John Stonestreet – Page 58

China and Hollywood

Oct 11, 2021John StonestreetChinaCCP, China

*John Stonestreet, Radio Host and Director of the Colson Center*

In 2020, Chinese box office revenue officially surpassed that of North America. Shirli Li writes in the Atlantic, “Filmmakers and actors have always been subject to bosses who decide which movies get to soar at the box office….Now, more than ever before, that boss is Beijing.”

Fast and Furious star John Cena demonstrated this deference in May when he posted a back-bending apology to China, in Mandarin, for calling Taiwan a country. Another example is the potential ban facing Marvel’s The Eternals because its director, Chloé Zhao, criticized the Chinese Communist Party … eight years ago.

Repeatedly, U.S. film companies posture as courageous defenders of human rights when they vocally oppose laws in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. But then they’re deafeningly silent about doing business in China, a country actively imprisoning more than one million Uyghur Muslims, hiding the presence of massive slave labor camps and no freedom of any kind when it comes to journalism. Hollywood, it seems, mostly just listens to the money.

The hope has always been that Western values would somehow infiltrate China and change it from the inside. But the opposite is happening. There’s nothing like the allure of massive profit to drown out our collective conscience.

Homeschooling Spikes Thanks to the Pandemic

Oct 4, 2021John StonestreetHome SchoolHome School

Recently, the US Census bureau reported, somewhat diplomatically, “It’s clear that in an unprecedented environment, families are seeking solutions that will reliably meet [the needs] of their children.” That’s an understatement.

The New York Times reports that just last year, more than 1 million children did not enroll in kindergarten. The impact of learning loss from missed school time has parents worried across every grade. After years of the nationwide percentage of homeschool families hovering around 3.3 percent, that number jumped to 11.1 percent in the fall of 2020.

If all of this means a renewed emphasis on parental involvement, that’s a good thing. Whether homeschooled or otherwise, involved parents consistently predict far better educational outcomes for kids. Which makes sense, because parents are the primary, God-given guardians of their children’s future.

Education begins in the home. Or, as Tina Windebank put it over at Citizenlink, “Relax! Your kids are already homeschooled.”

Marijuana Harms

Sep 27, 2021John StonestreetMarijuanaMarijuana

According to Dr. Eric Voth in a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “There exists clear medical evidence of increased psychiatric difficulties with marijuana use, including violence, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic episodes, worsening depression and suicide.”

These effects are particularly harmful for youth.

Of course, when it comes to public policy, the cat is largely out of the bag, and probably isn’t going back in. One thing, however, is becoming more and more clear with each study, despite what proponents claimed and promised: marijuana is not the harmless thing we were sold by advocates and the state.

For the record, states should not be in the business of promoting distractions to citizens in the first place, especially harmful ones used to self-medicate symptoms of loneliness, pain, or anxiety without actually addressing the root causes. But this is particularly disturbing when they accomplish this by overselling financial windfalls and underselling the social consequences.