Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds light and variable..

Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low near 70F. Winds light and variable.

A principal in Mountain View, California, calls the police on a four-year-old preschooler on Thursday, Aug. 18, for not wearing a mask. As reported by KRON4.com: “A 4-year-old boy was sent home from his Mountain View school several days in a row for not wearing a mask, according to a letter acquired by KRON4 that was sent from his family’s lawyer to the school. ... The boy’s parents said they asked the school for special accommodations because their son has sensory issues but received none.”

For the record, according to nbcbayarea.com the school was “one of the few districts around the Bay Area that started the school year with masks.”

The day after video of the principal’s despicable behavior swept the internet, the school district magically declared that masks were now “optional.”

• Port Townsend, Washington, Thursday Aug. 11: KOMO News reported on a story about an 80-year-old woman banned from the local YMCA over a transgender woman in the female locker room.

Julie Jaman, 80, told KOMO News, “I saw little girls with a man watching ... There was no doubt in my mind that that was inappropriate and not acceptable, and I needed to stop right then and there. ... I heard a man’s voice, very distinctive,” Jaman said. “I saw a man in a woman’s bathing suit where two toilets are and there were two little girls standing there taking down their suits to use the toilet. I looked at him and I said, ‘Do you have a penis?’ and he said, ‘It’s none of your business.” And I said, “You need to leave now.’ ”

Jaman’s reward for speaking out is to now be permanently banned from the facility.

• New York City, Aug. 17: The New York Post reported: “Shocking video captures the moment a convicted sex offender delivered a brutal knockout punch that left a Bronx restaurant patron with a fractured skull and a brain bleed.

“The 52-year-old victim — shown carrying a backpack — was leaving the Fuego Tipico Restaurant on East 188th Street near the Grand Concourse in Fordham Manor around 10:45 p.m. Friday when he stopped near a group of people chatting outside ... Cops later arrested Van Phu Bui, a 55-year-old parolee, and charged him with attempted murder, police said.”

That parolee, a level 3 sex offender (most serious), originally sentenced to six years to life in prison, would be released without bail the next day thanks to a progressive Bronx District Attorney’s Office that downgraded the original charge of attempted murder to third-degree assault and second-degree harassment that under New York State’s idiotic bail reform laws left the judge no choice.

The above are just three examples from three cities but they are far from isolated one-off incidents.

Between the radical “woke” attacking anyone and any thought that doesn’t bow to its ideology and George Soros-backed prosecutors emboldened by Democratic state legislatures putting suspects back onto the streets before the police have even filed their final reports, American society today is facing an assault from within unlike any in our history.

What lay just under the surface for years has now erupted with a force and fury unprecedented.

Mock traditional values all you want, but they are the guardrails that, through our most volatile times, kept us from going over the edge.

And to make matters worse, President Joe Biden this past Wednesday removed one of the last guardrails we had left: personal responsibility.

This past Wednesday, via his executive action, he and he alone decided that it was fair to put up to $20,000 of college debt onto the backs of first responders, plumbers, electricians, fixed-income seniors and tens of millions of working-class Americans so he could forgive that debt of those he deemed privileged to receive his largess.

It was a move that even The Washington Post editorial board found repulsive: “Widely canceling student loan debt is regressive. It takes money from the broader tax base, mostly made up of workers who did not go to college, to subsidize the education debt of people with valuable degrees.”

From canceling the Keystone pipeline to abandoning security at our southern border to the blood of 13 Americans killed because of his Afghanistan bugout, Biden has shown over and over that the only thing he cares about is some grandiose political legacy he has wandering around in that less-than-stable head of his.

There will be more breakdown of all of this in next week’s column, but until then I ask all of you to reflect on these happenings and ponder my closing sentence.

What in the world has happened to us as a society and why, why, are we allowing it to continue?

Geoff Caldwell lives in Joplin. He can be reached at gc@caldwellscorner.com.

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