An Ohio candidate for US Senator, Bernie Moreno, has suggested that the white descendants of northern Civil War soldiers should receive some type of reparations.

“We stand at the shoulders of giants, don’t we? We stand on shoulders of people like John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington. That this group of people took on the largest empire in history. They said no, we will not stand for this. And won,” Moreno told supporters at a campaign event last week.

“That same group of people later, white people, died to free black people. It’s never happened in human history before, but it happened here in America. That’s not taught a lot in schools much is it?” continued Moreno, who’s looking to challenge US Senator Sherrod Brown.

Ohio GOP Senate candidate Bernie Moreno proposes reparations for white people: “You know, they talk about reparations. Where are the reparations for the people in the North who died to save the lives of Black people?” pic.twitter.com/50wsfmWYdV

— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) April 21, 2023

“They make it sound like America is a racist, broken country. You name a country that did that: that freed slaves, died to do that. You know, they talk about reparations. Where are the reparations for the people in the North who died to save the lives of black people?“

Moreno, a business owner, is the second GOP candidate to jump into the race and faces a primary from Ohio State Senator Matt Dolan. The 2024 Ohio Senate race is a top target for Republicans looking to reclaim the upper chamber.

Though Ohio has a long history as a battleground, it has trended red in recent years. Incumbent Brown is the last major elected statewide Democrat. Ohio strongly backed former president Trump in 2016 and 2020 and sent his preferred candidate, J.D. Vance, to the Senate last year. –NY Post

According to a spokesman for Moreno, Conor McGuinness, the point about reparations had everything to do with political correctness.

“Bernie was right when he said political correctness is killing our country, and the crocodile tears from the left expose the Democrat hypocrisy he was referring to in the clip,” said McGuinness. “However, it’s unsurprising that the liberal media missed his point, since they’ve been complicit with the identity politics charade for years.”

Authored by Zachary Steiber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Republican senators joined Democrat colleagues in advancing multiple judicial nominees from a Senate panel after a weekslong pause due to the absence of a Democrat senator.

The Senate Judiciary Committee discharged seven nominees from President Joe Biden on April 20 as at least one Republican joined all remaining Democrats on the panel.

GOP senators helped advance Jeffrey Cummings and LaShonda Hunt, nominated as U.S. District Court judges for the Northern District of Illinois; Orelia Merchant, nominated as U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of New York; Michael Farbiarz and Robert Kirsch, nominated as U.S. District Court judges for the District of New Jersey; and Monica Almadani and Wesley Hsu, nominated as U.S. District Court judges for Central District of California.

Democrats control the Senate, giving them the chair and a majority on each committee. Democrats have 11 members, including Chairman Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), on the judiciary panel. Republicans have 10 members. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) has been absent since February as she deals with shingles. Feinstein asked to be temporarily replaced, but Ranking Member Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) blocked that bid.

Durbin, though, said he’d spoken to Graham and had chosen to hold the first hearing in weeks to vote on the nominees.

“Our agenda includes a number of judicial nominees who have been sitting on the agenda for some time. Some have bipartisan support. There’s nothing to prevent us from calling and voting on these nominees today even in Sen. Feinstein’s absence,” he said. “I understand we now have agreement to vote on several of them. I’ve spoken to Sen. Graham.”

“Today I’m going to do my part, and my colleagues will vote the way they think is best, to keep the committee moving forward,” Graham said.

Both Graham and Durbin said they wished Feinstein well and hope she returns soon.

Without Republican support, Democrats cannot advance nominees to the full Senate. The judiciary panel is charged with considering nominees offered by Biden. Feinstein voted by proxy for each nominee, but proxy votes are only allowed under committee rules if they are not the deciding vote, CNN reported.

Graham was the only Republican to vote for three of the nominees. Multiple Republicans, such as Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), voted for others.

Durbin held back other appointees, including Kato Crews, indicating they may not have had any Republican support.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the Senate floor recently that nominees “who are mainstream and qualified” would get bipartisan support but that Feinstein’s absence would mean “that Democrats aren’t able to push through a small fraction of their nominees who are so extreme and so unqualified that they cannot win a single Republican vote in committee.”

Read more here…

It looks like the bad news could only be getting started for Tesla.

The EV maker, which tumbled nearly 10% to end the week after reporting disappointing earnings and margins that failed to impress the street, is now also starting to lose its stronghold in the state of California, Reuters reported Saturday morning. 

The report shows that the company controlled just 59.6% of the battery electric market in California in Q1 2023, which is down from 72.7% in the year prior period. It’s also the lowest market share Tesla has had in California since 2017. 

Reuters made the calculation using data from the California Energy Commission and found that legacy automakers like Volkswagen, General Motors, Chevy and Kia all expanded their market share in the state, despite still sitting in the single digits, far behind Tesla. 

Last year, sales in California accounted for 16% of the company’s global deliveries, the report says. It’ll be no surprise that the West Coast state is also the largest in the U.S. for zero emission vehicles, making it a necessary stronghold for those who want to compete in EVs in the United States. 

Tesla, meanwhile, has been in a back-and-forth with raising and lowering the prices of its vehicles, ostensibly trying to find a “sweet spot” between being able to stoke demand, while not destroying margins any further than it did last quarter. 

We noted on Friday that Tesla is now increasing the prices of both versions of its Model S and X electric vehicles. The Model S Plaid and Model X Plaid now cost $107,490 from $104,990 earlier, Reuters wrote. They also said the regular Model X is at $97,940, which marks about a 2.6% rise, and the Model S is at $87,490, marking a rise of about 2.9%. 

Shares of the EV maker plunged Thursday after reporting earnings that disappointed Wall Street on Wednesday after market. Among the topics of discussions were the company’s poor margins, occurring as a result of Tesla slashing prices consistently since the beginning of 2023. Total GAAP margin for the quarter was 19.3%, missing estimates of 21.2% and down 977 bps from 29.1% just one year ago. 

Tesla closed its first quarter with record deliveries hitting over 423,000 units worldwide, but that’s still less than what the automaker produced. Tesla has used price cuts throughout the quarter, aiming to reach more of the mass market, and as Bloomberg calculated earlier this week, the latest price cut makes the Tesla Model Y nearly a third cheaper than it was at the start of the year, in part due to the introduction of a new lowest level trim.

The most recent cuts to Model X and Model S prices came on March 6, a little more than a month ago, when the company reduced the starting prices for the S and X in the US by 5.3% and 9.1%, respectively, to $89,990 and $99,990. Additionally, the higher-performance Plaid version of the Model S and X had been lowered by 4.3% and 8.3%.

Well…this is awkward.  The city of Port St. Lucie in southeastern Florida was scheduled to host a gay pride parade organized by the “Pride Alliance of the Treasure Coast,” but there was just one caveat – No kids allowed.

In accordance with legislation ready to be signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis the city allowed the pride parade to take place but required all attendees to be 21 or older due the sexualized nature of the performances common during such events.  

The Florida House has sent a bill to Desantis that is set to ban children from attending adult-oriented performances, including drag shows. The bill defines “adult live performances” as “any show, exhibition, or other presentation that is performed in front of a live audience and in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, specific sexual activities, … lewd conduct, or the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts.”

These rules would make the majority of pride parades a no-go for children given they violate nearly every item on the list.

Strangely, rather than following the new requirements and ensuring that only adults over 21 attend the event, the Treasure Coast organization took to Facebook to announce that they would cancel the parade entirely.  In other words, if they can’t have the kids, there’s no point to the parade.  Their statement notes:

“The city has decided that with the likelihood that the Governor will sign the latest bill into effect this evening, that we will need to be on the side of caution and has required us to make this necessary change. We are obviously upset and dishearten[ed] that it has come to this. We also regret to announce that we will have to cancel our plans to bring back our beloved parade.”

The group suggests it will return with a more “family friendly” event in the future, though the question remains – Why cancel the previous event?  Why not simply check IDs?

Dozens of states across the country are moving to ban children from sexual displays as drag shows for kids become the primary activist strategy for the political left.  Trans activists claim the shows are about acclimating children to “acceptance and tolerance”, while opponents argue that the shows are about indoctrination with perhaps even darker underlying intentions.   

It’s unfortunate that state governments need to legally intervene to protect children from these kinds of graphic demonstrations.  Generally, one would expect parents to have the good sense to keep their kids away.  But the existing ideological dynamic has made the sexaulization of children into a political tool, and so states like Florida are left with little choice. 

Authored by Matt Taibbi via Racket News,

An all-time media blackout is in effect. We’re experiencing real-time Sovietization.

It transpires that the infamous incident before the 2020 election in which 50 former intelligence officials signed an open letter declared a New York Post expose about Hunter Biden’s laptop to have the “classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” was instigated at the behest of the Joe Biden campaign. This at least is the allegation in a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken released by Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government.

In that letter, which is not easy to find, you’ll see three snippets of dialogue from questioning of Morell, who appears to have organized the open letter. In the first snippet, he explains that the idea originated with a call from Blinken, then of the Biden campaign, and that absent that call, Morell wouldn’t have done what he did:

In the second snippet Morell bluntly explains that he did it because “I wanted him to win,” him being Joe Biden:

By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceeds that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.

The seriousness of the actual laptop story, at least what’s been disclosed so far, is still not clear. I’ve long thought the suppression of it by Facebook and Twitter had clearer import, being a historic censorship first. However, if it can be proven that this “Russian Disinfo” whopper was laid on the public at the behest of the Biden campaign, with the aid of the intelligence community, that escalates things to a new level of scandal, far above the censorship issue.

Temporarily, however, that may be obscured by the absolute corruption of American media. Outside of conservative outlets, who naturally are eating it up, there were exactly two serious stories done about this on the national level in an appropriate response time. One was in CNN and was at least relatively down-the-middle, though humorously it did quote a Democratic Party spokesperson from the Weaponization Committee saying, “Jim Jordan has released cherry-picked excerpts of a transcribed interview.” The same Democrats from the same Committee also called my testimony “cherry-picked,” and also called the testimony of three FBI whistleblowers “cherry-picked.” The inevitable end-of-year Matt Orfalea “cherry-picked” video will be epic.

Subscribers to Racket can read the rest here…

A pair of Instacart drivers in Florida’s Broward County say someone shot at them after they ended up at the wrong address trying to deliver groceries.

Waldes Thomas told NBC affiliate WTVJ that he and his girlfriend, Diamond D’arville were on the phone with the customer trying to find the delivery address, when they ended up at the wrong home. They say they saw a flashlight as they were about to drive off the property.

“He’s like, ‘Who are you?’ and we’re saying we’re with Instacart,” D’arville told the news station, adding that the man then got into his truck and pulled up behind them.

“I had seen him pull out a gun and that’s when I said, ‘We got to go, we got to go,'” said D’arvile, adding “I was scared, I’m not going to lie.”

D’arville said her car was hit several times. The couple said they decided to pull over about a block away from the home and called Davie police.

“We were there for Instacart, we were trying to tell him, and he went about it the wrong way — instead of just calling police, saying ‘I have trespassers on my lawn,’ he decided to shoot,” Thomas said.

Davie police told WTVJ that a gun did go off at a home on Southwest 178th Avenue but no injuries were reported. –WFLA

“(A detective) asked if we wanted to prosecute and we agreed to do that, but he said since they didn’t break any laws or do anything unlawful, they couldn’t do anything because we were on their property,” said D’arville, who says he wants the man who shot to be held accountable.

“It’s just not right — even if you have a gun, I understand you’re trying to protect your family, but you don’t come outside shooting,” he said. “We’re telling you what we’re here, we’re trying to leave and you’re blocking us in, it could’ve just been on our way and they made it bigger than what it was.”

Authored by Mimi Nguyen Ly via The Epoch Times,

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey announced Friday she replaced the state’s director of early childhood education, due to the use of a teacher training book that Ivey said teaches “woke concepts.”

“The education of Alabama’s children is my top priority as governor, and there is absolutely no room to distract or take away from this mission,” Ivey said in a statement.

“Let me be crystal clear: Woke concepts that have zero to do with a proper education and that are divisive at the core have no place in Alabama classrooms at any age level, let alone with our youngest learners.”

The book of concern is the 881-page Developmentally Appropriate Practice Book, 4th edition, developed by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

The book is a guide for early childhood educators but is not a curriculum taught to children.

Ivey spokesperson Gina Maiola said she understands that the books have been removed from the state classrooms.

According to a release from Ivey’s office, the governor directed Dr. Barbara Cooper, the secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education (ADECE), to send a memo to disavow the book and discontinue its use after being alerted of concerning content in the book last week.

Ivey also decided to change leadership at the department, and accepted Cooper’s resignation “immediately,” the release stated. Meanwhile, Dr. Jane Hume has been appointed the interim secretary of the ADECE, pending Ivey’s decision about who will be the new department head.

Cooper was elected to the NAEYC’s national governing board in 2022. Her term ends in 2026.

“Governor Ivey remains appreciative for her service to the state and passion for early childhood education. In addition to expanding service to the number of four-year-olds, Dr. Cooper has helped put an increased focus on students in lower-performing areas and has even been a champion for computer science education in the state,” according to the release from Ivey’s office.

“However, Governor Ivey strongly believes that woke concepts have no place at any level of education in the state of Alabama and should not be taking away from the overall mission of improving educational outcomes for students.”

‘Woke Agenda’

Ivey’s office said that the governor is concerned about a “woke agenda” because the book “invokes ideas for teachers that there are ‘larger systemic forces that perpetuate systems of White privilege.’” It also promotes the idea that “the United States is built on systemic and structural racism.”

“Also included for four-year-olds to learn is that ‘LGBTQIA+ need to hear and see messages that promote equality, dignity, and worth,’” Ivey’s office stated.

“The glossary includes equally disturbing concepts that the Ivey Administration and the people of Alabama in no way, shape or form believe should be used to influence school children, let alone four-year-olds.“

Ivey’s office stated she “does not stand for these concepts.”

“For as long as she is governor, Alabama will be focused on ensuring our students are receiving a quality education.”

The NAEYC told multiple outlets that the book is a research-based resource for teachers.

“While not a curriculum, it is a responsive, educator-developed, educator-informed, and research-based resource that has been honed over multiple generations to support teachers in helping all children thrive and reach their full potential,” the NAEYC statement said.

According to a copy of the 881-page book obtained by The Associated Press, the book states: “Early childhood programs also serve and welcome families that represent many compositions. Children from all families (e.g., single parent, grandparent-led, foster, LGBTQIA+) need to hear and see messages that promote equality, dignity, and worth.”

It further states: “systemic and structural racism … has permeated every institution and system through policies and practices that position people of color in oppressive, repressive, and menial positions. The early education system is not immune to these forces.”

HBO host Bill Maher has done it again, asking the third rail questions and saying the quiet part out loud.

The comedian and self-professed liberal said blasted Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson during his most recent show, saying that Johnson was “excusing horrific behavior” in a speech he delivered following several shootings in Chicagoland last week.

Maher talked about crime with Brown University economist Glenn Loury and international relations scholar Daniel Bessner in the context of Chicago electing a soft-on-crime mayor and shoplifting in New York City.

“Most of the shootings [in Chicago] are young black men killing other young black men. Is that not correct?” Maher asked.

“Yeah that’s correct,” guest Glenn Loury responded.

“Okay, much more than what the cops do. Why doesn’t anybody talk about that? Why aren’t there a hundred giant black celebrities who would have the respect of those people saying what are you doing to yourselves? Why are you killing each other?” Maher asked.

Loury, a black Chicago native and longtime commentator on racial issues, advocated for tougher prosecution and enabling cops to do their jobs.

“…it’s no way to live, this dishonors our community, come on, we’re better than this,” Loury said.

Bessner disagreed and said material wealth redistribution would be needed to reduce incarceration rates without condoning individual criminal behavior.

Maher responded to Bessner’s claims that giving people more money would reduce crime

“One in three children in America can not read at a basic level of comprehension. 85% of black students lack proficiency in reading skills. We already spent a lot of money on schools. So are you going to keep telling me that more money will fix this because I feel like this is much more connected to the problems of people who can’t read. Yes, they’re going to have problems with gainful employment and it seems like, you know, a lot of times the solutions that come from the left seem symbolic. They don’t seem like we’re addressing what really needs to be done which is get kids learning, get them reading, get them to have a job,” Maher said.

“It doesn’t seem like the money is getting to this problem if 85% of black students lack proficiency in reading skills,” he said.

Watch the full discussion below:

From mediocre to champions…

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis displays a talent for trolling trans sports activists (specifically biological men claiming to be women) with a new commercial “congratulating” them on their impressive achievement of pushing women out of women’s sports.  

The Desantis team has a new commercial honoring real men who are dominating women’s sports in a play on the old real mean of genius Bud Light commercials. Enjoy: pic.twitter.com/2WRfmva9AW

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) April 18, 2023

Good work, guys!  Show those women athletes who’s boss.   

Florida has banned biological men from women’s sports since 2021 at all publicly funded institutions.  At least 21 states have so far passed similar laws.  Arguments on the political left range from claims that there are no physical advantages for biological males over biological females, to claims that barring trans athletes from women’s competitions could “lead to suicides.”  So far, none of the assertions made by leftists or trans activists on the issue have proven legitimate.      

Authored by Leighton Woodhouse via ‘Public’ Substack,

The political establishment has constructed a new apparatus of control…

In 2002, the Bush administration, desperate to sell its planned invasion of Iraq to the American public, turned to the mainstream media. Every evening on Fox News, White House officials invoked Hitler allusions and implied fictitious ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Fox, however, allowed them to preach only to the converted. To forge a working national consensus, they had to reach doves as well as hawks.

So the Bush administration zeroed in on The New York Times. With reporter Judith Miller, they hit pay dirt. With breathless headlines such as “HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS, Miller stamped the President’s mythmaking about aluminum tubes, mobile weapons labs, and Weapons of Mass Destruction with the imprimatur of her illustrious employer. So critical was her reporting to the spinning of American aggression as self-defense that it’s conceivable that the White House’s entire drive to war may have failed without it.

By the time Miller’s stories were exposed as so much laundered propaganda, they had served their purpose: American soldiers were already occupying Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq marked the last time the political elite would wield the power to mobilize an entire nation merely by manipulating a handful of journalistic elites. The era of mass media, during which just a dozen or so giant print and broadcast corporations enjoyed hegemonic control over the national public discourse, lasted about eighty years, beginning roughly a century ago, when modern television was born. The incestuous relationship between the government and the media during those decades was depicted in Steven Spielberg’s movie The Post, in which Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tries and fails to leverage his cozy relationship with Washington Post editor Katherine Graham to compel the media to fall in line with the government’s suppression of the Pentagon Papers. The story is heroic because it’s so unusual; Graham’s decision was the exception that proved the rule.

That era ended two decades ago, when social media networks emerged. About a year after the invasion of Iraq, Facebook was founded. The year after that YouTube was born; the following year came Twitter. With the cheap, targeted advertising their technology enabled, the new tech platforms destroyed the business model of the mass media. Unable to compete for advertisers, the media mammoths of the twentieth century floundered. The entire industry was thrown into crisis, bleeding revenue and laying off staff.

At the same time, social media began sorting news consumers into hyper-polarized digital silos, shattering the broad political center that the traditional media catered to and relied upon to sell advertisements to a mass audience. The New York Times, CNN, and even Fox News saw their broad national readerships and viewerships contract into smaller and evermore partisan echo chambers, even as ordinary people began to forge horizontal connections with one another online, exchanging information laterally. The public began generating their own, autonomous narratives about world events, typically cobbled together eclectically from reports by various news outlets, but beholden to none of them in particular. The power to shape the national narrative devolved downward, becoming increasingly fractured in the process.

This anarchic new media ecosystem has defined the public discourse ever since. For both elected politicians and the administrative state, it has constituted a perennial crisis. Bureaucracies manage populations by striking bargains with leaders; you can’t negotiate with a mob, much less a thousand of them. From the perspective of the state, this new information landscape was essentially ungovernable. An entire regime of social control, helmed by the most powerful politicians in the country in partnership with the titans of the media industry, was felled. In the age of social media that the new platforms jump-started, the state’s ability to control world events by playing reporters like Judith Miller like pawns on a chess board withered away, as the influence of the media corporations they worked for dissipated.

The political elite stumbled through this bedlam for two decades. But over that time, new gatekeepers emerged to replace those that had faded away with the decline of the mass media.

The state created a new apparatus of control over the public discourse, one whose existence most Americans are still oblivious to.

…

Today, we are witnessing the emergence of a new so-called emergency: the “disinformation pandemic.”

Like Oceania’s distant war with Eurasia, it’s an emergency concocted expressly to justify its proposed remedy: the erection and expansion of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

…

The defenders of the Censorship Industrial Complex regard themselves as ordained to rule.

They take for granted their right to dictate to us what we read, watch and hear, as we can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves.

To them, the public is a barbarian horde that, given an ounce too much freedom, will run amok, destroying all in its path.

These are the delusions of a political nobility. In the spirit of a democratic nation, they must be stripped of their crowns and never be allowed to wield power again.

*  *  *

Subscribers can read the full note here…