The Week In Woke

A Cultural Enrichment Agent illegally entered England by boat and decided to Enrich British Culture by threatening to murder Reform Party leader Nigel Farage.

Just as Farage had somehow learned of Khan's videos, Khan learned about Farage's video featuring him as an example of the kind of people the UK should be deporting. He quickly made a response on TikTok. Here's the video in which he threatens to kill Farage. "Delete the video. This not good my friend. You not know me. I gonna come to England. I gonna pop, pop, pop, murder."

He also published another video in which he doubled down on his theat.

A subsequent TikTok post by Khan read: "I mean what I say" on an image of a GB News report about the threat against Mr Farage.

Khan was stopped when he eventually crossed the channel. He was interviewed and denied any intention to kill Farage.

In a police interview on 1 November last year, Khan said through an interpreter that he had attempted to come to the UK "10 times" and was in Dunkirk, France, when he recorded the video in which he is alleged to have made a threat to kill Mr Farage.

Khan told police: "I come here because I want to live here. I want new life. I don't come here because I want to kill Nigel Farage."

He also said that he had been smoking cannabis and was "high" at the time of posting the video.

Quick, give him a free apartment and lifetime of welfare before this Cancer Curer decides to go to another European country and threaten to kill people there.

As reading scores improve in red states thanks to the "Southern Surge" and their emphasis on scientifically-proven methods of reading instruction like phonics, they're falling in blue New England states.

Red states raised the bar, whereas blue states just lowered standards.

Massachusetts public schools were the best in the nation, and the rest of New England wasn't far behind, writes Christopher Huffaker in the Boston Globe. Ten years ago, Massachusetts students "led the United States across ages, subjects, and most demographic groups, despite wide achievement gaps," on the Nation's Report Card. Students in the Deep South, who came from much poorer families, were at the bottom.

Now test scores are falling in New England, rising in Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama, he writes. While leaders of the "Southern Surge" focused relentlessly on improving reading instruction, New England schools were lowering expectations, Huffaker writes. To end the Massachusetts Malaise, leaders must "override the wishes of popular and powerful teachers unions, and, most of all, stop resting on their laurels."

Karen Vaites and others have written about the Southern Surge in reading scores for months now, but it's an essay last week by Kelsey Piper, Illiteracy is a policy choice, that seems to have woken everybody up. "If you live where I do, in Oakland, California, and you cannot afford private education, you should be seriously considering moving to Mississippi for the substantially better public schools," wrote Piper in The Argument.

No, Mississippi isn't cooking the books, Piper and Vaites write this week, also in The Argument. With far fewer resources than most states and far needier students, these deep South states are showing impressive progress.

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The "surge" states adopted comprehensive programs to train teachers in the "science of reading," adopt high-quality curricula and show teachers how to teach the curriculum well, Wexler writes.

Expecting teachers union members to do their jobs well is racist or something, you Racists (or somethings).

Huckster and flake Vivek Ramaswanay, the Guy Smiley of the Ganges, is now scolding the right for attempting to defeat the left and "own the libs."

This guy always stunk of the rankest opportunism. He was always a phony and a flake. And he'll soon be calling us racists for wanting to restrict H1-B's for Indians.

The truth is, we face a hard choice ahead for our movement. It is a fork in the road. It is a fork in the road for the future of the conservative movement. And it's a hard question to ask ourselves: Is our goal to defeat the left, or is our goal to save the country? Last year, I believed these goals were one and the same. But going forward, I don't think they quite are.

An Axios preview described his speech as "No more 'owning the libs': Ramaswamy pushes sharp break for GOP":

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on Tuesday plans to call on the GOP to embrace a less overtly belligerent and oppositional posture, Axios has learned.

According to his prepared remarks, Ramaswamy will say the conservative moment is at a "fork in the road" and urge them to abandon its fixation on "owning the libs" in favor of a less overtly confrontational posture.

"We can still stand for truth, while viewing those who believe in falsehoods not as our enemies who must be vanquished, but instead as our fellow citizens who have lost their way and must be shown the light," Ramaswamy will say.

"Not to berate them, embarrass them, and banish them -- but to pray for them, to talk to them, and to persuade them," he will add.

Trump fans liked him in the primaries because he was the guy "running for the nomination" who was in fact never running for the nomination at all, but always praising Trump and basically running to be a Trump appointee.

Raise your hand if you didn't see this coming. Now slap yourselves with the same hand, you Big Dummies.

A leftwing jag who is very, very exercised by Right Wing Authoritarianism is almost as upset by the left's headlong pursuit of political suicide.

During the 2010s [leftwing] sentiment swelled to a crescendo, but in the 2020s it has begun to wane. The popular outpouring of "antiracist" sentiment that characterized the "Great Awokening" has petered out, and with it has gone the feeling of overwhelming progressive cultural domination. Bari Weiss, who got run out of the New York Times for being insufficiently progressive, just got hired to run CBS News. Cancel culture is canceled.

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Meanwhile, the activist energy that powered the smaller, initial version off BLM in the mid-2010s is gone now. That generation of activists has largely gotten exhausted and/or aged out. When the Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade and banned affirmative action in college admissions, there was no major grassroots pushback. All the grassroots energy on the left now is invested in the Palestine cause, which is basically harmless to Republicans.

And the policy ideas that came out of the woke era mostly flopped. Black Americans did not like the country's brief experiment with anarchy in 2020, and became much more pro-cop, which put an end to "defund the police". The flood of illegal and quasi-legal immigrants that Biden allowed during his time in office ended up turning much of the country against immigration (at least temporarily). The trans movement is losing on key issues such as women's sports teams.

But in response to all of these losses, progressives have failed to moderate their views

[...]

...progressives have retreated to safe spaces where they still maintain the absolute cultural dominance that so intoxicated them in the 2010s -- universities, NGOs, a few companies, and the small social network Bluesky. There, they can wield some facsimile of the cancel-power they once enjoyed

[...]

Meanwhile, quietly and behind the scenes, progressives are still quietly pushing Democrats to support policies that no one outside the progressive bubble really likes.

This kind of thing renders progressives extraordinarily ineffective against Trump's anti-democratic blitzkrieg. It's also probably a big part of what makes the Democratic party so incredibly unpopular.

I saw Trump's Anti-Democratic Blitzkrieg open for Turgid Wrinkle Noodle at the Cow Palace in 1977.

The left's long romance with "revolutionary violence" -- aka terrorism -- is actual insurrection, writes Glenn Reynolds.

We live in ugly times -- made uglier, and ever more violent, by the institutional left.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller didn't mince words this weekend: "There is a large and growing movement of leftwing terrorism in this country," he declared on X.

"It is shielded by far-left Democrat judges, prosecutors and attorneys general. The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle . . . terror networks."

Progressives like Stephen King shrieked "extremist!" in response, but example after example backs Miller's point.

In Chicago on Saturday, a mob of protesters surrounded ICE agents on a routine patrol, ramming their vehicle and boxing it in with 10 cars to frustrate immigration enforcement efforts.

Chicago officials allegedly ordered the city's police to stand down and not assist the federal agents -- even though one of the "protesters" was armed and shots were exchanged.

Disturbed Staten Island teen seen bloodied on gurney as he's charged with murder for allegedly decapitating mom's boyfriend

Armed resistance to US government officers executing the law, with police refusing to back them up? That was no accident.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker didn't condemn the violent resistance, but he did condemn the feds.

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Sen. Charles Schumer openly threatened the Supreme Court, saying Kavanaugh would "pay the price" for overturning Roe v. Wade, shortly before Roske's assassination attempt.

Democrat after Democrat openly called Trump a fascist, a dictator and a mortal threat to "our democracy" -- and two different people came close to killing him before the 2024 election.

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Democrats are forever telling conservatives their "rhetoric" could lead to violence. Apparently they meant violence from Democrats.

As I said earlier: The Democrat-Antifa-Media Cult keeps making the case that political violence is acceptable if you're angry enough.

I don't think they appreciate that we on the right are thisclose to agreeing wholeheartedly with them.

And then won't that be fun for them?

Last week, Cracker Barrell cut ties with the advertising firm "Prophet" which advised it "Go Woke, Get Stoked!"

Cracker Barrel is ending its partnership with Prophet, the consulting firm behind its failed rebrand.

The chain faced intense backlash after unveiling a new logo and redesigned stores that longtime fans said stripped away what they loved most about the brand.

Cracker Barrel's restaurants, long known for their kitschy Americana décor, were recast in a style critics called drab and soulless.

The uproar grew after the company dropped its iconic logo of an elderly man leaning on a barrel.

A March press release said Prophet was hired to redesign Cracker Barrel restaurants and lead a new brand marketing campaign.

At the time, the company said: "In collaboration with Cracker Barrel, they are focused on shaping a new brand vision that will enhance market share while preserving the company's unique heritage. This new strategy will inform brand communication, restaurant redesigns, brand marketing campaigns and a redefined employee value proposition."

Separately, Prophet CEO Michael Dunn pledged $4 million in 2020 for the firm's DEI initiatives, saying the company would "bring in Black team members across every level of the firm," hire a DEI-specific recruiter and provide $4 million in pro bono work to social justice organizations, according to a 2020 blog post.

Fox News Digital found no evidence that Prophet's DEI commitments were connected to Cracker Barrel's rebranding.

Makes sense, right?

Not to effeminate anti-Christian liberal extremist David French.

Now, a reminder: New York Times columnist David French explained, just over a month ago, that the controversy over Cracker Barrel's rebranding was an absurd fake crisis ginned up by right-wing idiots who were just pretending that something had gone wrong at the company. Along with the Sydney Sweeney thing, he concluded that we were watching some "completely frivolous and meaningless cultural disputes," examples of the way "right-wing media both mobilizes its base and bends political reality."

If you believed that the Cracker Barrel rebranding was poorly done and would alienate the company's customers, you were falling for an invented reality that was completely meaningless and frivolous. Then Cracker Barrel fired a bunch of managers and its rebranding consultant, abandoned the rebranding, and apologized profusely, while its stock plummeted.

If you listened to French, if you trusted the op-ed pages of The New York Times to explain the world to you, your understanding of the most basic outline of factual reality was flipped over, turned precisely upside down. He was only wrong about literally every single detail, completely missing what was happening, what it meant, and what would happen in the near future as a result of it.

To listen to this idiot is to abuse your own mind, trapping yourself in the confines of an absurd house of ideological mirrors. He is inevitably wrong, completely wrong, reliably wrong to the point of absolute and unyielding madness.

Now, the twist:

David French, 2022: Churches are terrorist training centers, and churchgoing Americans are preparing to attack the country in a vast wave of right-wing insurrectionist violence. When you drive past one of the Lutheran terror cells, you're looking at the next 9/11, because here comes the Christian nationalist insurrection that they're prepping for in the pews.

People are wondering where the Dutch "men" are. The Dutch are among the tallest people in the world, but they're sad shriveled cucks for Islam.

posted by Ace at 06:37 PM

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