RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/critical-race-theory-radical-education-americans-rep-lee-zeldin

For 18 years, I have been proudly serving as a soldier in the United States Army. Service has taught me two enduring lessons: 

First, our men and women who serve this country look at each other as brothers and sisters, with one common mission. Our politics, religion, race and ethnicity are of no consequence. All that is important to us is supporting each other, whether on the battlefield or at home. If that support means giving your life to save your brother, you selflessly do your duty. 

Second, all those deployed abroad since 9/11 in locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan have seen firsthand what happens when a nation is governed, not by the rule of law, but by the iron fist of authoritarianism. It gave us all a new appreciation of what we have in America – a nation of laws, freedom of expression and religion, the right to bear arms, equal opportunity for all, and due process. 

These two lessons are important foundational pieces of who we are as Americans. We judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, their religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. And we jealously guard our fundamental rights so that we can continue to be the greatest nation on earth.

Unfortunately, those two principles are under attack in our schools. For years, we have seen the lurch to the left in our education system, but now that lurch has turned into an assault on our values, and it is being directed at our children within schools across the country in the form of critical race theory.

In short, critical race theory in education teaches children that America’s law, institutions, values, traditions and language are systemically racist and must be torn down. It requires that everything be viewed through the lens of race. It focuses on identity group politics and ignores that we are all unique individuals with different goals, skills and limitations. 

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

The competition for the greatest demonstration of “antiracist” wokism in our society is intense, what with media outlets, Hollywood, tech monopolies, teachers unions and plenty of others all vying to show the purest forms of virtue. But really, nobody can top the universities. These are the places where the ideas of “systemic racism” and Critical Race Theory were hatched, and from which come the demands that all the rest of us get in line with the official “antiracist” orthodoxy.

Which is all you need to know to deduce that these institutions must themselves be the very worst and most overt practitioners of racism. In a post back in February titled “The Worst Racists Are The Left-Wing Academics” I quoted one elite university spokesperson after another falling all over themselves to confess their racism. (E.g., Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, September 2020: “Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton. . . . Racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in structures of the University itself.”; the President and Trustees of Dartmouth, July 2020: “We know there are no easy solutions to eradicate the oppression and racism Black and other students, faculty, and staff of color experience on our campus. . . .”).

And then there is the NCAA. The NCAA isn’t some kind of difficult-to-analyze deeply-embedded “structural” thing that incidentally disadvantages blacks. Rather, it is a bold and overt anti-trust price-fixing conspiracy mainly directed to disadvantage black sports stars. Essentially all colleges and universities in the U.S. with sports programs of any significance belong to it and are active participants in the overt anti-black anti-trust conspiracy. In a post back in March 2018 titled “The Real Scandal In The NCAA,” I had this to say about the seemingly brilliant and virtuous academics’ total failure to recognize the real racism in their midst:

On the one hand, there is constant protest and anger [at major universities] over underrepresentation of blacks in the student body and faculty, even though almost all of the schools engage in dramatic discrimination in favor of blacks in student admissions and faculty recruitment. On the other hand, there is a naked antitrust conspiracy to prevent the black sports stars from getting paid anything for their work, and everybody is just fine with that.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/22/equity-or-education/

College admissions have been steeped in controversy for years with wrangling over which measures best identify desirable applicants. A typical application requires transcripts, essays, recommendations, and results from standardized tests such as the ACT and SAT. The latter are now at the forefront of current debate, including one taking place in California.

The University of California system began requiring applicants to take the SAT in 1960. Recently, there have been discussions regarding the use of test scores in scholarship or admissions decisions, from making submission optional (spurred by COVID-19 limitations) to ending the required submission. 

Increasingly, the motivation to change requirements no longer focuses solely on the student but is driven by concerns that family income, parents’ education, and race can adversely affect test scores.

UC Riverside Chancellor Kim A. Wilcox contributed to the debate with a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled “Dropping the SATs could make UC admissions more biased.” He included the findings of a faculty task force, which recognized that the UC system has been able to offset such bias by including other relevant factors in admissions. He argued that inequities could be made worse because test elimination would cause a greater reliance on grades, thus driving grade inflation, or result in more affluent families hiring tutors for their children.

While the task force’s findings and recommendations were persuasive, in May 2020 the UC Regents suspended the standardized test requirement for all California freshman applicants until fall 2024 and announced a plan to design a new test in time for 2025 admissions. If the deadline is not met, standardized testing requirements for all California students will be eliminated. 

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

This post wanders from the Midwest to a D.C. suburb, but the locations really have no geographic relevance because we’re witnessing the same thing playing out in public schools across America. It’s also got a lot of tweets, because they tell the story in real-time, with important videos. Stick with it, though because the bottom line is important: Parents are beginning to realize that the institutions that they fund and to which they’ve entrusted their children are indoctrinating their children with racist, Marxist theories. Moreover, when challenged, they will react like cornered rats and call upon the police state to protect themselves.

To begin with, you must see the Critical Race Training forced on Iowa School System teachers. The training is aggressively non-partisan in tone, as well as being racist and Marxist. (Hat tip: Twitchy.) After you’ve looked at these tweets (skimming them is fine), keep reading this post, because I’ll have more evidence of the battle between public schools and the public:
While many attendees doubtlessly sit in those CRT training sessions stoically listening as a way to keep their jobs, many teachers take this seriously. They believe it is their Gaia-given right to use their classroom to indoctrinate the students in their care.

The teacher in the video below, who is from Iowa (so ignore the language about Texas), is an example of people who take the training to heart helped, no doubt, by the endless indoctrination they experienced at college. They then use their authority in the classroom (and their control over students’ grades) to brainwash America’s children with material that violates laws against partisan education, racism, and, in Iowa, CRT indoctrination:

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/school-board-meeting-cut-short-parent-arrested-after-fiery-speech-on-crt-transgender-policy/

Police declared an unlawful assembly at a Loudoun County, Va., School Board meeting Tuesday after residents clashed regarding the district’s proposed policies on transgender students.

The proposal in question, known as policy proposal 8040, would require teachers to use a child’s preferred gender pronouns. The board closed public comments at its meeting on Tuesday night after multiple interruptions by residents in the crowd.

After several speakers voiced support for the proposal, a woman who said she was the mother of a transgender student was booed after saying “hate” was “dripping from the followers of Jesus in this room.” The board called a five-minute recess and said public comments would be closed if any additional disturbance were made.

After other residents spoke both in favor and against the proposal, former state senator Dick Black criticized the board over its alleged backing of the policies as well as critical race theory. Residents cheered Black, prompting the board to close public comments by a vote of 9-0.

Parents began singing the “Star-Spangled Banner” after comments were closed.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/citizen-patriots-are-fighting-back-clare-m-lopez/

This is the fourth article in this series on Critical Race Theory (CRT). The earlier three may be seen here, here, and here. Their intent was to document the deteriorating situation across America, and especially in our schools, where curricula increasingly focus on Marxist propaganda that teaches children to hate their own country and seeks to instigate racial divisiveness intended to foment civil strife and eventually, a communist revolution. The series began with an explanation of the purely Marxist origins of CRT, its ideological roots in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the transplant of the Frankfurt School to the U.S. in the 1930s, and the eventual spread of CRT narratives throughout American academia, faith communities, government, media, popular culture, and society in general.

With the Biden administration, and specifically the Department of Education, openly pushing the teaching of CRT in U.S. public schools, the situation is raising alarm among educators, parents, legislators, and ordinary citizens. As embedding of CRT into Ethnic Studies programs in California and other states became widespread over the last several years, parents increasingly began to realize the malignant nature of what was being taught to their children. Tried and true pedagogical methodology that rewards academic achievement, focuses on fact-based education, and operates on meritocracy was being replaced with meaningless policies of “equity”. Everything was reduced to race. Instead of Marxist economic class divisions, CRT substituted ethnic and race labels that identify Americans as either “oppressed” or “oppressors”. Identity by intrinsic, immutable characteristics took the place of Martin Luther King’s “content of one’s character”. The Marxist rot that spread throughout American society with what seemed a startling rapidity took many by surprise. In fact, though, that ideology had long been nurtured carefully, methodically, but below the radar, following Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s blueprint for a “long march through the institutions”.

But now, it is everyday American citizen patriots who are waking up. Organizations like The Civics Alliance have formed to promote the teaching of the U.S.’s founding principles, accurate history, the brilliant ‘structure of our self-governing federal republic’, and the spirit of individual liberty. The American Cornerstone Institute, founded by former neurosurgeon and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Trump administration, Dr. Ben Carson, likewise focuses on promoting the first things principles that undergird our Republic: Faith, Liberty, Community, and Life. The Final Report of President Trump’s 1776 Commission offers an excellent outline to “enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union” through a restoration of American education grounded in a teaching of that history and those principles that is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.”

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

Two University of Virginia professors — Manuela Achilles and Kyrill Kunakhovich — taught a history course this spring that reportedly portrays American conservatives as fascists. They weren’t being hyperbolic. They really meant it.

In their analysis, the wellspring of fascism is not worship of the all-powerful, totalitarian state — which conservatives totally reject — but the traditional American virtues of family and patriotism.

I first learned of this class from a young friend of mine. Here is her description: 

Recently, I enrolled in a fascism class thinking it would be a great way to weed through the constant accusations that politicians make about who is fascist and who is not. The class started out great. We studied Hitler and Mussolini and other fascisms in Europe, then moved to Asia to look at Japanism, but the more the course progressed, the more I was confused about what fascism actually is. My professors chose to leave fascism undefined and allow each student to come to their own conclusion. That seems pretty reasonable, right? I thought so, too.

That is, until we started a unit on American fascism. All of a sudden only conservatives were fascist, only Christians could be racist, only Trump supporters could be violent. The professor argued that traditionalists, those with a rural past, constitutionalists, and those who “fetishized patriarchal masculinity” were all hallmarks of fascism. Essentially, anyone with the slightest bit of conservative thought is now akin to Adolf Hitler.

The scary thing about it was not just that we were being taught lies, but rather that at first it made perfect sense. I could see how “American fascism” aligned with Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. After going back through the material we had previously studied that semester and doing outside research, I realized just how much information had been left out. Nowhere does the course mention that Nazi means “national socialist.” Nowhere do we dive into how exactly Mussolini amassed as much power as he did (through a SOCIALIST agenda).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/critical-race-theory-is-the-opposite-of-education-11624293824?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

I learned economics from a Marxist.

It was the height of the Cold War, a critical moment when the survival of the West seemed in doubt, an age when many people, even those under no illusions about the unfolding terror of Soviet communism, wondered whether capitalism’s days might be numbered.

My tutor at a famous university in the English heartlands was one of the nation’s most prominent socialist intellectuals. His works anatomized—and anathematized—the capitalist system from the traditional Marxian perspective. His wider writings championed a structuralist view of society and its institutions. He not only inveighed against the supposed moral inferiority of capitalism. He was convinced about the inevitability of its collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

But Andrew Glyn was first and foremost a teacher, an intellectually insatiable pedagogue with a desire to foster among his students a hunger for a broad understanding of the discipline. His reading list each week included the canon of classical economic thought ( Adam Smith, David Hume, David Ricardo ), John Maynard Keynes and his followers, and a thorough grounding in the modern neoclassical and monetarist works (F.A. Hayek and the Chicago school, Milton Friedman especially).

No thinker—no ideology—was off-limits. It was the early days of the Reagan-Thatcher counterrevolution. Neither seemed guaranteed of success at the time, and we were encouraged—in fact required—both to learn what they were doing and to understand dispassionately its intellectual origins.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-backlash-against-critical-race-theory-is-real/

No matter how much progressives want to claim otherwise, parents are genuinely concerned about a divisive worldview being imposed on their children.
Returning once again to the shallow well from which she has pulled the majority of her journalistic water, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer suggested last week that the escalating pushback against critical race theory “has all the red flags of an dark money astroturf campaign.” We are stuck, it seems, in Stage One of the Kübler-Ross Scale of Progressive Political Grief.

If they wish to, figures such as Mayer can spend the next few years insisting that the resistance to critical race theory that we are seeing from parents across the country is little more than a mirage. Fingers firmly in ears, they can maintain that their detractors have invented the controversy from whole cloth, that an astroturfing effort by the Koch Brothers or the Manhattan Institute has tricked them, or that their objections ring hollow because they don’t know what critical race theory “actually” is. Sneering, scoffing, and laughing off the revolt, they can submit in anger that those complaining about the development are suffering from “white fragility” or are engaged in a “moral panic” or are just trying desperately to prevent their kids from learning about slavery and civil rights.

What they can’t do, however, is make any of that true.

Precision in language is important, and yet, after a certain point, it matters less what we choose to call a given trend than that we acknowledge that said trend exists. And mark my words: The backlash against critical race theory most certainly exists. It is being driven by real people, many of whom I have seen with my own eyes; it has been constructed atop a discrete and comprehensible set of objections; and it is being fought on behalf of a class of citizens — children — whose interests arouse the rawest emotions in all of politics. Those who dismiss this development too harshly or too pedantically do so at their peril.

What are the parents leading this charge angry about? In essence, they’re angry about the idea that any form of racial essentialism would be taught in schools. They’re worried by the prospect of their children — black, white, Asian, Hispanic, whatever — being told that, as the result of their immutable characteristics, they will play a fixed role within a fixed system within a fixed world.