☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Friday, April 1, 2022 ☙ ENTHUSIASM GAPS 🦠

An important C&C announcement; why Florida’s controversial new bill is anti-marxist, not anti-gay; the Dems developing enthusiasm gap; Biden goes to war for trans rights; oil dumps; more...

Happy Friday C&C family! I thought for a long time last night about how to tell you all this, but short and plain is the best way: Coffee & Covid has been purchased by Twitter. I can’t discuss the details, because confidentiality and so forth, but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Don’t worry though, everything will stay the same, except better! We’ll have some new guest bloggers coming in, including — and I know you won’t believe this — America’s top doc, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Once you hear his side, you’ll have a whole different outlook on the whole pandemic thing.

Hahahaha! April Fool’s! Just kidding! Don’t panic. I would never sell, not interested, at any price, even Zuckerbuck money. And I wouldn’t let Fauci’s gross, chocolate-stained fingers touch my blog for anything. Ew. I can’t believe you thought that was real.

We have a great roundup for you today with extra commentary: a discussion of what censorship means; why Florida’s controversial new bill is anti-marxist, not anti-gay; the Dems developing enthusiasm gap; Biden goes to war for trans rights; and Biden orders a historic release of oil from our strategic reserves to prop up political chances.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Two of yesterday’s comments about the effort to clean up school libraries stuck out. The first commenter accused me of hypocrisy for supporting removal of harmful pornographic textbooks from schools while also being critical of Facebook and Twitter for canceling people and throwing users in social media jail. The second was a heartfelt comment explaining that being a gay teen in school can be difficult and socially isolating, and having some pro-gay material around can lessen the psychological damage.

I briefly replied to both of the comments. But they are both important issues deserving more thoughtful responses, and both raise questions that you guys might also need to answer at some point. So let’s dig into both issues a little. It won’t take long.

🔥 Is it hypocritical to favor removing pornographic and obscene material from school libraries on the one hand, but to complain about Facebook censorship on the other hand? No. The two are easily reconciled and supported by common values. It’s easy as shooting beagle puppies in a barrel. (Dog lovers: that was a sarcastic reference to the puppy-torturer-in-chief, our highest paid U.S. government employee. Don’t cancel me.)

Let’s focus on the core principle: FREE SPEECH, a CONSTITUTIONAL right. It comes from our Constitution, which by the grace of God is the strongest and best constitution ever designed and has survived over 200 years of constant attack and chipping away. The Constitution limits what GOVERNMENT can do, not what INDIVIDUALS can do (with a couple noteworthy exceptions). The Constitution doesn’t limit private companies either (same). The Constitution stops the government from doing crazy tyrannical things, which governments always eventually do unless prevented somehow.

The nature of man is to devolve into absolute tyranny. Period, full stop. It’s human nature. The U.S. Constitution is a bulwark against human nature, forcing us to adhere to higher virtues as we govern ourselves, and to govern ourselves in the inefficient, longer, messier, more virtuous way. By designing this system, the Founders look like geniuses — and some of them probably were — but they were also much closer to absolute tyranny and knew just what its furious apelike face looks like.

So here’s the simple answer to the original question: children enjoy LIMITED Constitutional rights. They are subject to dictatorial adults, their parents, who exercise kids’ rights for them. The Supreme Court has said kids have PARTIAL Constitutional rights when in school. For example, school officials can search kids’ lockers. Kids may NOT hotly criticize teachers during class, but adults MAY hotly criticize school board members at public meetings or on officials’ public Facebook pages.

Kids don’t get to pick what they can read. Adults can limit kids’ First Amendment rights. The question is, WHICH adults get to exercise kids’ First Amendment rights? Twenty-two year old woke school librarians? Or parents? The new Florida law says PARENTS get to pick what the kids read. Government is involved, since the public school enforces the parents’ choices. But since kids lack complete First Amendment rights, the school is within Constitutional boundaries when excluding material that isn’t age-appropriate.

Can you see the difference? A public library may not censor material in the ADULT section of the library. But we protect kids, and don’t let them have full access to their rights until they are adults. That’s what parents are for. So schools can and should curate, censor, materials in school libraries consistent with parents’ rights.

Now, what about Facebook censorship? Well, first of all, Facebook has been censoring ADULTS, not school kids, so it’s apples and oranges. But the First Amendment doesn’t protect people from Facebook anyway. Facebook is a private company. So what’s everyone’s beef about Facebook censorship? It’s simple. It’s still government action that violates the Constitution.

How? Facebook, Twitter, Medium and the rest are only censoring people because the federal government is illegally pressuring them to exclude “misinformation,” which is information that happens to be POLITICALLY inconvenient to the government. So when they censor folks, Facebook and Twitter are acting as “instrumentalities” of the government, restricting political speech, and thereby in fact violating the Bill of Rights.

Facebook’s censorship isn’t objectionable per se. Some censorship is welcome. Everybody is happy that Facebook excludes child pornography and snuff videos. But when Facebook acts in concert with the government to help government violate the Constitution by censoring POLITICAL speech, which the government may not do by itself, Facebook is also breaking the law along with the government. Think about it this way. Could the federal government pay newspapers not to print certain articles? Of course not. The federal government also may not influence media in other ways to censor speech, such as by threatening anti-trust action.

For a great example of the legal details related to this type of indirect censorship, here’s a lawsuit filed this week against Facebook and the government for this precise type of indirect violation of First Amendment rights:

Mark Changizi @MarkChangizi

We’re suing the feds for their violation of our rights to free expression.

markchangizi.substack.comWe have taken legal action against the federal government on first amendment groundsKudos to the New Civil Liberties Alliance, and counsel, Jenin Younes

So, it is NOT hypocritical to support removing obscene material from school libraries and also complain about Facebook jail. Both complaints are fully consistent with Constitutional values.

🔥 Now, does the controversial new Florida law punish innocent gay people, or does it even ACCIDENTALLY hurt confused, isolated gay teenagers? Again, the answer is NO.

Let’s first properly identify the problem. Leftists are trying to re-frame the issue as hetero parents wanting to remove gayness from schools through their “tyranny of the majority,” because homophobia or something. But that’s not even close to what the bill is for, it is an intentionally slanderous mischaracterization.

There is a world of difference between merely mentioning the existence of gay people and gay relationships, and of trying to convince children that they ARE gay, or should be or could be gay, or training them in sexual methods and practices, which should be completely reserved to parents, however badly parents might do it.

The current drive toward sexualization of school children is part of a marxist effort to destroy the family. That sounds extreme but it is actually very simple. By teaching kids about six hundred pronouns, and teaching them about words like “pansexual,” the marxists are driving a wedge between kids and their parents, who never heard of any of that nonsense.

Woke teachers are instructing kids that people who don’t embrace all these bizarre pronouns are bigots. Since their parents don’t embrace all these bizarre pronouns, the teachers are de facto teaching kids that their parents are bigots. And for some reason, parents don’t seem to like that. Woke sex ed manufactures artificial conflicts between parents and their own kids. They don’t send their kids to school to become alienated. They thought they were sending their kids to school to learn about math and stuff.

But worse, these woke teachers are making kids feel guilty about being unwitting accomplices to the bigotry, and offering them a simple way out: don’t be a bigot, become part of the victim group, by identifying as gay or pansexual or whatever bizarre perverted nonsense that is making the rounds of woke academic journals that week. And they are enticing kids with “forbidden knowledge,” like how to perform oral sex on each other:

The above pic is from an actual school library book that parents are trying to remove from Florida schools. The images aren’t blurred in the original. (Facebook users: I can’t include the image on Facebook because the post would be — properly — jailed. It’s two pages from a graphic novel illustrating a straight young man learning how to perform fellatio on his new boyfriend and navigating the logistical problems that come up. With explicit images.)

So by offering kids redemption from the manufactured guilt of being unknowingly bigoted, like their parents, woke teachers are intentionally pushing kids toward identifying as gay or bi or pansexual et cetera, ad infinitum. And parents object to that. It’s a level of sex ed that no rational parents want. And because their leaders are promoting this wacky rubbish, dems are losing their base.

It seems uncontroversial that kids in grades K-3rd don’t need to hear about these issues AT ALL. Let them have their childhood, and let parents decide when and to what extent they discuss these issues with their kids. Maybe TEENS can handle this stuff, but then we still need to have a discussion about just how much porn should be available to teens in school libraries. Just because porn is readily available on the internet doesn’t mean it should be officially promoted at school.

Least controversially of all, when teachers invest a class session explaining nonsensical new non-gendered pronouns like “xi, xir, and xer,” or whatever, that’s one fewer class session spent on reading, writing, and arithmetic. And at this point, given how our educational system is scraping the bottom, we can’t afford to lose any more class sessions.

So, is the new law designed to hurt gay people and stop hysterical gay teachers from ever mentioning their partners? No. It is intended to prevent woke teachers from destroying families by manufacturing inter-family conflicts, and from grooming kids for alternative lifestyles, neither of which has any place in public school.

🔥 Politico ran an article yesterday headlined, “‘We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves’: Enthusiasm gap keeps getting worse for Dems.” I wonder why.

The political magazine explained that at the end of October, Republicans held an 11-percentage-point advantage in voter enthusiasm. By January, that margin ticked up to 14 points. Now, according to the most recent NBC News poll, it has mushroomed to 17 points — a massive advantage historically foreshadowing devastating losses in Congress. Worse, there is no reason to think the gap isn’t continuing to widen.

In the NBC poll, two-thirds of Republicans said they have a high level of interest in the midterm elections, compared to only half of Democrats. Worse, more than SEVENTY PERCENT of Americans say the nation is generally on the wrong track. The party’s current enthusiasm deficit is a stunning reversal from just two years ago in 2018, when Democrats retook the House. Talk about wasted opportunities.

Politico mentions what happened in Virginia last November as a bellwether example. Republicans swept the state, taking the deep blue state’s Governorship and nearly all its state offices. What was the driving issue in Virginia last November? Woke schools. It turns out everybody hates woke schools, not just Republicans. Because woke schools are insanely destructive.

Politico mentions several issues that it suggests could turn it around. Inflation could ease. The January 6th Committee could unearth more material with which to damage Republicans. A Supreme Court rollback of Roe v. Wade could trigger a spike in Democrat enthusiasm. Maybe. But even Politico didn’t seem convinced. Why would that be?

🔥 The Administration seems intent on doubling-down on everything that isn’t working. A Daily Mail UK article yesterday features the headline, “Biden Goes to War With GOP States With Trans ‘Equality’ Plan Pushing More Teaching in Schools.”

Apparently in response to the Florida law, and to a new Arizona law banning “gender-reassignment surgery” (castration) for kids, the Biden Administration has announced a wide-ranging package of new woke policies it intends to push out asap. It includes items like gender-neutral airport scanners, whatever that is, ‘X’ gender options on passports and airline tickets, and promoting sex change therapies to kids.

The White House is also launching a new website with resources for LGBTQI+ children and their parents to circumvent states that “have removed critical information about mental health resources for LGBTQI+ youth from official state websites.” The Mail pointed out that Florida’s Department of Education removed “LGBTQ-inclusive antibullying resources” from its web pages in December.

Apparently referencing Florida, Biden explained, “Efforts to criminalize supportive medical care for transgender kids, to ban transgender children from playing sports, and to outlaw discussing LGBTQI+ people in schools undermine their humanity and corrode our Nation’s values.” Oh, the humanity.

Florida isn’t sitting still. Florida House Representative Spencer Roach (R) tweeted on Wednesday that lawmakers held two meetings this week to discuss revoking the 1967 Reedy Creek Improvement Act, which “allows Disney to act as its own government.” Rep. Spencer explained, “If Disney wants to embrace woke ideology, it seems fitting that they should be regulated by Orange County.” Touché. Maybe Disney moved too fast canceling all those donations.

Oh well!

🔥 The Houston Chronicle ran a story yesterday headlined, “Biden Approves Historic Release of 1M Gallons Per Day as Gas Prices Continue to Surge.” According to the Chronicle, Biden announced that the U.S. will release 1 MILLION barrels a day from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the next six months in an attempt to control rising energy prices.

Largely due to fracking successes and making the U.S. oil independent for the first time in history, President Trump filled up the Reserve after it had been depleted by the previous administration. But after promising during his campaign that he would NOT interfere with the fracking revolution, Biden promptly shut it down by executive order on his first day in office.

Biden’s new Strategic Reserve release is the largest in history. This is Biden’s second release from the petroleum reserve since November.

Representative Garret Graves (R-La), said yesterday that if Biden wants to lower energy prices he should lift environmental regulations that drive up drilling costs. “The gasoline and electricity prices that all Americans are paying right now aren’t the fault of the bonehead in Russia, but the boneheads running our federal government’s energy policies,” Graves said. “Tapping energy reserves is not a long-term solution to solving the skyrocketing prices at the pump.”

No, because the “solution” runs out when the reserve runs out.

But Joe Biden has a kooky different idea about how to get out of the slough of dependence on foreign oil. He said, “We and the whole world need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels altogether.” In other words, Bien plans on inventing a magical new energy technology fast enough to prevent economic destruction, somehow. How does that old expression about wishing in one hand go?

Have a fantastic Friday, and I’ll meet you back here for more tomorrow. There’s a lot going on.

You can help get the truth out and spread optimism and hope: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-

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