The video displayed in the tweet is a Tik Tok of two adult women teaching what appears to be a female toddler to twerk while onlookers recorded and encouraged the behavior in the middle of New York City.

The video has what sounds like a robotic voice overlaying the footage, which says, “We all need this confidence in life.”

There are no circumstances in which this behavior would ever be acceptable, and it sickens me that I even have to write about this topic. However, I feel a moral obligation to expose the sexualization and exploitation of children. I have a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who would exploit some of the most vulnerable people in society. Anyone who thinks that teaching a child to dance in a sexual manner is acceptable behavior is a depraved person who should be locked away where they can’t hurt anyone.

Standing against child exploitation shouldn’t be an unpopular opinion, and it should be universally accepted that it is neither morally nor culturally accepted to exploit kids sexually. I am all for personal liberty and each individual living in whatever way they see fit, but that doesn’t include taking advantage of a toddler and calling it “sexual freedom” or “cultural pluralism.”

I am not the only person outraged by this dumpster fire some try to pass off as dancing. Many Twitter users were quick to express their disgust with the video.

Freedom means living how you choose as long as it is not at the expense of another individual’s right to do the same. We cannot expect to remain a free society if we do not remain a virtuous people. I do not believe that a person necessarily has to be a Christian to live a moral life; however, I do feel that having faith certainly helps to cement someone’s moral compass.

Daniel Webster, an early American Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and author of the famed Webster’s Dictionary, articulated the importance Christianity plays in establishing the bedrock of a civil society when he said,” The Christian religion – its general principles – must ever be regarded among us as the foundation of civil society.” He further established this idea when he said, “Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.”
It is not a theocracy I advocate for, but instead a rebirth of the basic principles of Christianity, which allowed  the moral conditions which birthed our nation. In this sort of environment, the sexualization of children would be unthinkable. In fact, it is because our nation has forgotten what true love is that this sort of behavior is tolerated.

True love doesn’t take advantage of children who do not understand what they are doing. A proper understanding of love would motivate us to call out evil for what is and to protect those who can’t defend themselves. However, this behavior doesn’t surprise me when we live in an age where films like “Cuties” are celebrated.

Some who read this article may criticize me as a religious zealot, but one doesn’t have to have faith to think that teaching children to dance provocatively degrades the moral condition of America. Behavior such as this has no place in any civilized nation in our modern world and should be condemned. I hope that these women who took advantage of this girl would be identified and locked away so that they can no longer exploit children and that we would return to a place where actions such as these wouldn’t even make the news cycle.

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Jake Dima 

Tickets to Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s online birthday party fundraiser cost up to $10,000, according to an invitation for the event.

The governor’s “Virtual Birthday and Holiday Reception” includes a price tag of $10,000 for those wishing to attend a private online reception with Cuomo, according to a flier obtained by the New York Post. The high-dollar ticket also includes admission to the main event for friends and acquaintances, according to the flier.

The Democrat’s main online event will feature appearances from Whoopi Goldberg, Ben Stiller, Henry Winkler, Robert DeNiro and Rosie Perez, the Post reported.

The event, which is also a fundraiser for Cuomo, will also charge $5,000 for six friends of the governor to attend, $2,500 for three people, $1,000 per guest to the main reception and $50 for young professionals and activists, according to the flier. The online party follows Cuomo’s actual birthday that was on Dec. 6, when the governor turned 63, the Post reported.

The Democrat shuttered indoor dining in New York City on Friday amid a sharp increase in coronavirus cases throughout the state, according to the New York Times.

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Thomas Catenacci on November 9, 2020

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer appeared to violate the city’s social distancing guidelines while celebrating former Vice President Joe Biden’s apparent victory Saturday.

Mayor Bill de Blasio was spotted taking photos with New Yorkers while Sen. Chuck Schumer addressed a crowd, even taking off his mask at one point, video showed. Large groups of people gathered to celebrate in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, New York City, and Los Angeles after several news organizations declared former Vice President Joe Biden the winner of the presidential election.

“Congratulations, President-elect [Joe Biden] and Vice President-elect [Kamala Harris]!” De Blasio said in a tweeted statement accompanied by photos of him close to others. “New York City stands ready to work with you to heal our country and set us on a better path.”

Schumer, who is the minority leader of the Senate, appeared at a celebration outside Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York with a Biden campaign sign. He then removed his mask while in the crowd to make a short speech, video showed.

“Let’s send Donald Trump back to Florida, we don’t want him here anymore in New York!” he said in the video.

New York City has enacted “public health social distancing restrictions” and face covering rules. The city also created a portal where anybody can submit a “mass gathering complaint” when they witness a large crowd violating coronavirus rules.

“Social distancing restrictions include: Keeping 6 feet away from others (non-family group members),” the city’s official guidance said.

De Blasio first issued a state of emergency in March as coronavirus spread rapidly in the city and the state of New York. More than 24,000 people have died from coronavirus in New York City while more than 275,000 have tested positive for the virus, according to data compiled by The New York Times.

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Mary Margaret Olohan on October 12, 2020

Schools have not become the super-spreaders that officials feared, according to Brown University economist Emily Oster.

“It’s now October,” Oster wrote in an Atlantic op-ed. “We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19.”

Oster wrote that she has been collecting data on 200,000 children in 47 states in collaboration with school principal and superintendent associations as well as data scientists at the technology company Qualtrics. This data, which is from the last two weeks of September, found that students had an infection rate of 0.13% and staff had an infection rate of 0.24%.

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Modern Love on Amazon Prime perfectly depicts the realism and romanticism of New York City. Artistic films are usually found in independent movies because they don’t appeal to popular viewers enough to go mainstream. However, Modern Love walks the line between being artistic and intellectually interesting while being something that you can easily binge-watch on a lazy day at home. All of the 8 episodes revolve around love, but not from the traditional stereotypical perspective of love that our society is accustomed to.

They explore how choosing life even when pregnancy comes at a less-than-perfect time can still be beautiful. And how relationships don’t have to be perfect or ideal at all times to still be good or worth the effort of trying. But at the same time, acknowledging some relationships just do not work and can be strangling to those involved.

A flame from the past may shed light on the coldness of a situation, or the opportunity of rekindling the warmth of a current relationship. One of the important intricacies of this story is that the past flame was real, but still in the past. It’s a memory, not a future.

In one cringe inducing episode, a girl goes on a date with an older male colleague. She is suffering from severe daddy-issues and sees in this older gentleman the “dad figure” that she is missing in her life. He misconstrues her feelings toward him and eventually takes romantic steps. She’s outraged and responds by angrily telling him that all she wanted was an innocent dad relationship.

This is where the show gets it better than I expect from modern Hollywood. The man is embarrassed, not angry. He is a little lost because he so obviously misread the girl, but he is not depicted as a complete babbling fool that drags his knuckles and only responds to immature humor or violence. In other words, he is a multi-dimensional male character that is neither reduced to being feminine nor a dumbed down stereotype of a man.

In another episode, a couple is adopting a baby from a pregnant homeless woman. One of the men gets upset with the free-and-easy style of the pregnant woman who is staying in their apartment before she has the baby. During the argument, she lets out a brutal indictment of him,

“You read The New York Times and bitch about Trump but you mean none if it. You’re a hipster liberal.”

He more or less accepts that he is a “hipster liberal”, apologizes to her, and helps bring the baby into this world. At the end of it, he is explaining to his little girl why her Mommy doesn’t live with them and only visits every so often because she is like an ancient hunter-gatherer, but they stay in one place because they’re capitalists.

“We wouldn’t survive a second in the wild because there are no restaurants or Wholefoods or therapists or hospitals for when you get sick or books for you to read or movies for you to watch.”

Sometimes, love is not romantic at all. Modern Love shows us this in multiple different ways and through many different relationships. Women and men deal with dating, mental illness, pregnancy, marriage, and life in general. In the end, these people of New York City are portrayed with all their flaws and charms, and all the stories are interwoven in the common threads of love and humanity.

The post Realistic Romanticism: A Review of Amazon Prime’s “Modern Love” appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

To add insult to injury, the head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, Ed Mullins, claims that Majors was buying marijuana in the park and that is what put her in this dangerous scenario. He explains how he believes that recent limits on enforcement of marijuana laws in New York City contributed to this deadly situation.

What I am understanding is that [Majors] was in the park to buy marijuana….We don’t enforce marijuana laws anymore. We’re basically hands-off on the enforcement of marijuana. I understand the mayor made statements that this is surprising on how this can happen in New York City….I really have to question what world he’s living in to think that this is surprising, when we are watching the city slowly erode, with shootings, stabbings, an increase in homicides and, most importantly, a hands-off policing policy.

Majors’ family is taking offense to Mullins’ comments because, “…they intentionally or unintentionally direct blame onto Tess, a young woman, for her own murder.”

Nick Gillespie at Reason sees Mullins’ words as yet another reference to the old “reefer madness” hysteria, “…in which devil weed is the source of all forms of evil and criminality, even when it remains illegal.”

I can’t define what Mullins meant in his comments. I don’t read hearts and minds and, honestly, I don’t want to. But I did listen to the entirety of his radio interview. It doesn’t strike me as blatant victim-blaming. In actuality, he is taking way more swipes at NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio.

Furthermore, his comments are not textbook “refer madness” stuff because he never once says that these young teens went on a murderous rampage because they took a few too many hits of the devil’s lettuce. In context, Mullins blames the violence on the city (including Majors’ murder) – on somewhat of a lawless society that allows offenders to spin down a more violent hole.

There are many things that Mullins said in the interview that are questionable. Maybe he does hold to disproved parts of “reefer madness” and blames victims for being victims of violent crime, but I didn’t get that from this one radio appearance. He could be giving listeners a probable reason that an eighteen-year-old would be alone in a questionably safe park at night. But don’t take my word for it, listen to it here.

The problem is that NYC law enforcement might have given up on enforcing laws against marijuana consumption and trade, but it is still not legal to be bought and sold. (There is some liberalization on patients using it for medicinal purposes, but its effects are minimal).

In the same way alcohol prohibition enriched criminals, the marijuana black-market just proliferates and seedy characters take advantage of the fast cash they can make while providing consumers with a product that they demand.

The post NYC College Student Stabbing: Reefer Madness Murder? appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Shelby Talcott 

Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife announced Tuesday morning that she is supporting a program that aims to help LGBT youth because she understands the struggles as a former lesbian.

Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s wife, said that she “identified as a lesbian” when she came to New York in 1977.

“When I came to New York City, long ago back in 1977, I identified as a lesbian, so I know intimately the struggles that young people have had,” McCray said on NY1 according to the New York Post. “I was not rejected by my family like so many of these young people are, but it’s really difficult.”

The new program pairs with the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development and the public-private NYC Center for Youth Employment partnership. It works toward helping 16- to 25-year-old “runaway and homeless youth who are often LGBTQI” by giving them paid internships, job training and mental health support, the Post reported.

McCray authored a piece titled “I am a lesbian” in 1979 for Essence magazine where she wrote about her experience as a black lesbian.

De Blasio married McCray in 1994. She said in 2013 she was able to marry him “by putting aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in.”

Although McCray is married to de Blasio, she does not put labels on her sexual identity according to a 2016 Broadly interview with the mayor’s wife.

“I believe there is a fluidity that we are only just now growing to be more accepting of and aware of because people do like to put people in boxes. … I am just living my life,” she said in 2016.

This article is republished with permission from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Image: Bill De Blasio

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Michael Bastasch on April 17, 2019

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a video depicting a utopian future because of the Green New Deal.

• Democrats take control in 2020 and create a “society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane too,” Ocasio-Cortez says in the video.

• Energy experts and economists are skeptical the Green New Deal is possible or even desirable.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released a video depicting a where the Green New Deal turns the U.S. into a democratic socialist utopia, complete with a bullet train from New York City to D.C.

The video depicts a future where the Democrats take the Senate and White House in 2020 and enact a Green New Deal that ends up creating a “society that was not only modern and wealthy, but dignified and humane too,” Ocasio-Cortez says in the video.

Ocasio-Cortez says Americans need to close their eyes and “imagine” a Green New Deal society before it can happen. Meanwhile, energy experts and economists are skeptical the Green New Deal is possible or even desirable.

“We need to be able to close our eyes and imagine it,” Ocasio-Cortez says in the seven-minute cartoon. “We can be whatever we have the courage to see.”

Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal in February, bungling the bill’s roll-out and creating confusion over her signature legislation. Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey introduced a companion bill in the Senate.

The Green New Deal calls for achieving “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years through a massive green energy build-up, including high-speed rail and retrofitting every building. The bill also calls for universal health care and job guarantees.

The video comes after the Green New Deal fell flat in Congress. The Green New Deal bill got zero votes in the Senate when it was brought to the floor, and parts of it were rejected by House Democrats during a committee hearing — including a “no” vote from Ocasio-Cortez.

Ocasio-Cortez teamed up with Justice Democrats, anti-capitalist author Naomi Klein and The Intercept, a news organization. Ocasio-Cortez said she’d been collaborating “for months” to get the video finished.

Part of the video focuses on Ileana, who Ocasio-Cortez calls “a true child of the Green New Deal.” Ileana gets a union job restoring wetlands in Louisiana as part of the Green New Deal — at this point there’s a labor shortage because of how massive an undertaking the Green New Deal is, says Ocasio-Cortez.

(Somehow all this work, including dismantling pipelines, is accomplished without gas-powered construction equipment.)

Ileana eventually becomes a teacher, then gets elected to Ocasio-Cortez’s seat in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez is, of course, recounting all this while riding high-speed rail from New York City to Washington, D.C.

Of course, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies, according to Ocasio-Cortez. Sometime in the future, Hurricane Sheldon hits southern Florida and “parts of Miami went underwater for the last time,” the congresswoman says.

However, Ocasio-Cortez says Americans were “lucky” to have enacted a Green New Deal and moved away from fossil fuels when they did — though climate models show the Green New Deal would have no material impact on projected warming.

“But as we battled the floods, fires and droughts, we knew how lucky we were to have started acting when we did,” Ocasio-Cortez says.

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Tim Pearce on January 31, 2019

Amazon will not remain neutral on its New York City workforce’s attempts to unionize after the company builds one of its two headquarters in Queens, Amazon Vice President Brian Huseman said, angering residents and pro-union activists.

Huseman fielded questions from New York City council members Wednesday during a meeting at City Hall. Council Speaker Corey Johnson peppered Huseman on his company’s intent to fight unions after accepting a $3 billion payment in tax breaks and subsidies to locate a new facility in the city, The New York Post reported.

In a response to a question from Johnson on whether Amazon would stay neutral in any attempts by employees to unionize, Huseman replied, “No, sir, we would not.”

Amazon employs roughly 5,000 people in New York state, non of whom are unionized, according to Huseman.

The City Council also directed ire at New York City’s top development officer James Patchett for negotiating a deal that did not include a promise by Amazon to stay neutral in all unionization efforts. Instead, the deal negotiated gives preference to a few select unions.

“Shame on you, shame on you,” Councilmember Van Bramer said, who represents Long Island City, where Amazon’s facility will be built. “It’s a union-busting deal from the beginning.”

Unions are split on the $3 billion Amazon deal. The Building and Construction Trades Council backs the project for the jobs it could provide for its members.

The Teamsters union wants the deal trashed if Amazon “will not change its ways” of “mistreating workers and violating their rights.”

Protesters at the City Council meeting jeered at Huseman and city and state officials defending the project. Protesters unfurled anti-Amazon signs with the phrases “Amazon delivers lies” and “Amazon fuels ICE deportations,” referring to the company’s work with federal immigration forces, The New York Post reports.

“You’re against unionizing the damn facility, you’re against unionizing the motherf***ing facility,” one protester shouted.

He was escorted from the building after the outburst.

Amazon’s allies in the Building and Construction Trades Council organized a counterprotest outside the building to stunt the effects of the anti-Amazon forces.

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