I'm with Hur.

Nikole Hannah-Jones claims there is no absolution for she and other privileged parents who “continue to rescue our own children from the failing schools where we allow other people’s children to languish simply because those children have been born Black and poor in a nation of racism and riches.” Newsflash: Those “languishing” parents do not want nor need your absolution. They simply want the same privilege Hannah-Jones and her husband ultimately exercised: the right to choose a better school for their own child. My latest in the New York Post: ianvrowe.substack.com/p/niko…

Abortion is the intentional taking of an innocent human life. In what world does killing a child come with bereavement leave? God help us all.

Today, Xi Jinping walks into the White House. Jimmy Lai enters his 2,094th day in a Hong Kong prison cell. He is 78 years old, has diabetes, and has spent most of those days in solitary confinement. One of these two men leaves Washington with everything he came for. The other is still waiting for something as simple as his freedom. #FreeJimmyLai

Please pray today to Blessed Fulton Sheen for the release of Jimmy Lai and the healing of his daughter, Claire.

Woody Allen called him a homunculus in MANHATTAN. that’s too nice for this monstrous midget ugly ass prick.

Terrific article in #PhilanthropyDaily by Will Nardi on @SBMowing The Mower’s Grace: How YouTube’s Free Lawn Rescues Are Reviving American Localism philanthropydaily.com/the-mo… @amphil @center4civilsoc

If indeed his father was Frank Sinatra the man would be rolling in his grave. He'd understand choice if he weren't born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

Jimmy Lai Must Be Freed nationalreview.com/corner/ji…

Calling out: @VDHanson challenges @TuckerCarlson piped.video/JwzqRnP3P0Y?is=CUfz… @DailySignal

Jimmy Lai is a British citizen. He is 78. He spent the summer in a small cell with no air conditioning, still in solitary, and he is getting weaker. His son, Sebastien Lai, told @thetimes that China gains nothing by keeping him there. "After all, a martyr never dies." Read here: thetimes.com/article/678ecd1… #FreeJimmyLai #BringHimHome

Trump Bans the Fake News. So Obama Thunders Down from Olympus The White House Press corps and the liberal media have gone ballistic over President Trump’s recent banning of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press room. Apparently Trump had finally had it with their decade-long trail of “fake news” (e.g., CNN on the Steele dossier: the intelligence community had “corroborated all the details.”; MS(NBC): “All the supporting details in Steele's reports are checking out, even the really outrageous ones.”; and Politico (“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”). Or maybe it was Trump’s weariness that CNN and MS never learned from their serial untruth. The former for years put on their news shows the admitted liar (“least most untruthful”) James Clapper; The latter likewise hired the twice-admitted-liar John Brennan (on his demonstrable spying on Senate computers, Brennan thundered under oath: “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn't do that.”) So after witnessing the fake news’s spreading lies about the “walls are closing in on Trump” Mueller Investigation, ginning up the “mostly peaceful” 2020 riots, running with the Jussie Smollett farce, demonizing the Covington Kids, iconizing the assailant Trayvon Martin, and promulgating the “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson fable, and on and on—I suppose Trump finally had enough. In reaction and as expected, a sanctimonious Barack Obama now has jetted out from one of his three mansions and into the expulsion controversy. And also as his wont, Obama almost immediately on spec opened himself up to the usual charges of rank hypocrisy and empty, performance-art virtue-signaling. So Obama thundered, “I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News? You’re out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.” Actually, it’s not “unimaginable”, if Obama would just look into the mirror. So wait a minute. In 2009 the Obama Treasury Department tried to ban a Fox reporter from a press pool interview. Earlier during the 2008 campaign, Obama kicked out New York Post and Washington Times reporters from his campaign plane. But Obama was most notorious not for just excluding politically incorrect reporters but for surveilling and spying on them. Even liberal watchdog foundations blasted Obama in 2012-13 for grabbing the private records of some twenty phone lines used at home and on the job by Associated Press reporters. Most notoriously, it was finally revealed in 2013 that Obama’s State Department secretly had bird-dogged Fox Reporter James Rosen relentlessly— tracking his movements, obtaining a search warrant to examined two days’ worth of his private emails, and getting access to his private phone records. If Obama is still “trying to think what would have happened” when he surveilled and spied on a Fox reporter relentlessly, he can stop—since nothing as usual happened to the always exempt Obama. And Obama did not just at times eject reporters and surveille them. He also threatened to prosecute eight reporters and their sources (more than any administration before or since, including Richard Nixon’s). But he backed down when the AP and Rosen scandals surfaced and cooled down his Inspector Javert alter ego. The hammer/stiletto difference between a loud Trump and a smooth Obama? Trump blows up publicly, rails, and earns furor from “shocked”, sober and judicious journalists” who covet their White House billets—while he also earns the damnation of the liberal legacy media for his antics. But far more egregiously Obama used the powers of the administrative state, secretly and quietly, to surveille, follow, and spy on reporters and their sources, while threatening to prosecute and jail others—and he disguised his vindictiveness by his lofty tone and polished demeanor. As he anticipated, Obama’s victims and the media itself largely kept still, afraid to concede that their messianic “constitutional lawyer” possessed an Orwellian mean streak and was a far greater danger to the First Amendment. Or as the Left taught us, the fundamental threat to our Constitution is when “democracy dies in darkness.” Postscript: Obama also could not resist his “clingers” like demonization of Trump supporters, in the fashion of Hillary’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables”, and Biden’s “garbage”, “chumps”, “semi-fascists”, and “dregs”. So he also blasted not just Trump for the expulsions, but returned to his accustomed stereotype putdown of Neanderthal-like Trump supporters who are supposedly under-developed (e.g., “what that means is that we’ve have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires”): “If you have a certain cohort, let's call it 30 to 35 percent of the country right now, which thinks that's okay, well, what that means is we have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires, and we've got to shore that back up.” I wonder how Obama would do that shoring up of a third of America? Surveilling, tracking, and spying on them? Note finally, that even Hillary’s deplorables were only half of Trump’s half of the nation, “You could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”) whereas Obama writes off a third of the entire country!

Mr. President, China Unjustly Convicted Jimmy Lai because he stood for Democracy and Freedom of the Press. You Are The Only One in the World Who Can Free this Godly Champion of Freedom. Tell Chinese President Xi Jinping: It’s Time. #freejimmylai🙏🏻🇺🇸🇨🇳 Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Jimmy Lai | WSJ wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump…

Wonderful of you @madeleinekearns to tell the story of this decent and brave man.

Yes @wjmcgurn! #FreeJimmyLai "Though he started his business career making clothes, Jimmy moved to media because he wanted to empower Hong Kong’s people with an American-style free press. The Chinese recognized what he was doing, put him in jail, and basically called him an American agent. Doesn’t a man who put it all on the line to defend America deserve Mr. Trump’s help in his hour of need?" Who’s Stronger, Xi or Trump? - WSJ wsj.com/opinion/whos-stronge…

From my post on Sheen, a story from a young Black man from Mobile whom Sheen encouraged to apply to Notre Dame - and followed up with more than words: "Growing up in a devout Catholic family in segregated Mobile, Alabama, I had never heard of the University of Notre Dame until I was eleven or twelve years old. It was 1948 when Archbishop Fulton Sheen of New York, with a police escort, pulled up in front of my home on a dirt street in a black neighborhood in Mobile. He was accompanied by Clare Boothe Luce, the wife of the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. My Daddy was raising funds to build a hospital for black folk, and the archbishop heard of the effort and wanted to help. Under Jim Crow laws at the time, black women were not admitted in hospitals in Mobile and had to have their babies at home. My Daddy, a graduate of Hampton Institute, had plans to change that. A popular radio personality, Archbishop Sheen was a nationally known figure and helped raise funds. While visiting, he asked me if I had heard of the University of Notre Dame. I told him I had not. Then he told me that it was a great college and one day, if I wanted to attend, he would be happy to write a letter of recommendation and help me get a scholarship. In 1950, Mobile’s first African-American hospital opened not far from my home. It was named Blessed Martin De Porres Hospital. By then, Notre Dame had become my college of choice. A few years later, I wrote to Archbishop Sheen, and he wrote back: “Thank you for your kind and warmhearted letter, which brought to mind the happy occasions when I visited with your wonderful family in Mobile…. You have my hearty approval to use my name on your application to Notre Dame University. I shall be delighted to recommend you.” I still have the letter today. So with the help of an academic scholarship, I headed to Notre Dame in the late summer of 1954, climbing aboard the all-black “Jim Crow car” on a train from Mobile to Chicago. It was called the Hummingbird."

I have some thoughts! Nikole Hannah-Jones interviewed me at the height of woke-1 to champion and virtue signal her “fight for every black child” and disparage and dismiss my fight for all NYC public school students to enjoy the rising tide that lifts all boats of academic rigor and meritocracy. She thought my support of the Specialized High School Admission Exam, the SHSAT, was racist. I thought her school politics were deeply misguided, and well, quite racist. Unlike Hannah-Jones I have nothing to walk back. I knew then what she has just figured out that her identitarian race-based grievance project would not fix anything. And in fact, it has hurt all public school students. Not just in NYC—her Magnum Opus of racial grievance, The 1619 Project, is taught in schools across the country and its reasoning is used to dismantle and stop the creation of the kind of high school that her daughter ultimately chose—the one that finally taught her algebra. NYC Public School students score lower on all academic metrics now than they did when her daughter started school—and we tax payers pay more for it. Enrollment continues to plummet while those in charge dumb down standards and hide results. So much of that is because any solution that challenged Hannah-Jones' race-baiting—endorsed by The Times and Democratic leaders alike—was verboten. Like Hannah-Jones I have a HS junior. My two older kids have graduated from NYCPS and are in college and my youngest is in NYCPS elementary school. I have qualms with parts of their education but also many success stories. Can you get a great education in NYCPS? Yes. But you have to fight for it. And insisting on the schools that grade math homework is a start. Knowing what your child is learning and mastering is a non-negotiable. Standardized tests help with that, but are a starting point only. Blaming phantom racists instead of understanding the role parents play was and is a lazy cop out. There is still an effort–alive and well right now-to dismantle great schools like NYC’s specialized high schools because they use standardized admissions tests. The effort still relies on the same failed logic that Hannah-Jones has peddled for years. She insisted that kids like her daughter who did not score high enough on a test to gain admission were the victims of racism. But she refused to acknowledge that poor Asian kids whose parents had NONE of the resources that her daughter enjoyed (or should have enjoyed) (English speaking parents, resources to pay for prep classes, knowledge of how the system works, etc) were not racist oppressors—but kids willing to work hard and apply their smarts with parents that prioritized subject mastery and took the time to make sure their kids were actually learning. Her daughter is right. She deserved much better. But it is not the cauldron of racist grievances that Hannah-Jones still cannot let go of that failed her daughter. It’s her daughter’s parents that did not figure out for NINE YEARS that their daughter was not learning enough. New York City Public Schools should be among the best in the world because we have so many incredibly talented, smart and hard-working students that could and should learn more by being challenged more–and that means sorting kids into cohorts where they can rise to the level of their abilities and willingness to work. In other words “screening”—the exact project Hannah-Jones fought against for so long and which she has now relied on to rescue her daughter’s education. You’re welcome Nikole. Your daughter’s chosen high school would not exist but for parents like me who fought so hard to keep screened schools.

Jimmy Lai has now spent more than 2,080 days in a Hong Kong prison cell, most of it in near total solitary confinement. He is 78 years old and lives with diabetes. Next week, when Xi Jinping arrives in Washington, he should follow through on President Trump’s request and #FreeJimmyLai

These people really only have one Solution™ for everything and it’s just “World Communism” with corporate buzzwords.