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Anderson Cooper: 14-Year Old Bullied To Death “Even In Sadness, Reaching Out To Help Others”

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Anderson Cooper covers the tragic suicide of 14-year old Jamey Rodemeyer, and profiles Jamey’s It Gets Better video, the anti-gay hate comments he received via his Formspring account, and all the professional anti-gay people who are fighting to stop any help for LGBTQ students. Panel discussion focuses on agenda of anti-gay bigots who work to ensure LGBTQ kids are left without any support or resources.

“This is Jamie Rodemeyer, just 14 years old, a freshman at Williamsville North High School in Buffalo, New York. Jamie routinely blogged about his troubles. Just 11 days ago he wrote something online.” So says Anderson Cooper introducing the segment. “He said, ‘I always say how bullied I am, but no one listens. What do I have to do so people will listen?’ One week later, this past Sunday, Jamie committed suicide.” Cooper adds, “Even in his sadness, Jamie was reaching out to help others.”

Via CNN:

WISEMAN: I also think what’s happening is, and you heard it in one of the clips, is that — and I believe it was the politician from Kentucky, which is that he’s saying, if I have this correctly, that the children who are bullying, if they believe that homosexuality is wrong and that’s their value system, then they should be allowed to express that against other students.

And what that means is, is that they are able to be mean and cruel to other students. And that is an extraordinary thing to say. What you’re saying is these values that we think are so important and are Christian, which I know many Christian people who don’t believe this whatsoever, that those values enable children to bully other children and justify and reinforce the notion that it’s to OK to bully other children.

It is unbelievable that that would be the case coming from our leaders and from adults that our children need to be able to depend on to be safe at school.

…

COOPER: Rachel, to those who say that bullying is just a teenage rite of passage, what do you say?

RACHEL SIMMONS, AUTHOR, “ODD GIRL OUT”: I say that person has never been to a school or certainly is not listening. We live in a — where 60,000 — stay home every day because they’re too afraid to go to school. And anybody who spends time in a school and talks to kids knows that there is a culture both of everyday cruelty but also of protracted campaigns that kids cannot escape.

And when there are no rules at schools, when there’s no consciousness and when there’s a denial of the problem, kids cannot be safe and they cannot study.

COOPER: Rosalind, there are those who say — and we had just heard from some of them on the program — who say, look, you know, this is a way to spread the homosexuality or acceptance of homosexuality in schools throughout the country and some parents are saying, look, I don’t feel comfortable with that.

WISEMAN: Well, I think that’s ridiculous. Because we are not — when we talk about kids being safe from bullying, we are not talking about a pro-homosexual agenda unless a pro-homosexual agenda is that we think all children deserve to be treated with dignity. And if that is the pro-homosexual agenda, then I, as a straight person, are — I am completely for it.

And I would hope that we would all be behind that kind of agenda. So to think that we can in any way be against kids being safe for some kind of so-called agenda besides kids being safe makes absolutely no sense. And I believe that adults in every way when we have kids that we — are important to us or we have relationships with, that we have got to get behind the — beyond the politics of this and look at our children and be able to go where they are and to be useful to them and meaningful to them so they can trust us that we can be safe for them.

Also,

COOPER: But Rosalind, and there is the idea that the school district in Minnesota where they have what they call a neutrality policy.

WISEMAN: Right.

COOPER: Where they’re not using specific words of gay or lesbian. You say that’s not effective.

WISEMAN: Well, it’s not only not effective, it’s actually totally counterproductive to everything that Rachel just said. Because neutrality in the face of the — of an abuse of power is not neutrality. It is siding with the bully. So if you are going to — if you’re going to believe in what’s called neutrality policy, what you’re really believing is a way for kids to go after other kids and do nothing about it.

COOPER: Rachel, do you agree with that, that you have to use these terms, that neutrality doesn’t work or so-called neutrality doesn’t work?

SIMMONS: I do think neutrality doesn’t work. I find the whole thing shocking. I mean we don’t send American workers to their workplaces in this country saying, just do your job and we’re not going to protect you if something happens to you.

Likewise, we can’t send children to school in this country assuming that we’re just going to teach you or we’re not going to protect you if something happens to you. These are not children. We’re not educating part of the child. We have to be mindful of the whole child if we really want to do justice to our education system and to the young citizens of our country.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qQwdeJuvcPs%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

Our deep thanks to Dave Evans of for this important clip.

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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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2 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

“Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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News

Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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6 hours ago

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May 2, 2024

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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9 hours ago

on

May 2, 2024

By

President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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