Editors Note: You will notice a pattern in virtually all of the items in today's Hotline. The left lies and lies and lies – about nearly everything.
1) No, Climate Change Didn’t Cause the Canadian Wildfires
One of many reasons not to take the climate change alarmists seriously is they keep resorting to cockamamie narratives and spurious arguments to create a sense of impending crisis.
Here’s a typical example from the media, in this case, a USA Today headline:
The story includes a preposterous tweet from Catherine McKenna, Canada's former climate minister: “Climate change is real and having a huge impact on Canadians right now with forest fires burning across the country."
Right, except when we checked with the fact-checkers at Climate Change Depot, here’s the reality check:
You can see from the chart that yes there have been a high number of fires this year up north. However, last year there were a record LOW number of fires.
2) The Real Price Tag for Green New Deal More Than Twice What We Were Told
Speaking of green fraud and fake science, remember when the Green New Deal giveaways in last year’s "Inflation Acceleration Act" were supposed to cost $270 billion over 10 years? Well, you can scratch that. Last month when Republicans went to repeal these corporate welfare subsidies in their debt limit bill, the price tag had risen to $570 billion. Now the Joint Committee on Tax has released a more complete update, and the cost is up to $663 billion – 145% higher than the official score last year:
How did the Democratic scorekeepers get it so wildly wrong last year before the bill passed? Did they lie to us? Either that, or they are incompetent.
What do you bet that the NEXT estimate will have an even higher price tag?
3) The NAACP’s Bogus Claim That Florida Is Hostile to Blacks
Since the theme of today’s Hotline is "Liberal Lies", we now turn to the whopper from the NAACP claiming that Florida is: “openly hostile toward African Americans.”
Here are some statistics gathered by CTUP senior fellows John Fund and Wendell Cox:
In 2021, 49.2% of blacks owned their own home there - Florida ranks eighth-best among the 50 states. California’s black homeownership is only 34 percent.
Florida’s black unemployment rate was 3.4% in early 2023, while black unemployment rates in Illinois and New York were 10.5% and 8.0%.
Florida attracted more new black residents from other states than all but four other states from 2010 to 2015 and from 2015 to 2020, for a combined total of 60,000. Only Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada gained more black residents.
There has been a huge African-American exodus out of the more progressive states. A net 392,000 African Americans left New York for other states between 2010 and 2020, while Illinois lost a net 185,000, California 132,000, and New Jersey 100,000.
In summary, things are better in Florida for African Americans than in progressive states on important measures of prosperity and opportunity. The NAACP knows better, but chose to take cheap shots.
It’s been more than three years since COVID hit, but we’re still learning more about how so-called experts and scientists deceived us with phony “studies.”
Retraction Watch, a website that keeps tabs on the retractions of articles in science journals, reports that 330 COVID-19-related articles have been retracted due to a lack of scientific truthfulness and ethical guidelines.
Gunnveig Grødeland, a senior researcher at the Institute of Immunology at the University of Oslo, says many of the authors violated ethical principles or used sample sizes that were too small – a mistake that any high school science student learns to avoid.
The Lancet claimed that hydroxychloroquine caused an increased risk of heart arrhythmia and even death in patients with COVID-19. The article was retracted, but only after the Norwegian government and the World Health Organization (WHO) used it as an excuse to end research into the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine.
You’ll recall that from the beginning of the pandemic, all of us were chided if we voiced any dissenting views and told we must “follow the science.”
These troubling findings of academic fraud only sadly reinforce what we have been saying for years: today in America almost all “science” is “political science.”
5) Quote of the Day: The Education Every Child Deserves and Few Receive
Throughout the land, we are witnessing an important resurgence in classical education.
Prudent parents should take the initiative to learn what the classical approach entails. They must, because the purveyors of traditional, unionized, bureaucratized, government-owned, monopoly schools do not recommend it. Many of them, in fact, despise this classical resurgence with a seething hatred as nearly every facet of the movement is disrupting the status quo.
By objective measurements of academic success, Liberty Common School in Fort Collins might be the state’s best public school.
Liberty Common is a classically-oriented, K-12 charter-public school that recently concluded its 25th-anniversary year. In every year of operation, its students have performed either at or near the top as determined by various metrics.
People ask me all the time to describe the innovative things we must be doing at Liberty to achieve consistently superior results. Our answer: There is virtually no innovation here. We’ve become quite wary of anything in public education cloaked as “innovative.”
The general notion there are astounding new insights on learning to which the greatest educators of antiquity were somehow oblivious is a dubious proposition at best.
Classical education starts with the natural-law premise that human nature does not change. It’s the same premise that undergirds America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It’s how we can assert as Americans that all men are created equal and are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights.
It is no coincidence America’s founders were classically educated. Eloquent poets of freedom, their words were informed by common knowledge using vocabulary of precise and potent meaning. Their careful phrases inspired a nation and mapped the longest sustained period of prosperity in the history of human civilization. These founding principles inspire American students today; at least, they should.
Former Colorado Congressman Bob Schaffer and now president of the Liberty Common School in Fort Collins, CO.
