Featuring the Work and Ideas of the National Center for Public Policy Research & Project 21
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Able Americans Senior Advisor Melissa Ortiz was featured in multiple news outlets describing how people with disabilities were slaughtered during the Holocaust, and discussing how the same devaluation of these individuals continues to echo throughout health care today.
In a Washington Times commentary, Melissa wrote:
Ideas that were once reprehensible are again being embraced and championed. The twist is even more sinister this time. Murder is now called a compassionate choice. Medical Aid in Dying is thought to ease supposedly meaningless suffering, Euthanasia is now called Physician Assisted Suicide. Healers are again becoming killers simply to save insurance companies money and guard community resources. Money is calling the shots, not respect for all human beings who have something to offer simply because they are living….
As inflation rises and resources tighten, a stealthy move will be made toward mandatory euthanasia for people who are expensive to maintain or problematic to include – back to the “involuntary euthanasia” that culminated with the Holocaust.
In the commentary, Melissa shared her own personal experience advocating against this mentality during her recent cancer battle. She elaborated further when talking with OAN’s Stella Escobedo.
Project 21 Ambassador Philip Clay comments on the Tyre Nichols case:
Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work with my local police department and come to understand what goes into being a police officer, from passing selection to being on the road by yourself as a patrolman.
I’m not naïve enough to equate my hometown in Indiana to Memphis, Tennessee. I do, however, know that law-enforcement agencies have national guidelines and state agencies that work very hard to maintain the highest standards. The actions of five police officers do not represent the law enforcement community as a whole. Most officers these days are taught de-escalation, and the use of force is only necessary as a last resort. Officers are also often taught to de-escalate their fellow officers when they get too emotional. There is no excuse for what these five men did.
I ask myself though, where is the outrage for all black-on-black crime? Why are “leaders in the community,” like Al Sharpton, not vocal about the children who are killed in black-on-black crime on a daily basis in places like Chicago? As these “leaders” continue to vilify police and cause tensions to rise, they set these communities — and the police who are sworn to protect them — back another step. After seeing the horrible Tyre Nichols footage, I ask: Was it racially motivated? White supremacy didn’t cause this. Bad cops doing a bad thing did.
We see CNN and other media outlets race-baiting and inciting anger by saying police are racist. To the media, this situation cannot be simply tragic; there has to be a politically-motivated statement referring to “how racist policing is.”
Yet this incident mirrors gang violence far more than it does racially-charged beatings. These officers have no defense for the beating that they put on Tyre Nichols, and they deserve the charges being brought forth. There will likely be an investigation into the entire department, and these five might not be the only ones held accountable.
Regardless of the detestable actions shown in Memphis, we will still see men and women of all races, religions and creeds wake up and go to work protecting the very communities that are protesting against them. Terrorist organizations like Antifa will use this tragedy to race-bait and burn down cities, doing irreparable harm to the very communities they claim to support.
We have to raise up the officers who are doing their utmost to defend and protect, and work to weed out those who would break their oath. We have to stop looking to put the blame on everyone else and start looking at giving real leaders a chance to rebuild our morally decayed community.
As Memphis authorities released footage tonight of Tyre Nichols’ fatal interaction with police, Project 21 Chairman Horace Cooper slammed the timing of the video’s release:
I of course would have handled this differently…. There was no reason that it needed to come out Friday night. If from a legal perspective it had been determined that this video needed to be released, you could pick 8 am — maybe even 7 am — on a Monday morning, and allow people a chance to have an orderly processing of this.
What has happened instead is that we’ve given people two things: One, time to print up flyers so that they can engage in the unlawful agitation that I fear we’re going to see. And secondly, you have no natural end point because it’s Friday night — whereas if you started this in the morning you might be able, by 10 or 11 am, to have people fully express themselves without it having to turn into something dangerous.
On last night’s episode of the Fox News Channel program “The Ingraham Angle,” Project 21 Chairman Horace Cooper praised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for controversially blocking an African American studies curriculum proposed for state public schools:
Left progressives… exploit division in America.
Black kids — like white kids and all the other kids in America — we need excellence. We need high standards. Gender studies, queer studies… actually will cripple our people when they’re getting ready to enter the workforce. It will cripple their ability to get into a good college that could change their world.
Congratulations and thanks to Governor DeSantis for understanding: We need high standards. We’ve got to let the bigotry of low expectations move to the back of the political bus.
Jamie Dimon talks a good game about running JPMorgan Chase by rewarding merit to achieve profit, rather than by woke ideology.
But his chief lieutenants aren’t listening.
Instead, they’re changing the rules, lying and stonewalling in order to debank conservatives and to avoid having to respect center/right interests, all while they kowtow to the hard left’s agenda.
Someone — Congress? — needs to make sure Dimon knows what’s going on at his own shop, and hold him to account.
Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard has more in today’s RealClearMarkets column.
And if you haven’t, make sure to sign this petition to let Chase know you oppose what it’s doing.
Amazon has announced the end of its AmazonSmile charity program, but as Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard told The Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neil, the retail giant is not likely to change its posture toward many charities favored by conservatives and people of faith.
Writes O’Neil:
Many nonpartisan organizations have criticized Amazon for using the SPLC, including the Free Enterprise Project at the National Center for Public Policy Research, the New Tolerance Campaign, and the Coalition for Jewish Values, a coalition of 100 Orthodox Jewish rabbis.
“Amazon, like so many other companies, has rhetorically embraced ‘stakeholder capitalism,’” Scott Shepard, director of the Free Enterprise Project, told The Daily Signal in a Thursday phone interview. While Amazon Smile “allowed all the customers, all the stakeholders, to contribute in the ways they wished, the lefties who run Amazon didn’t like the distribution.”
Citing the “Housing Equity Fund,” as “coded language for distributing to its favored racial and ethnic groups,” Shepard claimed that Amazon “immediately promised to start providing its giving in racially and ethnically discriminatory ways.”
“Unless Amazon has publicly and absolutely promised not to use the ‘hate’ source of the SPLC, they’ll be going back to using them, just as we already know that they’re taking away this program from individual choice, customer choice, so they can return to partisan left-wing goals,” he added. “If Amazon wants to challenge that characterization in any way, it ought to release the distribution of where customers were sending their money.”
Read the entire article here.
In a RealClearMarkets commentary, Free Enterprise Project Director Scott Shepard reviews the annual Global Outlook of investment giant BlackRock, and marvels at what he finds:
In its 2023 Global Outlook, BlackRock rued the close of what it called the Great Moderation, the 40-odd years since the policies of Reagan and Thatcher brought forth from the malaise of inflation and stagnation a great flourishing of human creativity and productivity, and the concomitant upward rise in just about everyone’s standard of living.
BlackRock also implicitly revealed its significant role in ending the good times and its continuing contribution to the revival of a new age of economic sclerosis.
Read Scott’s commentary in full here.
One week after participating in “A Roundtable on Unaffordable Energy Costs” with members of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee, Project 21’s Donna Jackson has summarized her remarks in a striking commentary syndicated through InsideSources.
Donna, who serves as Project 21’s director of membership development, writes in part:
If you think high energy costs are hard on the middle class, imagine how they affect those struggling to reach the middle class.
As the Biden administration marches on with its energy price-boosting climate agenda, it is disproportionately hurting the most economically vulnerable Americans and stifling their dreams of a better future….
Environmentalists talk about a climate catastrophe, but what about the human one? Much is said about the environmental effects and the need to save the planet, but very little is said about the economic effects of government remedies on human beings….
It should be obvious that poverty — not pollution — is a greater threat. But the Biden agenda is willfully blind to this reality.
Read Donna’s commentary in full here.
Chase Bank has been very naughty.
It has refused to sign, or even to meet with some of its largest investors about, the Viewpoint Diversity Business Index, the first comprehensive measure of corporate respect for free speech and religious liberty.
But Chase’s problem isn’t confined to just laziness or negligence. It also seems to be actively discriminating against groups with which its woke leadership disagrees.
Chase has recently “debanked” fossil fuel companies, firearms manufacturers and even a religious liberty nonprofit headed by former U.S. Ambassador Sam Brownback.
The Free Enterprise Project has launched a petition by which YOU can tell Chase to respect customers of all viewpoints. Sign here to stop Chase’s assault on free speech and religious liberty.
Donna Jackson, who serves as the director of membership development for the National Center’s Project 21 black leadership network, will be participating tomorrow morning in a roundtable before the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce.
The event is entitled “A Roundtable on Unaffordable Energy Costs.”
The event will be live-streamed here starting at 10:30am ET.