Good News Friday: 03/22/24 ....
March 22, 2024
Dear Patriot,
Not gonna lie….this was a rough week. The left is pushing their crazy agenda fast and hard. However, we like to think they are in their last throes.
Stay vigilant on praying for our nation. Continue pushing good information out to those in your orbit.
Despite it all, here is the GOOD NEWS for the week!
1- It turns out that sane people do not appreciate when a company falls for the fad of men pretending to be women and being allowed to invade female spaces. This is good news.
Planet Fitness sees $400MILLION wiped off its value in just five days after banning member who exposed 'trans woman' shaving in the female locker rooms
QUOTE: Planet Fitness' valuation has plummeted $400 million in five days after they banned a member who shared a photo of a 'trans woman' using a female locker room.
The company's value dropped from $5.3 billion on March 14 to $4.9 billion on March 19, and its shares are down by 13.59 percent compared to a month ago.
The decline follows Planet Fitness' refusal to walk back its decision to ban a member who exposed a 'trans woman' shaving in a female locker room earlier this month.
Patricia Silva was barred from the gym in Alaska after she detailed an incident online - where she said she saw a transgender woman in her locker room.
Following backlash against the ban, the company said although some members may feel uncomfortable sharing facilities, 'this discomfort is not a reason to deny access to the transgender member.'
The company's stock fell by 7.8 percent on Tuesday, going from its opening price of $59.44 to a five-month low of $54.80, it then rebounded slightly.
Planet Fitness decision raised eyebrows and drew criticism and comment from Utah Congressman Phil Lyman and Tesla's Elon Musk.
2- The Democrats in Florida did not even bother to hold a presidential primary. This resulted in very low turnout for the Democrats on the ballot.
Democrats Canceled Their Florida Primary To Help Biden. It Backfired And Helped Republicans Flip Local Seats
QUOTE: Florida Democrats chose to award President Joe Biden the state’s delegates in November instead of holding a presidential primary vote, presumably to protect the unpopular incumbent. But it appears the move backfired and led to a wipeout of Democrats in local races.
Florida Democrat Party leaders awarded Biden the state’s 224 delegates months ago and cancelled the primary, in a move Biden’s Democrat challengers called “intentional disenfranchisement” and said was “done obviously in secret, obviously to help the incumbent Joe Biden.” The lack of a statewide Democrat primary meant registered Democrats had less reason to turn out on Tuesday than Republicans, who decisively voted for former President Donald Trump in Tuesday’s Republican primary.
Based on the several key wins by Republicans, Democratic turnout appears to have been hampered by the party’s decision. Republicans and Republican-supported candidates managed to flip several seats in their favor.
Republican-backed Bruce Rector won Clearwater’s nonpartisan race for mayor, while Michael Mannino flipped City Council Seat 3 and Ryan Cotton flipped Seat 2 — defeating incumbent Democrat Mark Bunker who was endorsed by the Florida Democratic Party. Biden narrowly won Pinellas County in 2020.
The Tampa Bay Times attributed the wins to “significant conservative turnout.”
In Orange County, Shane Taylor won the Oakland mayoral race, beating Town Commissioner Salvador Ramos. “Taylor had run as a strong conservative,” noted Florida Politics’ Jacob Ogles.
Nick Nesta, a Republican, won another term as Apopka City Commissioner while Nadia Anderson flipped a Democrat-held seat.
3- This is how we fight back and deprive the left financial fuel. More red states need to follow Texas and remove this woke company from their portfolios.
Texas Schools Fund Moves To Pull $8.5 Billion Contract With BlackRock
QUOTE: The Texas Permanent School Fund (PSF) opted on Tuesday to terminate an $8.5 billion investment with BlackRock Inc., with one official citing the financial asset manager’s support of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) proposals.
State Board of Education Chairman Aaron Kinsey said in a statement that PSF’s “relationship with BlackRock was not in compliance” with legislation enacted in 2021 that “prohibits state investment in companies like BlackRock that boycott energy companies.”PSF “has a fiduciary duty to protect Texas schools by safeguarding and growing the approximately $1 billion in annual oil and gas royalties managed by the Texas General Land Office,” Kinsey said, adding that terminating BlackRock’s contract “ensures PSF’s full compliance with Texas law.”
BlackRock, which boasts trillions of dollars in assets, endured divestments by other GOP-led states amid objections over its push for ESG that critics view as being part of a “woke” agenda. But the company has pared back support for ESG proposals while acknowledging such investments could hurt its bottom line.
Kinsey said BlackRock’s “dominant and persistent leadership in the ESG movement immeasurably damages our state’s oil & gas economy and the very companies that generate revenues for our PSF. Texas and the PSF have worked hard to grow this fund to build Texas’ schools. BlackRock’s destructive approach toward the energy companies that this state and our world depend on is incompatible with our fiduciary duty to Texans.”
He added, “Today represents a major step forward for the Texas PSF and our state as a whole. The PSF will not stand idle as our financial future is attacked by Wall Street. This bold action helps ensure our PSF remains in fact permanent and will continue to support bright futures and opportunities for generations of Texas students.”
4- We are always looking for the trends. The trends are looking positive.
Trump leads Biden in all seven battleground states: Polls
QUOTE: Former President Donald Trump is ahead of President Joe Biden in all seven swing states, according to new polls as the 2024 presidential race heats up.
Trump leads Biden by 4% in Arizona, 1% in Michigan, 3% in Nevada and 3% in Wisconsin, according to four polls released Wednesday and Thursday by Emerson College Polling/The Hill.
Trump is also ahead of Biden by 3% in North Carolina and 4% in Georgia, according to polls released Wednesday by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion.
Meanwhile, an Emerson College survey released last week shows Trump leads Biden by 4% in Pennsylvania.
NOTE: Please send all correspondence to THIS ADDRESS:
- Chris Rufo is a warrior and continues to investigate the lack of academic standards at Harvard.
Christopher F. Rufo on Substack
Copy and Paste: Another Harvard racial-justice scholar is accused of plagiarism.
QUOTE: Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article titled “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”
Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.
According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”
I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)
What is happening at Harvard? We have seen an explosion of plagiarism allegations against prominent scholars and administrators in recent months, all associated with critical race studies and “diversity and inclusion” programs. Former president Claudine Gay, chief diversity officer Sherri Ann Charleston, DEI administrator Shirley Greene, and now star professor Christina Cross have each come under fire for alleged plagiarism.
This raises several additional questions. Did these scholars manage to earn positions at Harvard without a comprehensive review of their work? Why are Gay, Charleston, and Greene, in particular, still employed at Harvard, given the seriousness of the questions raised about their academic integrity? Harvard’s own policy recommends serious consequences for students who have committed plagiarism. Are professors held to a lesser standard?
Finally, given Harvard’s long-standing support for DEI policies and affirmative action programs, it is reasonable to ask whether scholars such as Gay, Charleston, Greene, and Cross rose through the ranks on their merits or, at least in part, on their identity and their politics.
Further investigation is needed. Independent researchers currently looking into plagiarism at Harvard should scrutinize not only these programs but also a control group in other, more substantive disciplines to determine whether plagiarism correlates with left-wing racial disciplines or is widespread throughout the university.
Time will tell. My sources say that more allegations are coming.
6- This is a good step in the right direction.
As Biden's green energy agenda takes big hits, House Republicans announce legislation blitz
QUOTE: House Republicans this week are planning a barrage of legislation that takes direct aim at the Biden administration’s energy policies.
“Whether it's pumping gas at the gas station, or when you pay your household electricity bill, people know they're paying too much because of the far-left agenda here in Washington,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said in a press conference in West Virginia Friday.
Rep Scalise said that House Republicans are bringing several bills to the House floor that will lower energy costs and push back on the Biden administration’s pause on LNG exports, among other things.
This blitz comes after President Biden has spent a few years rolling out his climate agenda across a wide range of legislation and new agency regulations. He vowed to “end fossil fuel” during his campaign, and since taking office, he’s taken dozens of actions toward that goal, as have Democrats in Congress. Last week, the Institute for Energy Research updated its list of “Ways the Biden administration and Democrats have made it harder to produce oil and gas.” The list had 125 items on it in November 2022, and it’s now grown to over 200.
.
7- Some rare, positive news on Republican National Committee.
Stunning! There Is Some Very Good News for Republicans
QUOTE: There’s plenty of bad news about the Republican campaign in 2024, and I’ve covered it in detail, but objectivity requires that one correctly assess what is going right too, and there’s a lot going right for Republicans right now.
First and foremost, there is the massive change at the Republican National Committee with the firing of the utterly useless Ronna McDaniel and the elevation of Michael Whatley and Lara Trump.
Next, Donald Trump is in a position where it looks like he is likely to win the presidency if current trends continue…that’s one heck of an if. And, finally, we also seem to be doing pretty well in the Senate races. There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful.
We’re not used to hearing it, but for the last week or so, the RNC has done everything right. People like RedState Jennifer van Laar and superlawyer Harmeet Dhillon would point out how Ronna was wasting tons of money on useless fluff, donors would stop giving, and she would just continue wasting tons of money on useless fluff. She studiously ignored the grassroots and imagined that her role was to go on TV and talk about policy as if anyone cared what some party bureaucrat thought. But now she’s gone, and good riddance.
Her replacements have, astonishingly, done the right things, and they have done it right away. First, they clearcut a bunch of the deadwood at the RNC, firing tons of people. Some characterize that as a purge of unbelievers, but what it really is is a purge of unachievers.
The next thing the new leaders should do is publicly and, in detail, explain their legal strategy for lawfare victory to the grassroots. That’s the kind of thing that rebuilds the voters’ shattered confidence.
Donors are already taking notice of these changes and are starting to open their wallets again. I’ve written about the disastrous failure to have any kind of lawfare plan in place, and I received enormous feedback from Republicans telling me they are sitting on their hands instead of writing checks because they believe their money would be going to waste. We have much better things to do than spend our dough on Ronna McDaniel’s beauty treatments. There is a lot of cash out there on the sidelines just waiting to come in if the donors see it’s not going to be squandered by grifty mediocrities.
And while the House of Representatives is a real mess, with a significant chance of us losing control, the Senate is just the opposite. We’re playing on a good map and have some great candidates. Chances are we take the Senate.
Everything isn’t roses. We still have some challenges with election integrity and with making sure Donald Trump doesn’t alienate the people who are now tentatively supporting him – the regime media shutting him out and him not using Twitter are probably the best things that can happen to him. We’re also way behind in the money race. But that said, we have some advantages and have to press them. That’s how you win. And we might just win in 2024.
8- Great news for children in the state of Georgia.
$6,500 school vouchers coming to Georgia as bill gets final passage and heads to governor
QUOTE: Georgia senators gave final approval Wednesday to a plan to create a $6,500 voucher funding for private school tuition and home schooling, sending the measure to Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature.
Senators voted 33-21 along party lines to approve changes that the House made last week to Senate Bill 233. House approval had long eluded the state's school choice advocates.
Whereas last year a defeat of the bill in the House left Democratic opponents jubilant, supporters broke into applause and embraced as the Senate approved the measure, marking the end of a multiyear saga to create a third Georgia program funding nonpublic education options.
“When I cheer today, I’m going to be cheering because more parents and more families will have more opportunities," said state Sen. Greg Dolezal, a Republican from Cumming who sponsored the bill.
Republican Gov. Brian Kemp backs the voucher plan, including devoting a substantial portion of his State of the State speech to advocating for it.
“I firmly believe we can take an all-of-the-above approach to education options,” Kemp said in a statement Wednesday.
9- The other day we happened to hear an interview with Isabel Brown on The Clay and Buck Show. We share it with you as she is such a breath of fresh air.
QUOTE: Gen-Z streamer and author, Isabel Brown, joined Clay and Buck Tuesday to discuss her new book, “The End of the Alphabet: How Gen Z Can Save America.” Isabel thinks her generation is misunderstood and misreported on by the mainstream media.
10- We leave you this week with a droll observation by Don Surber. Could it all come down to TIES?
In praise of ties: They helped build a society that we are destroying
QUOTE: The first thing I notice when I watch a black-and-white TV show on one of the rerun networks is the ties. In the 1950s, every man wore a tie. The milkman wore a tie. The mailman wore a tie. The policeman wore a tie. Even Elvis wore a tie on occasion. Chuck Berry always wore a tie. Gas station attendants wore them. You could trust your car to the man who wore the star because he had a tie on. Men wore ties to ballgames because men were civilized.
Ties were important because they gave a sense of authority but ties also showed that a man wants to belong in society. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Eat to please thyself, but dress to please others.”
But gradually the ties came off. Comfort meant more than community. Men’s stores gave way to Sears and then Kmart and then Wal-Mart, which is now Walmart. The loss of ties — the loss of formality in interactions with strangers on the street — came with a price. When you stop wanting to please others, you begin to stop caring about others.
The 1950s were better than what we have today. Women stayed home and took care of their families while men went out and worked for their families. Marriage was the norm and the children were raised right. That was not my home life growing up, but my wife and I tried to do better for our kids, and now our son and his bride want to do better than we did for his kids. That is the way things should be.
If ties were good enough for the 1950s, why are they not good enough for us?
Enjoy Access to EVERY Article in Every Newsletter : $5/month
PRAY for divine intervention. PRAY that those elected will be blessed with great wisdom and courage. SHARE the good news. DESPAIR not.
Hold Fast,
Defending The Republic