RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/2/social-justice-101-intro-to-cancel-culture

The term “cancel culture” has hurtled into popular use as a way of identifying instances of social justice mobbing—essentially, the attack on a person, place, or thing that is perceived as inconsonant with “woke” ideological narratives. When a “cancel culture” event takes place the complainants demand—and often get—offenders fired, shut down, silenced, or otherwise removed from the public eye.

The students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, are calling for the removal of a statue of President Lincoln for his apparent mistreatment of Native Americans.1 The San Francisco public school board is making the same accusations against Lincoln, and are attempting to expunge his name from any of their school buildings.2 A long list of examples of cancel culture on campus—the epicenter of the mobbing maelstrom—is provided in Campus Reform’s “Burned: ‘cancel culture’ claims multiple victims in 2020.”

So what’s driving this cultural movement? Where has this new ethic and sense of morality come from? Almost all the modern iterations of leftist ideology we are dealing with in the present come from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who once conveniently summarized the essence of his thought:

The fundamental principle of all morality, upon which I have reasoned in all my writings and which I developed with all the clarity of which I am capable is that man is a being who is naturally good, loving justice and order; that there is no original perversity in the human heart, and the first movements of nature are always good.3

The most important clause to this quotation is “that there is no original perversity in the human heart.” The word original is an allusion to the concept of “original sin,” derived from the biblical Adam and Eve, who committed the first sin by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil against God’s instructions, thus staining all of humanity thereafter from the moment of conception. Rousseau doesn’t just invalidate original sin, he attributes natural goodness to all human beings, affirming “that man is a being who is naturally good,” that human beings are born pure and are corrupted by society.

By dovetailing the invalidation of original sin with the natural goodness of man corrupted by society, Rousseau created a new ethic for interpreting right and wrong, moving responsibility for evil from the individual to society. As Irving Babbitt, a critic of Rousseau, once explained:

The old dualism put the conflict between good and evil in the breast of the individual, with evil so predominant since the Fall that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau, this conflict is transferred from the individual to society.4

Rousseau’s transfer of the struggle for good and evil from the individual to society creates an interesting wrinkle in liberal thought: perfectibility. Man’s flaws and fallen nature are removed and no longer a limitation. Arthur Melzer, a scholar of Rousseau, asserts that because evil comes from without and not from within, “then perhaps it could be overcome by reordering society. In principle, Rousseau opens up radical new hopes for politics . . . that it can transform the human condition, bring secular salvation, make all men healthy and happy.”5 Now that man is devoid of any evil inclination, “the appropriate manipulation of environmental factors can lead to human perfectibility,” and the perfectibility of society as well.6

https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/08/02/the_lefts_crt_straw_man_shows_they_dont_trust_parents_to_teach_morality_110617.html

I taught history in Poland soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union. My students were eager to learn objective truth–something which the Soviet regime abhorred. When I look at the fight over Critical Race Theory (CRT), it reminds me of the party-approved curricula that my students’ parents remembered from the days behind the Iron Curtain. Like the Soviet Ministry of Education’s dogma, CRT is blatantly ideological. It’s no wonder CRT’s proponents are intent on muddying the waters with bad faith arguments. 

And that’s exactly what we saw from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interview with CNN’s Don Lemon last week. When asked about the pushback against critical race theory, the New York City Congresswoman replied: “Why don’t Republicans want kids to know how to not be racist?”

Parents like myself are stunned by Ocasio-Cortez’s ignorance. Aside from sounding like an activist college student who has yet to reconcile with reality, Ocasio-Cortez reverts to a common straw-man argument. She contends that parents and Republicans don’t want their kids to learn about racism or the history of it in this country. What she is responding to, however, is an argument entirely different from the one reverberating across the country.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/teaching-school-children-evil-whiteness-richard-l-cravatts/

In a 1963 interview with Louis Lomax, Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X, commenting on white people, said that “The white devil’s time is up . . ,” and that “Anybody who rapes, and plunders, and enslaves, and steals, and drops hell bombs on people . . . anybody who does these things is nothing but a devil.” NOI’s Louis Farrakhan has often repeated the same slur about white people being satanic, and such language has long been part of the organization’s radical, anti-white discourse and ideology.

What is surprising, however, is that this same view—of whiteness being linked to the devil in a satanic pact through which white people are given supremacy, power, and wealth—has made its way into a children’s book used in school districts all over the country.

Written by a white woman, Anastasia Higginbotham, Not my Idea: A Book About Whiteness (Ordinary Terrible Things), at first appears to be an innocuous picture book about race, but its not-so-subtle “anti-whiteness” message is part of the race indoctrination being promoted in public schools as part of critical race theory (CRT) and the ideology which teaches children that white people are irredeemable racist oppressors and blacks are perpetual victims of that oppressive white supremacy and racism. Not My Idea tells the story of a white family in which the white parents shelter their child from the reality of police violence against black people, the suggestion being that white people turn a blind eye to this form of racial injustice and, in not standing up against it and teaching their children to do so also, they are complicit in that injustice and in perpetuating white supremacy.

Higginbotham (pictured above) clearly was inspired by her self-loathing at being white and presents her assumptions as facts for the young readers in her book. “Whiteness is the reason these killings by police happen,” she said in an interview, “the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous.”

She also has apparently bought into the false and dangerous view, promoted most notably by the Black Lives Matter movement, that white police officers frequently and maliciously kill unarmed black people because of systemic and prevalent racism, a belief, however, that is not actually supported by facts or reality. “Whiteness is the reason cops make split-second decisions to fire their weapons into the body of an unarmed person who is Black,” Higginbotham suggested, “while not even reaching for their weapon during interactions with armed and violent criminals who are white.”

CRT clearly has as its guiding intention to change what Higginbotham referred to as “the white cultural mindset that tells us white is good and innocent, while Black is bad and dangerous.” In fact, CRT and books like this one have as their express purpose to flip this paradigm on its head, so that children are now being indoctrinated with the idea that whiteness is essentially bad, negative, oppressive, cruel, and racist, and that blackness, because of its victim status and as a result of its oppression, is virtuous and innocent. CRT does not teach tolerance by urging school children to be kind to each other and treat each other as equals, which it purports to do, but instead elevates blackness by degrading whiteness, making white people seem to be regressive, intolerant, hateful, and perennially racist as part of their very nature. Thus, CRT is condemned by its critics for branding white children in this way while at the same time telegraphing to black children that they are perpetual victims in a society dominated by whites who are morally defective as a result of their racist core.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/16/laws-against-critical-race-theory-are-only-the-first-step/

Several state bills and laws working to ban critical race theory (CRT) have excited heavy breathing from the see-no-evil allies of the radical educational establishment. Even purist free-speech advocates such as FIRE have expressed some qualms. So, is every bill working to ban critical race theory perfect?

No, of course not—I say with regret, because what America desperately needs is to evict CRT from its schools and from every private and public institution. The National Association of Scholars and the Civics Alliance have endorsed Stanley Kurtz’s model Partisanship Out of Civics Act (POCA), the source for Texas’ new law H.B. 3979, not just because it also bans the vocational training for community organization known as “action civics,” but precisely because its language to ban CRT is carefully crafted to respect free speech and survive the inevitable legal challenges. 

Notably, the Partisanship Out of Civics Act applies to public K-12 schools rather than to higher education, where constitutional precedent has established a larger sphere of academic freedom. We recommend the model legislations’ language to our colleagues throughout America who wish to rid our public schools of CRT because we believe that its precise language has the greatest ability to achieve real and lasting change.

That doesn’t mean we’re fussed by other bills that were introduced using broader language. The legislative process is supposed to improve bills by thoughtful amendment. So we think it is perfectly reasonable to amend a bill banning the racism of CRT to clarify that a teacher can still teach about racist figures from America’s past, such as eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger, as well as assign their writings to students. We also think it is wise to amend the scope of blanket prohibitions of CRT to protect academic freedom in higher education. These are reasonable changes in themselves—and they will allow these bills to survive predictable challenges from the CRT advocates.

What this heavy breathing really illustrates is the need for far greater reform of our schools and universities—indeed, of all our public and private institutions—than can be achieved simply by these bills to ban CRT. America confronts institutions whose members are devoted to subverting the spirit of the Civil Rights Act, which long ago declared that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The latest bills to ban CRT amount to saying, we really mean it, now practice nondiscrimination in good faith. Since the radical establishment that has seized hold of our institutions wishes to discriminate, by CRT, by so-called “anti-racism,” by “diversity, inclusion, and equity,” or by whatever jargon is in fashion, policymakers must face the fact that the radical establishment, to the greatest of its abilities, will treat these laws as dead letters.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/strangely_nazilike_talk_at_a_pennsylvania_college.html

Franklin and Marshall is a private college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania whose annual tuition exceeds $63,000 a year.  If the recent “Franklin & Marshall Faculty Statement in Solidarity with Palestine,” as signed by two dozen F&M professors, is in any indicator of the school’s quality, students should look into public universities whose tuition is one third of this or even less.  More to the point is the fact that Godwin’s Law ceases to apply when somebody really does talk like a Nazi.

The letter’s first paragraph refers to “refugees expelled and driven from their homes during the Nakba (1947–49) that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel.”  “Nakba” (catastrophe) does not refer to Israel’s well justified seizure of land in the 1967 war — the third war that its neighbors started or provoked in less than twenty years followed by the one in 1973 that could have started the Third World War.  The Anti-Defamation League explains that pro-Palestinian sources use “Nakba” to depict the creation of Israel as a catastrophe and deny Israel’s right to exist.  That, as opposed to arguments over the subsequently occupied territories, is anti-Semitic.

The truth is that while some Arabs were driven from their homes by Israelis, most fled at the behest of the countries that invaded Israel in 1948 with the openly expressed intention of driving all the Jews into the sea.  “Israel maintains that it is not responsible for the Palestinian refugee problem since it is the result of a war forced on Israel by invading Arab armies.”  The ADL adds accurately that the countries that started the war and were therefore responsible for most of the displacement refused, with the exception of Jordan, to accept their fellow Arabs.  The signatories also leave out the inconvenient fact that roughly 800,000 Jews had to flee nearby countries still in possession of the property they stole from the Jews in question.

The letter continues, “The story of children killed in the most recent Gaza attacks alone reveals the absurd inaccuracy of the ‘evenhandedness’ narrative.”  The story of the children killed in Gaza is the story of Hamas’s use of its own civilians as human shields with the intention of getting them killed so Hamas’s dupes and useful idiots can bleat about how the Israelis murder children.  Some were even killed by Hamas rockets that fell short of Israel.  The Germans (not Nazis, however) behaved far better during the Second World War.  General Frido von Senger took particular care to avoid looking out the windows of the Abbey at Monte Cassino lest he see Allied troops, which would technically turn the Abbey into an “observation post” and therefore a legitimate military target.  He also kept his soldiers and weapons off the premises, entirely in contrast to Hamas.

The letter continues, “The brutal system that controls Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is ideologically founded upon Jewish supremacy,” which is where it really talks like a Nazi.  “The phrase ‘Jewish supremacy’ can be traced back to Nazi Germany and has been retreaded for use in today’s conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, writes Gil Troy in Newsweek.”  Nobody needs to pay $63,000 a year to learn about Jewish supremacy at Franklin & Marshall when he can get it for free from the Stormfront White Nationalist Community where a Google search brings up more than a thousand links for this topic.  One of the Stormfront pages cites David Duke’s “My Struggle Awakening” (Ku Klux Klansmen can get “woke,” too!), which covers Jewish supremacy in extensive detail, according to the table of contents.  I did not buy a copy because there is no longer a shortage of toilet paper.  Here, meanwhile, is a free online lecture on Jewish supremacy that makes just as much sense.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/14/confronting-teacher-union-twaddle/

Randi Weingarten, the gaffe-prone president of the American Federation of Teachers has outdone herself, and that isn’t easy. In a series of seven open letters over the years, I have playfully chided the union boss about her trove of inane and bizarre musings. But now she has jumped the proverbial shark.

Immediately following the National Education Association’s annual meeting, the American Federation of Teachers held an online conference, which began July 6. As the keynote speaker, Weingarten kicked things off, and most of her 74-minute talk was typical rah-rah teacher union blather, including praise for Joe and Kamala, and the obligatory swipe at The Donald. But late in her talk, the bushwa really kicked in.

At the 60-minute mark, she described a “new culture campaign” that 

some lawmakers (and Fox News) are using to distort history, limit learning and stoke fears about our public schools. 

Let’s be clear: critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools. It’s a method of examination taught in law school and college that helps analyze whether systemic racism exists—and, in particular, whether it has an effect on law and public policy.

I wonder how Weingarten can make such a bone-jarringly stupid statement when there is a boatload of evidence to the contrary. Just a few of the myriad examples from across the country:

In Buffalo, students are told that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism, and kindergarteners were forced to watch a video of dead black children, warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” which might kill them at any time.

The Arizona Department of Education has created an “equity” toolkit, which claims that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old, and that white children become full racists—“strongly biased in favor of whiteness”—by age five.
In Cupertino, CA third-graders are forced to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”
The principal of a school in New York City sent white parents a “tool for action,” which tells them they must become “white traitors” and then advocate for full “white abolition.”
In Seattle, there was a training session for teachers in which schools were deemed guilty of “spirit murder” against black students.

The San Diego Unified School District orders their students to “confront and examine your white privilege” and to “acknowledge when you feel white fragility.” Additionally, children are told to “understand the impact of white supremacy in your work.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/07/neas-radical-agenda-public-education-richard-l-cravatts/

One positive aspect of the vigorous current debate over critical race theory (CRT) being taught in public schools is that parents and other interested parties have a new awareness of what is being taught in their children’s classrooms. The criticism has also resulted in educators closing ranks against a questioning of their perceived role in promoting a leftist, radical ideology that many think has no place in public school systems.

In a July 6th speech at an American Federation of Teachers (AFT) meeting, Randi Weingarten, the organization’s left-leaning president, defended the teaching about race and pushed back against critics who questioned the educational and moral validity of CRT being part of a school curriculum.

“Let’s be clear,” Weingarten proclaimed, mendaciously, however, “critical race theory is not taught in elementary schools or high schools.” And answering back defiantly to anyone who questioned how the current teaching about race may be divisive rather than educational, she further claimed that “. . . culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history.”

Weingarten and other educators, including local boards across the country, have been walking back their previous vigorous defense of CRT, claiming instead, as she did, that teaching about race and white supremacy is merely “accurate history,” and not part of a campaign to indoctrinate students with an ideological mishmash of racial justice, activism, white police brutality, social and economic disparities between whites and so-called “people of color,’ and a culture of white supremacy in which the privilege of the majority disadvantages and oppresses black victims.

But Weingarten’s protestation aside, the National Education Association (NEA) — with some 1,680,000 members — and other educators groups are not only actively engaged in promoting CRT but are creating learning environments in which students are bombarded with an increasingly radical set of lesson plans, some taught in conjunction with Black Lives Matter at School Week and some part of regular instruction, that teach children a one-sided view of race, law enforcement, class, family structure, crime, and economics—topics that have not heretofore been a central, or even appropriate, part of K-12 education.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/07/14/research_used_to_justify_californias_racial_equity_math_doesnt_add_up_784966.html

Part 1 of a Series on ‘Social Justice’ Research (Part 2 here)

The push to create “equity” and more “social justice” in public schools in America’s largest state rests on this basic premise: “We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents,” declares the current draft of the California Math Framework, which also states that it rejects “the cult of genius.”

Are blacks and girls filtered out of high-end math? Or are students just different?
Katerina Holmes

Informed by that fundamental idea, the 800-page Framework calls for the elimination of accelerated classes and gifted programs for high-achieving students until at least the 11th grade.

It’s a major departure for the Framework, commissioned every seven years by the Department of Education to provide guidance to the state’s 10,315 public schools serving 6 million students. Some California teachers describe it as a misguided “one size fits all” approach to reversing long-standing discrimination against girls and students of color in math instruction.

But the Framework, which could be adopted next year, claims its recommendations are based on the latest, seemingly unimpeachable findings of advanced social science research. Phrases such as “researchers found,” “the research shows” and the “research is clear” are sprinkled through the Framework, which states unequivocally: “The research is clear that all students are capable of becoming powerful mathematics learners and users.” If true, this evidence would provide a powerful rationale for adopting the Framework’s proposals, which, given California’s size and prestige, is commonly seen as a model for other states.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/07/the_end_of_critical_race_theory.html

Critical Race Theory is liable to end for reasons very similar to the reasons the Salem witch trials ended.

In January 1692, nine-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms.

A special court, the court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem to hear the cases; and based on spectral evidence the first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem’s Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women, and children were accused over the next several months. 

Opposition to the trials grew as the family and friends of more and more villagers were accused of witchcraft, including the wife of Governor William Phips.  Governor Phips saved his wife by dissolving the Court of Oyer and Terminer and moving all trials to a higher court. This superior court did not allow “spectral evidence” and, since most of the earlier accused witches had been executed due to this evidence, any remaining witches were all ruled innocent.

The tide is turning against Critical Race Theory as those who endorse it become its victims.  Most teachers and staff of New York schools went along with the CRT craze because they were afraid they would lose their jobs if they spoke out against it.  In fact, even George Davison, the headmaster of New York’s Grace Church school that teaches CRT did not dare admit that he had said in a private conversation with Paul Rossi, a teacher at his school, that “we’re demonizing kids, we’re demonizing white people for being born.”  Instead, Davison accused Rossi of misquoting him.  Rossi released an audio recording proving his account was accurate after which Mr. Davison, perhaps with some persuasion from his school, decided to retire.