RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://nypost.com/2021/01/30/dad-says-nyc-doe-public-schools-are-brainwashing-kids/

Henry Jones* is a married 49-year-old father of a daughter, 12, and son, 8, who are enrolled in two different public schools in Manhattan’s District 2. Worried about the identity politics agenda that’s increasingly dominating his children’s education, Henry, who is white, reached out to The Post. Here, he reveals his fears that his kids’ curriculum has gone too far: 

In 2017, our 5-year-old son came home from kindergarten and said he was studying a famous teenage transgender girl in school. I’d never heard of her, but he said her name was Jazz Jennings (formerly a boy who transitioned a few years ago and has so far had three gender reassignment surgeries.) 

I knew his school was liberal, so in the beginning I didn’t worry too much. But I did tell the principal I thought it was inappropriate. He disagreed. He told me, “We would never teach something inappropriate.” 

Not long after that, our son came home and told me the teacher said it was wrong to give little girls pink toys and little boys blue toys. That same year, teachers urged my son and his classmates to march around the school chanting, “Pink and blue is for everyone!” in a gay-rights walk. 

In 2018, my son and daughter were in the same elementary school, and their principal started involving parents as if they were part of the problem, too. We were told to read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Antiracist.” I read both books, and had issues with them both. Alexander argues that the war on drugs is racist. This is crazy talk because drugs were and still are devastating the black community. Kendi says that unless you’re actively pushing for “equity” all the time, you’re racist. So, for example, the city wants to abolish testing for its more competitive schools because there aren’t enough black kids passing the test. But this lowers the bar for everyone. In my opinion, this so-called anti-racism is hurting black people. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/28/biden-teachers-unions-and-the-630-billion-shakedown/

For all their devastating, long-term side effects, the various failed remedies to COVID-19 have been clarifying.

The “expert” class, in case it was still unclear to anyone, is overrun not with critical thinkers devoted to scientific inquiry but hyperpartisan hacks with a hive mind no better than that of a typical seventh-grade cheer squad. The scientific method is dead; in its place is a multitiered campaign to bully, silence, and cancel anyone who dares to challenge their unchallengeable expertise.

Political leaders on both sides of the aisle are as clueless as they are callous. Little daylight exists between Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and Republican Governor Mike DeWine.

The majority of Americans, sadly, quickly submit to the whims of the expert class to the point of self-destruction. Millions of Americans are doubling up on face coverings because Master Fauci said to do so and they are prepared to harass others into compliance as well.

But the biggest takeaway is this: The Democratic Party will never again get away with claiming that their number one priority is “the children.” 

Joe Biden and the Democrats just lost their most overused political prop—exploited to advance every policy from climate to health care—as tens of millions of American children, locked out of their classrooms for almost a year, act as human pawns in the unions’ biggest, most brazen shakedown yet.

The hustle has been underway since March 2020; unbeknownst both to students and parents, America’s youth of all ages walked out of classrooms and off college campuses not to return for months on end. 

Back then, as today, no scientific justification existed to shut down schools. The decision was based on the now-discredited Imperial College model created by now-discredited British scientist Neil Ferguson. Armed with no reliable data, Ferguson nonetheless warned that unless schools were closed in the United States, millions would die of the disease.

Teachers’ unions and their stooges in Congress wasted no time exploiting the crisis—and the gravy train quickly delivered. Over the past 10 months, colleges and K-12 schools have received at least $114 billion in federal COVID “relief” funding; the CARES Act allocated roughly $34 billion for shuttered schools and the bipartisan package passed in December gave away another $80 billion—despite no disruption in the flow of federal, state, and real estate tax revenues that fund the nation’s public school systems.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/leftist-bureaucrats-and-foundations-are-displacing-republican-government/

Last week I laid out the nightmarish plan by the Illinois State Board of Education to turn the state’s schools into leftist indoctrination camps. Never in two decades of writing on education have I seen a more extreme or pernicious proposal than the “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards.” The only good thing to be said about this episode is that it shows us what to beware of. The Illinois-teaching-standards outrage is the endgame of the coming push for expanded “civic education” at the state and federal levels. More than that, the ultra-woke Illinois teaching standards, and the bogus Illinois “civics” law they build upon, are case studies in the hijacking of representative government by leftist bureaucrats and foundations.

Typically, when we think about the out-of-control growth of the administrative state, we mean the federal bureaucracy. Well, the “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” are the product of an out-of-control state-level bureaucracy. Relatedly, the misnamed Illinois “civics” law (it should have been called the “mandatory Alinskyite-activism law”) effectively ceded control of the state’s “civics” education to a batch of woke Chicago foundations.

In 2018, I wrote here about an important study by Emmett McGroarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle, Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty. That book went further than most critiques of the administrative state, because it showed how the growth of federal bureaucracy had subverted independent government by the states. The “Illinois Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards” take us to new level, however. They show that even states have begun to cede their legislative authority to leftist state-level bureaucrats eager to usurp the lawmaking power.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/parents-at-elite-nyc-school-push-back-against-facult

Parents whose children attend an elite, private New York City prep school are pushing back against the faculty’s litany of antiracist demands, which would force students to learn critical race theory.

In an open letter to the Dalton School community, a group of parents expressed “loving concern” over the school’s “abandonment” of liberal-arts education in favor of an “anti-racist curriculum.” They asked Dalton to suspend newly developed lessons rooted in critical race theory, return to former curriculum standards, and hire an independent ombudsman to conduct a survey among students, parents, and alumni about the school’s antiracist measures.

“Love of learning and teaching is now being abandoned in favor of an ‘anti-racist curriculum,'” the parents wrote. “Every class this year has had an obsessive focus on race and identity, ‘racist cop’ reenactments in science, ‘de-centering whiteness’ in art class, learning about white supremacy and sexuality in health class. Wildly age-inappropriate, many of these classes feel more akin to a Zoom corporate sensitivity training than to Dalton’s intellectually engaging curriculum.”

Months of racial unrest sparked last year by Black Lives Matter led dozens of schools, particularly expensive, private institutions, to weave lessons in critical race theory—the notion that laws and society in the United States are inherently racist—into school curricula.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/28/leftists-want-the-next-ted-cruz-or-josh-hawley-exiled-from-name-brand-universities/

The American gentry seeks to squash conservatism, the free speech ethos of the university system, and intellectual diversity in our country.

An article titled “Instructing Insurrections: How UChicago Can Avoid Creating the Next Ted Cruz” was published on Sunday in “The Chicago Maroon,” a nearly 130-year-old left-wing student newspaper at the University of Chicago.

Replete with obnoxious Ivy League elitism, the article reads like an instruction guide on how to undermine the university’s renowned “Chicago Principles,” which guarantee free speech and open discourse on campus, and how to gaslight conservative students in the classroom. It is also a direct attack on the “Chicago Thinker,” an opposing conservative student newspaper I co-founded this summer, which is the solo voice on campus deviating from its woke orthodoxy.

“We’ve seen the consequences of elevating hateful rhetoric—we have seen it now in the highest echelons of power,” writes student author Kelly Hui. “It begins in our classrooms,” where the Ivy-educated Cruzes and Josh Hawleys “are given the tools they need to acquire and keep power, even if it means promoting fascism and white nationalism.”

“The next Ted Cruz could be walking through the quad right now,” warns Hui. “The future Josh Hawley might be playing devil’s advocate in your [sociology] class. We can prevent such radicalization by reexamining the Chicago principles and prioritizing safety over absolute free speech.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/campus-racial-thoughtcrimes-richard-l-cravatts/

As the Maoist-like purges on university campuses continue, yet another faculty member has suffered the consequences of speaking words that may not be spoken and having views that are forbidden at universities where woke students, pretending to be supremely tolerant, indict others with their actual intolerance and join with faculty and administrators in suppressing views that they will not and cannot abide.

The latest victim is Charles Negy, an associate professor in the University of Central Florida’s Psychology Department. Negy’s thought-crime? In now-deleted tweets, Negy, who has taught at UCF for 22 years and presumably enjoys the protection oftenure, questioned one of the prevailing absolutes on university campuses: namely, that what is called “systemic racism” permeates and defines American society, and that even on university campuses—those places where the most enlightened and sensitive of all citizens reside—racism still shows itself in a dark undercurrent of bigotry, bias, and repressed hatred for non-white others.

The ubiquity of race obsession on campuses in the post-George Floyd age of Black Lives Matter has shown itself at schools other than UCF, as well. At Princeton University, as one noteworthy example, self-inflicted racial guilt was so prevalent that in September the University’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, published a self-flagellating open letter in which he bemoaned the fact that “[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/how_and_why_joe_biden_opposes_patriotic_education.html

Of all the executive orders that newly elected Joe Biden swiftly enacted,  nothing is more indicative of his anti-American animus and radical left-wing influence than his revoking Trump’s “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education.” 

The 1776 Commission to Create a Patriotic History Curriculum is in direct contrast to the “1619 Project,” which reflects a decidedly  anti-American, factually incorrect, and blatantly biased program currently being pushed through the U.S. education system.

The mission of the 1776 Commission is “to defend the legacy of America’s founding, the virtue of America’s heroes, and the nobility of the American character.”  But the left continues the mendacious onslaught of falsehoods about America.

Considering the people Biden is choosing to assist him, this move should come as no surprise.

After all, Susan Rice, his incoming domestic policy adviser, views America as a racist nation.  In fact:

[I]n 1986 she wrote an 86-page book titled A History Deferred, which claimed that because most U.S. students were ‘taught American history, literature, art, drama, and music largely from a white, western European perspective, their grasp of the truth, of reality, is tainted by a myopia of sorts.’  Hence, ‘[t]he greatest evil in omitting or misrepresenting Black history, literature, and culture in elementary or secondary education is the unmistakable message it sends to the black child,’ Rice elaborated.  ‘The message is ‘your history, your culture, your language and your literature are insignificant.  And so are you.’

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/23/transmitting-the-truth-about-americas-founding/

Among the 17 executive orders emitted by the Biden Administration on January 20, perhaps the most disturbing was the abolition of the 1776 Commission, the body President Trump formed last year 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.” 

Other of Biden’s executive orders will have a more immediate practical effect. His scuttling of the Keystone Pipeline, for example, will throw thousands of Canadians and Americans out of work. Furthermore, by signaling the new administration’s hostility to fossil fuels, it will also abet the process of undermining America’s energy independence, one of President Trump’s greatest accomplishments and a dynamic motor of America’s prosperity. There is cheering tonight in Tehran, oil-rich Arab states, and Moscow because of those insidious initiatives. And it goes without saying that there is wild celebration in Beijing as they digest the implications of the fact that the man whose family they so conspicuously enriched over the years made it to the White House. 

Another of the Biden Administration’s early woke initiatives is obeisance to the tiny but turbulent “transgender” lobby. Accordingly, another executive order requires that high-school and college sports teams allow men who say they are women to compete on women’s sports teams, the effect of which will be to obliterate women’s sports. Henceforth, too, all government forms will ask what people’s “preferred pronouns” are. One wit suggested that Biden should say his preferred pronoun was “Xi,” after his big benefactor in China. 

The negative consequences of Biden’s more pragmatic executive orders are incalculable. Nevertheless, the symbolic importance of dissolving the 1776 Commission may, in the end, be the single most destructive act promulgated by the new administration in its opening effort to repeal the achievements of the last four years. 

In dissolving the commission, the Biden Administration clearly signaled that it was siding with the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a malignant, anti-American fantasy whose guiding axioms are that America was founded as a “slavocracy” and that the American Revolution was fought primarily to perpetuate the institution of slavery.