Growing up in China, I never heard of parental rights. Every child in China belongs to the State. After Mao used urban youth Red Guards during his Cultural Revolution, he forced them to be re-educated in the countryside. My uncles were sent hundreds of miles away from home for ten years, and my grandparents had no say.

As a student, I was subjected to forced indoctrination in government schools, centralized curricula, testing, data collection, secret “Student Files,” and mandatory vaccinations.

Student Files for each child included grades, speeches, behaviors, rewards, violations, punishments, physical health, mental health, vaccine shots, religion, family members inf. No parents were allowed to see what was in these files.

Our school day started with chanting “Long Live CHAIRMAN MAO, LONG LIVE CCP” and red songs like “My parents are dear, but Chairman Mao is dearer.” We were required to memorize Mao’s quotations, writing dairies reviewed by teachers, report on our family and neighbors for anti-gov speeches, and confess our own incorrect thoughts.

There were posters in schools and communities in front of your eyes everywhere.

Our music and art classes were about showing affection and loyalty to Mao, demonizing the oppressors. I never questioned anything. It was effective in convincing people that if you see something and hear something daily, it must be the truth. I would see Mao’s face in the clouds and in the fire under our wok, smiling at me. I thought Mao was a God until he died when I was 12. That was my first awaking moment.

What happened in China is happening here in the US. I opposed Common Core, centralized education standards, testing, and data collection over ten years ago. I enrolled my kids in a charter school where I served as a board member and a chair. Today’s school kids are being indoctrinated with CRT, the 1619 project, SEL, DEI, Gender Ideology, LGBTQ agendas, etc.

We want to thank Lily Tang Williams for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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Kids are encouraged to keep secrets from parents, health centers in schools keep separate files, and teachers are not required to inform parents about a child’s gender identity change. Some School teachers and counselors are political activists who brainwash and train kids to be SJWs.

Parents are being sidelined, if you dare to challenge age-inappropriate books in schools, you are called bigots, and book banners. If you go to school board meetings speaking up against their indoctrination, you could be a “domestic terrorist”.

The fact that I must go to the State House and Senate to testify to support parental rights bills is concerning. It is absolutely necessary, though. It clarifies and protects one of the most ancient of all human rights – parental sovereignty.

The deepest human bond is between parents and their children. This bond must be protected from being torn by any political agenda. In America, children still belong to their parents, not the government, not the institutions, not any collective groups.

In America, children belong to their parents, not state. Parents have the right to choose the best suitable school for their children. Parents must have the right to know what their children are taught in school, Parents should have the right to access all their kids’ personal data, health records, and make informed medical decisions with/for their children.

Schools should not be political battlefields or indoctrination centers. Schools should be places of joyful learning focusing on academic subjects like reading, writing, math, and science — not places of social engineering with divisive political agendas and age-inappropriate content.

Girls should always feel safe to use their bathrooms, boys, too. Girls’ sports should not be crushed by men who identify as women.

Parents, grandparents, and good teachers, our kids need us more than ever. They are the most vulnerable, innocent, and precious humans and need our love, guidance, and protection.

Local town elections, including school board elections, are coming up on March 12th. Show up to vote for the candidates who represent your values and respect your parental rights. Make it your priority to get involved in your kids’ schools and their lives at home, including their social media activities.

If your state can’t pass a parental rights bill, try to work with local districts or towns to protect kids. At the Federal level, make sure your candidates will pledge to sponsor or co-sponsor a bill to abolish the DOE and return education to local control and parental control. That is what I will do when I get elected.

We need concerned citizen groups willing to be fierce, Mama and Papa Bears ready to protect the children. Your children, families, and freedoms depend on this. Take action now before it is too late.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBoBBQUpa4U&t=225s
Lily Tang Williams
Republican Congressional Candidate NH02
www.lilytangwilliams.com
Reminder: Content about candidates or by candidates is not an endorsement by GraniteGrok.com or its authors.

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Several Gmail users have emailed me to say they got the newsletter this morning. I checked, and we are in 100% compliance with Gmail’s requirements for now, so if you use Gmail and don’t see it today, it is in your spam folder (mine was).

Compliance with Outlook, Comcast, and several other mail services has also improved, but they are not 100% compliant, so we will continue to work on that.

As a reminder, we now are delivering two newsletters daily. The AM version will have the posts from the previous evening. The PM version will have the posts from that day.

I’m excited to learn that we are making progress.

Again, check spam, and then, if you are still not receiving it and know you signed up, please let me know.

steve@granitegrok.com

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One could be forgiven for mistakenly believing that Jennifer Mandelbaum was running unopposed in the Rockingham District 21 special election. The 32-year-old contender for a seat in the NH House of Representatives, whose race reaches its conclusion on March 12, is virtually ubiquitous both online and in signage.

How has a hitherto unknown candidate in an obscure contest established such sudden name recognition? I suspect the answer is a progressive advocacy group known as 603 Forward, which has hosted public events with Mandelbaum and invested in the election, according to campaign finance reports.

Founded in 2019 by Lucas Meyer and Elizabeth Wester—both hotshots in the realm of liberal political causes—the youthful organization has quickly grown into a veritable factory of progressive candidates for state and local office. Since its inception, 603 Forward has boasted over 150 successful elections, an unmatched success rate for an NH advocacy group.

We want to thank D. S. Dexter Tarbox Jr. for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Steve@GraniteGrok.com.
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For his part, Meyer was well-equipped to launch an effective electoral machine. Not only was he a principal player in Chris Pappas’ Executive Council and Senate campaigns, the former Deputy Communications Director of the NH Democratic Party, and a consultant for the energy and tech industries (among others); he currently leads a public affairs strategy firm called Catalyst Advocacy.

Wester is likewise no small player in the world New England politics. Best known as the NH State Director for Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, the Massachusetts native is also an alumna of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and several Democrat congressional offices.

It should come as no surprise that both of these rather flourishing characters were also accomplished collegiate athletes — a vigor they have seemingly carried into their hale and hearty careers in activism. But to call 603Forward a purely grassroots organization would be an error. Like most movements, its true origins can be traced to the ever-entangled and endlessly-moneyed powers.

Although it solicits donations, 603 Forward is mainly funded by grants. In fact, grants were the sole source of funding used to launch the group in 2019, according to its 501(c)(4) IRS filings.

From whom do these funds derive?

Reports from 2022 alone indicate that 603 Forward was the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash awards from leftist donor clearinghouses like the New Hampshire Progress Alliance (“NHPA”), Run for Something, and the Rural Democracy Initiative (“RDI”). Indeed, RDI awarded two grants to this and other progressive NH causes in the same year.

RDI boldly proclaims its ominous objectives in no uncertain terms:

“We establish multi-year relationships with grantees. We invest in efforts that have the power to change immediate statewide and local electoral, public opinion, and policy outcomes, and at the same time RDI extends our impact by building sustainable organizational infrastructure that will support rural people working to transform America—and therefore the entire country—for decades to come.”

A review of the states and communities targeted by the Rural Democracy Initiative (i.e. AK, AZ, GA, NH, NC, ME, MN, MT, MI, OH, PA, TX, VA, and WI) plainly reveals the ultimate objective of their efforts: to strike at the rural conservative bases in key swing states and establish an enduring liberal majority. Ignore the many platitudes they espouse about the country worker. Radical entrenched transformation is RDI’s actual ambition.

The origins of RDI itself are obscure, but not untraceable. One name emerges especially from amidst the fog: William Carter.

Carter is a West Virginian string musician and wealthy financial manager who operates the firm of McKinley Carter Wealth Services and is a key founder of RDI. Carter’s business manages approximately $2 billion in total assets between its purported 5,262 clients, placing it among the largest firms of its type in the United States.

Naturally, Mr. Carter is not the only apex predator in the jungle of donor dollars. Run for Something and NHPA are backed by several shadowy nonprofits connected to billionaire megadonor George Soros (including the North Fund, Open Society Policy Center, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund).

But RDI’s expressed mission to develop a wide-reaching “network of donors” bent on “transforming America” seems to be the most keenly focused on impacting local elections in communities like NH, and Carter is an apparent fountainhead of this comprehensive program.

Billionaire-hating liberals be warned: you are far from immune to their influence.

That rich men have coopted our essential civic processes is no bombshell. On the conservative side, the Koch family’s Americans for Prosperity (AFP) operates a relatively powerful branch in NH, which advocated for Nikki Haley during the 2024 Primary almost to the point of nausea.

But the comparison is hardly equal. While 603 Forward is successfully recruiting and advancing candidates at all levels of government, conservative-minded political prospects are hardly supported by the Republican Party itself. While liberal syndicates have effected hundreds of local victories over the course of a few short years, the conservatives have all but completely abdicated their role in the process.

During the hotly contested November 2023 election, even the local Republican Committee hosted no recruitment events or candidate forums, had no social media activity, published no direct mail, posted very limited signage, and offered no sample ballot to voters in contested cities like Dover and its environs. Meanwhile hardly any Democrat candidate was lacking in any essential support.

The subsequent liberal victories in diverse House special elections—and now, the accelerated rise of Jennifer Mandelbaum against her GOP challenger—evidence the same pattern.

Where is our knight in white satin armor? Will our state ever bring forth a conservative Meyer, Wester, or Carter who will effectively organize GOP money and energy into a fruitful statewide operation? There is no reason why both sides should not be able to participate with equal strength, if certain Republicans will consent to desist in their genteel fantasies about American society and agree to truly involve themselves in the necessary civic mud.

If Republicans fail to learn the lesson of past defeats, the sway of local elections will ever more incline away from the right. It’s behind time for Republicans to learn from their shrewder Democrat counterparts by recruiting, training, and supporting bankable candidates.

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The New Republic was gobsmacked by a 2022 report that claimed only 5-6% of plastics entering the recycling stream in America were actually recycled. Most of them are relocated until they end up in landfills, incinerated, or in a turtle’s nose photo-op.

We should blame Big Oil.

Among the biggest plastics producers in the U.S. are ExxonMobil and Shell. Shell opened a giant petrochemical plant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, in 2022. On the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, it admitted that costs for the project had soared 130 percent past the original estimates. An investigation by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that, in the first year of the plant’s operations, its polyethylene units—which convert ethylene into tiny plastic beads—were shuttered as often as they were operational. Shell announced this week that it would be pulling out of talks to build a new petrochemicals plant in Basra, Iraq, having said it’ll cut down on “mega projects” like the Beaver County facility.

The gig is up. Thirty years of knowing that recycling was just a lie to protect the plastics industry has been exposed. The petrochemical cat is out of the single-use thin film bag. We have you where we want you. Except you don’t.

Recycling hasn’t worked for years, not just for plastics. Considering all the moving parts and processes, it is cheaper and less carbon-intensive to use new and bury or burn the old.

And that island of floating plastic bobbing about in the ocean that no one can find is a byproduct of recycling. Much like all the other bad things happening to the planet, most come from Asia, where a lot of America’s recycling has traditionally ended its life cycle. In other words, it would be better for the oceans if we buried or burned it, but the New Republic’s author never goes there.

Incinerators are notoriously bad, says the Climate Cult, but we have a better chance of using them to generate electricity and finding stack scrubbing technology to pull out impurities in the exhaust than we ever had of making recycling a lower carbon footprint endeavor.

Then there’s the biggest question of all. If plastics are not or cannot be recycled (even if it makes economic and emissions sense), what do we replace them with? Wood, cardboard, glass, or metal.

Any guesses as to how much more carbon-intensive those are than plastics individually or in total? Manufacturing, transportation of raw material and finished product (they weigh a lot more), and what about disposal? You can recycle cardboard, some glass, and metal, but the post-consumer process is an emissions bitch and not at all cost-effective, so most of that will end up in landfills, too.

And if you thought reusable shopping bags were carbon-intensive (or more likely didn’t know or pretended it was a conspiracy theory, just like how recycling was a lie), wait until they can’t make them with petrochemicals.

You can talk about environmental injustice until the genetically modified lab meat cows come home. This transition will make everything more expensive, which, the last time I checked, was precisely what the Climate Cult wants. If people can’t afford it, they use less, which aligns nicely with the left’s admission that this is what they want and the reality that they’ve made things like food, electricity, and water exponentially more pricey as a matter of policy.

The real problem, aside from an unhealthy obsession with hating big oil and affordable living, is that they hate you. People are the biggest problem, and it’s one the globalists have been working on. What do you think Medically Assisted dying is all about? They make you miserable, convince you that death is what’s best for the community, and then recycle your organs into elites whom they are convinced will do more with them than you ever could.

And you can’t do the transplants without a lot of unrecyclable single-use plastics (medical waste), so the New Republic is either yanking their chain or yanking their own. You decide which.

The post An Inconvenient Truth About Recycling appeared first on Granite Grok.

I just read today’s “Judy Aron Report,” which is a great thing to do the day after the House meets. One of many reasons to encourage others to do the same is that she captures most of the items of great public interest.

One of those things is enemy camp member and former Speaker Shurtleff’s taking of the gavel and his motion to suspend the rules for his late-season and election-year “feel-good bill.”

I have yet to know of anyone who disagrees that the Harmony Montgomery tragedy was a terrible thing. I’m sure we all can agree that many changes need to be made as a result, but the nuts and bolts of those changes are likely where there’s disagreement. However, there’s plenty of material on that for separate discussions.

I’m here to discuss Rep. Arlene Quaratiello’s newly deceased bill, HB 1308 (relative to parent access to children’s library records), as a “post-mortem,” if you will.  You might remember my previous article on parental rights and Library Lewdness and another on how YOU are the (library’s) CUSTOMER. For your “reference,” to use some “libraryspeak,” tune into 1:11:01 in this video when Arlene’s bill comes up.  Arlene took the mic and made some more points that I didn’t even think of, such as the dastardly UNFUNDED MANDATE.

Then, Queen Heather, whom I’ve previously discussed before, made her retort, defending the ITL committee recommendation.  When done speaking, she “refused to yield” for a question at 1:18:50, which reminded me of two occurrences on the “other side of the wall” that happened yesterday.

At 3:59:30, Senator Gray asked Senator Twitley if she would yield, and she acted like her law degree came from the Lionel Hutz School.   Obviously, she has never watched C-SPAN.  I recommend watching her buffoonery for yourself.  Then, later on, at 4:13:08, Senator Avard had a question for Altschiller after her pearl-clutching diatribe, and she refused.  I’d sure hate to be in a road rage situation with any of those three angry women, even if YIELD signs were facing them, but I digress.

Back to Arlene. You heard in her speech that she requested the ITL be voted down so another amendment (addressing the opposition’s issues) could be introduced. As a lay observer of both chambers, I thought it was etiquette to allow for discussion of new ideas because I’ve observed it happening before in a bipartisan manner, but that’s just me. Sadly, HB 1308 died in a 194-170 roll call vote.

So in keeping with the topic of reactionism, we have the new Shurtleff bill that does nothing for the political process, but the lame duck Damn Emperor did commit to signing it.  Interesting.  Remember the prognostications of Chris Buda. And then there’s the Uniparty, um, I mean gun hater Rep Meuse collaborating with House Criminal Justice Committee Chair Terry Roy in sponsoring HB 1711, which does not resurrect the lives of retired Franklin Police Chief Bradley Hass or any of the Lewiston victims next door in Maine.

So, just a thought here, but let me first say that I do NOT encourage anyone to build a bomb. It is important to get that disclaimer out of the way, so consider it said.  What if you’re a parent and you suspected that your kid went to the library and checked out “How to Build a Fertilizer Bomb” by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, and your request for such records was refused?  That is, after all, what the American Library Association (ALA) would want librarians to do.

But wait a minute. What if there was an EXEMPTION for any kid not in any subset of “LGBTQABCDEFG,” as Chris Salcedo would say?

Town elections are coming up, and you might consider asking your library trustee candidates if they would agree to stop paying dues (your tax dollars) to the ALA.

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Climate “warriors” and animal rights activists are out in far-left field on cows and livestock farming. The attacks against cows and agriculture have become so ubiquitous that a nearly universal brainwashing has succeeded in conditioning consumers and academics to simply believe cows are bad for the planet—all cows, all the time. But this is the exact opposite of the truth and indeed pushes humanity toward great peril: There is a reason European farmers are rising up in revolt. Ultimately, these activists are clamoring for their own destruction through totalitarianism and starvation. What’s needed is a recovery of actual farming.

I am not defending industrial farming. For a century, America has watched academics, government agencies, and corporations shrink family farms in the name of progress. Ignoring soil experts like Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry, the technocrats pushed for consolidation of farms, destroying waterways, pushing small families into poverty, and packing more and more animals into tighter and tighter spaces for “productivity” and “progress.”

As the animals sickened under such conditions, the same groups peddled antibiotics, hormones, and other chemical “solutions” to maintain profit margins. The activists who claim humanity must now abandon all animal consumption are non-farmers who have fallen for a triple scam against cows and small farms:

1) They make it sound as if all cows were raised industrially. This enables animal rights activists to use the most egregious animal treatment to slander all farming. It also allows climate alarmists to condemn all livestock because industrial ag concentrates plumes of water, air, and soil pollution into crises not present with traditional regenerative agriculture.

2) Activists also claim livestock is a human health problem. This, too, is built on decades of carb-pushing propaganda that falsely claimed eggs and milk were evil and that red meat causes cancer. Increasingly, it appears that the surfeit of carbohydrates is the culprit and that grass-fed meats are much healthier than grain-fed. A much greater health threat is presented by glyphosate, atrazine, and a plethora of toxic food (and packaging) contaminants, but corporate America would much prefer to target and scapegoat cows.

3) Both groups join together in the simplistic claim that the only solution to the problems technocrats and corporations created by consolidating natural agricultural systems into artificial, industrial death camps is for the exact same groups of technocrats and corporations to rescue humanity using GMO cropping in lieu of cows and other livestock.

One quite typical and typically absurd article recently called to “recogniz[e] the reality that stopping consuming animals and animal byproducts greatly benefits animals as well as the planet.” Both claims are dubious, yet this article touts the usual talking points:

More people eating vegan diets is backed by research confirming the significant impact it would have on planetary health just as much as consumer health, per the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

From the risk reduction of certain cancers, dire diseases, and chronic conditions to the compassionate sense in knowing that a vegan diet does not involve the suffering or use of animals for human consumption, the vegan diet is the clear standout amongst a crowded and muddled field of modern diets.

Related criticisms of cows for their flatulence display either utter ignorance or a deliberate scheme. Cow burps are accompanied by cow manure, which is a vital fertilizer that, when properly fed to soil, causes more methane and carbon dioxide to be sequestered than the cow ever created. The alternative crops we are told we will eat are to be raised using GMOs (saturating the soil with more glyphosate and other toxic chemicals) and synthetic fertilizers that release nitrous oxide and other pollutants (urea is manufactured from methane!).

The technocratic math doesn’t add up. Small wonder the genuine farmers of the world are standing up in droves in Europe: they see the destruction of their livelihoods and the ecosystem by those feigning its rescue to seize yet more power.

If humanity keeps following misinformed (or duplicitous) people into the ignorant dependency and environmental destruction of this faux eco-cause, perhaps it is well deserved—one ignores one’s food at one’s peril. But this ignorance threatens to sweep all before it aside, not just through totalitarianism (to “save the planet” we must sacrifice all individual liberties) but because expanding humanity’s industrial ag diet will drench the land in neonicotinoids which will kill the bees, atrazine which will kill fish and saturate groundwater, and a host of other chemicals yet to be created to fix the problems these and other man-made disasters cause.

If raising cows humanely is good for people and the land, it’s also good for the cows. Not all industrial livestock practices are as inhumane as the activist agitators claim. It is unpleasant for humans to imagine being housed in a crate, but farrowing pens save piglets’ lives—even veterinarians support them. But not the activists, who believe (as with hunting rights and wildlife management by biologists) that their moral claims are superior to what farmers or hunters, or veterinarians or wildlife biologists, know about animals.

I raise animals traditionally. They never miss a meal, are always with water and housing, run on green pastures, raise their own young, and are slaughtered here where they were born with zero suffering. Those who lump this form of animal husbandry together with industrial factories are either dishonest or profoundly uninformed. Farmers do not enjoy taking life in order to eat well and live: it is an ancient practice entailing humility, reverence, and gratitude.

Climate and animal rights activists may unwittingly further the aims of those who seek to seize control of all food (and its “equitable” distribution”) in the name of saving the world. The World Economic Forum, which seeks to lead the world into yet greater technocratic industrial agricultural dependency, is populated by “partners” who have been among the worst actors in destroying farming, the ecosystem, and animal welfare: Dow, Monsanto (now Bayer), Cargill, Syngenta, JBS…. The list is hundreds of consumer-poisoning corporations long.

This global coordination of corporate “stakeholders” is served by climate/vegan activists, begging Big Brother Ag to rescue them from carbon dioxide, while sparing farm animals from slaughter. But it is not the traditionally raised animals who need rescue: While the vegan/climate alliance lumps soil-building animal husbandry in with factory meat production, the industrial masters were busy at work. New “plant-based” products are highly processed, adulterated with dubious chemical additives, costly, and not very flavorful.

Most of the humans who embrace this baloney about climate-killing cows and cow-killing humans have eagerly thrust their necks into a parallel industrial dependency and blind trust as the factory animals they seek to liberate. Chomping against nature’s bit to expand industrial food production in the name of saving either animals or the planet is a fool’s mission, begging for servitude. I do not say this here to condemn but to spare these well-intentioned but misinformed people the consequences of what they are seeking.

The technocratic destruction of America’s farms (documented in Wendell Berry’s seminal work, The Unsettling of America) pushed millions of Americans into cities for work, where they are disconnected from the soil microbiome upon which the human companion (the stomach) depends. Inhaling toxic air, crammed into compact housing, feeding on plastic-wrapped factory fare trucked into the cities, drinking a long list of unpronounceable chemicals in their tap water, more and more Americans are waking up to their Orwellian enslavement and embarking on homesteading journeys, or at least trying to reclaim a responsible relationship with their food.

In the cities, the vegans and their climate warrior allies dine on styrofoam-packed vegetables raised with tasty glyphosate and atrazine (a ubiquitous endocrine disrupter that imitates estrogen). These consumers do not rebuild soils like cows, and their regenerative masters do, but they advocate for more regulations against farmers. They strive to protect bees from suffering by embracing policies that will extinguish all bees; they embrace no-animal policies that, in the name of animal welfare, will end all livestock animals being alive—and with them, the manure upon which plant agriculture has always depended will vanish.

Sickened by toxic food (and perhaps a deficiency of vital amino acids), big-ag consumers will need more medications to counter the ill effects of their unnatural diets. No worries—the same technocrats are available to proffer more drugs, just like with the CAFO cows. Drugs for obesity replace exercise; bottled water is teaming with microplastics; new antibiotics may be effective for a little while longer. Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence on the corporations that have long damaged the ecosystem and human health.

My cows and sheep have much healthier lives and much greater freedom than these self-enslaved human consumers. My livestock do not require rescue from a generation of people so disconnected from farming that they are attacking the natural systems upon which their future health and food security depend.

My animals are that future.

The post Night Cap: In Defense of Livestock and the Errant Motives of Those Who Attack Cows…. appeared first on Granite Grok.