RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/admissions-nyc-specialized-schools

At a state senate forum earlier this month on Mayor Bill de Blasio’s plan to end the admissions test for New York City’s top high schools, an African-American woman went on a harangue about how Asian-Americans come from “a culture that has no problem with cheating.” Waving a sheaf of “documentation,” McCarthy-style, she railed against “some of the newer immigrants who have come here . . . with that cultural milieu of cheating.” She was not interrupted or challenged by any of the legislators.

But when a 12-year-old, Asian-American middle school girl spoke in favor of retaining the test—asking “If I work hard, shouldn’t I have a higher advantage than those who . . . are just being lazy”—the senators were alert to potentially racially insensitive language. “Be very careful how you prepare them for this argument,” Senator Velmanette Mont­gomery of Brooklyn admonished Asian parents in the audience after the girl testified—taking the word “lazy” as a reference to blacks, though the girl had said nothing about race. “It is your responsibility and . . . obligation that . . . those children do not internalize those racist atti­tudes.”

These anecdotes tell you a lot about the progressive war on New York’s selective “specialized high schools” (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and five others), now dominated by Asian-American students from largely poor and working-class immigrant backgrounds. It’s a war being fought on two fronts, and both involve attacks on Asian-Americans that would be unim­aginable against any other minority group.

The main action is in the state legislature, where the Democratic takeover of the senate last fall gives the Left its best chance to get rid of the 48-year-old state law that requires a competitive exam as the sole criterion for admission to the selective high schools. De Blasio and his schools chancellor Richard Carranza are pushing an alternative scheme that would cut Asian enrollment in half.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/what_an_honest_commencement_speech_would_sound_like.html

…..”Good morning and congratulations!  I sincerely believe that most of you came to college with a desire to learn and be prepared for your future. But many of your teachers have skills and ideas that are proscribed by coercive politically correct bureaucrats.

However, you are all victims of a colossal scam for which your parents have anted up colossal sums of money.

You have been ensconced in an academic gulag where you have been programmed and robbed of the intellectual dexterity it takes to listen to, consider and debate opinions that are contrary to those into which you are being indoctrinated.

You abjure capitalism without understanding that everything you own, buy, wear, ride and text on — and that includes your Che Guevara t-shirts — are available to you because capitalism provides the funds for research, development and production.

Even the organic vegetables you consume so virtuously, not to mention those windmills and solar panels, depend on capital investment.

 You mock religious Creationists, but many of you are worshippers in the cult of global warming without even being aware of the vast scientific research that debunks it.

Many of you call yourselves “woke” and “alert to injustice in society, especially racism” but sanction the racist hypocrisy of organizations that promote libel, boycott and divestment from a freewheeling democracy like Israel, while giving Ilhan Omar and Tlaib a ” freedom of speech” pass.

You raise your fists in solidarity with “Black Lives Matter” but have no interest in the genocides and famines that are perpetrated on hapless millions of black people in Africa.

There is no calamity, no atrocity, no failure of a system, no tyranny that you have not been taught to trace to a “root cause” in American greed or complicity. Patriotism and nationalism are evil, but you give socialism a wide berth ignoring its documented failures.

Almost everything you learn to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree is indexed to gender and race. Oh, and by the way, “Bachelor” is a male noun. Will that word also be scrubbed from your diplomas?

You wish to make simple pronouns “gender fluid” while ignoring the barbarism inflicted on millions of women by Shariah laws. Will it really ameliorate their suffering if you call them “hirs?”

You have lost the fun of flirting without p.c. opprobrium and ridiculous accusations that trivialize real abuse. And, you reduce all expressions of gratitude, admiration or even condolence to illiterate texts.

 You are coddled and babied in the most cynical and self-indulgent way with “safe spaces” to avoid any words, images, or persons that “trigger” your vapors.

In conclusion, my advice to you is simple.  The word commencement means a start. Go forth and free your mind from the cant to which it has been hostage for four years. And grow up!

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/the-death-of-merit-and-the-race-to-mediocrity-in-our-increasingly-marxist-universities/

“Our school teachers and university professors have been doing their best to discredit and destroy liberal individualism, freedom, merit, the search for objective truth, Western civilization, American and Canadian culture, and capitalism, all contrary to the views of the American and Canadian public. This is an ambitious agenda, but through the magic of “social justice,” they have made great progress in shaping the minds of pupils and students, and our future doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, and legislators, if at the expense of objectivity, science, and truth. In a competitive and dangerous world, they lead us to ever increasing mediocrity and vulnerability.”

The television series “The Enemy Within” begins by informing the viewer that there are 100,000 foreign spies in the United States working to undermine and destabilize America. China has sent hundreds of thousands of students to America to gain maximum access to the West’s advanced knowledge and technology, some through education alone, some through espionage.

While the foreign threat is real and serious, it pales beside the internal threat represented by the North American education complex. There are 756,900 teachers and professors in Canada, and 5.2 million in the U.S. Almost all of these professors and teachers are daily resolutely and relentlessly attacking Western culture, rejecting American culture, and advocating cultural Marxism.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/america-has-become-a-place-where-spoiled-children-paying-60000-tuition-consider-themselves-victims/

“I don’t feel safe,” says a Harvard student in a video.

What threatens her? The dean of her Harvard dormitory, law professor Ronald Sullivan, agreed to be part of accused sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein’s legal defense team.

Sullivan and his wife were deans of the dormitory for years, but no matter. Now the professor is apparently an evil threat.

A group calling itself “Our Harvard Can Do Better” demanded Sullivan be removed from his dean job.

Sullivan is black, but black activists joined the protest, too. On the videotape, one says, “Dean Sullivan told me to my face that I should view his representation of Harvey Weinstein as a good thing because that representation will trickle down to black men like me who constantly face an unjust justice system.”

Seems reasonable to me. But the privileged Harvard students laugh and clap when the protester goes on to say, “F— that!”

Colleges don’t show much courage when pushed by student activists. Harvard administrators removed Sullivan and his wife from the residence hall.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-professor-who-argues-against-multicultural-ideology-and-for-western-exceptionalism-now-fears-for-his-job/

I have met University of New Brunswick sociologist and co-founder of the blog Council of European Canadians Ricardo Duchesne only once and found him reserved, thoughtful and modest. A brilliant writer and genuine scholar, he has authored two impeccably-researched volumes on the history of Western civilization and the settler domestication of pre-industrial lands.

In an earlier article for PJ Media, I had occasion to mention Duchesne, who writes in Canada in Decay — one of the most important books in our national literature explaining the emergence of the ideology of immigrant multiculturalism — that Canada is an extreme, though not unique, example of impending ethnocide, “promoting its own replacement by foreigners from other races, religions and cultures.” As Duchesne points out in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, the same form of national self-deprecation we note in Canada is at work in most Western nations today.

Before multiculturalism took root, Duchesne argues, Canada was not an immigrant nation, as the cliché has it, but a European nation built by settlers and pioneers. The same formulation applies to the U.S. and Australia. He notes a critical difference between categories of newcomers: pioneers create, immigrants contribute (at their best). Multiculturalism, however, which radically changes the identity of a country, is neither a creation nor a contribution; it is “an experiment imposed from above.” Tensions inevitably arise between the rapidly shrinking European majority and the multi-ethnic, culturally alien brew that is displacing it.

Duschesne lays out his agenda in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. His central contention, he writes, “will be that the West has always existed in a state of variance from the rest of the world’s cultures,” divergences that include, among a plethora of others, “the ‘Greek miracle’, the Roman invention of the legal persona, the Papal revolution, the invention of mechanical clocks, the Portuguese voyages of discovery, the Gutenberg revolution, the Cartographic revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the ‘rational’ mercantilist state and the ‘industrial enlightenment.’” He has no doubt that the “ideals of freedom and the reasoned pursuit of truth were cultivated and realized in the course of Western time.”

https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/teachers-allegedly-told-to-treat-black-students-as-victims-punish-whites/

In controversial “implicit bias” training, New York City’s public-school educators have been told to focus on black children over white ones — and one Jewish superintendent who described her family’s Holocaust tragedies was scolded and humiliated, according to firsthand accounts.

A consultant hired by the city Department of Education told administrators at a workshop that “racial equity” means favoring black children regardless of their socio-economic status, sources said.

“If I had a poor white male student and I had a middle-class black boy, I would actually put my equitable strategies and interventions into that middle class black boy because over the course of his lifetime he will have less access and less opportunities than that poor white boy,” the consultant, Darnisa Amante, is quoted as saying by those in the room.

“That’s what racial equity is,” Amante explained.

Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union, was appalled.

“It’s completely absurd — they want to treat black students as victims and punish white students. That defeats the purpose of what bias awareness training should be,” said Davids, who is black.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/

Harvard University’s maladroit defenestration of Ronald Sullivan and his wife, Stephanie Robinson, struck a blow against liberal education. Many of Harvard’s own left-liberal luminaries are up in arms. But the university’s disgraceful act can come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the last few decades to higher education in general and to Harvard in particular.

On May 11, the Harvard Crimson reported that Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana informed Winthrop House residents by email that morning that he would not renew Sullivan and Robinson — both of whom teach at Harvard Law School and will keep their positions there — as Winthrop faculty deans. The first African Americans to head one of Harvard’s 12 residential houses, Sullivan and Robinson had served in that position for 10 years.

The trouble began in January when Professor Sullivan — faculty director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute and the Harvard Trial Advocacy Workshop — announced that he would serve on the legal team representing film producer Harvey Weinstein, who faces criminal charges of rape and other sexual misconduct (Sullivan left Weinstein’s defense team on Friday, May 10, the day before Dean Khurana made public his decision). Students protested angrily. They claimed that Sullivan caused them to feel unsafe by taking Weinstein as a client. They alleged that Sullivan’s decision was “trauma-inducing.” They demanded his ouster on the grounds that he had rendered himself unfit to lead Winthrop House.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/24/college-professors-reason-students-crazy-people/

Bring together immature adolescents with leftist professors and the inevitable outcome is the current crisis in higher education. The conditions on most American campuses should not surprise any people who are aware of the nature of adolescence. The educators running them, however, seem particularly ignorant. They condone incivility, tolerate infantile behavior, and encourage such silliness as “redefining gender.” They cave under threats and apologetically submit to the most outrageous student demands.

Contemporary educators are curiously insensitive to one aspect of adolescent development in particular. When immature youths with fragile impulse control get no help (e.g., firm limit-setting) from adults in authority, their control over their sexuality and aggression worsens, and they act on their impulses more often.

This behavior reflects not only diminished self-control, but also an attempt to locate desired boundaries. However, neither meeting the developmental needs of students nor providing them a liberal education are primary concerns of many American academics. More important to them is inculcating students with the leftist political and cultural ideology they champion.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/what_are_the_children_learning.html

Because of the manipulative leftist ideology rampant in schools, black children are not permitted any pride in their own achievements. Instead they are pumped full of an inordinate opinion of themselves merely because of the color of their skin.  It is an abuse of the potential that they actually possess, and it is leading to frustration, failure, and anger at many levels.

Examples abound.  In Saratoga Springs, New York students are asked to tabulate their “privilege” and as a result their race, gender, religion, appearance, and disability status are used as a means “to enlighten students on their relative status in society.”  Achievement is cast aside.  Instead, a false self-aggrandizement for certain groups is established.

Jason D. Hill, a black immigrant who has chosen to embrace the American dream takes issue with author Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Hill writes that Coates’ beliefs “[t]hreaten to alienate [his] son from his country and afflict him with a sense of moral inefficacy and impotence.”

Hill maintains that by “imparting this credo, [Coates has] potentially paralyzed [his son and other black children because he has] “alienated them from their own agency and emancipatory capabilities.”  Hill asserts that Coates presumes that “black people are mostly treated as mindless automatons who can’t seem to help themselves.”