RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/totalitarian-tenderfoots-bruce-bawer/

You don’t hear a heck of a lot about Oberlin College, the liberal arts college in Ohio, but on Wednesday Hugh Fitzgerald wrote here about an esteemed member of its faculty, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who has enjoyed the unanimous support of Oberlin’s top administrators. Mahallati, reported Fitzgerald, served as Iran’s ambassador to the UN in the late 1980s, where, among other things, he promoted “genocidal antisemitism,” denounced the Baha’i people (hundreds of whom “have been executed or murdered” in Iran), and helped cover up the mass execution of political prisoners. At Oberlin, he teaches Religion, Islamic Studies, and Middle East and North African Studies.

This wasn’t Oberlin’s first time in the spotlight this month. A couple of weeks ago the college got a good deal of social-media attention after Peter Fray-Witzer, one of its 3,000-odd students, took to the Oberlin Review to pen an ardent j’accuse. You see, an e-mail had gone out from Josh Matos, “the area coordinator for Multicultural and Identity-Based Communities,” informing students that radiator installations were scheduled to take place in the “Women and Trans Collective,” a dorm in which Fray-Witzer resides. Being “very averse to people entering my personal space,” especially when those people are “strangers” and “cisgender men,” Fray-Witzer was rendered “angry, scared, and confused” by the news of this unwanted intrusion, which would damage the “feeling of safety and protection” ordinarily provided by the Collective. Why, asked Fray-Witzer, couldn’t the installation have been scheduled during the summer?

Three score and seven years ago, men Fray-Witzer’s age stormed the beaches of Normandy. Now this. American colleges once taught young people to deal with challenging ideas and experiences. Now the most expensive of them – Oberlin is America’s 11th costliest college, beating Yale at #18 and Stanford at #50 – are padded playpens where their pampered students, the presumed leaders of tomorrow (is Fray-Witzer, by any chance, the child of Harvard law professor Sharon Fray-Witzer?) expect to be protected from the slightest hint of distress. And when they graduate they become – well, they become those totalitarian tenderfoots who were protesting Dave Chappelle’s latest comedy special outside of Netflix the other day.

No wonder Fray-Witzer’s tantrum went viral. “Ponder the rotted roots of an ideology,” commented Glenn Greenwald, “that convinces highly privileged and wealthy students at elite colleges that the guys who come to fix their radiators are their oppressors, and that the ones whose family is paying $80k/year are the oppressed.”

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/27/the_contretemps_at_yale_110658.html

Recent events at Yale Law School reveal that it’s all too easy for administrators to condemn a student for perceived racist statements, even in highly ambiguous circumstances – but much harder to undo the implications for admission to the bar. To put it plainly, a law school’s “discrimination and harassment coordinators” cannot denounce a student for racism and then withhold that information from its bar certifications. If the condemnation is warranted, it must be reported; if it is not warranted, it should be retracted. To do otherwise would violate the administrators’ own obligations under the Rules of Professional Conduct.

According to Associate Dean Ellen Cosgrove, the YLS Office of Student Affairs “tries to help students talk to one another and resolve their disagreements within the community,” even about the most difficult issues. That’s a noble objective, but it doesn’t describe what recently happened when nine law students complained that a classmate had engaged in harassment and discrimination by circulating a “triggering” email. The offending message was in fact an invitation to a Constitution Day celebration jointly sponsored by the Native American Law Students Association and the Federalist Society, to be held at the jokingly described “world-renowned NALSA Trap House,” with a menu that included “Popeye’s chicken,” apple pie, cocktails, and soft drinks.

Trent Colbert, the second-year student who issued the invitation, was called in for a meeting with both Dean Cosgrove and YLS diversity director Yaseen Eldik, who patiently explained the racial overtones of the term “trap house,” as well as the troubling implications of “the fried chicken reference.” This came as news to Colbert, who thought that “trap house” was an innocent reference to a place where young people held parties, “like a frat house without the frat” (and Popeye’s was just a nearby fast food joint). He said he would stop using the term, but that was not good enough for the administrators, who urged him to issue a written apology for any “harm, trauma, or upset” his email had caused, along with a promise to “educate myself” to do better.

When Colbert balked, Eldik cautioned him about potential damage to his reputation, and ominously pointed out that “there’s a bar you have to take,” which of course would include a character and fitness assessment. That bit of not very friendly advice started Yale on a damaging course from which it will be difficult to withdraw.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/has-america-been-overtaken-by-creeping-credentialism-college-jobs-requirements-11635282885?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Editor’s note: In this Future View, students debate “credentialism,” the ever-expanding requirement of college degrees.  Very interesting responses….read them all…..rsk

https://www.wsj.com/articles/about-those-domestic-terrorists-national-school-boards-association-merrick-garland-memo-fbi-11635285900?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It took a few weeks, but the National School Boards Association has apologized for sending a letter to President Biden suggesting that “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings might be “domestic terrorism.” The NSBA now admits there was “no justification for some of the language included in the letter,” which could have parents investigated under the Patriot Act for trying to influence what their children are taught.

The retraction comes after tremendous blow-back. First came parents at school board meetings with T-shirts saying “Parents are not domestic terrorists.” Then 21 state school board associations distanced themselves from the letter. The Ohio, Missouri and Pennsylvania state associations cut ties altogether.

It turns out that when Chip Slaven, the NSBA interim executive director and CEO, and president Viola Garcia sent the letter, they did so without consulting their own board. But according to one of Mr. Slaven’s emails, they did work with White House staff.

The NSBA has owned up to its mistake, but what about the Biden Administration? Days after the NSBA letter was sent, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys to intervene—without spelling out the federal authority or hard evidence for what the AG called a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence.” This directive still stands.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17892/schools-indoctrination

Every expert who came in indicated that the most important thing in a child’s learning was the presence of a caring adult in that child’s life. We learned that schools most connected to their community were most likely to be successful. And that schools that focused on the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic achieved the best results.
Hillary Clinton once famously said it takes a village to raise a child. It is hard to disagree with that statement on its face until you realize the village Clinton had in mind is the government and not the parents and families who make it up.
While the media may portray this as a battle about COVID mandates, American history, or the teaching of sexuality, those are just the scrimmages that we are witnessing. The real battle is for who the teacher will be in our children’s lives — parents and loving local individuals who know our children’s names, or faceless government bureaucrats hell-bent on indoctrinating our children with their particular worldview.
McAuliffe, Garland, and the NSBA would have you believe that parents are domestic terrorists, but it is time for them to realize how their way of thinking poses a real threat to American rights. Put me in the category of those that believe parents are the ones who should be raising our kids.

The discontent at school board meetings across America is hard to miss. It is showing up in the news and social media feeds that people are watching and reading in their homes. Many people, however, are missing the major driver of this discontent — the major transformation that the White House, National School Boards Association (NSBA) and others are trying to impose on our government schools.

The recent debate statements by Terry McAuliffe, the Democrats’ Virginia gubernatorial candidate, and actions by Attorney General Merrick Garland following a letter from the NSBA clearly signal they believe that government schools are a tool to be used to indoctrinate children. They also believe the force of the federal government should be used to back them up.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/25/columbia-law-professor-explains-why-public-schools-are-tearing-america-apart/

Smearing parents fed up with their kids’ schools as “domestic terrorists” seems to be a wild, incendiary charge with little basis in reality. Yet it’s the basis on which the U.S. attorney general has convened an FBI task force to surveil and intimidate parents who object to what their children are being taught, and how they are being treated, with public tax dollars. The organization that colluded with the Justice Department to create the pretext for chilling voters’ speech has backed down, but the FBI threat remains.

School lockdowns have clarified and accelerated the deep, irreconcilable differences among American parents and citizens about how to educate children. Americans want completely different things from their kids’ schools, often opposite things. It’s simply impossible to teach both that there’s a hierarchy of races and that all humans are created equal, let alone to teach “both sides” of other education flashpoints, such as whether to teach social justice or actual math in math class. Schools have to choose.

K-12 schools are largely choosing the political establishment over the wishes of the people who elect them and provide their children as the pretext for schools’ public funding. The political establishment that benefits from public schools’ monopoly on teaching future voters what to think is being increasingly direct about this arrangement.

In 1996, Hillary Clinton told Americans “it takes a village” to raise a child. That was the soft sell. Today, we’re getting the hard sell: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” said Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe in a September debate.

As Democrats were forcing millions of American children to stay home for yet another school year while their international peers were safely learning in person, a Harvard University conference suggested banning at-home education. One of its organizers, a Harvard Law professor complained that homeschooling is “a realm of near-absolute parental power. . . . inconsistent with a proper understanding of the human rights of children.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/26/virtue-signaling-and-wokeness-a-return-to-the-primitive/

Last week, activists at Dartmouth College reacted to notices of Republican-sponsored events by vandalizing property and harassing conservative students. Like so many other woke fits pitched by Democrats and their fellows travelers, the infantile behavior was driven not by policy differences but instead by primitive impulses, which have come to be regarded by the ruling class as acceptable responses.

According to Campus Reform, zealots tore up flyers announcing a speaking engagement and a panel discussion, and tried to intimidate members of the Dartmouth College Republicans. The topic of the talk was abortion, quite clearly a divisive issue in this country.

But it was not opposition to ideas that fed the thuggish behavior. It was fueled by a need for some to feel morally superior over others. It’s the same inclination that drives kids to pick on the least popular and the different among them on the playground. They feel better about their own inadequacies when they have a target to attack.

The ugly display at Dartmouth is an example of what we see frequently on college campuses. But bullying and threats are also widespread on social and mainstream media. We see it as well in Democratic politicians. They rely on their own “Big Lies” to spread misinformation, and actively try to pit American “deplorables” and bitter clingers against the cool kids.

This mob mentality intended to hurt has infected the left and radicalized a large segment of the country. Those living the out an “us vs. them” mindset have neither the inclination nor apparently the time – so busy in their efforts to ostracize that there’s not a moment for reasonable thought – to examine the facts they’re constantly screeching about.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/24/ground-zero-of-woke/

Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.  

For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions. 

Never in U.S. history have elite universities piled up such huge endowments, which soared during the lockdown. Harvard has $40 billion, Yale $30 billion, Stanford $28 billion, Princeton $25 billion and so on. The tax-free income from these huge sums ensures equally extravagant budgets that are somewhat insulated from market realities—at least in the sense that the larger endowments grew, the more likely university costs rose beyond the annual rate of inflation, and the greater aggregate student debt rose. 

Just as importantly, spending per pupil is rarely calibrated to whether graduating students leave better educated than when they arrived—the ostensible purpose of universities. 

There are certainly no “exit tests” for certification of the BA degree, in the manner of, say, a bar exam, that might set a minimum national standard for any acquisition of knowledge. Such standardized reassurance would rescue the BA degree from the growing general public perception that the campus has become politically warped, therapeutic, a poor measure of real knowledge, and is now largely a cattle brand of a sort that qualifies its holder for some sort of non-physical labor. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/dartmouth_college_dems_try_to_shut_down_college_republicans_event_and_fail_badly_.html

Dartmouth College Republicans hosted three up-and-coming conservative voices in an event Sunday night.  Remarkably, all three of these articulate, patriotic voices are young:

North Carolinian Madison Cawthorn is the youngest Congressional House Member in the nation at age 26;
Congressional hopeful and rising star Karoline Leavitt presents a very strong case (at age 23) why she should join him; and
Alex Bruesewitz (24) is a proven campaign strategist who schools career politicians. 

But for the Dartmouth College Democrats, what united the three was their allegedly intolerable political views.  Predictably, there was abundant vitriol.

The Dartmouth College newspaper attacked Madison Cawthorn with particular venom, listing an array of allegations and character attacks.  The paper’s chief concern appears to be Cawthorn’s challenge of 2020 voting results:

….perhaps his most damaging statements target democracy itself. In the months and weeks following the November 2020 election, he promoted the baseless and absurd idea that the election was “stolen.” His dishonesty and apparent willingness to entertain violence if his party loses an election should be disqualifying for any reasonable conservative campus group.

….the College Republicans appear to be voicing their approval of his twisted and authoritari

Strange, the Democrats were quite vocal in their suspicions that the 2016 Trump win was less than trustworthy — the Democratic Party filed suit alleging Trump colluded with Russia and WikiLeaks to steal the election!  They “targeted democracy itself!”

It is common for election losers to question election integrity (anyone remember the Gore/Bush decision?), a phenomenon termed:

…the “winner effect.” That is, those voters who support the winner in the election are more likely to believe their own ballots and the ballots of others were counted as intended, while those who supported the losing candidate are more likely to believe their votes were counted incorrectly.

Dartmouth Democrats don’t want young Republicans to speak unless the roster is first approved by Democrats as acceptable:

The Dartmouth College Democrats are deeply disturbed by the Dartmouth College Republicans’ chosen guests for their October 24th panel on “The Future of the Republican Party.” (snip) All three speakers perpetuate harmful rhetoric against immigrants and minority communities, continually question science, and deny that President Biden won the 2020 election. (snip) It is our belief that these speakers will contribute to division, encourage prejudice on campus, and foster a negative campus environment not conducive to open, honest, and mutually respectful conversation. (snip) We are especially concerned about their hateful views towards immigrants and the effect of that prejudice on immigrants and children of immigrants at Dartmouth.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-10-23-progressive-craziness-of-the-day-critical-race-theory-in-k-12-schools-and-corporations

Yesterday I attended an in-person program at the Manhattan Institute with the title “Deconstructing Wokeness in K-12 and Corporate America.” There were two panels and a speech totaling close to three hours. Presenters included something of a who’s who of the movement opposing the spreading cancer of Critical Race Theory in schools and corporations: Christopher Rufo and Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute, Vivek Ramaswamy (author of the new book Woke, Inc.), Paul Rossi (the guy who blew the whistle on CRT at Grace Church School, who is currently affiliated with the Educational Liberty Alliance), and Asra Nomani (Vice President of Parents Defending Education).

Finally, after more than a year and a half in virtual purgatory, we have resumed in-person events to discuss issues of public policy. The huge difference between in-person and virtual events is that at in-person events you get to meet the people who take important roles in contesting these issues. In addition to the presenters, several other notable participants in recent events showed up at yesterday’s event, for example Andrew Gutmann (the parent who blew the whistle on CRT at the super-snooty all-girls Brearley School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side) and Maud Maron (mother of four kids in New York City public schools, who spoke out against CRT and for her trouble has been ostracized at her job defending indigent criminal defendants at the Legal Aid Society).

But for today I’d like to highlight the work of Rufo. Here’s a picture of me with Rufo at yesterday’s event:

Over the past couple of years, Rufo has rapidly gained a reputation as the most important “investigative reporter” in the CRT arena. But in my discussion with him prior to the beginning of the formal event, he admitted that his “investigative reporting” substantially consists of just sitting at his desk and receiving a flood of submissions from around the country from outraged parents and corporate employees. He has a couple of junior staffers who work with him to review the submissions and rate them on a scale of how incendiary they are. Then he writes up articles consisting mostly of direct quotes of the submitted material.

Here is a sample of Rufo’s work from 2021. All of the pieces originally appeared in City Journal.

Cupertino, California. In a January 13, 2021 piece titled “Woke Elementary” Rufo quoted extensively from whistleblower documents provided by parents in this very-upscale Silicon Valley community that is home to the headquarters of Apple. What follows comes from a third-grade class at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School. Excerpt:

[R]eading from This Book Is Antiracist, the students learned that “those with privilege have power over others” and that “folx who do not benefit from their social identities, who are in the subordinate culture, have little to no privilege and power.” As an example, the reading states that “a white, cisgender man, who is able-bodied, heterosexual, considered handsome and speaks English has more privilege than a Black transgender woman.” . . . Following this discussion, the teacher had the students deconstruct their own intersectional identities and “circle the identities that hold power and privilege” on their identity maps, ranking their traits according to the hierarchy.

It goes on and on from there. Rufo notes that the Cupertino community is 94% non-white (majority Asian) with a median household income of $172,000.