Blog

Damning Report Card: California Schools Get An ‘F’

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Free Speech Rankings crowned California’s Claremont McKenna College with a grade of B- as the best college in the U.S. for free speech, while a string of other California schools received F grades amid anti-free speech environments across campuses.

FIRE released its sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings, which pulled responses on free-speech topics from 68,510 students attending 257 American colleges. The survey highlighted a decline in support for free speech among all students. 

Students on both sides of the political aisle are showing a deep “unwillingness” to face controversial ideas, the press releases stated. 

“This year, students largely opposed allowing any controversial campus speaker, no matter that speaker’s politics,” said FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff. “Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely … We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture’s deep polarization.”

According to the FIRE survey, Claremont McKenna College is ranked in the top 10 best schools for free speech on  “Comfort Expressing Ideas,” “Openness” and “Self-Censorship,” among other categories. 

Shortly after the horrific assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk at a Utah college campus event, Claremont Independent, the college newspaper, wrote a story on how CMC students reacted to the killing of Kirk.

“Even those who despise Kirk and everything he stood for should mourn the damage his assassination will do to America’s fragile architecture of free speech and civil discourse. There can be no picking and choosing in the world of free expression. It’s free speech for all, or free speech for none,” the editorial board wrote.

Out of the 257 schools surveyed, 166 of them received an F for their free speech climate. Only 10 schools received a free speech grade of C. Claremont McKenna was the only college to get a better grade than a C.

Keep reading

Michael Crichton’s Unheeded Warning of Biotechnology Catastrophe

With over 30,000 reader reviews on Amazon, Michael Crichton’s bestselling sci-fi novel Jurassic Park (first published in 1990) has become a cultural sensation, spawning a series of successful movies, one of which is in cinemas in Japan as I write. Yet despite this dino-disaster movie popularity, most people have failed to heed the warning Crichton makes clear in many of his novels about the terrible dangers of modern technology – especially biotechnology and genetic engineering.

As Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm puts it, “genetic power is far more potent than atomic power” and potentially even more destructive. That destructive power manifested itself on a global scale during the Covid disaster, precipitated both by an apparently bioengineered pathogen and the genetically engineered injection widely promoted to combat it.

For a long time, Crichton’s novels and films depicted catastrophes caused by technology going berserk and beyond the control of its human creators. For instance, in his 1973 movie Westworld, Crichton’s story depicted an interactive amusement park replicating an American Old West town, with humanoid robots. To the consternation of the programmers, the robots eventually escape their control and commit brutal murders of many customers in the park.

However, these destructive robots are simply artificial technological simulations. The mayhem in Crichton’s tales gets even worse when the natural world is involved. In Crichton’s view, the world of nature is far more complicated and uncontrollable, making the destructive consequences of human attempts at manipulation all but inevitable.

Crichton declares his stance about this explicitly in his introduction to the 2002 novel Prey, which is about biology-based nanotechnology. He explains, “The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do,” which therefore is a “powerful argument for caution.”

Continuing in that vein, he makes an astonishing prediction: “Sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self-replicating entities into the environment.”

Gain-of-function viral bioengineering and self-replicating mRNA vaccines delivered by lipid nanoparticles have now made this forecast a reality.

Crichton’s theme is not the usual sci-fi disaster trope about the human race misusing scientific advances for war or other evil ends. His point is that both highly complex technological systems and the biological world are inherently uncontrollable and tend toward chaotic breakdown, regardless of our attempts to keep them under control.

Crichton drives this point home in a number of ways. Many chapters in Jurassic Park are titled “Control” as a way to make his theme explicit. The people sitting in control centers on the dinosaur island only have an illusion of control, which disappears when the computer fails or unexpected things happen.

Keep reading

The Strange Disappearance of the Word “Retarded” in the Vaccine Era

For decades, vaccines were recognized to cause brain injury and mental retardation.

So “retarded” was banned, the injuries were relabeled as autism, and autism’s ambiguity was used to hide it all.

Lived experiences were turned into word games. But the paper trail shows it was never an accident.

In this report, 

A Midwestern Doctor exposes the games that have been played to hide vaccine injuries for generations.

This information comes from the work of medical researcher A Midwestern Doctor. For all the sources and details, read the full report below.

Keep reading

Republican Bill To Allow Utility Companies To Ration Energy

Instead of demanding that utility companies spend up for reliable sources of energy, legislators try to balance the shortfall on the backs of consumers. Worse, this type of nonsense come Republican lawmakers. Public Utilities are monopolies under strict control of public boards and are supposed to provide energy to all consumers.

As I wrote in Technocracy’s Necessary Requirements, this was the plan for Technocracy as revealed in the Technocracy Study Course in 1934. Here are the first two requirements:

1. Register on a continuous 24-hour-per-day basis the total net conversion of energy

Conversion of energy means creating useable energy from stored energy like coal, oil or natural gas; when they are burned, electricity is generated. Hydroelectric and nuclear also convert energy. There were two reasons to keep track of useable energy: First, it was the basis for issuing “energy script” to all citizens for buying and selling goods and services. Second, it predicted economic activity because all such activity is directly dependent upon energy. (Note that Technocrats intended to pre-determine how much energy would be made available in the first place.)

2. By means of the registration of energy converted and consumed, make possible a balanced load

Once available energy was quantified, it was to be allocated to consumers and manufacturers so as to limit production and consumption. Technocrats would have control of both ends, so that everything is managed according to their scientific formulas.

The modern Smart Grid, with its ubiquitous WiFi-enabled Smart Meters on homes and businesses, is the exact fulfillment of these two requirements. The concept of “energy web” was first revitalized in 1999 by the Bonneville Power Authority (BPA) in Portland, Oregon. A government agency, BPA had a rich history of Technocrats dating back to its creation in 1937. The “energy web” was renamed Smart Grid in 2009 during the Obama Administration. Note that Smart Grid was a global initiative that intended to blanket the entire world with this new energy control technology. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.

Proposed legislation would allow utility companies to temporarily limit the amount of customers’ energy usage during peak demand times.

Rep. Roy Klopfenstein, R-Haviland, introduced House Bill 427 late last month. The measure, which has not yet been assigned to a committee, creates a “voluntary demand response program.”

Under the program, customers could opt to allow utilities to “temporarily adjust energy usage” during periods of high demand. Actions could include “raising thermostat settings or cycling water heaters.”

As proposed, customers could override any changes, and utilities could compensate customers either annually or per event. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio would review the programs to ensure they are cost-effective for customers.

“This legislation is a crucial step in our state’s comprehensive plan to ensure all Ohioans have access to reliable, affordable, and readily available energy,” Klopfenstein said in a release.

“Demand response programs have proven to be a vital tool for our large commercial users, and it’s important that similar programs are made available to residential and small commercial users,” Klopfenstein added. “These programs will ease the strain on our energy grid and save money for all Ohioans.”

Keep reading

“Above the Law” Landlord: Letitia James Caught Violating New York’s Rent Stabilization Laws

New York State Attorney General Letitia James, long claiming to be a public champion of tenants’ rights, has herself been in violation of New York City’s rent stabilization laws for more than two decades.

Since purchasing a four-story apartment building at 296 Lafayette Avenue in Brooklyn in 2001, James has failed to register the property with the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) as required for rent-stabilized buildings.

By failing to register, she denied her tenants the protections of rent stabilization, while collecting rents above the legally regulated amounts for 24 years.

New York City’s housing code is based on its “Rent Stabilization Law of 1969,” which was designed to shield tenants from large rent raises, unlawful deregulation, and eviction abuses.

It sets yearly allowable rent increases, typically at around 3% per year. The law applies to qualifying buildings and requires landlords to register with DHCR and file annual reports on tenants, rents, and lease terms.

Keep reading

Schools Make Kids Crazy

Almost one-third of government schools nationwide are now surveilling the mental health of students. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker recently signed a bill to bring “universal mental health screening” to two million Illinois students as part of his Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Initiative. But this rescue effort will ravage many students and is a warning shot to parents across the nation. Manhattan Institute fellow Abigail Shrier warned that the new Illinois law will mean “tens of thousands of Illinois kids get shoved into the mental health funnel and convinced they are sick. Many or most will be false positives.”

If politicians want to help kids, they must recognize how government schools systematically undermine students’ mental health. 

The Covid school lockdowns nuked the mental health of millions of young Americans. A 2024 JAMA Original Investigation found that between 2018 and 2021, young people saw an almost 300% increase in the number of hospital emergency visits for eating disorders and suicidal ideation. Suicide attempts increased 250% during that time. Depression and anxiety skyrocketed among youth from the start of the pandemic, but politicians and policymakers ignored the mental carnage that Covid policies inflicted.

A 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that 44% of high school students said they “persistently felt sad or hopeless in the past year.” Females were almost twice as likely to be depressed, with 57% “persistently felt sad and hopeless” versus 31% of male students. School shutdowns dismally failed to thwart the spread of Covid. After schools reopened, students were hassled to comply with idiotic mask mandates that did nothing except multiply anxiety. 

  Schools are subverting students’ mental health by endlessly hectoring them to doubt or despise their own bodies. These school antics reached epidemic level even before the start of the Covid pandemic. In 2019, the state of Maryland issued regulations to promote “viewing each student’s” “gender identity and expression” as “valuable.” Government officials and political appointees arrogated to themselves the prerogative to redefine gender in the state of Maryland. Montgomery County, the largest school system in the state, announced that it would choose books for the curriculum “through an ‘LGBTQ+ Lens’ and ask whether books ‘reinforced or disrupted’ ‘stereotypes,’ ‘cisnormativity,’ and ‘power hierarchies,’” according to a brief filed at the Supreme Court by parents who successfully challenged the school system. That brief also noted that “teachers are told to frame disagreement with [pro-LGBTQ] ideas as ‘hurtful,’ and to counter with examples of ‘men who paint their nails’ or ‘wear dresses.’” The goal is to instill in children “a new perspective not easily contravened by their parents,” as the county school board admitted. 

The indoctrination produced a 582% increase in the number of kids self-identifying as “non-binary” in Montgomery County schools. “Disrupting children’s thinking” has been so successful that almost half of the students identified themselves as non-binary. But non-binary kids are far more likely to suffer mental illness. One survey found that more than half of transgender and non-binary youth considered committing suicide in 2022. That has not stopped other school systems from openly or covertly campaigning to sway children to repent or revolt from how they were born. 

Schools have bludgeoned kids with “Chicken Little – The Sky is Falling!” environmental propaganda for decades. The result, according to the American Psychological Association, is that 58% of American youth are “very or extremely worried about climate change” and 43% said “climate change impacted their mental health.” Harvard Medical Magazine reports that for many young people, “worry over threats of future climate change results in panic attacks, insomnia, obsessive thinking, and other symptoms.”

Keep reading

AG Pam Bondi Clarifies Her Stance on First Amendment Following Backlash — Says Her Office Won’t Prosecute “Hate Speech”

Attorney General Pam Bondi is scrambling to clarify her comments after a firestorm erupted over her suggestion that the Department of Justice would target so-called “hate speech.”

The controversy follows an outrageous incident at an Office Depot in Michigan, where three teenage boys were denied service after pre-paying for posters meant for a Charlie Kirk memorial vigil.

The smug employees—one identifying as a supervisor, another as a “manager”—flatly refused to print the order, dismissing the vigil posters as “propaganda.”

Office Depot corporate quickly issued an apology, announced an internal review, and confirmed the employee had been terminated.

But rather than directly addressing the broader climate of hate fueling these incidents, Bondi used her Fox interview to focus on discrimination claims against Office Depot:

“Employers, you have an obligation to get rid of people. You need to look at people who are saying horrible things, and they shouldn’t be working with you. Businesses cannot discriminate. If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that. I have Harmeet Dhillon right now in our civil rights unit looking at that immediately. That Office Depot had done that—we’re looking at it.”

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh wasted no time unloading on Bondi for what he called a “gratuitous and pointless” use of DOJ resources:

“Get rid of her. Today. This is insane. Conservatives have fought for decades for the right to refuse service to anyone. We won that fight. Now Pam Bondi wants to roll it all back for no reason. This stuff is being handled successfully through free speech and free markets. We need the AG focused on bringing down the left wing terror cells, not prosecuting Office Depot for God’s sake.”

Keep reading

‘Worrying’: RSV Shot Linked to Drug-Resistant Strains in Infants

A “substantial proportion” of infants immunized against the RSV virus with the monoclonal antibody shot nirsevimab — marketed by Sanofi and AstraZeneca as Beyfortus — developed a nirsevimab-resistant strain of the illness, according to a French study.

Over 12.5% of infants with breakthrough cases of RSV following immunization had variants of the illness with “intermediate to high-level resistance” to nirsevimab, including new strains of the virus not seen previously.

“The emergence of RSV-resistance described by this paper is simply incredible,” Children’s Health Defense Senior Scientist Karl Jablonowski said. He added:

“Most studies that shed light on the emergence of pathogens resistant to prophylaxis are population-wide and after many years of their use. Examples include the pertussis vaccine, the pneumococcal vaccine and the meningitis vaccine.

“This paper appears to show, with a high degree of certainty, the genesis of resistance.”

The study, designed to monitor escape variants of the virus and published on The Lancet’s preprint server, was conducted by a team of researchers from hospitals and research institutions across France.

The preprint follows a peer-reviewed paper published in The Lancet earlier this year by some of the same authors showing escape variants among a smaller number of infants. However, that study concluded the emergence of mutated variants was rarer.

The RSV monoclonal antibody shots were approved by the European Union and the U.K. in November 2022 and by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in July 2023.

In September 2023, France was one of the first countries to launch a national immunization campaign with nirsevimab for newborns.

Many countries, including the U.S., followed France’s lead. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) added the shots to the childhood immunization schedule, recommending that either pregnant mothers get vaccinated or newborns get the monoclonal antibody shot.

Keep reading

Biden administration FBI probe targeting Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA revealed

Multiple America First leaders are speaking out against the weaponization of the justice system, revealing that the Biden administration’s FBI “improperly” targeted Republican groups during their “Arctic Frost” probe, which included recently assassinated political powerhouse, Charlie Kirk, and his Turning Point USA organization. 

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, noted that a whistleblower confirmed that while operation “Arctic Frost” was supposedly designed to investigate claims that President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the questionable 2020 election, the FBI used its power to target Republican bystanders. 

Nearly 100 Republican groups and individuals were politically targeted, including Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA organization, according to Grassley. He stated, “In other words, Arctic Frost wasn’t just a case to politically investigate Trump. It was a vehicle by which partisan FBI agents and Department of Justice prosecutors could achieve their partisan ends and improperly investigate the entire Republican political apparatus.”

After the hearing, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., discussed the FBI targeting of Kirk on the Jesse Waters show on Fox News. He said he believed that the intention was purely intimidation. He called the Biden administration’s political weaponization of the justice system “Nothing but terrorism.”

Keep reading

Zelensky tells West to put Ukraine first

Western states should put Ukraine’s needs above their own, Vladimir Zelensky has suggested, accusing the EU and US of dragging their feet on new sanctions against Russia.

Moscow has faced sweeping restrictions from Kiev’s Western backers since the Ukraine conflict escalated in 2022. The EU has adopted 18 sanctions packages and is debating its next measures. Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Washington has been cautious about new measures amid a thaw with Moscow. Trump has warned, however, that he could turn to sanctions if the conflict persists.

In an interview with Sky News aired on Tuesday, Zelensky claimed deliberations about possible blowback from further sanctions were a “dangerous” waste of time.

“I believe that all countries need to stop thinking about themselves and their future relations with Russia, but instead think more about Ukraine, because it’s today and now,” he said. “This is very dangerous, and to be frank, dishonest.”

Keep reading