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Author: Anne Segal

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Anne Segal

Anne Sorock Segal is a market researcher and president of The Frontier Lab, a nonprofit organization that seeks to increase demand for freedom and revive a unifying American character using cutting-edge behavioral science methodologies.

What allegedly happened at a routine White House briefing yesterday may be the latest skirmish in the larger conflict between the D.C. insider class and outsider challengers. Tensions between legacy Washington, D.C., media and new-entrant reporters who have been granted access under the Trump Administration came to a head Friday in an alleged attack leveled at Gateway Pundit's Lucian Wintrich by Fox News Radio reporter Jon Decker. As reporters entered Friday's White House press briefing, witnesses reported that Decker loudly, and allegedly physically, accosted Wintrich personally, calling him a "Nazi," and saying of the site, "they hate blacks, Jews, and Hispanics."

Legal Insurrection readers are part of a small community of people outside the inner-city of Chicago who may be familiar with Joe Watkins, who passed away this week after a battle with cancer. We've published a few videos and interviews with Joe on this site, including Rebel Pundit's "Chicago Unchained," which reached more than 1 million views after it was first published in 2014: But readers may not realize that Watkins's outspoken denunciation of Democrat rule over the poor, black inner-city communities may have paved the way for enormous changes in the way our political landscape unfolds.

Common Core education standards, which use the "Race to the Top" grant program to enjoin states to adopt national education standards, is the mechanism through which the federal government is taking control over K-12 curriculum. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) recently referred to it as the "Obamacare of education." From Cato's Neal McCluskey:
...While Washington did not outright order states to adopt the Core, it did require that they promise to adopt standards common to a majority of states — a description fit only by the Core — to get maximum points in the $4 billion Race to the Top competition, held at the nadir of the Great Recession. After the vast majority of states had made that promise — but many had not won money — the Obama administration declared that, to get waivers from the hated No Child Left Behind Act, they would have to either adopt the Core most had already promised to use, or standards certified “college- and career-ready” by a public university system. Washington also selected and paid for Core-aligned tests — including the Smarter Balanced assessment used by California — that would be plugged into NCLB’s testing requirements.

Three weeks ago the Huffington Post published an article detailing the distress of transgendered parents who breastfeed, "The Troubling Erasure of Trans Parents Who Breastfeed." The article describes the way gendered pronouns and attitudes are excluding men who nurse, and the legalities associated with challenging the heretofore female-centric endeavor of breastfeeding. In particular, women who have had chest surgery and now identify as men, described how they are made to feel unwelcome in breastfeeding circles. Here is one example from Canada:

This past Wednesday night, GOP consultant Frank Luntz discussed the results of his "focus group" with Donald Trump supporters, concluding that their enthusiasm for the candidate is unshakeable. From the Washington Post to National Review and FOX News, much is being made of the focus group participants' unwavering support for Trump even when presented with negative ads and statements from the candidate, including Kasich's ad comparing Trump to Hitler. The wearying theatrics of Frank-Luntz "focus groups" are one of the speed bumps we viewers have to navigate during the election season. I am resigned to the fact that producers think someone still marvels at the "dials" and the Price Is Right aspect to it all. Why we shouldn't pay any attention to this focus group:

Over the past few weeks, Americans have had provided to them two new and diverse sets of emojis to reflect, more precisely, their exact physical characteristics: Latino emojis and curly-haired emojis. Zubi Advertising released the Latino-culture emoji keyboard and Unilever's Dove crafted the "curly-haired" emojis, both available to download for free. If I was feeling generous, I would say this is quite the triumph of the free market: companies, sensing a consumer need, responded to than need and, voila, a gap was filled in the emoji market. It seems that this may be less of a "demand" issue than a desire to be a "first-mover" in the race to find the next empty overture to appease the gods of condemnation and political correctness.

It's sobering to see such staggering ignorance about free speech and freedom in general on display on American campuses this week. The special snowflakes of the Snowflake Protests (Yale, Mizzou, etc.) are providing a window into the results of the progressive takeover of our education system -- from pre-school all the way on up to college and beyond. (Common Core will just streamline the process a little more.) Alarming, but in keeping with findings about Americans' demand for freedom, or lack thereof, detailed in The Frontier Lab's recent study, "Freedom Buzz." Ask Americans about freedom, as we did in this study, and you get what seem like familiar responses: freedom is the American Dream, the ability to worship and speak freely, or to choose your own path in life. Pretty standard. Nearly 100 hours of research interviews, and a national survey to test the findings, revealed two trends in how many Americans perceive the value of freedom.

Odious Obamacare is about more than crippling families with massive cost increases and destroying the market for innovation that has created so many lifesaving drugs and treatments. The small-business regulatory compliance costs for restaurants and grocery stores to report calorie counts for each and every menu offering, which would go into effect in December 2016, are threatening to add yet another burden to ma-and-pa outfits across the country. Wednesday, the bipartisan"Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act" was approved by voice vote to move to the full House committee and means some relief from the insanity of Big Government may be on the way. The bill seeks to ease the requirements of restaurants and grocery stores to disclose the calorie counts for their foodstuffs, regulations that add up to nearly 400 pages of national disclosure requirements from the FDA. The compliance required is overwhelming enough for some Democrats to part from their Dear Leader and join Republicans seeking to amend the process. But what's more awkward for the Obama nutrition-gestapo is that a study from NYU reported on in the Wall Street Journal this week shows that there is virtually no difference in menu-ordering when consumers are provided with calorie counts.

According to the left-leaning Sunlight Foundation, "Thanks in part to outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, gun control groups could match or outspend gun rights forces in 2013 electoral contests, and are heading into 2014 with formidable campaign war chests." It was Bloomberg, via his "Mayors against...

Project Veritas published a video showing members of the nonprofit National Urban League (NUL) appearing to counsel applicants to lie on their Obamacare forms and "defraud the federal government." Alarming and quite a preview of the corruption that will come with our new bureaucracy. Helpful...

A sobering day for those of us observing the GOP's messages in the wake of Virginia and New Jersey elections. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page provides all you need to know about how the establishment is posturing Christie for President, writing that he's 1) not...