1) Want to send your kids to a good school?  Shame on you: you’re “privileged.”

As you know, our Save Our Country coalition has been aggressively pushing the reopening of schools across the country in the Fall with our partner Jenny Beth Martin.  The economy can’t be reopened with schools closed down.  So we were a little distraught when we saw this story from the New York Post:

New York City is notorious for having some of the worst schools in the nation – despite spending near the most per child of any school district in America. Now the city school officials are informing parents that the schools may not even be open in the fall, or if they are, social distancing requirements may mean part-time school for the kids.  So big surprise: parents are opting out, by moving, by sending their kids to private schools, or charters (which the left hates). 
 
And Mayor de Blasio smears these New Yorkers as “privileged.”

Here we have the leftist philosophy on full display.  True equality in America requires every child to attend an equally lousy government school that is run by corrupt and incompetent teachers unions.
 
President Trump has a golden opportunity here to fix our failing school systems in inner cities and in many suburbs too.  If local school systems won’t open up this fall, stop sending federal dollars to these school districts and instead give families in these areas “emergency school scholarships” of up to $10,000 (NYC spends well over $20,000 per student) to find charter, private or religious schools that will educate their children.  This will infuriate lefties like DeBlasio, but Trump should simply remind them that, as the United Negro College Fund once put it: “a mind is a terrible thing to waste.”
 
 
2) The Six Foot Rule Isn’t Science
 
The CDC has hardly even tried to justify its 6-foot recommendation for social distancing, and maybe that’s because it was made up out of thin air.  The impractical guideline is being enshrined into mandatory requirement by governments around the country who find it easier to ratify CDC recommendations than review the actual science.  The result is expensive and arbitrary business and school layouts, which will in many areas result in hybrid schedules in which children will be in school only half the time or less –  as in New York City (see above).
 
The World Health Organization has always recommended one meter — just over three feet — of distancing.  This was always the U.S. standard in previous pandemics dating back to the 1940s. Austria, Norway, Sweden, and Finland went with one meter. Germany and the Netherlands went to 1.5 meters.  The US and the UK doubled it to two meters or six feet.
 
UK government consultant Rupert Dingwall explained they went with six feet because they “did not think the British population would understand what one meter was and we could not trust them to observe it so we doubled it to be on the safe side.”  Science!
 
The two meter rule may have come from an article in the often-disgraced journal The Lancet, which reviewed recommendations from 15 health studies.  According to Oxford reviewers misstated or misapplied the findings of 13 of them.  And that is how you get “scientific consensus” these days. 
 
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/covid-19-evidence-is-lacking-for-2-meter-distancing/
 
 
3) Goodbye to Chaz…and Seattle
 
It’s happening. On Wednesday, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan finally announced plans to gradually dismantle the protestor-occupied “autonomous zone” that has taken control of a six-block area of her city.
 
But what local businesses really paid attention to was her announcement she would be cutting $20 million from the city’s police department budget for the remainder of 2020.
 
The money would be redirected to “focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable and BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Color] communities.” She will also implement an immediate hiring freeze for all police officers in 2021.
 
Durkan’s decision to downgrade public safety is having immediate repercussions.  Snead Capital Management, a firm with $2 billion under its guidance, is moving its headquarters to Phoenix’s Camelback Corridor.
 
https://ktar.com/story/3321032/due-to-seattles-unrest-billion-dolloar-investment-firm-moving-to-phoenix/
 
  
4) Blacks Not Wild About Black Lives Matter                                                               
A new Rasmussen poll of 1,000 likely voters finds that while the media, politicians and corporations are falling over themselves to curry favor with the socialist “Black Lives Matter” movement, no one bothered to ask blacks what they think.
 
The poll showed that when African Americans were asked “Which statement is closest to your own?”, 47 percent chose “All Lives Matter,” while 44 percent picked  “Black Lives Matter.”  They better be careful: the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that in universities across America using the term “All Lives Matter” can get you fired. 
 
The group of people who are most attracted to the BLM agenda are high-income voters.  A little more than half of people who earn above $200,000 chose “Black Lives Matter” while just one of three who earn less than $30,000 backed the slogan.   When you think about it, this makes sense.  The rich and elite white liberals in America – like the media talking heads and lifetime tenured university professors – aren’t the victims of the chaos and violence that happen at BLM rallies. Low income minorities are. 
 
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/poll-most-african-americans-prefer-the-term-all-lives-matter-over-the-term-black-lives-matter/
 
 
5) More International Evidence that Lockdowns Don’t Work: Brazil Versus Peru
 
It’s a perfect natural experiment.  We keep hearing about how terrible it is that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro advised Brazilians to break local lockdowns and go on with life as usual.  Next door Peru has been in a draconian lockdown since March.  So how have they fared?  This video showing slightly lower death rates in Brazil than Peru is worth the two minutes it takes to watch. 



6) 1984 or 2020?
 
“Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
 
–Winston to Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
 
 
7) New York Somehow Lurches Further to the Left
 
First, it was AOC in 2018 defeating No. 4 ranking House Democrat Joe Crowley for being too moderate for his Queens district. This year, AOC crushed former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, her moderate opponent. 

And now AOC has some progressive reinforcements joining her in Congress.   Many mail-in ballots from Tuesday’s primary haven’t arrived yet but as of now another progressive newcomer, former Bronx middle school teacher Jamaal Bowman, has a commanding lead over sixteen-term incumbent Eliot Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.  On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, 14-term incumbent Carolyn Maloney barely leads progressive challenger Suraj Patel.

Add to that the apparent victories of progressives Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres in open House districts in the Bronx and Westchester counties.  

On Election Night, AOC declared these results were historic:  “What you all have shown is that a people’s movement here is not an accident, it is a mandate. To win with that kind of mandate is transformative.”

After raising over $10 million for her race, CNN speculates that  she is now poised to take on and take out Democrat minority leader Chuck Schumer in two years. Schumer is apparently two moderate for the modern New York Democratic party.