P. 7

Extreme Events

The report, which relies on data from the CDC, paints a troubling picture.

"We show a rise in excess mortality from neoplasms reported as underlying cause of death, which started in 2020 (1.7%) and accelerated substantially in 2021 (5.6%) and 2022 (7.9%). The increase in excess mortality in both 2021 (Z-score of 11.8) and 2022 (Z-score of 16.5) are highly statistically significant (extreme events)," according to the authors.

That said, co-author, David Wiseman, PhD (who has 86 publications to his name), leaves the cause an open question - suggesting it could either be a "novel phenomenon," Covid-19, or the Covid-19 vaccine.

"The results indicate that from 2021 a novel phenomenon leading to increased neoplasm deaths appears to be present in individuals aged 15 to 44 in the US," reads the report.

The authors suggest that the cause may be the result of "an unexpected rise in the incidence of rapidly growing fatal cancers," and/or "a reduction in survival in existing cancer cases."

They also address the possibility that "access to utilization of cancer screening and treatment" may be a factor - the notion that pandemic-era lockdowns resulted in fewer visits to the doctor. Also noted is that "Cancers tend to be slowly-developing diseases with remarkably stable death rates and only small variations over time," which makes "any temporal association between a possible explanatory factor (such as COVID-19, the novel COVID-19 vaccines, or other factor(s)) difficult to establish."

That said, a ZeroHedge review of the CDC data reveals that it does not provide information on duration of illness prior to death - so while it's not mentioned in the preprint, it can't rule out so-called 'turbo cancers' - reportedly rapidly developing cancers, the existence of which has been largely anecdotal (and widely refuted by the usual suspects).

While the Phinance report is extremely careful not to draw conclusions, researcher "Ethical Skeptic" kicked the barn door open in a Thursday post on X - showing a strong correlation between "cancer incidence & mortality" coinciding with the rollout of the Covid mRNA vaccine.

Phinance principal Ed Dowd commented on the post, noting that "Cancer is suddenly an accelerating growth industry!"

Continued:

Bottom line - hard data is showing alarming trends, which the CDC and other agencies have a requirement to explore and answer truthfully - and people are asking #WhereIsTheCDC.

We aren't holding our breath.

Wiseman, meanwhile, points out that Pfizer and several other companies are making "significant investments in cancer drugs, post COVID."

Phinance

We've featured several of Phinance's self-funded deep dives into pandemic data that nobody else is doing. If you'd like to support them, click here.

 

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/16/2024 - 16:55

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending