RUTHFULLY YOURS

ttps://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/trump-1776-commission-patriotic-education-worthy-cause/

America’s proud history is worth defending, and it is worth defending through government and politics. There are fair arguments about how best to go about that task consistently with a duly conservative skepticism about the proper powers of federal and local government, but conservatives should not shy away from conserving the core of our national history, ideals, and culture — a goal that not so long ago was neither partisan nor ideological.

The current lines of battle are joined around the teaching of the New York Times 1619 Project, Howard Zinn’s 1980 screed A People’s History of the United States, and other fact-challenged efforts to supplant the story of America, its ideals, and its exceptional history with critical-race and gender theory and leftist agitprop. It is wrong to fill the heads of children with falsehoods, or to subject them to outside-the-mainstream theories until they are old enough to learn to evaluate them critically. It is right and important to commemorate what makes this nation great and special.

Control of public-school curricula is properly a local matter, but presidents can provide moral leadership, start national conversations, and raise alarms in this area. So long as there is a federal Department of Education with its hands in school curricula, its actions, too, should aim to be constructive rather than destructive. A proper American history does not mean feeding children Parson Weems’s whitewashed just-so stories. It is, rather, what Ronald Reagan called for in his Farewell Address in 1989, an “informed patriotism”:

An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? . . . We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile. . . . Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/10/05/against-the-1619-curriculum/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Choice and local control remain the best defenses.

It has been a year since the New York Times kicked off a national controversy by devoting an issue of its Sunday magazine to the 1619 Project, a factually flawed effort to portray all of American history as little more than the product of slavery and racism. Since then, our country has been convulsed by a cultural revolution dedicated to the proposition that America is a systemically racist country. This is no coincidence.

In the wake of the death in May of a black man named George Floyd from what gives every indication of having been mistreatment while in police custody, mass protests against allegedly endemic police racism spread across the country. Those protests soon devolved into rioting, looting, and — especially in Portland — daily violence in behalf of vaguely defined revolutionary goals. All of this has occurred despite extensive evidence that claims of “systemically” racist mistreatment of blacks by police are false.

Amid a national wave of monument destruction set off by the George Floyd disturbances, Portland rioters tore down a statue of George Washington, tagging it with graffiti such as “White Fragility,” “F*** Cops,” and “1619.” When Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute responded by dubbing the disorders “the 1619 riots,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, organizer and lead essayist of the 1619 Project, tweeted that “it would be an honor” to have the statue-toppling and riots so named.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/trying-purge-skidmore-faculty-student-run-anti-richard-l-cravatts/

“The power to be found in victimization, like any power,” wrote Shelby Steele in The Content of Our Character, “is intoxicating and can lend itself to the creation of a new class of super-victims who can feel the pea of victimization under twenty mattresses.” Evidently, the new campus victims in the culture of aggrievement since George Floyd’s death have been irritated by the ‘hard pea’ of racism and want everyone else on campus to know and feel their pain, as well, since coddled, narcissistic college students have weaponized their professed victimology and have turned it on administrators and the professoriate as a way of extorting concessions, influence, and power on their respective campuses.

On the first day of classes at Skidmore College, for instance, a rally was held, sponsored by the student organization Pass the Mic, at which the protestors called for the end of racism at the school and conveniently presented the administration with 19 specific demands aimed at facilitating “. . . transformative healing work for Black and Indigenous people of color, and trying to cultivate a sense of community that isn’t here on campus,” as one of the organizers put it.

In order to create this brave new anti-racist world at Skidmore, the 19 demands included the predictable ones, such as “a zero-tolerance policy toward racism among faculty, staff, students and administrators” and “mandatory and reoccurring anti-racist training for all professors and students,” but also more radical and delusional requests such as: “full access to all Campus Safety officers’ background records;” a “ban [of] all police presence from campus including as responses to disputes and for large-scale public events;” and, frighteningly, a policy that “all bias reports filed against professors/faculty [be made] public and accessible while concealing the identity of the person who filed.” But perhaps most troubling on this list was the one very specific demand that called for “The immediate firing of Mark Vinci, David Peterson, and Andrea Peterson,” three Skidmore faculty members. And what were the offenses that would justify these professors’ termination?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/san_francisco_state_university_once_against_embraces_terrorism.html

San Francisco State University (“SFSU”) has a history of overt leftism and anti-Semitism going back at least to the 1970s, so perhaps it’s merely business as usual that the campus is hosting an online event featuring Leila Khaled. Still, even for S.F. State, Khaled is extreme. She is a violently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel member of the hard left Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group more radical than the PLO. In 1969, she was part of a team that hijacked a TWA flight with 80 people on board and, in 1970, she attempted to hijack another flight while armed with two hand grenades.

Naturally, Khaled is feted on the left. Although she is still affiliated with the PFLP, which the U.S. and the European Union classify as a terrorist organization, in 2017 she spoke to the European Parliament. While there, she said that the Israelis are worse than the Nazis because they haven’t been punished:

“You can’t compare the actions of the Nazis to the actions of the Zionists in Gaza,” she claimed, later adding, “The Nazis were judged in Nuremberg but not a single one of the Zionists has yet been brought to justice.”

SFSU, although a taxpayer-funded institution, is entirely on board with inviting a member of an anti-Semitic terrorist organization to give a speech:

San Francisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED) is scheduled to host later this month a virtual conversation with a known Palestinian terrorist.

The Sept. 23 event, “Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice, & Resistance: A conversation with Leila Khaled,” will take place via Zoom. It will be hosted by SFSU professors Rabab Abdulhadi and Tomomi Kinukawa, the former of whom has a history of anti-Israel activism.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/princetons-confession-of-bias-11600469066?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

The folks at Princeton are supposed to be smart. But you have to wonder about the intelligence of inviting federal scrutiny by declaring their own school guilty of racism.

Amid a struggle session with progressive faculty and students this month, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber published an open letter promising to combat “systemic racism” at the school. That’s an eye-opener since Princeton has assured students and the federal government that it doesn’t discriminate. Has the university been lying?

Enter the Education Department, which wants to know. On Wednesday Assistant Secretary Robert King wrote Mr. Eisgruber requesting records related to his confession of bias. “Among other things,” Mr. King writes, “you said ‘[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton . . .’ and ‘[r]acist assumptions . . . remain embedded in structures of the University itself.’”

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that no one on the basis of race should “be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Colleges each year must certify to the Education Department that this is true to receive federal funds.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/brown-universitys-gift-to-the-assad-regime/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

Is Brown University’s Costs of War Project laundering Syrian government talking points, or is the Assad regime taking advantage of Brown’s research?

A study issued last week by the project made the extraordinary claim that post-9/11 military action by the United States has created 37 million refugees — which is only the most conservative estimate, according to its authors.

While estimating the impact of U.S. military action is a worthy goal, the study’s authors simply blame American policymakers for the actions of their foreign counterparts. The siege of Aleppo, resulting in hundreds of thousands misplaced? That’s part of the U.S.’s tab. The displacement of 4.2 million people in Somalia? Attributable to the U.S. special operations forces there — all 400 of them.

At best, as this is an egregious miscount and a sloppy study. Worse, though, it provides cover to those responsible for refugee displacement not caused by the United States, placing significant responsibility on America for the millions displaced during the Syrian Civil War, not the Assad regime or Russia.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/16/leftist-hostility-makes-university-of-chicagos-intellectual-diversity-pledge-a-joke/

The University of Chicago administration and department heads violate the Chicago Principles by using their powerful positions to impose their far-left political beliefs.

A July statement by the University of Chicago English Department faculty announced “For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black studies.”

The English Department’s move to block other areas of intellectual exploration was picked up this week by major news outlets, creating a lot of negative press for the university. While many were shocked by the English Department’s statement, as a third-year student at the University of Chicago, I was not.

Ironically, the University of Chicago prides itself on what they call the “Chicago Principles,” a mission statement claiming a commitment to protecting free speech and encouraging open debate. The publication of the Chicago Principles garnered the university a lot of media attention, kudos from parents concerned with leftist orthodoxy, and set the University of Chicago apart from other elite universities in its efforts to create an environment of political and ideological tolerance on campus. The principles have even been adopted by other schools. 

Unfortunately, in practice, the University of Chicago is hardly a bastion of free speech and political tolerance. It socially and academically rewards groupthink. This summer university departments and administration officials have imposed their politics on the campus community, further emboldening a left-wing mob of students who routinely bully conservatives into silence. 

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/exclusive-education-department-opens-investigation-into-princeton-university-after-president-deems-racism-embedded-in-the-school

The Department of Education has informed Princeton University that it is under investigation following the school president’s declaration that racism was “embedded” in the institution.

President Christopher Eisgruber published an open letter earlier this month claiming that “racism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.”

According to a letter the Department of Education sent to Princeton that was obtained by the Washington Examiner, such an admission from Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars of federal funds in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declares 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.”

Eisgruber’s letter branding the 274-year-old university racist came after a summer of unrest rife with race riots and an open letter from hundreds of Princeton faculty members who wrote, “Anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup.” The admission was followed by dozens of “anti-racist” policy change demands. Among them were calls for select faculty race quotas and to “reconsider” the use of standardized testing for admissions.

Now, the Education Department has sent a formal records request as it pursues its investigation. Its main point of contention is whether Princeton has lied to the public with its marketing and to the department in its promise not to uphold racist standards, in accordance with receiving federal funds.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/09/u-chicago-english-dept-wont-accept-anyone-unless-daniel-greenfield/

The cultural revolution decimating academia and turning it into a hollow shell for radical indoctrination only grows more crudely shameless with each cycle.

It’s not enough to just jettison Shakespeare or rename buildings. No, you will only be allowed to work with Black Studies.

A memo from what used to be the University of Chicago English Department.

For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods.

Considering U of C’s influence in this area, that’s significant.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/provocative-plo-diplomat-saeb-erekat-named-fisher-ari-lieberman/

The Future of Diplomacy Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs announced last week that Saeb Erekat will serve as a Fisher Family Fellow for the upcoming 2020-21 academic year. Erekat is a Palestinian diplomat, who’s held various senior posts within the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority. As a Fisher Family Fellow, Erekat will mentor students and give virtual seminars, and will presumably impart his knowledge and expertise on the state of Palestinian affairs and its international relations, including those it maintains with Israel.

Harvard could not have picked a worse choice. Erekat has a long record of mendaciousness and historical revisionism, and can best be characterized as an unrepentant congenital liar. He’s also an outspoken apologist for Palestinian terrorism and has dabbled in conspiracy theories laced with anti-Semitic overtones.

In April 2002, the Israel Defense Forces launched a counter insurgency campaign to rout Palestinian terrorist forces from the densely populated West Bank city of Jenin. Terrorists affiliated with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade had transformed the city into a terror hub. Jenin was macabrely referred to as the suicide capital of the West Bank due to the many suicide bombers who had domiciled there.