Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

Many public schools kicked off 2022 by switching back to remote learning — or canceling classes altogether — leaving frustrated parents across the country frantically searching for more consistent schooling options.

These past two school years of remote and hybrid learning, forced masking, and an intensified culture of unpredictability has pushed teachers, administrators, students, and parents to very edge. What began as a temporary interruption to student learning has become a vicious cycle of confusion, inconsistency and lost educational time.

Thanks to the unreliability of distance learning, children are retaining less of what they’ve learned, reading at lower grade levels and suffering from a lack of social interaction. There is little to no support for children who rely on school to provide a safe haven from difficult home lives, and students in free or reduced meal plans have a harder time receiving them.

As school policies continue to isolate students from friends and peers, such as forcing students to eat their lunch outside on buckets, or facing the same direction without talking, the tragic numbers of adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicide continue to rise.

Millions of exasperated parents, many in deep-blue cities and states, are desperately pursuing educational alternatives that better suit their families’ needs and values. Parents are enrolling their children in private and charter schools in droves, while those without the financial means to do so remain stuck in a system captive to the whims of teachers’ unions and indifferent school boards.

Many teachers are going above and beyond in the name of what is best for kids, but their ability to truly innovate and explore new ways of teaching and inspire learning is being blocked by the unnecessarily restrictive demands of union leadership.

These unions tend to operate at state and national levels in ways that do not represent most of their members. Rather than sticking up for these vulnerable children, unions — as recently exemplified by the Chicago Teachers Union — are prioritizing strikes, walkouts and funding political campaigns, halting true progress as students remain stranded at home.

Fed-up teachers across the country have resigned their union membership, tired of their dues dollars funding an agenda they don’t support.

Dr. Angelique Coetzee is the South African responsible for alerting health officials about the omicron variant of COVID-19 back in November. At the time of the discovery, she observed that it presented “unusual but mild” symptoms.

This was undeniably good news. Despite being more transmissible, the omicron variant was less severe, and many believed that it meant that the pandemic was nearing its end. But Dr. Coetzee says that she was subjected to “a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians” to revise her original diagnosis that omicron presented mostly mild symptoms so that the public would perceive omicron to be just as dangerous as the delta variant.

She was subsequently attacked for her refusal to push the preferred narrative.

“Because of all of COVID’s mutations, all of these scientists and politicians who aren’t from South Africa were contacting me telling me I was wrong when I spoke out, that it was a serious disease … they were telling me I had no idea what I was talking about, they kept attacking me,” she told the Daily Telegraph. “In South Africa it is a lighter disease, but in Europe it has been a serious, serious illness, which is what the politicians want me to say … there has been a lot of pressure from European scientists and politicians who have said ‘Please don’t say it is a mild illness.’”

There’s nothing our leftwing ruling elites won’t corrupt. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) called on the U.S. to stand up to the “generational threat” posed by China while unveiling a major report on Beijing’s “malign behavior” at the same time her husband’s law firm was working on behalf of companies linked to China’s military, intelligence, and security services.

As Cheney stood at the podium, her husband Philip Perry’s law firm was cashing in on legal and lobbying work that his employer — Latham & Watkins (LW), one of the largest law firms in the world — was doing for a host of Chinese companies, some of which were involved in the kind of activity that Cheney was warning had to be stopped.

Over at @CNNPolitics, the same agitprop story got recycled in Florida.

But now? We’re told “Democratic governors outpace the White House with masking pullbacks.”

Oddly, I don’t recall the term “outpace” being used about DeSantis. pic.twitter.com/triNfLPuwH

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) February 11, 2022

Democrats were caught off guard by Donald Trump’s numbers in South Texas in 2020. The Hispanic Republican women who live there were not.

Many of them have played a leading role in urging their neighbors in majority-Hispanic South Texas to question their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Hispanic women now serve as party chairs in the state’s four southernmost border counties, spanning a distance from Brownsville almost to Laredo — places where Trump made some of his biggest inroads with Latino voters.

A half-dozen of them are running for Congress across the state’s four House districts that border Mexico, including Monica De La Cruz, the GOP front-runner in one of Texas’ most competitive seats in the Rio Grande Valley.

It’s some of the clearest evidence that Trump’s 2020 performance there may not have been an anomaly, but rather a sign of significant Republican inroads among Texas Hispanics — perhaps not enough to threaten the Democratic advantage among those voters [Keep whistling past that graveyard. -LP], but enough to send ripples of fear through a party that is experiencing erosion among Hispanics across the country.

“For so long, people here just never had Republicans knocking on their doors and calling them the way we did in 2020. The majority of us are women that did it then and are doing it now because we feel it’s our responsibility to keep the American Dream alive,” said Mayra Flores, a leading candidate for the GOP nomination in a South Texas-based congressional seat.

For Flores, the road to becoming a Republican was similar to the path traveled by many Hispanic women in South Texas. She grew up seeing most of her immigrant family vote Democrat and felt that it was standard for Hispanics to only vote for Democrats. Then, she says, came an inflection point where she began to question her loyalty to the party.

A family member asked if she knew what both parties stood for, and after looking into it, Flores felt that her religious, anti-abortion and pro-border security views were more conservative than she’d ever thought and more in line with the GOP. Five years ago, she got involved in her local GOP and now a majority of her family votes Republican, too.

She wasn’t surprised at all to see Republicans gain ground in 2020 along the Texas-Mexico border, even as Democrats and Republicans outside the region expressed shock at results in places such as Zapata County — where Trump became the first GOP presidential nominee since 1920 to carry the county.

Neighboring Starr County saw the most dramatic shift of any county in the state when thousands more Republicans turned out to vote than in prior elections. While President Joe Biden ultimately won the county with 52 percent of the vote to Trump’s 47 percent, that paled in comparison to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance, when she garnered 79 percent to Trump’s 19 percent.

Can you hear them now, Democrats? (Hat tip: Push Junction.)

Democrats want to continue allowing private money to fund public elections. Republicans want to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential contest.

So far, at least 10 Republican-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio. In another swing state, North Carolina, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed such legislation, as did other Democratic governors.

During 2020, nonprofits donated more than $400 million to state and local election boards to support their work and get out the vote. Most of the funding, about $350 million, came from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, distributed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life, a Chicago-based progressive-led group that includes former operatives of President Barack Obama.

Democrats and others contend that such money is necessary to support the work of underfunded election boards facing the added challenges of the pandemic. Republicans assert that the private grants were disproportionately allocated to counties eventually won by Biden, a mismatch that hurt them in 2020 and, if continued, would damage their chances in future elections.

(Hat tip: Director Blue.)

Most of the bounce back has been in red states. Policies matter.

More here: https://t.co/NYS5CN3h4p @TPPF #JobsReport https://t.co/xzB11P1Thq pic.twitter.com/K4NYzPyMtN

— Vance Ginn (@VanceGinn) February 4, 2022

District Attorney Larry Krasner (D-Philadelphia), one of the George Soros-funded stooges who took office in some of our major cities with the explicit promise to reduce prosecutions, tried to tell people that yes, crimes with firearms had increased, but other crimes were down. That, of course, was bovine feces.

The real reason for the increase in carjackings? It’s because the perps simply aren’t very afraid of being caught, or, if they’re caught, being seriously punished, not with a ‘social justice’ District Attorney in charge of prosecutions.

(Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

The Press Just Asked @danawhite About The @joerogan Controversy…

But @stylebender Stole The Show With A Mic Drop Moment! pic.twitter.com/TcAZgn8yQk

— Covid-1984 (@Orwells_Ghost_) February 11, 2022

We didn’t run into a single black person that cared about @joerogan using “THE WORD.”

White liberals, however, were livid. pic.twitter.com/LwGqvetIcC

— James Klüg (@realJamesKlug) February 7, 2022

WATCH: Kids in a Las Vegas school react to the news that they don’t have to wear masks anymore🇺🇸🥲 pic.twitter.com/L3poa8tmby

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 11, 2022

The dog of a friend makes such funny noises that it's always hard to refuse him anything pic.twitter.com/rLvrBwnU0k

— Διγενῆς Ἀκρίτης ֎ Pierre (@Digenes_Akrites) February 5, 2022