Phil Orenstein

By Micah Morrison

Presidential races are critically important, but no matter who helms the Oval Office after the 2020 election, New York City will face enormous challenges brought on by Covid-19 and years of mismanagement by Mayor de Blasio. Crime is rising, social disorder is accelerating, the city economy is in tatters, and our schools are in deep trouble.

I’ve seen this up close as a proud resident of Queens, chief investigative reporter for the watchdog group Judicial Watch, and a member of the Queens District 28 Community Education Council. The CECs are part of New York City’s school governance structure, a middle ground between parents and the Department of Education. There is a CEC for every school district in New York. Our D28 CEC supports 40 elementary and middle schools—more than 40,000 kids—in Central Queens.

I recently wrote in the New York Post that during my time at the CEC, I’ve seen a community that is filled with moderate, thoughtful people. But there’s also a contingent of hard-core “progressives” intent on imposing their agenda on the city. They are led by a truly radical schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, and a mayoral administration aiming to ram through a left-wing educational agenda under the banner of “diversity.”

Today, the stakes are rising, because de Blasio and Carranza know they are running out of time.

2021 will bring the most consequential New York City municipal elections in a generation. Open positions include mayor, city comptroller, a majority of City Council seats, and the influential Manhattan DA’s Office.

District 28 is at the center of the radical push on education policy. Last year, Carranza’s DOE introduced a “Diversity Planning Process” that turned out to be no true process at all, and a mockery of diversity. But they did have a plan.

Kids, it appeared, would be moved to different schools to achieve a racial balance. Parents were aghast. Would there be busing? How would moving children fix school-funding issues?  What about the Gifted & Talented programs? What about the SHSAT—the Specialized High School Admission Test for entry to the city’s top schools? It turned out that while G&T and SHSAT were not directly linked to Diversity Planning, Carranza had plans to scrap those too, in the name of “equity.”

Carranza has been open about his agenda. “We see [the Covid-19 crisis] as an opportunity to finally push and move and be very strategic in a very aggressive way what we know is the equity agenda for our kids,” he said in an April 16 address.

In District 28, the community revolted. We slowed down Carranza’s plan. The pandemic led to an additional pause. But my reporting for the Post uncovered big City Hall money behind the diversity push and the apparent intention to impose radical change—enforced diversity, an assault on G&T and SHSAT—in the coming months.

It’s true that fault lines of racism and inequity run beneath the social topography of New York City. But solutions imposed from the top down will not work. Traditional American conservatism recognizes that imperfect as we all are, we can work together to form a more perfect union.

At the CEC, I introduced a resolution to scrap the mayor’s diversity planning process, pausing it for a year, until the pandemic passed, and starting over in a way that celebrates the diversity of Queens. The Left denounced me and my effort failed in a close CEC vote.

In 2021, all New Yorkers will get to vote. Republicans, conservatives, and embattled moderates need to come together to offer compelling alternatives to the programs of the Left that currently dominate New York City politics. In 2021, if we fail to act, those programs will grow much more powerful.

Micah Morrison is chief investigative reporter for Judicial Watch and a member of the Queens District 28 Community Education Council. He can be contacted at micah@micahmorrison.com      

By Phil Orenstein

Roger Stone’s trial was a Stone-cold case of abuse of justice and due process at a time when Americans are crying out for justice. Now, after his federal prison sentence was commuted by the president, the feds are coming after him again. They never stop abusing justice to attack President Trump and his loyal Republican allies, in their failed attempts to undo what they couldn’t do at the ballot box in 2016 and now in 2020, as voter enthusiasm mounts for our president.

Roger Stone, senior campaign advisor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Trump, gave us a taste of some “Stone Cold Truth” as keynote speaker at one of the past Lincoln Dinners of the Queens Village Republican Club. It was his personal account of the political establishment’s attempt to remove President Trump after he was elected in 2016 in “the largest case of political espionage that makes Watergate look like small potatoes.”

Stone, the loyal defender of our president, was prosecuted as a victim of a political witch hunt. He was arrested and a trial ensued for his “crimes” of standing up for President Trump and not caving in to the threats of his inquisitors of the Mueller investigation aimed at sending him to die in the Gulag.  This was a Stalinist show trial.

How do they justify the pre-dawn raid with more than 20 FBI agents armed with automatic weapons, with CNN, the American Pravda, filming the spectacle on nationwide TV, to arrest Roger Stone as the #1 enemy of the State? They don’t send 20 FBI agents to arrest a murderer! Without evidence of a crime, presumed guilty before the trial, which was fixed, the prosecution, fixed, the court, the judges, the jury, the media all of which were fixed, in an effort to get Stone to turn on the president, to lie, in order to collect evidence for Mueller’s Russia collusion witch hunt. They will do anything to overturn the legitimate election of Trump.

The special court of Salem Massachusetts convened the infamous Salem witch trials, where you could be accused, prosecuted, and hanged for practicing witchcraft whether there was evidence or not. An accusation of being a witch was enough criminal evidence. Accusations of being a communist in the McCarthy era could ruin your reputation and send you to prison. People have no rights in high government commissions and are judged guilty before the trial begins.

Stone’s alleged crimes were prosecuted in a fake government court replete with liberal activist Judge Amy Berman Jackson, Obama and Hillary Clinton operatives acting as prosecutors, and a partisan jury.  It was a bogus government investigation of a political prisoner, in a kangaroo court that found Stone guilty before the trial without evidence of a crime, where he had to prove his innocence by squealing on Trump.

The show trial was based on the false premises that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is a Russian asset, that Wikileaks is a Russian front organization, and Stone collaborated with WikiLeaks. This was the core of the failed narrative that the Trump campaign was in collusion with Russia to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, all of which is 100% rubbish. WikiLeaks is a big thorn in the side of our government by publishing deep secrets they don’t want American voters to know. It’s a key part of our government’s ongoing political war against our president, who poses a great threat to the Washington deep state, the globalists, the lobbyists, the special interests, and the Democrat party itself. They don’t care about America, they don’t care about you, they don’t care about our Constitution, they don’t care about justice. All they want is to preserve business as usual to maintain their own power and control.

So they went after Stone to confess to his alleged crimes, and tell his inquisitors what they wanted to hear, that Trump put him up to this. Smear Trump and you’re off the hook. But Roger Stone is an American Patriot, and he would not lie to save his own skin.  So they punished him severely.  They sentenced a 67-year-old with underlying respiratory problems, to rot in a federal prison with coronavirus outbreaks, for 40 months which is a certain death sentence. 

Cop killer Steven Chirse was recently granted early release from prison due to the coronavirus epidemic. Criminals are being released in droves in crime-ridden Democrat run cities. Murderers are being released. But Stone is treated worse than a murderer. They sent him to prison to die, like a political prisoner in Stalin’s Russia. Like the Soviet court system, criminals are let out, and if you don’t fit their narrative, they send you to the Gulag. They’re all Stalinists – the Mueller Special Counsel investigation, the judge, the courts, FBI, CIA, the media – they got rid of the rule of law and people who don’t fit their narrative, to give the state absolute power.

They wanted to destroy a human life to get to Trump. You wouldn’t want your worst enemy to go to jail with Covid. But where is the uproar from the silent majority? Why aren’t more good people demanding justice for Roger Stone, as the DOJ inspector general is now re-investigating his sentencing? Why weren’t more people screaming that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime? Where are all the social justice lawyers, hypocrites that they are? Paging Clarence Darrow who famously said: “You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom?”

Where are the good people of this country standing up for a person, whom they may not like, but still deserves equal justice, because it could be you next. Stone was framed and they sent him out to die.  Stone received no justice, but the greatest threat is coming to all of us. You will not receive justice under the new Stalinist Democrat regime. We must all stand up for Roger Stone and true justice, and vote in the most important election of our lifetime!

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Phil Orenstein is the President of the Queens Village Republican Club. Established in 1875, it is America’s oldest Republican Club.  www.QVGOP.org   Historian, Jerry Matacotta, founder of History Seminar Series at Queensborough Community College was the advisor for this article.