Tag: massachusetts

Illegal Aliens Will Now be Able to Obtain Driver’s Licenses in Massachusetts

Illegal alien residents of Massachusetts will soon have the ability to obtain driver’s licenses. Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, recently vetoed a bill that would have done just that, but both chambers of the Massachusetts legislature voted to override the veto.

The law, titled the Work and Family Mobility Act, will go into effect on July 1, 2023. As of that date, illegal alien residents of Massachusetts will have to pass both a written and road test before obtaining a license.

Governor Baker explained that he vetoed the bill over concerns of illegal aliens voting in elections. In a statement explaining his veto, Baker also expressed concern over the burden it would place on state motor vehicle workers to verify foreign documents. “The RMV does not have the expertise or ability to verify the validity of many types of documents from other countries,” Baker said.

Baker’s concerns were ultimately overruled by overwhelming margins in each chamber. The deep blue state’s House voted 119-36 and the Senate 32-8 to override Baker, according to The Epoch Times.

In addition to overwhelming support in the state legislature, the bill secured the backing of the Massachusetts Major City Chiefs of Police and a majority of the state’s sheriffs and district attorneys. Supporters of the bill claim that allowing illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses will make roads safer for all Americans.

Massachusetts state Senator John Keenan, a Democrat, said he is hoping the move will lead to a nationwide movement, The Epoch Times reported. 16 states already issue driver’s licenses to illegal alien residents, including California, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Virginia and Utah among others.

While immigration activists have pushed the measures for over a decade, the movement has gained significant traction over the last three years. Illegal alien residents have staged multiple demonstrations demanding the right to obtain a driver’s license over that time period.

Keep reading

Students made to ‘fake play’ instruments for Covid ‘safety’

Grade school students in Wilmington, Mass. will “NOT permitted to play/blow into their instruments” due to the omicron variant. Instead, students will “…move their fingers through exercises and songs” while “…being fully masked.”

According to an email from the district posted by parent group Bring Kids Back MA, “Students who play woodwind or brass instruments (Flute/Clarinet/Alto Saxophone/Trumpet/Trombone will NOT be permitted to play/blow their instruments in lessons in school.”

Under the district’s new approach, “…students will assemble their instruments (without the mouthpiece) and move their fingers through exercises and songs, as well as participate in music and rhythm reading lessons while being fully masked for the entire lesson.” Despite the complete lack of constructive work for the students, the district still expects the children to “…attend band lessons during this time.” Nothing was mentioned with regard to concerts or performances.

The email added that “Percussion (drums) students will continue to have their lessons as usual since those instruments do not involve blowing aerosols into the classroom.”

Keep reading

Now ‘trigger warning’ is banned by Brandeis University along with the ‘offensive’ phrases ‘picnic’, ‘rule of thumb’ and ‘take a shot at it’

A liberal arts college in Massachusetts has warned its students and faculty against using ‘violent language’ – even banning the phrase ‘trigger warning’ for its association with guns.

Brandeis University in Waltham has created an anti-violence resource called the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center which provides information and advice to students and staff. 

It lists words and idioms, including ‘picnic’ and ‘rule of thumb,’ which it claims are ‘violent’ and suggests dreary alternatives such as ‘outdoor eating’ for the former and ‘general rule’ for the latter.

The college claims that ‘picnic is often associated with lynchings of black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against black people.’

Picnic is derived from the French ‘pique-nique,’ originally used to describe the taking of one’s own wine to a meal, which later evolved to encompass the sharing of food outdoors and started being used in England in the 18th century. 

Lynchings were often public spectacles and could be described as taking place in a picnic-like setting. A project by the Equal Justice Initiative entitled ‘Lynching in America’ notes that during the late 1800s and early 1900s, ‘white men, women, and children present watched the horrific murders while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.’

However, the word picnic itself is not derogatory and has no intrinsic links to slavery, lynchings or racism.  

Brandeis also disagrees with ‘rule of thumb’ which it claims ‘comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.’

But this is another spurious etymological interpretation which has been wrongly attached to the phrase by myth and rumour.

The precise origins of the phrase are unclear but it is meant in the sense of approximating something using the thumb rather than a specific tool – there is no evidence of a legal application to wife beating.

Keep reading

Judicial Watch Critical Race Theory Investigation: Records Show Massachusetts School District Segregates Students/Staff Based on Race In ‘Affinity Spaces’

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 111 pages of records from Wellesley Public Schools in Massachusetts which confirm the use of “affinity spaces” that divide students and staff based on race as a priority and objective of the school district’s “diversity, equity and inclusion” plan. The school district also admitted that between September 1, 2020 and May 17, 2021, it created “five distinct” segregated spaces.   

Judicial Watch obtained the records after filing a May 17 Massachusetts Public Records Law request for records concerning the number of affinity spaces, the policies regarding their creation and use, the topics discussed, and any analysis of whether affinity spaces that exclude certain races are consistent with state and federal law, which would include the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the MA Equal Rights Amendment and/or the MA School Attendance Law.

The Wellesley Public School records include a document detailing the school district’s “Equity Strategic Plan 2020-2025” which includes a “District Equity by Design” plan with the stated goal of amplifying student voices by providing “opportunities for affinity spaces for students with shared identity.”

In a section of the document titled “Diversity Staffing,” a stated goal is to “Provide resources for affinity spaces for specialized populations within the wider Faculty/Staff (ie. ALANA, Admin Leaders of Color, LGBTQ+, White Educators for Antiracism, etc.)”

Wellesley Public Schools states in its plan for “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion:” “We will practice risk-taking and challenge one another to continuously examine systems of privilege and bias, and work collectively to disrupt and dismantle inequity in all its forms.” 

In an email on March 18 to Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Charmie R. Curry, the day of the so-called “healing space,” a Wellesley High School fitness & health teacher writes: “I wanted to check first, is it appropriate for me to go to this healing space?” Curry responds: “This time, we want to hold the space for Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff. I hope this makes sense.”

In an April 12 email to school district colleagues, Curry notes that “Equity Literacy” is required coursework in the district. Curry writes: “There is still plenty of time to enroll in the two required courses – ‘Understanding Equity and Inequity’ and ‘Learning to Be a Threat to Inequity.’ These courses, with a keen focus on helping us to build/sharpen our structural ideological lenses, are essential to our ability to address inequities in our community. Our students who are being impacted by inequities such as racism, homophobia, ableism, etc. need to be equipped to respond today to their needs in order to positively impact their experiences.”

In addition, the school district admitted that it does not have any records analyzing whether such segregated spaces violate the U.S. Constitution, the Massachusetts Constitution or any other law.

Keep reading

Massachusetts Android users alarmed to wake up to COVID tracking app auto-installed

Massachusetts recently launched a contact tracing app for COVID-19, called MassNotifyApp, to track the spread of the virus in the state. But there is one big problem with the app; it is installing itself on Android devices without users’ consent, and even on devices with parental-lock.

“Thank you MA/Google for silently installing #MassNotify on my phone without consent. But I have a request: Can you also silently install an app that makes my phone explode and kill me?” someone wrote on Twitter.

The story is perhaps one of the most egregious violations of an app during the pandemic. It also contradicts what Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, said about the app; that it would be voluntary.

Keep reading

Massachusetts School Committee Allows Real-Time Crime Center To Monitor Students Live

How does a school committee respond to a year of remote student learning? How will the Springfield, MA School Committee respond to post-COVID schooling?

Now that public schools are reopening (just in time for summer vacation) what are officials worried about? Is it face-to-face learning? Is it in-person interactions with students? Nope, it is mass surveillance and how to let Real-Time Crime Centers (RTCC) monitor students under the guise of public safety.

As MassLive reports, the decision to let the Springfield Police Department monitor students in real-time “feels tone deaf.”

The school committee took a half hour to decide that the best way to make students and faculty feel safe is to allow Big Brother to monitor them in real-time.

It is becoming more apparent to even casual observers, that our public schools resemble our prison system. Our schools are increasingly tied to the school-to-prison pipeline with CCTV cameras watching a students’ every movement; to weapons detectors at entrances, to vape detectors in bathrooms, and to police officers waiting for students to commit an infraction.

Will tying school surveillance cameras to RTCCs be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back?

Keep reading

Massachusetts High School Forces Students To Accept Concept Of ‘Systemic Racism’ In Essays

Students in one 10th-grade history class at a Massachusetts high school last month were tasked with creating slides to highlight the effects that “systemic racism” had on George Floyd’s life.

According to Parents Defending Education, a national grassroots nonprofit group dedicated to combatting state-sanctioned racism under the cloak of critical race theory in K-12 schools, sophomores at Concord-Carlisle High School were assigned a prompt based on required reading from the Washington Post.

Students were asked to create a slide outlining “one form of systemic racism, how it impacted Mr. Floyd’s life and how he responded,” after they read the piece, “Born with two strikes: How systemic racism shaped Mr. Floyd’s life and hobbled his ambition” in the Washington Post.

Parents Defending Education published the assignment shown below, where it appears students were offered no opportunity to dissent from the premise that the United States was systemically racist and oppressive, an idea at the heart of critical race theory, a once-fringe theory being forced into the U.S. educational system.

Keep reading

Parents’ group alleges Massachusetts school district held no-Whites-allowed event

A parents-rights group has filed a federal complaint accusing a Massachusetts school district of engaging in racial discrimination by banning White students from an event on hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Parents Defending Education asked the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights to investigate the Wellesley Public Schools for an alleged Zoom session described as a “Healing Space for Asian and Asian American students (grades 6-12), faculty/staff, and others in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) community who wish to process recent events.”

The invitation shown in a screenshot attached to the complaint went on to say: “* Note: This is a safe space for our Asian/Asian-American and Students of Color, *not* for students who identify only as White.”

Keep reading

Mass. Prisoners Among The First To Get COVID Vaccines

Among those first in line for the COVID-19 vaccine in Massachusetts are correction workers and the nearly 13,000 people incarcerated in jails and prisons in the state. The news comes as COVID cases continue to spike behind bars.

Gov. Charlie Baker included both groups in the first phase of his COVID vaccination plan, which he announced last week. The first phase also includes health care workers, police, fire and emergency responders and residents of long term care facilities and those living and working in homeless shelters. Massachusetts is one of six states to specifically include prisoners in the first phase of vaccinations, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

The Department of Correction referred questions about the vaccine process to the state’s COVID-19 Response Command Center. It says those working and living in congregate care settings, like homeless shelters and correctional facilities, are prioritized for phase one because of the high-risk, high-exposure setting. The state estimates that 22,000 vaccines will be needed for those living and working in correctional facilities, and officials expect the vaccines to be distributed between December and February. Details about how the vaccines will be given behind bars will be clearer once the state receives vaccine shipments.

Keep reading

DPH: Flu vaccine required for all students of Massachusetts schools

Flu shots will now be required for all students in Massachusetts schools, from child care through colleges, the Department of Public Health announced Wednesday.

Students older than six months will have to be vaccinated by Dec. 31, unless either a medical or religious exemption is provided.

“The new vaccine requirement is an important step to reduce flu-related illness and ​the overall impact of respiratory illness during the COVID-19 pandemic,” officials wrote in an announcement of the new policy.

Students who are homeschooled are exempt from the policy, but health officials said students at elementary and secondary schools that are using a remote learning model are not exempt.

College or university students who are entirely off-campus will also be exempt from the mandate.

Keep reading