Author: adler

By Tyler O’Neil for The Daily Signal
While much of the cultural debate about education centers on school libraries removing sexually explicit books, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem’s team has been hard at work crafting new K-12 history and social studies standards that her chief of staff calls a “model for the rest of the country.”
Noem rejected an earlier effort in 2021, which her team faults for a leftist slant and for including critical race theory. The governor gathered a new commission to compile standards in 2022, including a former politics professor who had taught at Hillsdale College, a Christian school with decades of outreach in the K-12 classical school movement that is known for its rigorous approach to Western and American history. That former professor, Will Morrisey, served as a facilitator for a diverse commission—25% of which was Native American—that tailored the standards for South Dakota.
“When it comes to social studies standards, the governor wanted us to create a model for the rest of the country, and I think the rest of the country will see a model that they can follow,” Mark Miller, Noem’s chief of staff and a member of the 2022 commission, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview last week. “We think this is an incredible positive change and step forward in terms of providing a true and honest American history for the children of South Dakota from K to 12.”
The state’s Board of Education Standards voted to approve the standards in April. Miller mentioned the standards’ three pillars: world history that provides the foundation for U.S. history, Native American history that formed South Dakota, and U.S. history.
Ben Jones, the state historian and a member of the 2022 commission, said the new standards represent a model for the rest of the country because they reject the approach of progressive education reformer John Dewey, who transformed American education to focus on skills, rather than content.
The new standards “put content and knowledge at the center of things,” Jones told The Daily Signal in an interview last week. “I think they’re a model because they excavate the John Dewey progressive notion about skills” and using education as a tool to “funnel students into jobs,” rather than equipping them with the knowledge to be informed citizens.
Some education groups have opposed the standards, suggesting they require students to learn too much.
“I believe that more facts do not necessarily mean better standards,” Summer Schultz, president of the South Dakota School Superintendents Association, told KELOLAND. “We need every minute of the day that we can to make sure our students are leaving those classes at grade level in reading and mathematics so that they have that strong foundation to be successful academic learners later.” She warned that if students are focused on memorizing facts, “they have a lack of balance.”
Jones, the state historian, insisted that teachers can incorporate a great deal of civics and history material into reading lessons. “In the elementary years, the content is going to reinforce their reading,” he noted, which “can be heavy on history, civics, economy, geography, and stories about them.”
He also noted that South Dakota is launching professional development programs for teachers to help them incorporate these civics lessons into the curriculum.
Hillsdale Weighs In
Kathleen O’Toole, assistant provost for K-12 education at Hillsdale College, noted that social studies standards “cannot, by definition, require memorization.” Yet she defended memorization as “important for setting a basic timeline in the students’ minds before deeper inquiry takes place.”
“Hillsdale’s own recommended curricula are built on this principle, and in its affiliated schools, teachers lead students through a deep inquiry of history through thoughtful questions and the discussion that naturally follows,” O’Toole added. “In any course of study, materials should be presented in a context that is age-appropriate and takes into account the developmental stages of students.”
O’Toole noted that many state officials, school administrators, and concerned parents often reach out to Hillsdale’s K-12 office for recommendations. In this case, South Dakota tapped Morrisey “independently of Hillsdale.” Hillsdale College did not review or approve the South Dakota standards.
“While Dr. Morrisey’s work was not connected to Hillsdale, we are proud that he used Hillsdale’s generic civics standards as the basis for the new South Dakota standards,” she noted. “The commission customized Hillsdale’s generic materials to reflect South Dakota’s Native Indian tribes and other historical details unique to that state. Hillsdale College believes that high-quality social studies standards should be robust, nonpartisan, and thorough. It is heartening whenever Hillsdale’s work is an aid to establishing such standards.”
Related: Gov. Noem Blames Biden For Higher Food Prices: ‘A National Security Issue’
Critical Race Theory
The true root of the controversy may involve debates over critical race theory, an approach to history, civics, and other disciplines that encourages students to find “systemic racism” throughout American institutions and to reexamine every aspect of life through a race-based lens that assumes white people are oppressors and black people are oppressed.
Miller, the governor’s chief of staff, said Noem moved to craft new standards because the 2021 proposed standards had a “leftward tilt” and politicized standards are “simply unacceptable to the governor.”
“We didn’t want to see a leftward tilt in the teaching of history, which we think has infected too much of the teaching of the public school system in general since Dewey,” he explained. “In our history classes and civics classes, we have to be careful not to teach our children that our country has been a bad actor since 1776 or even before that, but rather has been a shining light for the rest of the world.”
Jones, the state historian, said critical race theory is “a great conversation for college students and grad students to have, but it’s not proper historical inquiry.” Proper history involves investigating the facts to draw conclusions, but “critical race theory provides that answer right up front.”
K-12 teachers do students a “disservice” if they teach through a critical race theory lens because it leaves students “underinformed about and unable to test your preconceived notions.”
Jones noted that many commentators suggest that “critical race theory is just teaching about race, which is absolutely wrong.”
“There’s plenty of teaching about race in the standards we have, but there’s no preconceived notion about what the outcome is going to be,” he noted.
Jones praised Morrisey’s contributions for including “plenty of material about race, slavery, the Japanese exclusion laws, Chinese exclusion laws, the KKK.”
Jones and Miller insisted that the standards include the dark parts of U.S. history, but the state historian declared that “the idea that because someone is a certain race, they have certain talents” does not belong in K-12 education.
Jonathan Butcher, a senior research fellow in education policy at The Heritage Foundation who has analyzed the standards, praised them for excluding “woke orthodoxy.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“These standards appropriately reject the woke orthodoxy surrounding radical gender theory and racial preferences found in states such as Minnesota and California,” he told The Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday. “The standards are rigorous and involve a nontrivial amount of facts and specific content regarding notable individuals and events in American and world history.”
Related: Gov. Kristi Noem: ‘Every Young Woman Deserves An Even Playing Field’ In Sports
World And Native American History
Yet the standards do not just include U.S. history—warts and all—but also the longer history of human civilization.
“The United States didn’t just spring anew,” Miller said. “It came from an intellectual history going back centuries, and that’s the idea for these standards.”
The new South Dakota standards require lessons on ancient Egypt, China, India, Babylon, Greece, Persia, and Rome, along with medieval and modern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian history, at appropriate age levels.
Finally, the standards include a great deal of Native American history.
“The governor wanted a significant role for Native Americans to play,” Miller said, noting that a quarter of the commission was Native American. He mentioned Joe Circle Bear with the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, state Rep. Tamara St. John with the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribe, and Stephanie Hiatt with the Florida Seminole tribe.
“These standards have more teaching of Native American history than any standards South Dakota has had before,” Miller added.
Yet South Dakota’s Native American tribes, represented by the South Dakota Education Equity Coalition, condemned the new standards, claiming that they “lack proper representation of Native American history.” The tribes called for “the reinstatement of Oceti Sakowin references” as in the 2021 proposed standards.
The 2021 proposed standards mentioned the Oceti Sakowin (commonly referred to as Sioux) 24 times, while the new standards adopted this year mention the tribe 30 times. The new standards also mention tribes who once lived in South Dakota but now exist in North Dakota.
“The now approved 2023 standards specifically mention the Mandan, Arikara, Crow, Kiowa, Otoe and other tribes in the history standards,” Jones, the state historian, explained. “Those tribes, in addition to the Oceti Sakowin tribe, will provide students the opportunity to learn of the state’s rich Native American past and present. The 2021 group’s draft did not include these other tribes – only the Oceti Sakowin was mentioned.”
The Oceti Sakowin historically fought the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes in the Dakotas. the South Dakota Education Equity Coalition did not reply to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time.
The Great Plains Tribal Chairmen’s Association, which includes 16 tribal leaders in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, condemned the standards in a resolution provided to The Daily Signal. The resolution condemns the standards for including “culturally inappropriate stereotypes,” such as portraying Native Americans as primarily as warlike and not explicitly mentioning Native American religion. It also condemns the standards for “vague references to whole sections of the Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings.”
The resolution also claims that the standards “include indoctrination and specific religious instruction,” suggesting that they violate the premise that “state and church should be separate.” The standards do require students to learn about the historical impact of Christianity, but they also mandate lessons on Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.
Butcher, the Heritage scholar, noted that the standards include “a significant amount of Native American history, which is what state educators should do to help students learn about how their state’s history is unique compared to other areas of the country.”
Syndicated with permission from The Daily Signal.
The post South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem Scraps Critical Race Theory, Builds on Hillsdale College Foundation appeared first on The Political Insider.

By Jason Poje
Editor’s note: The following is an email written by Cook County prosecutor Jason Poje, circulated to colleagues last week.)
To my colleagues:
After 20 years, I always kind of figured an email like this would start with “It is with a heavy heart that I leave…” The truth is, I can’t get out of here fast enough.
Let me start with the positive. There is not a single day that has gone by that I have not felt truly honored to work with such an incredible group of people who spent every waking hour on behalf of victims. This opportunity has been a gift for which I have no words to explain the extent of my gratitude.
My partners, our Victim/Witness advocates, our Investigators, our support staff, the police officers and detectives, time after time I see each of you putting everything you have into helping people we encounter on the worst days of their lives. So often I see our personal lives, and indeed at times our own well-being, set aside just to do a little bit more on that last case for that last victim. It’s been nothing short of inspiring not as a lawyer, but as a person.
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And yet, I’m leaving. Why could that be? The simple fact is that this State and County have set themselves on a course to disaster. And the worst part is that the agency for whom I work has backed literally every policy change that had the predictable, and predicted, outcome of more crime and more people getting hurt.
Bond reform designed to make sure no one stays in jail while their cases are pending with no safety net to handle more criminals on the streets, shorter parole periods, lower sentences for repeat offenders, the malicious and unnecessary prosecution of law enforcement officers, overuse of diversion programs, intentionally not pursuing prosecutions for crimes lawfully on the books after being passed by our legislature and signed by a governor, all of these so-called reforms have had a direct negative impact, with consequences that will last for a generation.
Many years ago my family found a nice quiet corner of the suburbs. Now my son, who is only 5, hears gunfire while playing at our neighborhood park, and a drug dealer is open-air selling behind my house (the second one in two years). If it were just me to consider, I’d stick it out. I’ve been through stupid State’s Attorney policies before. But this Office’s complete failure to even think for a moment before rushing into one popular political agenda after another has put my family directly in harm’s way.
The current people in charge of this state, including the [State’s Attorney’s Office] suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding…we live in a society with adversarial court and criminal justice processes. Defense attorneys, legal aid clinics, Public Defenders, defendant advocate groups…they fight like hell to protect the rights of criminal defendants. And they should. Their work is as noble as ours. But we have an obligation to fight like hell on behalf of the People. It should go without saying that this must be done ethically and evenhandedly. When both sides vigorously defend their positions, a balance is reached between protecting rights while preserving some sort of order and safety. Once we start doing too much of the defense’s job, once we pull our punches, once we decide that it’s worth risking citizens’ lives to have a little social experiment, that balance is lost. The unavoidable consequences are what we are witnessing in real time, an increase in crime of all kinds, businesses and families pulling up stakes, and the bodies piling up; the whole time with a State’s Attorney who insists that there is nothing to see here, and if there is it must be someone else’s fault. And then they wonder why they cannot retain experienced prosecutors or even hire new ones…it’s because any true prosecutor recognizes the importance of this balance, and that they will not be permitted to be a prosecutor under this administration.
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I will not raise my son here. I am fortunate enough to have the means to escape, so my entire family is leaving the State of Illinois. I grew up here, my family and friends are here, and yet my own employer has turned it into a place from which I am no longer proud to be, and in which my son is not safe.
To everyone in the trenches in the State’s Attorney’s Office and in law enforcement, my one regret is that I cannot be at your side anymore as you continue to fight the good fight. I do not envy the task you have before you, but you have my utmost respect for carrying on. I hope one day you are successful at returning some kind of common sense and security to our communities.
Thank you all so much for this opportunity to serve. I will treasure every moment of this chapter in my life. Be safe, be well, fight hard.
Jason F. Poje
Assistant State’s Attorney
Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.
The post After 20 Years as a Prosecutor in Illinois, I Quit appeared first on The Political Insider.

By Dr. Derek Ellerman
I’m about to say something that will send shivers up your spine, make you nauseous, and possibly even make your brain start melting out of your ears.
CNN is awesome!
Really! Look at all the favors they did for President Trump last night. They gave Trump a free primetime rally, put him up against a lightweight nobody who stood no chance, filled the audience with Trump supporters, and then even provided video of their network getting beat up by town hall viewers.
If you haven’t seen it already, they also produced what is destined to be one of Trump’s funniest and greatest moments.
Behold:

Trump just pulls out receipts to disprove Kaitlin Collins’ claims on the CNN town hall… and the crowd cheers!
This is NOT going the way CNN wanted it to. pic.twitter.com/7byCeFkCHr
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) May 11, 2023

While Trump’s receipt game was my personal favorite moment of the night, there was another one that was just so delicious I’ve watched it about 500 times already.
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Voter Wrecks CNN Stooge
By now everyone is familiar with the post-event focus groups put on by outlets like CNN and Fox.
The idea is to gauge the immediate reaction of your average voter to what they just heard and saw.
Since the outlet is CNN, you know going in that the questions will be outrageously stupid and biased, and CNN did not disappoint.
In the focus group, voters were asked, “Does it bother you that he [Trump] keeps talking about 2020, and not 2024?”
Such a question is designed to accomplish several purposes: First, to get sneering liberals to laugh at the yokels who think there were severe problems with the 2020 election.
Second, to make it look like Trump is an obsessive living in the past, instead of focusing on tomorrow’s problems.
Third, to get a Trump supporter to say something stupid.
They might have accomplished the first one, but boy oh boy, not the second and definitely not the third.
It was a crucial mistake to call on Jonathan, CNN!
Focus group attendee Jonathan is obviously familiar with their games. But even he probably wasn’t expecting a question so stupid and lazy. If you watched the event from beginning to end, you might already have realized what Jonathan knows.
“So, I feel like part of it is also the media narrative, as you guys asked him in the first question at the town hall about the 2020 election,” Jonathan retorted (and emphasis added.)
So CNN tried to paint Trump as not shutting up about 2020, while also making that the first question they asked him. In other words, TV for scumbags.
Watch:

Town Hall viewer calls out CNN after being asked why Trump still mentions 2020:
“You guys asked him that as the first question.” pic.twitter.com/eVH60e2yOe
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 11, 2023

But it got even better!
RELATED: Media Usage of Social Justice/Woke Terminology Increased 700% Since 2014
CNN Blames Trump For CNN Questions
You didn’t think CNN would do the honorable thing and apologize for such ham-fisted skullduggery, did you?
Of course not. The moderator then tried to blame Trump for answering the questions CNN asked!
“Don’t you think he could say, ‘It’s time for me to start talking about 2024, not lies that are untrue.’”
OK, maybe “TV for scumbags” wasn’t harsh enough, but I don’t think my editor will allow anything more graphic.
Attendee Jonathan has seen all this before though, and wasn’t taking the bait. He replied, “Couldn’t the media ask him a question about 2024?”
Finally, Mr. Moderator realized he was banging his head against a brick wall, and gave up after admitting that the entire set up was a horseplucky, saying, “There were questions, but you’re right, that was the first thing and it was something on our mind.”
Yeah, we know. It’s because we know that voters like Jonathan are no longer fooled by Scumbag TV.
The only thing left to do is for Elon Musk to buy CNN next, and change the name and tagline to: Scumbag TV: TV for scumbags.
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The post CNN Stooge Gets Completely Embarrassed by Trump Town Hall Viewer in Failed ‘Gotcha’ Moment appeared first on The Political Insider.

By Bethany Blankley (The Center Square)
South of an El Paso port of entry in the West Bridge downtown area and along the Rio Grande River stretching to New Mexico, Texas Department of Public Safety officers and Texas National Guard officers working through Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security mission, Operation Lone Star, have effectively blocked illegal entry, Texas authorities say.
The Texas National Guard erected several miles of concertina wire to fill a gap where construction in the border wall existed. When President Joe Biden came into office, he immediately halted construction of the border wall and a gap was left in the area.
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People from all over the world who didn’t want to legally enter through a port of entry roughly a mile down a Juárez, Mexico, highway would walk across the highway down a ditch, across a shallow Rio Grande River that resembles more of a stream, and into Texas, authorities say.
A partial steel wall and the river were the only barrier between Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, until the Texas National Guard stepped in.
Just after midnight Thursday, when the public health authority Title 42 ended, Texas Department of Public Safety will have a show of force in this area, the DPS commander of the western region of Texas, Juan Sanchez, told The Center Square at a briefing with a border security coalition arranged by The Texas Public Policy Foundation.
The coalition visited the area where in December a group of 300 people staying in a camp of several thousand on the other side of the river tried to rush across and illegally enter but were held back by Border Patrol agents. The camp is now closed.
Since then, no one can rush across the river in this area because Operation Lone Star has been so effective, Sanchez said. Foreign nationals either have to enter at the port of entry or go through New Mexico. But because New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, has told New Mexico state police to stand down and not pursue or apprehend any foreign nationals illegally entering, and because no New Mexico National Guard is there, New Mexico is wide open for illegal entry, Texas authorities say.
RELATED: Texas Governor Abbott Deploys New Border Force to Fight ‘Catastrophic Disaster’ as Title 42 Ends
However, the area is so remote and there’s no infrastructure and the next biggest city, Las Cruces, is roughly an hour away.
“They’re just coming back into El Paso,” Sanchez said. When they do, DPS is actively working to apprehend them.
Cartel traffickers put illegal foreign nationals in El Paso hotels, Airbnb rentals and then trash them, Sanchez said.
“It’s been a toll on local businesses, the community and everybody else,” he said.
Texas DPS special agents working with Border Patrol are actively identifying stash houses, he said, and “we’ve been very successful.” Previously, stash houses held groups of 20-30 people. Now they’re holding groups of 50, 100, 150, he said.
Sanchez, who’s worked in this area for years, also said the kind of people who are illegally entering are unlike those in the past.
“This new group, they are very entitled,” he said. “They’ve been giving us a lot of resistance. They don’t have respect for law enforcement. They don’t have respect for the citizens here.”
RELATED: Border Patrol To Release Foreign Nationals En Masse Into Communities As Title 42 Ends
Immigrants who come to the U.S. legally who want to be U.S. citizens “were real quick to say ‘I can’t wait to come into the United States. I can’t wait to carry the American flag,’” he said. But the people illegally entering today, “they still represent their home country’s flag. They’re here; they’re entitled. They expect certain things,” he said, referring to taxpayer-funded welfare and other subsidies.
“They laugh at just about everything we do,” he added. “Our citizens will say, ‘can you please get off my sidewalk, you’re blocking my door.’ And they laugh at them.”
“The problem we had downtown with all the migrants and homeless population increasing,” he said, is transnational gang members took over the streets. If homeless illegal foreign nationals wanted “to get in the chow line at the front,” where free food was being offered, he said, they had to pay the gangs.
By contrast, the Biden administration is actively working to release foreign nationals into the U.S., Texas authorities say. At a Border Patrol conference in El Paso on Wednesday, DHS Chief Information Officer Eric Hysen said the “extremely challenging operational environment will only increase after tomorrow night,” referring to when Title 42 ended Thursday.
One of the agency’s primary goals is to facilitate an efficient processing system to release an expected influx of foreign nationals into the U.S. To do this, over 2,400 DHS employee volunteers, 1,500 Department of Defense personnel, 1,000 employees from 11 federal agencies and 2,000 contractors are working to “scale up processing efforts,” he said.
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Abbott, who deployed a tactical National Guard unit to El Paso on Monday, said, “The cartels are working in collaboration with President Biden and the federal government to facilitate that illegals cross the border.”
He said Texas is “being overrun by our own federal government. Texas is being undermined by our own federal government and our efforts to secure our border.”
Syndicated with permission from The Center Square.
The post Texas National Guard and DPS Block Illegal Entry South of El Paso Port of Entry appeared first on The Political Insider.

On Tuesday, Joe Biden revealed that he has been considering using the 14th Amendment to circumvent Congress and raise the debt ceiling unilaterally, while he admitted that this is a short-term solution and that the United States is on course to default without congressional action by June.
After meeting with congressional leaders on the debt ceiling, Biden told reporters, “I have been considering the 14th Amendment, and the man I have enormous respect for, Larry Tribe… thinks that it would be legitimate.”
However, “the problem is it would have to be litigated,” Biden elaborated. Additionally, “and in the meantime, without an extension, it would still end up in the same place.”
Pushing The Limits
Biden said he plans to investigate whether the Supreme Court would find that the 14th Amendment permits the president to continue issuing debt until the White House and lawmakers deal with the immediate matter at hand of extending the debt ceiling.
McCarthy, on the other hand, dismissed the notion as futile.

RELATED: Federal Government Borrowing Astronomical $6 Billion Per Day
At the Capitol, he said, “Really think about this, if you’re the leader, if you’re the only president, and you’re going to look at the 14th amendment to look at something like that – I would think you’re kind of a failure of working with people across sides of the aisle, or working with your own party to get something done.”
As worries of a U.S. default grow more pressing, discussions inside the Beltway have heated up over whether or not the debt ceiling is constitutional under the 14th Amendment, which primarily deals with citizenship and was introduced to the Constitution after the Civil War.
Embrace Lawlessness
The central clause of the theory comes from the 14th Amendment, which states that the national debt “shall not be questioned.”
However, some members of the Biden administration have been hesitant to fully embrace the concept, citing concerns about the idea’s legal and economic ramifications.
The only way to preserve the banking system and the economy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated Sunday on ABC, is for Congress to do its duty by lifting the debt ceiling and allowing us to pay our debts. And it’s important that we avoid having to question whether or not the president has the authority to continue issuing debt. In other words, this would constitute a constitutional crisis.
Without saying it outright, Yellen called it “one of the not good options” if Congress does not act.
A Harvard law professor whom Biden cited on Tuesday was originally opposed to the plan but later changed his mind, saying that while fundamental questions still need to be answered, “they are the wrong ones for us to be asking.”

President Biden is asserting the 14th Amendment as a possible basis for forcing Congress to raise the debt limit. He is citing Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe, the same authority cited by Biden for his flagrantly unconstitutional eviction moratorium. https://t.co/Tx2t2gyIeJ
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 10, 2023

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In an opinion piece for The New York Times, she argued that the real issue is whether or not Congress has the authority to use a “arbitrary dollar limit” to coerce the executive branch into doing its bidding after having previously approved the spending measures responsible for the nation’s financial crisis.
Yellen has warned Congress that the United States could go into default by early June if the debt ceiling is not raised. Increased interest rates, the loss of jobs, a decline in the stock market, and the postponement of Social Security benefits would all result from a default.
Even after Biden’s Tuesday meeting with congressional leaders at the White House, it doesn’t appear that the parties made any significant forward toward averting a default.
Reprinted with permission. View this story and more on WayneDupree.com.
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The post McCarthy Scoffs at Idea Biden Can Raise Debt Ceiling Without Congress, Using 14th Amendment appeared first on The Political Insider.