RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Last week, United Educators of San Francisco (i.e., the San Francisco public school teachers’ union) issued a “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” and voted to boycott Israel. San Francisco’s Jewish community is unhappy and Jewish parents are worried. Not only is the resolution disgraceful, but it also reflects everything that’s wrong with government unions.

Let me begin by stating my bias. I don’t merely dislike teachers’ unions, I absolutely despise them. As a public-school student in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s, I saw how the unions worked to protect bad, even evil, teachers, without regard for students. And as the daughter of a public-school teacher, I got the inside scoop on the increasingly leftist politics driving these unions. (Even worse, back in the day, they didn’t even get a decent salary for teachers. It was all about the predecessors to today’s woke politics.)

I also believe that government unions are inherently corrupt. In the private sector, both management and the unions have skin in the game when they sit down at the negotiating table. They’re negotiating for their own benefit (profits versus wages and job safety), and both have an interest in ensuring that the company survives.

However, when it comes to government unions, the only people with skin in the game – the taxpayers – aren’t at the table. The government representative ostensibly speaks for the taxpayers but the reality is that both the union negotiator and the government representative want to funnel as much money to the union as possible, in exchange for the union funding Democrats.

The Democrats, in turn, ensure that government employees get salaries and benefits far greater than those available in the private sector. It’s a massively corrupt system that has kept Democrats in power even as their policies fail whenever implemented.

So, as I write about the disgraceful, anti-Semitic San Francisco teachers’ union, you know that I come from a place of pure loathing. But even without that loathing, one ask to ask why teachers, whose job is supposed to be teaching San Francisco students reading, writing, and arithmetic are, instead, getting involved in international politics:

The San Francisco teachers union turned its attention away from city schools and toward international conflict, calling for a boycott of Israel in a strongly worded statement that has angered some families and outraged Jewish organizations.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/free-speech-in-crisis-at-stanford-law-school/

Stanford University recently threatened a liberal law student’s ability to graduate over a satirical post to an email listserv aimed at the campus chapter of the Federalist Society. Fortunately, the school has now backed down. This is yet another story of academic disciplinary systems run amok against free speech. The hero of this tale is the indispensable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which fights for student rights to free speech, religious liberty, due process, and freedom of conscience on campuses across the country. Given the political climate on today’s campuses, that means that a lot of FIRE’s work is on behalf of conservative students, but as this case illustrates, FIRE will take on the campus censors to protect speech from all different perspectives.

The chief villain in the story is the university’s cowardly, brain-dead complaint system, the staff of which acted so unreasonably in this case that they even came under fire from the dean of Stanford Law School. The press, interested primarily in score-settling against the Federalist Society, has focused mainly on the involvement of the three law-student officers of the Stanford Federalists in triggering the disciplinary process. Those students did, in fact, have a legitimate reason to be aggrieved — but they crossed a line by invoking the disciplinary machinery of the university. There are lessons all around about how we should go about protecting free speech on campus.

The Riot Act

The controversy began on January 25, a few weeks after the January 6 Capitol Riot. Nicholas Wallace, a third-year student at Stanford Law, created a satirical poster purporting to be a Federalist Society event on “The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection.” The event claimed to feature Missouri senator Joshua Hawley (a Stanford alumnus) and Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, hosted by the Stanford Law student chapter of the Federalist Society.

The flyer promised to hand out “riot information” and give out Grubhub coupons, and explained, “Violent insurrection, also known as doing a coup, is a classical system of installing a government. Although widely believed to conflict in every way with the rule of law, violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government.” The flyer took pains to imitate the design and cadence of a Stanford Federalist Society event, down to the logo and formatting. You can see it below:

A modestly careful reader would notice that the event was dated January 6, the date of the riot, rather than a date in the future. Sadly, many people these days are not modestly careful readers.

In a saner time, the flyers would have been posted around the campus. Instead, Wallace posted them to a Stanford email listserv, and the drama escalated from there. Judging from the negative comments he received that day, the people who were immediately offended were thin-skinned left-leaning law students triggered both by the satire and by the very existence of Federalist Society debates on the campus. One wrote, “If cannibalism were a real, widespread fear among people in your society, then I think A Modest Proposal would be inappropriate to email to everyone en masse, under the guise of a legitimate organizational proposal.” There was also discussion of “*why* so many students believed this was a real event.” Another: “To those of you made to feel unsafe by this fictional event, I invite you to likewise reflect on the actual events hosted by the Federalist Society that have threatened our classmates’ wellbeing,” citing speakers critical of DACA and DAPA:

For the sake of “academic freedom,” our undocumented classmates must bear the trauma of attending an institution that welcomes speakers actively working to remove their right to remain in the country…I hesitate to draw the line of what is acceptable discourse at pointing out the Federalist Society’s complicity in this issue, even if done so satirically and at our discomfort. Our policy, as recently reaffirmed by Dean Martinez, is to promote discussion despite discomfort. I ask only that you reflect on the momentary dread you felt as an example of the cost of “academic freedom” we impose on our BIPOC and undocumented classmates.

https://spectator.org/public-schools-gender-radical-reshaping/

Part one of a three-part series on extremist indoctrination in America’s schools.

Extreme ideologies are quickly taking root in U.S. K-12 public schools through new school policies, practices, and curriculums — with devastating effects on students. Unfortunately, Americans are mainly turning a blind eye instead of speaking up against political and social indoctrination that threatens our children’s education and the very fabric of our nation.

One radical development is in the area of sex/gender. Although the terms historically have been used interchangeably, a shift has occurred in recent decades, with sex primarily referring to a biological category or anatomy and gender referring to people’s thoughts or feelings about who they are. Over the past several years, schools have increasingly embraced the cultural redefinition of gender — from male and female to a host of created alternatives. Despite the biological reality of only two distinct sexes, schools embrace, and in some cases actively promote, students questioning and then self-selecting their gender based upon how they feel.

The Gender Unicorn

Starting as early as preschool and kindergarten, taxpayer money is funding radical sex education content. Just one example is the Gender Unicorn (an iteration of the Genderbread Person), a purple cartoon image featuring hearts and rainbows. Adopted in 2016 by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in Charlotte, North Carolina, Gender Unicorn use has spread nationwide and into Canada. The Washington State ASCD Curriculum in Context Spring/Summer 2020 lists the Gender Unicorn as one of several “educational materials” for teachers. The Alberta Teacher’s Association includes the Gender Unicorn in their 152-page teacher toolkit aimed at cultivating LBGTQ-inclusive classrooms.

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

In Carmel, New York, there is a woman named Tatiana Ibrahim. She is a warrior and a heroine. She stood up at a school board meeting and gave the board members what-for because the teachers in her children’s school district are bringing Marxism to the classroom in the form of Critical Race Theory (“CRT”), defund the police lessons, and other leftist concepts.

In the past couple of months, more and more parents are starting to fight back against the plague of leftism that has been infecting America’s classrooms. This leftist instruction has been going on for a long time (I fought it with my kids’ education beginning two decades ago), but 2020 had two factors that brought it into the open.

The first factor was distance learning because of COVID, which meant that parents got a window into their children’s classrooms. The second factor was the maddened escalation of CRT because of the George Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter’s subsequent cultural ascendency.

Parents are sending open letters to schools and speaking up at school board meetings. Each of these parents is a true hero. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with the passion and clarity that Tatiana Ibrahim brings to the subject. She completely dominates the room.

The only thing disturbing about this video is the passivity of the other parents in the room. They should be applauding her wildly. Instead, they sit there and you know that each of those parents is desperately hoping that the “educators” before whom they grovel is not putting that parent’s name – or worse, the name of that parent’s child – on a list for future harassment:

https://pjmedia.com/culture/gwendolynsims/2021/06/03/disturbing-report-suggests-pornography-exposure-doesnt-harm-children-n1451955

Did you know that online pornography isn’t bad for our children? Heck no, according to a report released by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) exposure to pornography even makes some children feel happy feelings.

What could be wrong with that? We want our children to be happy, right?

The report, “Digital Age Assurance Tools and Children’s Rights Online across the Globe,” discussed the technical, legal, cultural, and policy uses of online age verification tools on internet sites involved with pornography, gaming, and social media.

Ultimately, the report concluded that online age verification tools warranted further study and development. As they are now, the age verification tools are ineffective at best and they may intrinsically violate the rights of children at worst. That’s pretty non-disturbing, right?

The disturbing part was hidden in the conclusion of the section on pornography that asked, “What is the evidence of risk and harm?” That section took it one step further by suggesting that there may not actually be any harm:

The 2020 EU Kids Online study compared survey findings from 19 European countries and found that in most countries, most children who saw sexual images online were neither upset nor happy (ranging from 27 per cent in Switzerland to 72 per cent in Lithuania); between 10 per cent and 4 per cent were fairly or very upset; and between 3 per cent of children (in Estonia) and 39 per cent (in Spain) reported feeling happy after seeing such images.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/lefts-urgent-mission-sexualize-kids-mark-tapson/

During a speech at Joint Base Langley-Eustice in Hampton, Virginia last Friday, listless President Joe Biden drifted into a strange reverie addressed to a female child in the audience, daughter of guest Brittany Bean, the wife of a soldier currently deployed in Afghanistan.

“I love those barrettes in your hair, man. I tell you what, look at her. She looks like she’s 19 years old sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed,” Biden mused breathlessly. The little girl looked to be no older than perhaps seven years old.

This deeply disturbing behavior is not atypical of the 78-year-old Biden, who has a long, well-documented history of cringe-worthy touching and sniffing of girls and women in public. It is so typical, in fact, that this leering in the middle of his speech didn’t even raise an eyebrow among his fellow Democrats, particularly in the activist news media, who did not report on it. Imagine the apoplectic outrage if Biden’s comments had been made instead by former President Donald Trump, whom the media routinely demonized as a sexual predator for a boastful comment he made about grown women, not little girls, in a private conversation ten years before he was president.

But then, why should the left find Biden’s apparent sexualization of children inappropriate? After all, sexualizing little children ranks very high on their anti-family agenda.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/texas-bars-protest-civics-and-crt/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

The Texas legislature has just passed House Bill 3979, a landmark education bill. It is the first law in the country barring not only the core concepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) from K–12 schools, but “protest civics” as well. The practice of protest civics — mandatory student protests and lobbying after school (invariably for leftist causes) — is every bit as much a threat to K–12 schools as CRT. Even if every state legislature in the country were to bar CRT, the federal civics bills being considered right now in Congress could still force leftist indoctrination on the states via protest civics. That is why the passage of Texas H.B. 3979 is so important.

The momentum coming out of Texas is significant. Already, Ohio representative Don Jones has introduced a bill broadly similar to what just passed in Texas. Other states are considering legislation that also take on both protest civics and CRT. We may soon see a wave of expanded K–12 protections sweep over the states. That means the news out of Texas — and now Ohio as well — is very good.

That said, the Texas bill emerged from its legislative struggle a bit raggedy. Democrats fought the measure tooth and nail. While they failed to undo the protections against protest civics and CRT, Democrats did manage to weigh the bill down with a long, scattershot list of readings that inappropriately forces a detailed and highly debatable curriculum onto local districts. Quite apart from arguments about the readings themselves, states should not dictate curriculum to districts at this level of specificity. Democrats also managed to block a number of important technical fixes to the bill.

None of this is prohibitive. Governor Abbott should certainly sign H.B. 3979. Abbott would be well-advised, however, to pare down the vastly over-extended list of required readings and make some additional technical fixes during September’s special session.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/banning-critical-race-theory-11622670206?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

An emerging reality of the current American presidency is that any normalcy Joe Biden may have promised was entirely fake.

The latest exhibit is the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis occurring as about six states are enacting or planning restrictions on teaching what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota are calling “critical race theory.”

This was the sort of hyper-polarization Mr. Biden was supposed to arbitrate. Instead, he marches leftward, covering his trail with pixie-dust rhetoric.

As always, it defaults to the media to substitute its own explanations for the country’s social tension. Two reporters for the New York Times connected the dots in a piece this week: “Republicans’ attacks on critical race theory are in sync with the party’s broad strategy to run on culture-war issues in the 2022 midterm elections.” Little wonder so many say they are tuning out politics and the media. The reductionism is hopeless.

This new divide is a textbook example of the Founding Fathers’ (if one may still cite them) fears about destructive political factions. “By a faction,” James Madison wrote in his now constantly cited Federalist No. 10, he meant citizens “who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens” (emphasis added). We are there.