Category: Conservative Review
Previously Deported Illegal Reportedly Stabbed Victim On Same Rail System Ukrainian Refugee Iryna Zarutska Was Killed
Alleged Illegal Reportedly Commits Attack On Same Rail System Refugee Iryna Zarutska Was Killed
Inside the radical pipeline turning America’s teachers into activists
Following the unrest that unfolded at a Turning Point USA event at the University of California, Berkeley, the Department of Justice has launched an investigation into those behind the disruption.
One of the alleged organizers of the recent protest, By Any Means Necessary, has been described as part of the ecosystem of the “anti-fascist” movement.
These educators are attempting to advance their political agenda through statewide governmental jobs and teachers’ union leadership positions.
Unfortunately, UC Berkeley is no stranger to left-wing protests turning violent.
In 2017, several far-left agitators were arrested at a conservative rally on the same campus. One of those individuals was BAMN member and middle school teacher Yvette Felarca, who had previously defended the use of militant violence in an interview. She had also been charged in 2016 with assault related to a previous counter-protest.
But Felarca is not an anomaly. Rather, she is one example of a fringe of aggressive, far-left revolutionaries who seek to corrupt the K-12 education ecosystem to advance their radical political ideology. Whether through ethnic studies curriculums, organizing “Teach-ins for Gaza” and anti-Israel activism, or alleged glorification of terrorism and endorsement of Antifa, activist teachers are leveraging the historical trust bestowed upon the education profession to foment an anti-Western, anti-American mindset in schools and the culture writ large.
Not surprisingly, the teachers’ unions play a role in funding, promoting, and protecting these activist educators.
In fact, the American Federation of Teachers came to Felarca’s aid in 2018 by passing a resolution in support of her and her lawsuit against Judicial Watch. The legal action was aimed at stopping the watchdog group from obtaining public records from the school district. But the lawsuit failed.
Yet this has not stopped Felarca and other BAMN members from continuing to advance a far-left ideology both inside and outside K-12 schools.
For example, in March, Oakland High School (Calif.) students, flanked by teachers who affiliate with BAMN, led a protest over immigration policies. In this instance, the influence of the teacher-activists is no secret. The student protesters publicly claimed they received help from the local BAMN chapter in organizing the event.
RELATED: The radical left is poisoning our schools — here’s how we fight back
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Even though street activism can be the most visible form of ideological battle on the American culture, these educators are attempting to advance their political agenda through statewide government jobs and teachers’ union leadership positions.
The executive vice president of United Educators of San Francisco, for example, is currently running for state superintendent of public instruction. The San Francisco Unified teacher touts that under his leadership, the UESF “transformed into one of California’s strongest and most militant unions.” His site also states that he is an activist and “longtime organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation” — an organization known to be behind many of the anti-Israel and anti-ICE protests that have taken place across the country.
In Los Angeles, the Association of Raza Educators, the education wing of the radical group Union del Barrio, has a slate of individuals running for positions of leadership in United Teachers Los Angeles. Included on the roster is teacher Ron Gochez, who is no stranger to controversial comments and actions.
In fact, he was recently the subject of a DOJ probe over public statements he made toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Other ARE members have served on committees for the California Teachers Association, have been delegates to the NEA convention, and are engaged in groups such as Educators for Justice in Palestine and Queers for Palestine.
The system is being used as a tool to advance a radical left-wing political agenda.
But should ARE achieve its goal of taking over leadership of the union of one of the largest school districts in the country, it would be more status quo than anomaly.
In 2021, UTLA President Cecily Myart-Cruz infamously proclaimed that “there is no such thing as learning loss.” She continued by stating that it was “OK that our babies may not have learned their times tables … they learned the difference between riot and a protest.”
Myart-Cruz said the quiet part out loud — the teachers’ unions and far-left educators value political activism over learning.
Yet parents, public officials, and even other teachers are either willfully blind or largely unaware of the influence that these nefarious actors have on education despite the increase in public-facing activism. The system is being used as a tool to advance a radical left-wing political agenda, and it comes with a very steep cost for American children.
The proof is already starting to rear its ugly head, as evidenced by a recent University of California, San Diego, report.
Regardless of one’s position on public schools or teachers’ unions, this issue will eventually impact all Americans if left unaddressed. It is time to put a stop to the “school to far-left activism” pipeline and return the institution to its primary charter — to teach children to read and do math.
Killing drug ads won’t lower prices — it will kill innovation
The United States is one of the few countries that allows prescription drugmakers to speak directly to patients. That simple fact now fuels political calls to “ban the ads.” But restricting direct-to-consumer advertising would do more than change what runs during football games. It would shrink the flow of information to patients and push our system toward the bureaucratic throttling that has turned other countries into innovation laggards.
Advertising is part of a dynamic market process. Entrepreneurs inform consumers about new products, and when profits are high, firms have every incentive to improve quality and expand access.
The pattern is clear: The more Washington intervenes, the fewer cures Americans get.
New, cheaper treatments need to be brought to consumers’ attention. Otherwise, people stay stuck with older, more expensive options, and competition falters. Banning pharmaceutical advertising would hobble innovative firms whose products are not yet known and leave those seeking medical care less informed.
Critics warn that “a growing proliferation of ads” drives demand for costly treatments, even when less expensive alternatives exist. Yet a recent study in the Journal of Public Economics finds that exposure to pharmaceutical ads increases drug utilization across the board — including cheaper generics and non-advertised medications. In short, advertising pushes people who need care to make better, more informed decisions.
A market-based system rewards risk-taking and innovation. Despite the many flaws in American health care, the United States leads the world in medical breakthroughs — from cancer immunotherapies to vaccines developed in record time. That success wasn’t created by government decree. It came from competition: firms communicating openly about their products, fighting for patients, and reinvesting earnings into the next generation of lifesaving discoveries.
Sure, some regulations are adopted with good intentions. But drug ads are already heavily regulated, and a full ban would create serious unintended consequences — including the unseen cost of innovative drugs that will never reach patients because firms won’t invest in developing treatments they are barred from promoting.
American health care is now regulated to the point of satisfying no one. Patients face rising costs. Physicians navigate a Kafkaesque maze of top-down rules. Taxpayers foot the bill for decisions made by distant bureaucracies. Measures associated with socialized medicine continue creeping into the marketplace.
Price controls in the Inflation Reduction Act are already cutting into pharmaceutical research and development. One study estimates roughly 188 fewer small-molecule treatments in the 20 years after its enactment. The pattern is clear: The more Washington intervenes, the fewer cures Americans get.
RELATED: Trump faces drugmakers that treat sick Americans like ATMs
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The answer to the problems in American health care isn’t more government. It’s less. Expected profitability drives investment in biomedical research. Imposing new advertising bans or European-style price controls would mean lower-quality care, higher mortality, and the erosion of America’s leadership in medical innovation.
The United Kingdom offers a warning. Once a global leader, it drove investment offshore through overregulation and rigid price controls. Today, only 37% of new medicines are made fully available for their licensed uses in Britain. Americans spend more, but they also live longer: U.S. cancer patients outlive their European counterparts for a reason.
Discovering new drugs is hard. Every breakthrough begins with the freedom to imagine, to compete, and to communicate. Strip companies of the ability to inform patients, and you strip away the incentive to develop the next cure. Competitive markets — not centralized control — will fuel tomorrow’s medical miracles.
University of Minnesota faces backlash over project that seeks to cure the ‘Whiteness Pandemic’
The Trump administration has worked with great success over the past year to dismantle racist DEI initiatives in government and public education across the country. Nevertheless leftist identity politics continue to linger in various taxpayer-funded institutions.
The parental advocacy group Defending Education recently highlighted that the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, which received $628 million in federal research awards in the 2024 fiscal year, is harboring an anti-white research project that claims America is suffering from a “Whiteness Pandemic.”
‘Family socialization into the centuries-old culture of Whiteness — involving colorblindness, passivity, and fragility — perpetrates and perpetuates US racism.’
Rhyen Staley, research director at Defending Education, said in a statement obtained by Blaze News, “This far-left programming at a major public university is another example of how ingrained DEI is in higher education and is not going away any time soon.”
The UMTC’s Culture and Family Lab, which is part of the school’s Institute of Child Development, has a page titled, “Whiteness Pandemic Resources for Parents, Educators and other Caregivers.”
The website:
- characterizes the white family as a threat, stating, “At birth, young children growing up in White families begin to be socialized into the culture of Whiteness, making the family system one of the most powerful systems involved in systemic racism”;
- tells white adults that it is their “responsibility to self-reflect, re-educate [themselves], and act” and that they need to engage “in courageous antiracist parenting/caregiving”;
- recommends white adults begin “listening to, taking seriously, and following the stories and recommendations” of the scandal-plagued Black Lives Matter organization and “humanizing victims of police brutality and racism — such as Mr. George Floyd”; and
- links to various works of agitprop for parents to “read and watch with children as part of a discussion about race, racism, white privilege, and antiracism.”
While the website references content from various radical sources, it largely focuses on a 2021 paper by the lab’s director, Gail Ferguson, titled “The Whiteness pandemic behind the racism pandemic: Familial Whiteness socialization in Minneapolis following #GeorgeFloyd’s murder.”
RELATED: Woke lecturer cries ‘white supremacy’ after MAGA-racist smear doesn’t go as planned
Photo by KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images
The paper, which was published in the journal American Psychologist and dedicated to repeat offender George Floyd, claims that “family socialization into the centuries-old culture of Whiteness — involving colorblindness, passivity, and fragility — perpetrates and perpetuates U.S. racism, reflecting an insidious Whiteness pandemic.”
While generally implying that “Whiteness” is a disease, the UMTC professor suggested that “color-evasion and power-evasion” specifically are “pathogens of the Whiteness pandemic” that “are inexorably transmitted within families, with White parents serving as carriers to their children unless they take active preventive measures rooted in antiracism and equity-promotion.”
According to Ferguson, who is black, and the paper’s other authors, one litmus test for whether a white mother is helping spread the supposed “Whiteness” disease comes down to how that mother responded to George Floyd’s death.
A mother’s apathy over the criminal’s death and her unwillingness to discuss so-called “systemic racism” with her children were treated as indicators that she approves of or is at the very least indifferent to imagined racism. Alternatively the willingness of mothers to express grief and concern over Floyd’s death and to discuss it “and Black Lives Matter with their children using color- and power-conscious parenting” were regarded as signs of a desired “antiracist” mentality.
The authors stressed that to dismantle “colorblind racial ideology,” white students should be subjected to “racism and antiracism education,” especially at a young age, and that “it will be important to go beyond how White women learn to say the right things to also consider how they learn to do the right things and actually ‘show up’ for racial justice.”
The basis for the conclusions in the paper was a survey of 392 white mothers, 51% of whom were “somewhat or very liberal,” 18% of whom were “somewhat or very conservative,” and over 91% of whom had a bachelor’s degree or higher.
The racist initiative was made possible with the help of federal funds provided by the National Institute of Mental Health during former President Joe Biden’s tenure.
When asked about the anti-white project, the UMTC told the National Review that it remains “steadfast in its commitment to the principles of academic freedom.” The NIMH reportedly did not respond to the Review’s request for comment.
“It is not only concerning that these programs appear to still be up and running, but that absurd ideas like ‘whiteness’ also gain legitimacy through dubious activist-academic ‘scholarship,'” said Staley. “Universities must end this nonsense yesterday.”
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14- and 16-year-old boys arrested for brutal murder of 14-year-old girl, Florida police say
Two teenage boys have been arrested for allegedly shooting and killing a 14-year-old and then lighting her body on fire.
Danika Troy was reported missing by her mother on Monday, according to Santa Rosa County Sheriff Bob Johnson, who conducted a media briefing on Thursday.
‘The evidence pointed to them immediately. They took them into custody immediately.’
A day later, the girl’s badly burned remains were found by a man walking near Kimberly Road in Floridatown.
Police said they identified the remains as belonging to Troy because her mother had reported that she left with a scooter, and it was found near the remains. They also found shoes that matched those she was wearing.
Johnson said that a witness told police that 16-year-old Gabriel Williams and 14-year-old Kimahri Blevins had planned the murder of the girl.
In an interview with police, Blevins allegedly said he blocked Troy after they had a falling out on social media. Williams also said he was upset with something Troy had said, according to police.
But a possible motive is still undetermined.
“They have been interviewed, but the motive that we’re getting doesn’t fit the forensics or any facts of the case,” Johnson said.
The sheriff said Williams stole the gun they used from his mother.
“It’s bad enough that you kill a 14-year-old; you’re 14, you’re 16, you shoot her multiple times, and then you set her on fire,” Johnson added.
The state attorney’s office said a grand jury will determine whether the boys should be tried as adults.
RELATED: California man convicted of brutally attacking his son with a sledgehammer while he slept
“This is what major crimes calls a ground ball,” Johnson said. “The evidence pointed to them immediately. They took them into custody immediately.”
Williams and Blevins were each charged with first-degree premeditated murder. They both are in custody at the Santa Rosa Juvenile Detention Center.
“It shocks me,” neighbor Sue Petrisch said. “It’s always been so quiet here, and it’s getting bad. It’s terrifying, in fact.”
A candlelight vigil is planned to honor the victim on Monday at Avalon Baptist Church. A GoFundMe account has been set up to help pay for her burial costs.
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