It's been nearly 12 years since a young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with an AR-15. rifle and two handguns and opened fire, killing 20 first graders and six faculty members before turning the gun on himself. Survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting—kids who watched their friends and teachers being murdered in their classrooms—are now graduating from high school, and they have complicated feelings about the milestone and the 20 classmates who aren't joining them. A private graduation ceremony was held at Newtown High School on June 12, 2024, with 335 graduates including around 60 Sandy Hook survivors. Some of them shared their thoughts with journalists in the days leading up to graduation.“I think we’re all super excited for the day,” Lilly Wasilnak, 17, shared with the AP. "But I think we can’t forget ... that there is a whole chunk of our class missing. And so going into graduation, we all have very mixed emotions — trying to be excited for ourselves and this accomplishment that we’ve worked so hard for, but also those who aren’t able to share it with us, who should have been able to.”"The shooter actually came into my classroom," Emma Ehrens, 17, told CBS News. "So I had to, like, watch all my friends and teachers get killed, and I had to run for my life at six years old."According to the AP, Ehrens was one of 11 kids who survived from Classroom 10. She was able to escape with a group of students when the shooter paused to reload his gun. Five students and both teachers in the room were killed.“I am definitely going be feeling a lot of mixed emotions,” Ehrens said. “I’m super excited to be, like, done with high school and moving on to the next chapter of my life. But I’m also so ... mournful, I guess, to have to be walking across that stage alone. … I like to think that they’ll be there with us and walking across that stage with us.”The survivors who are graduating this year are dealing with both the exciting what ifs of their futures and the tragic what ifs of their past as they remember their slain classmates."Just growing up with having the fear, and the what ifs of what could have happened if I stayed? Because I was, like, I was going to be next," Ehrens told CBS News."So even going to prom, you think, well, what if they were my prom date? Or, you know, what if they were my significant other? What if they were able to walk the stage with me," survivor Ella Seaver added.“As much as we’ve tried to have that normal, like, childhood and normal high school experience, it wasn’t totally normal,” Grace Fischer, 18, told CBS. “But even though we are missing ... such a big chunk of our class, like Lilly said, we are still graduating. ... We want to be those regular teenagers who walk across the stage that day and feel that, like, celebratory feeling in ourselves, knowing that we’ve come this far.”That desire for normalcy conflicting with their not normal childhood is part of what makes graduation such a bittersweet experience for these young people. They had so much taken from them at such a young age, and that trauma doesn't just disappear. Some of the students expressed that they are looking forward to moving away from Newtown and building a life in which the school shooting doesn't define them.Sandy Hook was unique in that the victims were so young and there were so many of them, but the survivors aren't alone in their experience. In the years since the Sandy Hook massacre, the U.S. has seen dozens more school shootings, and there are thousands of school shooting survivors dealing with related traumas. Many of those survivors have become outspoken anti-gun-violence advocates, pressuring officials to enact stronger laws to keep guns out of the wrong hands. But for now, the Sandy Hook graduates are celebrating a big life milestone, just as they—and their 20 missing classmates—should be. Watch six of the Sandy Hook survivors share their stories on Good Morning America:

Even in the healthiest of work environments, child actors are thrust into adult life before they’ve really had a chance to grow up. They don’t have the coping mechanisms for dealing with the stresses of fame, nor do they have the skills or authority to advocate for themselves when they are being abused. The obvious answer to this problem is to provide protections for these kids. But let’s face it: exactly how to go about creating these protections isn’t so obvious. Hollywood is only just beginning to address these long-seated issues.However, Ariana Grande, certainly no stranger to the highs and lows of finding fame at a young age, recently suggested that one solution would be “mandatory therapy” for younger actors.Grande, who got her big break on the Nickelodeon show “Victorious” when she was just 14, reflected on her time on the network while guest appearing on Penn Badgley’s Podcrushed podcast. This interview comes not too long after the shocking revelations made in the docuseries “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” where former Nickelodeon stars accused former producer Dan Schnieder of a litany of abuses, including but not limited to sexual harassment and racism. Grande did not appear on the docuseries, footage from “Victorious” was often used as an example of inappropriate content for children. @discoveryplusuk It’s got everyone talking. #QuietOnSet #TheDarkSideOfKidsTV #nickelodeon #danschneider #90skids #arianagrande #amandabynes ♬ original sound - discoveryplusuk "I think that’s something that we were convinced was the cool thing about us,” she reflected during the podcast. “That we pushed the envelope with our humor and innuendos. We were told — and convinced as well — that it was the cool differentiation. It all just happened so quickly and now looking back on some of the clips I’m like, ‘Thats… Damn, really?’”After “reprocessing” a lot of her experience around that time, she came to the conclusion that there should be “mandatory therapy” 2-3 times a week included in a young actors contract. “There should be an element that is mandatory of therapy, a professional person to unpack what this experience of your life changing so drastically does to you at a young age,” she said, adding that this should probably be used for celebrities of all ages.In addition, she thinks that “parents [should be] allowed to be wherever they want to be.”"A lot of people don’t have the support that they need to get through performing at that level at such a young age. But also, dealing with some of the things that the survivors who have come forward [have]... There’s not a word for how devastating that is to hear about. So, I think the environment just needs to be made a lot safer all around.” You can watch the podcast episode in full below:

Who’s more out of his mind: Hunter after a 72-hour crack bender or Joe after a good night’s sleep? President Biden strangely saluted the Italian prime minister at the G7 Summit on Thursday. Evidently, he mistook Giorgia Meloni for General Patton (or himself for Sergeant Slaughter). Later, perhaps hearing Dion singing inside his head, he wandered away from other world leaders observing a skydiving demonstration before Meloni corralled him. Video of the Bidenesque behavior called for a Sesame Street soundtrack: one of these kids is doing his own thing. The mystery seemed about as easy to solve as when Sesame Street would juxtapose three baseball players with a football player. It came as not the first time Biden embarrassed the people who voted for him in front of bemused foreign dignitaries. Last week at Normandy, the president tried to sit when everyone else stood and generally appeared unaware of his surroundings. Earlier this year, he talked about his discussions with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, about Jan. 6, 2021. Around the same time, he referred to interactions during the first year of his presidency with French President Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996. One cannot attribute his confusion regarding European politicians entirely to age. Recall that his first run for the presidency ended once he expropriated Neil Kinnock’s biography. He portrayed the British Labour Party Leader’s life as his own at 44. If he suffers from senility now, then he merely suffered from stupidity all those years ago. Hunter Biden, not much older when he met Lunden Roberts than the Joe Biden who identified as Neil Kinnock, suffered from his own mind-altering afflictions. Miss Lunden details some of the pitfalls of his habits in Out of the Shadows, a memoir set for August publication that the New York Post summarized on Thursday. The former strip-club employee and mother of Biden’s fourth child writes of a drug dealer named “Bicycles,” a bodyguard named “Big Country,” a sister-in-law who became his lover, and other Hunter Biden hangers-on. Biden, she said, showered (wisely?) a half-dozen times a day to scrub away the demons, kept drug paraphernalia at the mansion his father rented in McLean, Virginia, and exited an Amtrak to New York to randomly buy pants. A photograph accompanying the Post article appears the picture of unhealth. The party’s-over picture featured a hotel table holding up a quarter-gone handle of Tito’s, an empty 750 milliliter bottle of Stoli’s, an empty half-pint of Jack Daniel’s along with a twin with an ounce left, a Hershey bar wrapper, Hall’s cough drops, Tostitos queso, an empty Pellegrino water, utensils, strange resin, and, most disturbingly, two cartons of baking soda, which, if crack came in packaging, would appear as ingredient number two next to cocaine. The people consuming all those chemicals require rehabilitation; the table witnessing the bacchanal needs therapy. Not since Joy Behar last sat down has a piece of furniture elicited so much sympathy. Seeing Hunter Biden speak in 2024 gives the impression that drugs do not govern his life now as they did then. That’s a blessing. A judge suspending a prison sentence in his federal gun case contingent upon him passing periodic drug tests might most closely approximate justice. The remedy for Joe’s affliction comes in November (and Republicans hope it comes no sooner lest a less beatable candidate replace). Winning, like speaking without trailing off, now seems beyond this politician who never lost a general election in 11 tries. Awarding him four more years in the White House strikes as cruel and unusual punishment not only to the American people but to Biden himself. The post Joe Behaving Stranger Than Hunter on Yeyo appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Sen. J.D. Vance and Rep. Michael Cloud introduced the Dismantle DEI Act on Wednesday, which would eliminate all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and funding. Though the bill’s passage would be a significant legislative victory for Republicans, Democrats would also benefit, if only because their own political priorities have been slowed by President Joe Biden’s DEI policies.  DEI initiatives only make sense to the truest of believers in 2020–style race radicalism. On an ideological level, implementing racial preferences at the federal level cuts against the very premise of American equality. Similarly, it makes little sense not to hire the most qualified candidate for a position, regardless of factors like race or gender. And, on a practical level, creating and administering extensive DEI bureaucracies throughout an already bloated government creates additional expenses and new delays in federal action.  So far, the legislation proposed by Vance and Cloud has been discussed as an opportunity to bring some small shred of sanity back to our government.  “The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division,” Vance stated. “It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society.”   Heritage Action, the Heritage Foundation’s sister nonprofit advocacy organization, has voiced support for the legislation. Heritage Action Executive Vice President Ryan Walker said, “Contrary to President [Joe] Biden’s claims, DEI policies have nothing to do with equity or inclusion, and instead perpetuate the very discrimination and division the Left claims to be fighting.”  “DEI destroys competence while making Americans into enemies[. …] This ideology must be fought, and its offices removed,” said Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life director Arthur Milikh. They’re right. DEI is little more than state-sanctioned racism cloaked as social justice. The Dismantle DEI Act would apply to federal agencies, contractors who receive federal funding, recipients of federal grants, and educational accreditation entities. Additionally, the bill would ban DEI trainings and close the government DEI offices that administer them. It’s hard to imagine what military commanders will do without sessions on “male pregnancy,” or how nuclear engineers will move forward without required sessions about the “roots of white male culture,” which generated workplace norms like “hard work” and a “can-do attitude.”  Ending federally sponsored DEI initiatives would shave millions of dollars off of the federal budget. In 2023 alone, the Biden administration requested $83 million for DEI programs at the State Department and $9.2 million for the Office of Personnel Management’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility — in addition to the $16 million spent on diversity training for government employees.  Not only would the Dismantle DEI Act reduce the waste of taxpayer dollars, but it would also eliminate barriers to policy implementation. Ironically, eliminating DEI programs would accelerate Biden’s own priorities, which have been hamstrung by onerous diversity requirements.  Internal memos from the Department of Transportation (DOT), obtained by the Washington Free Beacon and publicized this week, reveal that Biden’s green energy agenda faces significant delays as a result of the White House’s DEI policies. The Biden administration promised to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030. A few years into the project, the DOT has only built seven.  “These requirements are screwing everything up,” a senior Department of Transportation staffer told the Free Beacon. “It’s all a mess.” The department must follow an executive order signed shortly after Biden took office, which mandates that 40 percent of the beneficiaries of “federal climate and environmental programs” should come from “underserved communities.” Additionally, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council provides oversight of ongoing DOT projects.  “These onerous diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements handcuff professionals from making proper evaluations and prevent the government/public from funding the most deserving projects, instead funneling money towards less qualified applicants,” the senior Department of Transportation official told the Free Beacon. Clearly, some government employees are waking up to the consequences of implementing DEI with Biden’s “whole-of-government” approach. But don’t expect a pragmatic response from Democrats to the bill proposed by Vance and Cloud. After all, when it comes to the Left, their playbook isn’t hypocrisy — it’s hierarchy.  Yes, Democrats could cut through significant red tape constraining their policy priorities by supporting the Dismantle DEI Act. But those priorities, climate or otherwise, aren’t nearly as important to progressives as the issue of race. In the end, it doesn’t matter much if the government isn’t working — as long as the right people are not working for the right reasons.  Mary Frances Myler is a contributing editor at The American Spectator. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022.  READ MORE by Mary Frances Myler:  Chasing Gender Euphoria Bishops Sue Biden’s EEOC for Mandating Employers ‘Accommodate Employee Abortions’ Even Portland Is Fed Up with Progressive Policies  The post Sen. Vance, Rep. Cloud Introduce Legislation to Dismantle DEI appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

We return to a persistent subject with the lead subject of today’s Five Quick Things — that being the utterly insufficient and generally useless quality of a majority of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate. I’ve said here and there, and I especially said it in the runup to, and promotion of, my 2022 book, The Revivalist Manifesto, that I no longer consider myself a conservative. I’m with the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson, who six weeks or so ago wrote a piece noting that the old “three-legged stool” of conservatism has devolved into a three-legged stool of abject failure. Self-styled conservatives, like the editors at National Review or the David Frenches and Quin Hillyers of the world, are the people who have consistently devolved the status quo by failing to ever go on offense or even to mount a vigorous defense of principle while the Left has aggressively broken down America’s cultural, economic, and political norms over the past 80 years or so. And now, after having run off the vast majority of their former supporters as the public has recognized how toothless the “conservative” leadership is, these tend to be the people pot-shotting not just at Donald Trump but, far more importantly, Trump’s supporters. I’ll confess that back in 2016 I was not a Trump guy. I was a Ted Cruz guy. But I was a Cruz guy for the same reasons the Trump people were for Trump. Cruz was the new kid in the Senate who insisted on pushing the GOP’s chips into the middle on a government shutdown to force the Obama administration to back off its left-wing aggressions, which looked a lot to me like the kind of brash, iconoclastic leadership we needed atop the Republican Party if we were going to get the proper level of backlash against the eight years of rapid decline in constitutional governance Barack Obama represented. Trump promised that, too. I wasn’t sold that Trump was truly committed to the project. But he did deliver, and so I’m with him even if I still from time to time see things I’d prefer not to out of his camp. The one thing the Cruz people and the Trump people, who have pretty much unified since the spring of 2016, agree on is that the Republican establishment, the “conservatives” who took Ronald Reagan’s legacy and dragged it through 30 years of Bush family mud until “conservatism” essentially meant starting stupid wars while surrendering on fiscal policy, the culture and corporate-fascist economics, simply cannot be the standard bearers of a future for the Right in America. My formulation, which I outlined in The Revivalist Manifesto and will expand upon in my next book The Revivalist Agenda, which I’m planning on having out for public consumption before this fall’s election, is to stop using conservatism as the word to describe the philosophy of an America First/MAGA movement that aims to drain the Washington Swamp and return our culture, politics, and economics to something productive and sustainable. The folks I’m describing, and I’m including myself in their number, obviously, are Revivalists. It’s not as evident as it ought to be in the House, because there simply aren’t enough votes for it in a paltry 219-vote GOP majority. Even still, most of the House Republicans are more Revivalist than conservative at this point. There was evidence of that Thursday in the meeting Trump had on Capitol Hill. But we’re still very, very short of the number of Revivalists we’re going to need in the Senate. 1. They Should All Be Lining Up Behind Vance, Lee, and the Others How is this not the open position of the entire Senate GOP Caucus? Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Senate Republicans on Thursday announced a hold policy on numerous President Joe Biden nominees in response to the 46th president’s “radical lawfare” against former President Donald Trump and other political opponents. Vance led an effort alongside Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and Eric Schmitt (R-MO) to block swift confirmation of roughly four dozen of Biden’s nominees throughout various positions of the government. This includes judicial nominees, a nominee for deputy undersecretary for the Treasury Department, and a general counsel nominee for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Under the blockade, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would have to waste significant time to confirm the nominees. Only five senators signed on to that effort. So far, at least of this writing, the other 44 haven’t said a word. My guess is that’s more logistical than ideological or political, and Vance and the others may have simply run out there with an announcement and others would have (and likely will) signed on. But Vance shouldn’t be the guy leading this. Mitch McConnell is the leader of the Senate GOP caucus. He should be doing it. But Morphine Mitch couldn’t be bothered. Maybe he’s busy sundowning. He hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt, though. McConnell has done everything he possibly can to sabotage the Revivalist cause, and even now, having declared his impending retirement as the caucus leader at the end of the current term (instead of just doing it now so the new leader can get a head start on charting a new course for the caucus and, more importantly, play a leading role in the GOP’s efforts to retake the Senate), he’s standing in the way. A couple of weeks ago, the Daily Caller had a story on the Republican senators who still haven’t endorsed Trump: Despite Trump’s positive polling and historic fundraising numbers since a New York City jury found Trump guilty on all 34 counts against him, there are still several Republicans who will not say whether or not they will be supporting Trump in November. The Caller reached out to every Senate Republican who has yet to endorse Trump, to ask why and if they would be soon. Here Are The Senate Republicans Who Have Not Endorsed Trump:  Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski Utah Sen. Mitt Romney Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul Maine Sen. Susan Collins Indiana Sen. Todd Young Romney, Young, Collins and Murkowski have all said they would not be voting for Trump in 2024. Rand Paul might get a pass since he tends to be pretty good on Revivalist policy items. The rest? Suspect. McConnell’s endorsement was tepid and forced. He’s done nothing to help the cause. We are so far past the point where new leadership is needed that it’s acutely painful. If you’ve read those stories in legacy corporate media outlets about how endangered Senate Democrats are hanging on to leads in polling against their Republican opponents in red states like Ohio and Montana and you’ve been scratching your head as to how that could possibly happen, it’s not complicated. Mitch McConnell is the least popular politician in Washington, and the average voter associates his performance with the concept of a Republican majority in the Senate. And the average voter is not wrong to do that. McConnell is the personification of the problem, to be sure, but he isn’t the whole problem. Most of the problem is the caucus itself. 2. The Southern Poverty Defamation Center Is Dumping Employees As Charles Barkley would say, this is just turrible: The far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center reportedly terminated a quarter of its staff Wednesday, weakening and perhaps eliminating two of its departments amid a restructure that heavily hit its union members. The SPLC “gutted its staff by a quarter,” the organization’s union posted on X. (Yes, this nonprofit organization has its own labor union. If staff get tired of protesting Alliance Defending Freedom, they can protest management, instead.) The SPLC told more than 60 union members, including five union stewards and the union’s chair, that they would be losing their jobs. “We are devastated for our union and our colleagues,” the union posted. This might be my favorite tweet of all time: Today, @splcenter – an organization with nearly a billion dollars in reserves, given an F rating by CharityWatch for “hoarding” donations – gutted its staff by a quarter. — SPLC Union (@SPLCUnion) June 12, 2024 Is anybody sympathetic to these people? I hope not. The dark lining to this brilliant white cloud is that the leftist agitators being let go by the greedheads at the SPLC won’t go and get real jobs. Last week I had a story at The Hayride about the Left’s reaction to the new city of St. George, a previously unincorporated suburban area here in the Baton Rouge area that recently became a new city after a decade-long fight: apparently, for citizens of a non-declining area to form a city is “white fortressing,” according to a pair of “researchers” for the Soros-funded Urban Institute, writing at Bloomberg. One of the two “researchers” is a Mexican female named Luisa Godinez-Puig (I’m not calling her a Mexican because she’s Hispanic; she’s a Mexican import whose law degree comes from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México). And before Godinez-Puig landed at her current job, she was on the staff of Ibram X. Kendi’s idiotic Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University as a doctoral fellow. Kendi had to jettison a whole bunch of people lately because the money is running out. Whether Godinez-Puig was one of them or not, she nonetheless migrated to the Urban Institute and went right on calling regular Americans racists from a new sinecure at a different left-wing pseudo-academic political shop. So all this really means for the unionized race baiters being evacuated from the SPLC is a new line on their resumes. Still, any suffering is good suffering where they’re concerned. 3. At Least He Didn’t Drop a Deuce This Time We don’t need to apply too much commentary to this: Joe Biden wanders off and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had to go wrangle him back in.. pic.twitter.com/CAzunBqDkZ — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) June 13, 2024 Can you imagine being Giorgia Meloni and having the “smart set” trash you as a right-wing loon, and then this potato-brained old man shows up to represent the United States, and the same “smart set” mob gives him the benefit of the doubt? That has to be irritating. One can’t help but think, though, that these persistent incidents — which are getting continuously more frequent and glaring by the day — won’t make for some growing problems for the Democrats. Stock up on popcorn and pudding. Or, as noted yesterday, beaver nuggets from Buc-ee’s, which might just be the official snack of Normie American schadenfreude in 2024. 4. Jake Sullivan Is to Blame for the Loss of the Petrodollar When the fallout from this really starts to hit, Sullivan, a longtime peddler of the Trump-Russia hoax and the architect of that disgusting mass lie told by some 50 intelligence community spooks about Hunter Biden’s laptop being Russian disinformation, is the one who should wear it. Sullivan was made national security adviser for having pulled off that Big Lie in front of the American people. Well, here’s how well that’s working out: The financial markets are bracing for disruption now that Saudi Arabia decided not to renew its 50-year petrodollar partnership with the United States, MSN reported. This opens the door for Saudi Arabia to sell oil and other goods — instead of exclusively in the U.S. dollar — in multiple other currencies, including the Chinese renminbi, and in euros, yen, and digital currencies such as bitcoin. Saudi Arabia’s shift to other currencies is expected to hasten the global movement away from the dollar. The contract, originally signed on June 8, 1974, expired on June 9, 2024, although the petrodollar system was established in 1972, when the U.S. decoupled its currency from gold. The 1974 security agreement that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia signed heralded close cooperation between the two countries by establishing two joint commissions, one on economic cooperation and the second on Saudi Arabia’s military needs. The United States’ goal was to motivate the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to ramp up its oil production and foster cooperation not only with that country but other Arab nations as well. We’re teetering on the brink of losing the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. When we do, we’re going to hit the federal government’s real debt limit — meaning that the financial markets will stop buying our government’s debentures. Sullivan was made the point man to get the Saudis to renew that deal, but the regime he’s a key part of made that impossible through stupid policy and worse diplomacy. What consequences should fall on him? The British used to shoot an admiral or two for gross incompetence, pour encourager les autres. I guess Sullivan can be glad he’s not British and this isn’t the 18th century. 5. The Best Ad of All Time This actually went up on local TV in North Carolina 15 years ago. I hadn’t seen it until a few days ago, but I couldn’t stop laughing. And it infused me with a deep love for my fellow man regardless of race. Surely it’ll have the same effect on you: The post Five Quick Things: Why Aren’t the Rest With J.D. Vance? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.