RUTHFULLY YOURS

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. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/what-if-department-education-were-running-daniel-greenfield/

How ambitious is this whole attempt to exploit the manufactured crisis with a massive government crackdown on political dissent?

Here’s an NPR interview with Cynthia Miller-Idriss an “expert” on “extremism”.

But we also know that that’s always a Band-Aid solution, that by the time you get to the need to infiltrate groups or deplatform people who are spreading mass amounts of disinformation, you’re already just so far down the pipeline that you’re now talking about deradicalization instead of actual prevention. So this has to be something that involves, you know, Health and Human Services. It has to involve the Department of Education. 

“The need to deplatform”.

We got past the point where we’re pretending otherwise. Now let’s talk about how the DOE and HHS can work on this.

It’s the kind of thing that we invest in as a country or through foundations and foreign ministries overseas in fragile democracies to help the public understand what manipulation looks like and how they could be persuaded by it, but we haven’t done it in our own country, and I think that’s going to have to change.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2021/01/21/thoughts-on-the-1776-commission-and-its-report-n1398928
Biden to Rescind Trump Admin’s 1776 Report on “Patriotic Education” RSK

The newly formed President’s Advisory 1776 Commission just released its report. The group was chaired by Churchill historian and Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry P. Arnn. The vice chair was Dr. Carol M. Swain, a retired professor of political science. (Full disclosure: I was a member of the commission.)

The unanimously approved conclusions focused on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the historical challenges to these founding documents and the need for civic renewal. The 16-member commission was diverse in the widest sense of the familiar adjective. It included historians, lawyers, academics, scholars, authors, former elected officials and past public servants.

Whether because the report was issued by a Donald Trump-appointed commission, or because the conclusions questioned the controversial and flawed New York Times-sponsored 1619 Project, there was almost immediate criticism from the left.

Yet at any other age than the divisive present, the report would not have been seen as controversial.

First, the commission offered a brief survey of the origins of the Declaration of Independence, published in 1776, and the Constitution, signed in 1787. It emphasized how unusual for the age were the founders’ commitments to political freedom, personal liberty and the natural equality endowed by our creator — all the true beginning of the American experiment.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/15/scholastic-pushes-a-false-racial-narrative-to-elementary-children/

Scholastic seeks to connect emotively with our children and change the way they think about the United States and the ideals, principles, and freedoms it was founded upon.

What do George Floyd, Thanksgiving, and the Civil War all have in common? The publicly traded Scholastic Corporation has made a conscious decision to weave them into a twisted account of American History (their label) portraying our country as systemically racist, fundamentally flawed, and essentially evil. Articles written in their weekly Scholastic News Review are mandatory classroom reading and discussion for our children—6 million in total from first through sixth grade across the country, according to Scholastic.

During back-to-school week in August, these 6 million mostly elementary-age students were welcomed back with an article titled “Demanding Justice,” with the subheading: “Protests spread across the United States after a Black man is killed by police.”

The opening article paragraphs are misleading and disturbing:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are demanding an end to the long history of racism and police brutality against Black people in the U.S. He (George Floyd) died after being pinned to the ground by a white police officer. The officer had pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes. Floyd repeatedly said he couldn’t breathe.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1776-report-11610754084?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Trump established the 1776 Commission with an executive order last year for the purpose of producing a counter-balance to the political left’s largely negative interpretation of American history.

The commission’s report, set for release Monday, won’t silence criticism of America, as liberal teachers groups feared. That isn’t in the power of the federal government, let alone an advisory commission. Instead, the 1776 Report makes the case for the American creed and a less radical way to teach history.

“Neither America nor any other nation has perfectly lived up to the universal truths of equality, liberty, justice and government by consent,” the report states. “But no nation before America ever dared state those truths as the formal basis for its politics, and none has strived harder, or done more, to achieve them.”

The Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal” was a revolution in itself, a turning point in world history. To reduce America to its violations of that principle, as do many contemporary writers, is to miss the distinguishing part of the story that roused freedom lovers and terrified tyrants everywhere—and still does. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate Monday, could make America better by insisting it be truer to its own founding principles.

Those steeped in recent academic accounts of the U.S. may wonder how the 1776 Report can say core U.S. principles are “true” and still call itself history. That’s because it reads the Declaration not as archaeology or dissimulation, but as a live claim that demands adjudication.

Can anyone be surprised to hear that undergraduate history enrollments lately have hit new lows, facing worse drop-offs than any other department?