Displaying the most recent of 91910 posts written by

Ruth King

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Counterfeit Civics “Educating for American Democracy” is the return of Common Core under a new label, this time applied to history and civics. America can only restore its civics education by rejecting EAD. By Peter W. Wood *****

By on June 18th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/17/counterfeit-civics/

The National Association of Scholars opposes the proposal, “Educating for American Democracy.” The proposal has attracted some well-meaning supporters, but they are mistaken about what Educating for American Democracy—EAD—would bring into being.

Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy is a “framework” that prescribes how American K-12 schools should teach civics. That word “framework” is part of EAD’s official self-description, and it deserves a closer look. In this case, the so-called “framework” is really a well-developed plan to impose a politically progressive program of instruction on almost all American students. The framework determines the ideas to be taught and the means by which these ideas would be conveyed and enforced. The content of EAD is antithetical to how the vast majority of Americans understand our country.

Precedents

We have been here before, several times. In the early 1990s, the academic Left hijacked the National History Standards. Under the Left, those “standards” projected a dismal view of the nation’s past, but a public outcry, led by former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, prompted a retreat. In January 1995, the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 to repudiate those standards.

Though they were officially shelved, the National History Standards retained a strong following among college history professors and a hefty number of high school history teachers. Those educators helped the National History Standards to become a kind of stealth curriculum in many of the nation’s schools, which goes some distance toward explaining the formation of political attitudes among people who attended school in that era. It also contributed to the popularity of works of pseudo-history such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Among the successors to the National History Standards was the 2014 revision of the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History Standards (APUSH). Twenty years after the 1994 standards were officially set aside, the College Board imposed essentially the same partisan view on the nation’s most important (and most popular) secondary school history curriculum and examination. The National Association of Scholars blew the whistle on this capture-the-flag maneuver, and the College Board officially backed down—though once again, more in appearance than in substance.

Lately, the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” reconfigured by the Pulitzer Center as the centerpiece of a new history curriculum, has been introduced into tens of thousands of classrooms around the country. Controversy has rightly erupted over teaching this body of false premises and fake facts. The National Association of Scholars has been in the thick of this with our “1620” rebuttal.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Significant Election Irregularities Exposed in Fulton County, Georgia By Matt Margolis

By on June 18th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/17/huge-significant-election-irregularities-exposed-in-fulton-county-georgia-n1455273

Documents from Fulton County, Georgia, that were submitted to state officials for the election audit “highlight significant irregularities in the Atlanta area during last November’s voting, ranging from identical vote tallies repeated multiple times to large batches of absentee ballots that appear to be missing from the official ballot-scanning records,” reports Just The News.

Thousands of ballots are potentially impacted by these irregularities, suggesting they could be results-changing, as Joe Biden’s state-certified victory in the state was by fewer than 12,000 votes.

Just The News reviewed memos that included “handwritten tally sheets for all absentee ballots counted by the county as well as a private report from a contractor hired by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to monitor the Atlanta-area election process.”

The report, which chronicled seven days of problems, recorded troubling behavior like the mysterious removal of a suitcase of sensitive election data known as polls pads, used to authenticate voters.

“Learn that Rick reprogramming poll pads earlier was setting up a new precinct for SC11 because someone took the wrong suitcase but only took one,” the contractor Seven Hills Strategy wrote late on Nov. 2, the night before Election Day. “Seems to be a mystery who this person was –> Should have chain of custody paperwork!! That means that a stranger just walked out with sensitive election materials?”

The contractor also observed that sensitive election materials were left on a dock at a warehouse without supervision. “Several cases (including SC11) were just left out on the loading dock outside the warehouse,” he wrote. “Thankfully the seals were intact.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Uses Juneteenth to Push His Federal Takeover of Elections and the Suburbs By Tyler O’Neil

By on June 18th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/17/biden-uses-juneteenth-to-push-his-federal-takeover-of-elections-and-the-suburbs-n1455386

On Thursday, President Joe Biden signed a law proclaiming Juneteenth, June 19, a federal holiday, commemorating the freeing of the very last slaves in the United States in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865. Yet the president used Juneteenth as an excuse to push his radical agenda, including his federal takeover of elections and housing. He demonized Republican voter integrity laws and hailed a federal program that will pull zoning decisions away from city councils.

“The truth is, it’s simply not enough to just commemorate Juneteenth. After all, emancipation of enslaved black Americans didn’t mark the end of America’s work to deliver on the promise of equality,” Biden said. “To honor the true meaning of Juneteenth, we have to continue toward that promise. We’ve not gotten there yet.”

The president said his administration is “committed to doing just that. That’s why we’ve launched an aggressive effort to combat racial discrimination in housing.”

Combatting racial discrimination in housing is a noble goal, but Biden was referring to a revamped version of the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule (AFFH), a rule that started removing zoning from the purview of state and local governments. The Trump administration eliminated the rule, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) under Biden has already proposed two new rules. Part of Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan explicitly pushes for apartment buildings in neighborhoods that are currently restricted to single-family homes.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden promised to go much further than AFFH. He embraced Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating “little downtowns” there. Biden justifies his assault on local zoning control by claiming that current zoning laws that favor single-family homes disproportionately hurt low-income people who can’t afford to move to the suburbs. Yet this policy would take away Americans’ abilities to shape their own neighborhoods.

Biden’s pledge to increase black homeownership may be noble, but Donald Trump was right to warn that Biden’s policies represent a threat to the suburbs.

In terms of pushing racial equity on Juneteenth, the president also touted his administration’s goal to give black entrepreneurs more access to capital (a noble goal but a policy that singles people out based on the color of their skin) and his desire to “give each and every child, three and four years of age, not daycare but school.” Yet without vital measures to improve schools like school choice, decreasing the age of first entry may not make much of a positive difference.

Biden also called for more funding for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), pushing racial equity in the health care system, and ensuring clean air and water for all communities.

Yet Biden saved his most controversial talking point for last.

He said America’s promise of racial equality is “not going to be fulfilled so long as the sacred right to vote remains under attack.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

YOU ARE NOT A RACIST TO CRITICIZE CRITICAL RACE THEORY. Dismiss those pretending that if you don’t like what’s happening in our schools, you’re a jingoistic moron who doesn’t want kids to learn about racism. John McWhorter

By on June 18th, 2021

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-to-criticize?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy

Since a year ago, CRT-infused members of The Elect, traditionally overrepresented in the world of schools of education, have sought to take the opportunity furnished by our “racial reckoning” to turn American schools into academies of “antiracist” indoctrination.

And the backlash is on.  One by one parents, teachers and even students are speaking out against the idea that the soul of education must be to battle the power that whites have over others.

Yes, that’s the watchcry. It’s why The Elect can make so little sense to the rest of us: they actually believe that the heart of all intellectual, moral, and artistic endeavor must be battling power differentials. They get this from Critical Race Theory. And what most alarms The Elect is that state legislatures are proposing to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools, Florida being the latest example.

One response to this backlash is that anyone who questions the takeover of schools by CRT is against schoolkids learning about racism, and wants schoolkids to have the adulatory view of the American story typical of the 1950s and before. A sarcastic tweet by a certain famous black figure employed by the New York Times who won a Pulitzer recently encapsulates this kind of view:

“Our children must learn that we are the greatest and freest country in the history of the world, and we will demonstrate this by barring educators from teaching things we do not like, and in the name of liberty, mandating government control of what ideas can be exchanged.”

So, whenever a body of lawmakers (or anyone else) is against their kids being taught not how, but what, to think, and call this “Critical Race Theory” just as many of its teachers do, that body of lawmakers is a nest of racists.

Let’s break this down.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

It’s Israel’s political system, stupid  By Ruthie Blum

By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/its-israels-political-system-stupid-opinion-671343

The swearing-in on Sunday night of Israel’s 36th government was a relief to some of the public, if for no other reason than the fact that it staved off the fifth round of elections. Or so the members of the motley coalition would have us believe, though they, like most people in the country, don’t have great faith in its longevity.

But since the main purpose of the peculiar formation was to oust now-former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they have good cause to be pleased with themselves. Their mission was accomplished, at least temporarily.
The same cannot be said of the voters who gave Netanyahu’s Likud 30 Knesset seats, a far greater number than any other individual party. Nor are many of those who cast their ballots for Yamina, headed by Naftali Bennett, happy at its having joined forces with the Left and Islamist Ra’am Party. Ironically, though their candidate is now prime minister, they’re suffering from buyers’ remorse.

After all, their criticism of Netanyahu, no matter how vocal and hard-hitting, has always come from the right. The current constellation that Bennett finagled, then, isn’t exactly what they’d had in mind when campaigning for him.

Still, there are those among his loyalists who’ve decided to give him a chance to steer the government in the literal and figurative right direction. So far, he’s been put to and passed a couple of small tests.

These include enabling the Jerusalem flag march to proceed as planned on Tuesday, and subsequent airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military compounds, following incendiary-balloon launches from Gaza into southern Israeli border communities.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Nations Slip from Greatness to Obscurity Is America on a path of permanent decline? By Don Feder

By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/how-nations-slip-greatness-obscur

Men, like nations, think they’re eternal. What man in his 20s or 30s doesn’t believe, at least subconsciously, that he’ll live forever?

In the springtime of youth, an endless summer beckons. As you pass 70, it’s harder to hide from reality.

Nations too have seasons. Imagine a Roman of the 2nd. century contemplating an empire that stretched from Britain to the Near East, thinking: This will endure forever.

Forever was about 500 years, give or take.

France was the thing in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now the land of Charles Martel is on its way to becoming part of the Muslim ummah.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sun never set on the British empire. Now Albion exists in a perpetual twilight. Its 95-year-old sovereign is a fitting symbol for a nation in terminal decline.

In the 1980s, Japan seemed poised to buy the world. Business schools taught Japanese management techniques. Today, its birth rate is so low and its population is aging so rapidly, that an industry has sprung up to remove the remains of elderly Japanese who die alone.

I was born in 1946, almost at the midpoint of the 20th century – the American century.  America’s prestige and influence were never greater. Thanks to the Greatest Generation, we won a World War fought over most of Europe, Asia and the Pacific. We reduced Germany to rubble and put the rising sun to bed.

It set the stage for almost half a century of unprecedented prosperity. We stopped the spread of communism in Europe and Asia, and fought international terrorism. We rebuilt our enemies and lavished foreign aid on much of the world.

We built skyscrapers and rockets to the moon. We conquered Polio and COVID.  We explored the mysteries of the Universe and the wonders of DNA, the blueprint  of life.

But where is the glory that once was Rome?

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

I Must be Racist Lynn Lechter

By on June 18th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/so_call_me_racist.html

The worst epithet one can be called in the America of tribal identities, traveling snowflakes in search of a trigger, BLM comrades, critical race propagandists, and purportedly systemic white privilege Kens and Karens, is a racist. 

In today’s mass social milieu, if one is the wrong skin color, religion, nationality, or political party affiliate, one must be a racist.  That accounts for at least half of us.  So what’s the issue? 

Since the accusation has become so ludicrous — in that it encompasses everything from drinking pre-woke Coke to having the right math answer — it has lost its zing along with its original connotation.

So in this age of insanity, where all things are defined as the opposite of what they are supposed to mean: call me racist. 

I must be a racist because: I believe that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, regardless of original intent, has devolved into a Marxist, anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-family racist hate group.

I must be racist because: I believe that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are the same anti-Jew hatred that has existed for millennia. 

I must be racist because: I believe that while anti-Semitism exists on the far right, it is powerless and negligible as compared to the very vocal and ever-growing anti-Semitism, overtly coalescing in the Democrat-controlled U.S. House.   

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Evolution into a Force-Multiplier for the USA Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on June 18th, 2021

https://bit.ly/35tV9z9  Pre-1967

In 1948, the CIA opposed the reestablishment of the Jewish State, contending that it would be a feeble entity, unable to withstand an all-out Arab war – which would yield a second Holocaust in less than ten years – fully dependent on US soldiers for its survival, jeopardize US ties with the Arab World, imperil US access to Persian Gulf oil, and probably join the Soviet Bloc. 

The State Department and the Pentagon, along with the New York Times and Washington Post, seconded the CIA assessment.

On the other hand, Clark Clifford, President Truman’s trusted advisor, who dedicated much time to studying the track record of Jewish sovereignty in Middle East history, impressed upon the President that an independent Jewish State would be a most effective military power, reliable, stable and inherently pro-US.

Clifford was absolutely right, while the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, the New York Times and the Washington Post were resoundingly wrong.

Following the impressive Israeli military performance in the 1948/49 War of Independence, General Omar Bradley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff, recommended that Israel be considered a favored strategic ally, since “the Israeli army would be the most effective force south of Turkey, which could be utilized to delaying action [in the case of a Soviet invasion]….”

The 1967 Six Day War

Since the 1967 Six Day War Israeli military victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the US national security establishment has recognized the potency of Israel to advance regional and global US national security interests, which supersede the Palestinian issue.

Unlike NATO, South Korea and Japan, Israel has extended the strategic arm of the US with no need for US military personnel.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden Transforming America Into an Unconstitutional Sanctuary Country By Michael W. Cutler

By on June 18th, 2021

https://usinc.org/biden-transforming-america-into-an-unconstitutional-sanctuary-country/

The radical Democrats have declared war on law enforcement, and, hence, Americans by demanding the defunding of police in towns and cities across the United States, as I explained in Attacks on Law Enforcement Are Attacks on America.

However, the notion of undermining law enforcement actually began decades ago with the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) an agency I am well acquainted with, since I spent 30 years at that agency that was dismantled and reassembled under the aegis of the Department of Homeland Security. DHS is an agency that was ostensibly created, in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 to supposedly address the failures of the former INS to prevent the entry and embedding of international terrorists as laid out in detail in the findings and recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, to which I provided testimony.

The harsh reality of how the DHS was created by the administration of George W. Bush was shocking, to say the least. I addressed my observations and concerns in Sanctuary Country – Immigration failures by design, and I urge you to take the time to review it to understand how the Department of Homeland Security should have been properly renamed the Department of Homeland Surrender.

Immigration anarchists and those who profit from open borders and failures to enforce our immigration laws frequently complain about how enforcement of our immigration laws are somehow “unconstitutional.” Consider that Article Four, Section 4 of the United States Constitution states: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s New Government Is Among the Most Diverse in the History of Democracies by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on June 17th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17472/israel-government-diversity

[B]igots… in the United States and Europe, insist on characterizing Israel as an apartheid state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Israel has real diversity, not the kind of phony diversity that characterizes many American institutions. American diversity is simply a euphemism for more Blacks, and especially more Blacks who hold the same views about political and racial matters.

The best evidence of this truism came from Google’s appointment of a chief diversity officer who had expressed anti-gay and anti-Jewish views…. He is Black and that is all that diversity means at Google and many other American institutions. It is different in Israel, because Israel is such an inherently diverse nation that takes its diversity seriously.

Every Muslim majority nation is officially a Muslim state that bestows considerable benefits on members of that faith. Great Britain is an Anglican Christian state with an established religion. Catholicism is the official religion of several European countries. Many national flags and emblems have crosses, crescents or other distinctly religious symbols.

So stay tuned to see how the now government manages to survive the challenges of diversity. In the meantime, however, stop singling out Israel for demonization by mislabeling it as apartheid or undemocratic.

I challenge anyone to name a parliamentary democracy that has had a more diverse coalition government — racially, religiously, ethnically, ideologically, politically, national origin — than the current Israeli government. It includes people of nearly every color from Black Ethiopians to brown Muslims to swarthy Sephardim to pale Russians. It includes a modern Orthodox Jew as Prime Minister, along with fundamentalist Muslims and atheist and agnostics Jews. It has a gay cabinet member, a deaf member of the Knesset and people who trace their roots to Asia, Africa, Europe and America.

A record number of nine women will be serving in the new Israeli cabinet. The current Prime Minister is a right-winger. The Prime Minister designate who is currently Minster of Foreign Affairs, is a left-winger. Every shade of political opinion — and there are many in Israel — is represented in this government. The old expression “two Jews, three opinions” can now be changed to “20 Israeli cabinet members, 30 opinions” — because each cabinet member represents multiple opinions within their parties.

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