RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/george-harbison/2022/11/27/the-babylon-bee-publishes-a-hysterical-spoof-of-a-college-english-course-description-oh-wait-n1648938

The Babylon Bee is far and away the leading source of conservative satirical content on the internet.  Its writers brilliantly skewer the entire spectrum of woke and PC nonsense on a daily basis.  Its pieces are shared widely in social media by clear thinkers seeking comedic relief in the face of the avalanche of increasingly crazy and dangerous ideas, positions, and rhetoric emanating by the American left.

If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:

Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5

How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-choice-tremors/

The election on November 8th was good for the school choice movement. As Corey DeAngelis, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, explains, 76% of candidates supported by his organization won their election. Govs. Kim Reynolds (IA), Chris Sununu (NH), Kevin Stitt (OK), Bill Lee (TN) and Greg Abbott (TX) were victorious after making school choice a centerpiece of their campaigns.

In Florida, where there are four different private options for families, Gov. Ron DeSantis annihilated Charlie Crist, who drew a distinct line in the sand when he chose the president of Miami’s teachers union as his running mate. DeSantis not only won by almost 20 percentage points, he outperformed Crist by 13 points with Latino voters, according to exit polls. This should not come as a surprise, as 38% of students using the state’s largest private-school choice program are Hispanic.

While the above governors are all Republicans, some victorious Democrats had become education freedom advocates. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro was elected governor after campaigning hard for school choice. Also, Illinois J.D. Pritzker found religion and supported his state’s tax credit scholarship program during his campaign.

But the choicers weren’t the only ones claiming success on November 8th. After the election, the National Education Association crowed, “Educators, Parents, Students Won Big in Historic Midterm Elections.”

NEA President Becky Pringle triumphantly asserted, “Parents and voters explicitly rejected extreme politicians who engaged in the politics of division, politicizing our classrooms, banning books, dragging their culture wars into our public schools, and pushing failed privatization schemes.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2022/11/25/biden-education-dept-deputy-director-says-democracy-and-everything-else-is-white-supremacy-n1648648

“Kristina Ishmael [she/her],” a Biden deputy director to the Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology, made her Twitter account private after Fox News caught her claiming that democracy, “fatphobia,” and, well, pretty much everything else is “white supremacy.” Considering that Ishmael said she was tuning out white people, while she/herself is white, should we follow her example and exclude her from public expression?

Fox News reported that said she also tweeted, “Learning to be comfortable in my own skin & weight and really ready to reject the White supremacist ideal body? F*ck yes. Fatphobia is real. The ‘ideal’ weight, shape & look is white supremacy baked into our everyday lives. I’m so over it. We deserve more than diets.” Because apparently only white people have ever criticized fatness?

“[Democracy is] also built on white supremacy, which I see perpetuated in education circles when BIPOC folx are being told they’re too negative by addressing real issues instead of superlatives,” Ishmael tweeted. The Biden official also tweeted an accusation that the “white evangelical church” has “welcomed” both “White supremacy and hate.” Ishmael commented, “Amen.” Which would seem to lower her woke score, since she did not add “awomen.”

Over a quarter of Americans identify as evangelical, Fox News reported.

In 2019, Ishmael pontificated, “I walked away from a conversation because a white male dominated the conversation that was being facilitated by a woman of color. Sometimes walking away is the only thing to do.”

Ishmael also seemed to ponder if white homosexuals ought to be considered marginalized in school curriculum. Which is clearly a consideration of paramount importance for an educator. “In most ‘inclusive’ materials, the most dominant folx are still represented in the marginalized group (e.g. white, cis, gay men). This does not include the nuance of this group,” Ishmael whined. But she’s always focused on the most important aspects of education: “[M]ost of my curriculum was written from a very narrow and white perspective.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-without-lsats-american-bar-association-11669157733?mod=opinion_trending_now_opn_pos3

The flight from merit continues across America, and it’s spreading fast in the legal profession. An arm of the American Bar Association (ABA), which accredits law schools, voted on Nov. 18 to end the requirement that prospective law students take the Law School Admission Test. And here we thought torturing prospective lawyers was a widely accepted public good.

The vote is pending approval from the ABA House of Delegates in February. If adopted, it would make standardized testing optional in preparation for a career that demands a lot of standardized knowledge.

The LSAT has long been a target of diversity advocates who argue that the use of the test has limited minority enrollment in law schools because the test questions are allegedly biased in favor of white test takers. Detractors also object to the LSAT because affluent students often pay thousands of dollars to prepare for the test that is supposed to predict their first-year law school performance.

The ABA decision is best understood as an attempt to get ahead of a possible Supreme Court decision against the use of racial preferences in school admissions. By making the LSAT optional, schools will be able to admit the students they want without lowering the average LSAT score that is one measure of elite status. But the schools need the ABA to move first.

https://christopherrufo.com/support/?mc_cid=569a7c5199&mc_eid=9bde3e8efb

I’ve finished my investigative reporting series on radical gender theory in America’s schools. These stories had a dramatic impact on the national conversation, driving nearly 500 million direct media impressions and changing the national debate. But, more than anything, they established the facts: America’s public education system has taken the most destructive principles of academic Queer Theory and injected them into the public school curriculum—starting in kindergarten.

Here is a summary of the stories:

The War on Innocence: A Kentucky summer camp teaches “sex liberation,” “BDSM,” and “self-pleasure” to minors.
Radical Gender Lessons for Young Children: The Evanston–Skokie School District adopts a curriculum that teaches K-3 students to “break the binary” of gender.
“Banging Beyond Binaries”: The School District of Philadelphia encouraged teachers to attend a conference on “kink,” “BDSM,” “trans sex,” and “masturbation sleeves.”
The Gender Variant Universe: A consortium of publicly funded nonprofits wants to “decolonize gender” and normalize male genitalia as a form of authentic womanhood.
Sexual Liberation in Public Schools: Los Angeles Unified School District adopts radical “trans-affirming” programming and instructs teachers to work toward “the breakdown of the gender binary.”
In Portland, the Sexual Revolution Starts in Kindergarten: The city’s public schools teach K-5 students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.”
The Dismantlers: San Diego public schools want to overthrow “heteronormativity” and promote “genderqueer,” “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “two-spirit” identities.
Soldiers for the Gender Revolution: Left-wing activists have smuggled radical gender theory into more than 4,000 schools.
How Gender Radicalism Conquered Sacramento Schools: Sacramento City Unified School District instructs teachers to “normalize gender exploration” and promotes such identities as “genderqueer,” “polysexual,” and “two-spirit.”
Radical Gender Theory Comes to the Heartland: A Missouri school district promotes the idea that “gender is a universe.”
Unholy Alliance: In Chicago, local school administrators and the city’s largest children’s hospital promote “kink,” “BDSM,” and “trans-friendly” sex toys for minors.
Concealing Radicalism: Michigan’s Department of Education encourages teachers to facilitate child sexual transitions without parental consent.
Sexual Disturbance: The teachers union promotes a how-to guide for “anal sex,” “bondage,” “sadomasochism,” and “fisting.”
Pronouns Unbound: San Francisco Unified School District facilitates secret child sexual transitions and allows students to identify as “it.”
The Real Story Behind Drag Queen Story Hour: Aimed at children, the phenomenon is far more subversive than its defenders claim.
My work on radical gender theory is shaping the national agenda. Please support it with a $5 or $10 monthly contribution here.

Share

Tweet

Forward

https://www.frontpagemag.com/school-board-battles-are-raging/

It’s no secret that the teachers unions have control over most aspects of public education in the U.S. The school boards, which negotiate with unions over salary, work rules, etc. are particularly important for the unions to dominate. To that end, Michael Hartney, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, recently quantified the unions’ stronghold on the all-important boards.

Hartney asserts that union-endorsed candidates win about 70% of all competitive school board races. Union support helps both incumbents and challengers, and union-friendly candidates also tend to win in both conservative and liberal school districts.

As teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci notes, union involvement has been going on for years, and it’s been a massive effort. The largest union in the country, the National Education Association, has 13,000 local affiliates in all 50 states. A study conducted by the National School Boards Association found that in 2018, 24% of school board members surveyed were current or former members of a teachers union.

Not surprisingly, California leads in union involvement in school board races. Per Antonucci, in the recent election, the California Teachers Association funded 287 board candidates in 125 school districts – large and small – dispensing more than $1.8 million for its candidates.

The process is simple. The teachers unions fund left-wing school board candidates, who, when they win, then support generous pay and benefits for teachers as well as various radical causes. Then, via union dues, a portion of teacher pay is routed back to the union to start the cycle again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Union leaders clearly know the game. As former Los Angeles teacher union boss Alex Caputo-Pearl once explained, “We have a unique power – we elect our bosses. It would be difficult to think of workers anywhere else who elect their bosses. We do. We must take advantage of it.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/17/ied-explodes-on-mits-campus/

Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, seems to be everywhere these days, from the White House to the boards of directors at Fortune 500 companies and to admissions and hiring policies at universities. We prefer to reverse the acronym, because IED – as in improvised explosive device – seems more apt, given the IED explosion in creating administrative bloat, invasive control of speech, and what used to be called “affirmative action.”

In a recent talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a speaker characterized the zeitgeist thusly: “Diversity is being invited to the dance. Inclusion is being asked to dance. And equity is sharing in the planning of the dance.” But for MIT and other academically rigorous universities and programs, the goal has always been to develop the brightest minds for the betterment of humankind in all fields of endeavor, not to create social butterflies.

MIT does not “invite” participants, because it is tantamount to a science, technology, engineering, and math (“STEM”) Olympics. You compete feverishly to get in. You must be highly self-motivated to participate once there in absorbing every possible iota of knowledge and technique in your field of study. And it defies reality to assert that intellectual capacity and specialized aptitude are evenly distributed to allow equal contributions. The same applies to other higher education programs committed to advancing knowledge through its students and faculty. The dance metaphor for these schools is a gross distortion that reeks of the entitlement mentality of many in today’s younger generations.

In fact, the very assumption that there is a significant educational benefit of identity diversity is questionable for these academically rigorous schools, just as the Olympics are focused only on athletic excellence and have retained their exalted status as a result. Intellectual diversity, which is not the within the purview of IED departments, is what fosters advancement of knowledge. In any case, the similarities and intense focus among those students who are truly qualified tends to make identity diversity largely inconsequential in comparison. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yale-and-harvard-law-schools-unrank-themselves-u-s-news-and-world-report-rankings-college-heather-gerken-11668726298?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Yale and Harvard law schools said this week they will no longer participate in the annual law-school rankings published by U.S. News & World Report. Readers may see no one to root for in a showdown between elite schools and the higher-ed ratings complex, but there’s a point to be made about what appears to be a flight from merit and transparency at these schoo

Yale Law Dean Heather Gerken in a statement this week called the U.S. News rankings, which have long influenced the perception of prestige, “profoundly flawed.” Yale has “reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.” Harvard Law School quickly followed, and on Thursday UC-Berkeley Law pulled out.

The U.S. News rankings have plenty of shortcomings, though being run by a “for-profit magazine,” as Yale swiped in its statement, isn’t one of them. Dean Gerken says the U.S. News methodology penalizes law schools that send students into public-interest fellowships, and that its metrics on student debt don’t account properly for loan-forgiveness programs. Berkeley also noted a per student expenditure rating that pushes tuition prices up and is not a proxy for an excellent legal education.

But Dean Gerken gave away the game when she wrote: “Today, 20% of a law school’s overall ranking is median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs. While academic scores are an important tool, they don’t always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses.”

This sounds like cover for a desire by Yale to be free to admit students with lower test scores in service to diversity, but without taking a hit to its exclusive reputation. Yale has long been No. 1 in the U.S. News rankings.