RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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

The University of Virginia is planning to host a class on the Mueller investigation of former President Trump, otherwise known as the Great Russian Collusion Hoax. The investigation, which spanned most of three years and cost millions of taxpayer dollars, ended with a whimper, but only after an armed SWAT team, guns drawn, conducted a pre-dawn raid on the home of 66-year old former Trump associate Roger Stone and his wife, an embarrassment to Mueller and law enforcement in general. This would be akin to sending Delta Force to pick up Nancy Pelosi for jaywalking. As Stone said of the 29 FBI agents in 17 vehicles that swarmed his property, “They could have contacted my lawyer.”

The University, which Thomas Jefferson founded, recently announced that its School of Law course will take students “inside the investigation that dominated headlines during the Trump administration.” The news release added that the course will “offer an inside look at the role of special counsel,” and will be taught by former members of Mueller’s team…and Robert Mueller himself!

What a concept! No bias here! The release noted the Stone prosecution but somehow omitted the part about the entire investigation being a sham of epic proportions, a political witch-hunt for the ages. The UVA class will almost surely also forget to mention that a prosecutor attached to Mueller’s Special Counsel probe is being investigated for falsely testifying to Congress.

Axios reported, “The course will begin with the start of the investigation and Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. It will then focus on the special counsel’s relationship with Congress and the Justice Department, how the investigation related to the White House and the Roger Stone prosecution.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/18/pro-critical-race-theory-teachers-reward-extra-credit-to-students-who-testify-on-anti-crt-bill/

A group of Rhode Island teachers in favor of implementing critical race theory in their schools offered extra credit to their students who agreed to testify on an anti-critical race theory state bill.

Documents obtained by Parents Defending Education show that at least two educators across different departments at Barrington High School in Barrington, Rhode Island offered five extra points to students to be used on their next exams if they chose to verbally testify or offer a written comment on the legislation. Emails also show the educators praised students who chose to submit testimony.

The bill prohibits teaching certain divisive concepts that have infiltrated government schools at the taxpayers’ expense, as well as some private schools. Those concepts, which make up the bedrock of the racist so-called critical race theory, include “an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” “an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” and “meritocracy or traits such as hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.”

The social studies teacher who created the original email “strongly urged” her students to partake in the hearing while offering her own left-leaning commentary on the legislation, which she said would prevent her from teaching “the unit on Race or Gender.”

The teacher, Alison Grieco, claimed she believes “every opinion is valuable in my classroom as long as it is respectful” and that “good civics discourse only happens when multiple sides of an issue is discussed” — but she made those comments only after clearly opposing the legislation. “This bill essentially states that there should be no discussion of race or gender in classrooms,” she lamented.

Although Grieco also claims she always encourages her students to involve themselves in the political process, saying she “[doesn’t] care if they testify for, against or no position (you must select one of those three options when testifying and I have gone over all three with students),” she also wrote in an email that she encourages students to testify on legislation “that would relate to them.” The examples she listed are all on Democrats’ wish lists: “lowering voting age, funding for mandatory civics education, and this bill.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-university-

The lack of backbone in American higher ed leaders is astounding. They’re so afraid of getting on the wrong side of the aggressive leftists on campus that they won’t defend good faculty members who come under attack for having offended some Social Justice Warrior.

In today’s Martin Center article, Giovanni Gravano of FIRE writes about a case at Central Michigan University (CMU). A journalism professor, Timothy Boudreau, quoting from court documents, spoke the “n-word.” That was enough to cause a student to file a complaint against him.

How did the CMU administration react? By telling the student to behave like an adult rather than a whiney child? Of course not.

Writes Gravano, “Following class that day on June 22, 2020, a nine-minute video was posted by one of his students, labeling Boudreau ‘racist’ and criticizing his choice to quote the slur in the classroom. As is often the case on social media, a single post criticizing a professor’s speech or course content quickly became an amplified movement to have him punished or fired.”

After the dust had settled, Boudreau was forced into retirement, accepting a small settlement from the school. Remaining faculty at CMU will no doubt have learned to avoid even quoting the forbidden word, but also to worry about anything else that might “trigger” some student with a grudge.

Gravano concludes, “And as universities continue to fail to protect faculty speech, students suffer as good professors decline to return to classrooms. For students to miss out on the opportunity to learn how to properly deal with differences or study the breadth of their respective subject matter is a failure of educational institutions.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/18/a_plan_to_get_divisive__radical_theories_out_of_our_schools_145946.html

As a candidate, Joe Biden’s number one promise was to “unite” America. Yet in his first months as president, his number one priority has been to divide our country by race and gender at every turn.

There is no clearer example than the Biden Administration’s new effort aimed at indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren with some of the most toxic and anti-American theories ever conceived. It is vital for Americans to understand what this initiative would do, what drives it, and, most importantly, how we can stop it.

For decades, the America-blaming Left has been relentlessly pushing a vision of America that casts our history, culture, traditions, and founding documents in the most negative possible light. Yet in recent years, this deeply unnatural effort has progressed from telling children that their history is evil to telling Americans that they are evil.

In classrooms across the nation, students are being subjected to a new curriculum designed to brainwash them with the ridiculous left-wing dogma known as “critical race theory.” The key fact about this twisted doctrine is that it is completely antithetical to everything that normal Americans of any color would wish to teach their children.

Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, it teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice. Far from advancing the beautiful dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—that our children should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”—the Left’s vile new theory preaches that judging people by the color of their skin is actually a good idea.

Teaching even one child these divisive messages would verge on psychological abuse. Indoctrinating generations of children with these extreme ideas is not just immoral—it is a program for national suicide. Yet that is exactly what the Biden Administration endorsed recently in a rule published in the Federal Register aimed at inflicting a critical race theory-inspired curriculum on American schoolchildren.

The rule explicitly cites the New York Times’ discredited “1619 Project” as a motivation

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-florida-graduate-student-wanted-to-correct-the-record-on-covid-deaths-rebekah-jones-tried-to-ruin-his-career-over-it/

Jon Taylor had a disagreement with Jones over COVID data, so she falsely accused him of sexual harassment.

Jon Taylor’s desire to help Floridians understand a pandemic that was remaking their lives nearly cost him his career.

Taylor, a 37-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the Florida Atlantic University College of Business, waded into the world of COVID data analysis last spring after being informed that he had been in contact with someone who tested positive for the virus. When he looked at the data for himself, what he found disturbed him: The way the Florida Department of Health was presenting the pandemic death toll was confusing members of the media who lacked a background in data analysis.

News outlets, local and national, were conflating the actual number of Floridians who had died of COVID on a given day with the number of COVID deaths that had been entered into the system on that day — a total that included deaths that had occurred days and sometimes weeks before the entry date.

The misunderstanding was a dream come true for news editors eager for attention-grabbing headlines detailing Florida’s “record-setting” daily COVID deaths.

Taylor, an affable and apolitical mathematician, thought he could clear things up by presenting the data in a more transparent way, so he and his academic adviser created their own COVID tracker, which relied on the state’s data but presented it on a timeline that accurately captured the number of deaths in the state each day.

Unbeknownst to Taylor, who studiously avoids political media, he had just stepped on a hornet’s nest.

By creating a tracker that showed the situation in Florida to be somewhat less dire than enemies of Governor DeSantis preferred to believe, he had left the staid world of academia and entered the world of politics, where facts are subordinated to the question of whom those facts might help and whom they might hurt.

And in Florida, the foremost enforcer of the dire COVID narrative was a woman named Rebekah Jones, the former COVID dashboard manager for the state health department.

“In the process of building the tracker, of course I found Rebekah Jones. You can’t do Florida COVID work without running into her,” Taylor told National Review.