RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yeshiva-university-fights-for-its-constitutional-rights-first-amendment-free-speech-students-higher-education-religious-schools-values-morals-11661798761?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

In recent years, a spate of lawsuits have asked whether, and to what degree, religious colleges and universities are free to craft policies consistent with their religious values, even when those policies are unpopular with those who don’t share those values. These decisions run the gamut from the mundane—whether to allow tobacco, alcohol, caffeine or meat on campus—to the headline-grabbing—how to structure on-campus housing arrangements or decide which student clubs get official school recognition.

In these lawsuits, student plaintiffs typically ask the court to force the school to abandon a longstanding religious principle in favor of a policy incompatible with the school’s faith. But as judges continue to evaluate the legal merits of these cases, it is important to consider the real danger to the First Amendment, and to the continued viability of religious schools, each time a suit like this succeeds.

For many religious traditions, religious schools help convey beliefs to new generations of faith and community leaders. But they also bring critical diversity to higher education and prepare students to weigh moral considerations of justice, mercy and kindness while in pursuit of stellar educations and professional careers. The Supreme Court reaffirmed this only months ago, noting that “educating young people in their faith, inculcating its teachings, and training them to live their faith are responsibilities that lie at the very core of the mission” of religious schools. Not only is this blend of religious and secular learning the primary goal of a religious school; it is also the reason why hundreds of thousands of students voluntarily attend such institutions each year.

https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2022/08/08/woke-trophy-hunting/

The woke mob’s attack on academic heretics can be likened to hunting. Most hunts attract scant attention, often no more than shooting squirrels with a .22. Blocking the reappointment of a visiting instructor at Smallville Community College who mis-gendered a student is an example of this low-level hunting. But of far greater consequence is what might be called “Big-Game Trophy Hunting.” Here the prey are the academic equivalent of elephants or elk, and these trophies will be prominently displayed as a warning to all others who refuse to obey.

As with big-game hunting in the wild, the academy has its own, though unwritten, rules for bagging big-time campus heretics.

First, the trophy must be associated with a top-tier institution—the more Ivy the better—and honored with notable prizes—such as an endowed chair—all the while being recognized by one’s professional colleagues as a star. Possums don’t count.

Second, the offense instigating the coup de grâce must appear inconsequential to non-academics. This is dog-whistle persecution. Firing a distinguished Yale professor for falsifying government-funded research is the equivalent of bagging an infant rhino. It’s barely noticeable and hardly worth paying the taxidermist. But not so where the hanging offense was asserting an obvious truth, albeit in language that mysteriously offended the ultra-thin-skinned Dean of Marginalized Communities. A big-game conviction is covered by the Wall Street Journal and countless internet sites. That’s the point—notoriety is the aim of these show trials. And nothing brings notoriety as much as violating some obscure, impenetrable element of today’s woke ideology. Punishing an obscure philosophy professor from a fly-over community college counts for zero. It’s a waste of time—nobody notices, so it never happened.

Finally, and most importantly for our purpose, the trophy must be secured with minimal personal risk. Cowardice is essential. Think of the luxury African safari that guarantees your safety no matter what. So, when you unload your large caliber AR-15 on a Cape buffalo and miss, and the beast charges you, don’t worry—nearby sharp-shooters will finish the job, and your trophy is secure.

In practice this means never attacking members of groups enjoying a justified reputation for violent retaliation. Similarly avoid those on the ideologically endangered species list, such as the transgendered or students explicitly protected by a government agency. Heed the commandment of the Church of the Woke—strike those who meekly shuffle off. What provost wants drumbeating, screaming feminists following his family into Costco?

https://www.newsweek.com/name-equity-schools-are-reintroducing-racism-opinion-1737058

There was a time in America when racial discrimination and segregation were not only supported by the government but mandated. Restaurants had separate areas for Black and white Americans, people were only allowed to use restrooms and water fountains that were specifically designated by their skin color, and Black and white students were taught in separate school systems. It wasn’t until after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 that the nation began integrating its educational institutions and healing the wounds caused by the Jim Crow era, edging closer to a society that does not judge individuals based on their skin color or ethnicity.

But fast forward to 2022 and the pendulum has swung hard in the opposite direction. Today, in the name of “equity,” there is a major push to incorporate elements of the thinking that was pervasive in the Jim Crow era into today’s K-12 schools, but this time from people who cast themselves as social justice warriors, who are bringing race-conscious schooling back in the name of fighting racism.

Many school districts now promote racial affinity groups, which the Great Schools Partnership defines as “a group of people sharing a common race who gather with the intention of finding connection, support, and inspiration.” The ostensible purpose of these groups is to “provide participants support to survive the racial isolation that exists in many schools and institutions.”

Affinity groups are typically based on shared interests, but racial affinity groups are specifically designed to provide activities and meetings that include or exclude students based on their skin color.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/the-success-sequence-an-alternative-to-radical-school-indoctrination/

Do you know what’s being taught in the sex education program at your child’s school? It’s unlikely that it’s “The Success Sequence.” And that’s unfortunate – because it should be.

In 2019, I ran for school board in Fairfax County, Virginia – one of the nation’s most infamous battlegrounds when it comes to woke public education. I ran on a platform of school choice, listening to parents and reforming the school’s sex ed program to align with community values. Key to my platform was promoting The Success Sequence.

I like to call the Success Sequence the greatest poverty-breaking tool known to man. Unlike most government programs that might cost thousands – if not millions – of dollars per school district to implement with sketchy results, the Success Sequence costs nothing but perseverance and self-discipline.

It teaches that the best way to move up from poverty to the middle class and beyond is to do the following things in sequential order:

Graduate from high school.
Get a full-time job. 
Get married before having kids.

According to an American Enterprise Institute study, “97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the ‘success sequence’ are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years.” This is in comparison to over half of the poor young adults who were found to have not followed the sequence. And it is abundantly clear that not following The Success Sequence is even more disastrous for those in poor or black and Hispanic communities.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/27/drain-the-academic-swamp/

Recently, a number of medical schools have joined the anti-European, anti-Christian, pro-Marxist woke bandwagon. According to physicist Lawrence Krauss, “the American Association of Medical Colleges has approved a Diversity-Equity-Inclusion based curriculum, which the AAMC Council of Deans Chair says is as important as teaching the latest scientific breakthroughs.”

Meanwhile, our military leadership continues to push incoherent gender ideology upon a captive audience of young soldiers, sailors, and airmen.And justices at the heights of our judiciary system, because of political correctness, dare not even define the word woman.

In response to these instances and instances like them within the present culture war, conservatives have offered much-needed criticism within the domains of news media, entertainment, government, and law. While these battles are necessary, of course, they have been largely impotent against the omnipresent spread of leftist ideas. This is so because conservatives consistently miss the mark when it comes acknowledging the true root cause of such radicalism: the ivory tower.

For some time now, American patriots have committed the grave mistake of overlooking the extreme aggregated impact of subversive, far-Left academics; individual rogue neurons in the cultural nerve center who have produced so much suffering in our body politic. The hypothetical, one-sided thought-experiments and hot-air pseudo-philosophies cooked up at run-of-the-mill liberal arts colleges across the nation have achieved the desired effect on all the cultural institutions downstream from the academy: complete destabilization and disintegration. From law and medicine to religion, government, media, and even to language itself (ze? zir?), the bottom has fallen out and the center cannot hold.

Conservatives can no longer afford to shrug off academy-bred, society-wide intellectual sepsis, as if what happens in academia stays in academia. It’s not true; the effete eccentrics and dangerous, sandal-clad subversives at the fringes of the sociology and lit crit departments have exercised maximum influence over our shared institutions and overall culture, and all for the negative. Conservative nonchalance in the face of intellectually weaponized neuropathy has now come home to roost.

https://thestarnewsnetwork.com/2022/08/26/report-the-gay-straight-alliance-network-now-operates-in-more-than-4000-u-s-schools/

The Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) Network, which promotes radical gender theory in elementary, middle, and high schools, now operates over 4,000 “gender and sexuality alliances” under the guise of student “clubs,” reports Christopher Rufo at City Journal.

A senior fellow and director of the Initiative on Critical Race Theory (CRT) at the Manhattan Institute, Rufo explained the GSA Network is a “professionally staffed nonprofit with a multimillion-dollar annual budget. GSA Network serves as an umbrella organization for more than 4,000 “gender and sexuality alliances” across 40 states.”

After rebranding itself in 2016 as the Genders & Sexualities Alliance, GSA Co-Executive Director Ginna Brelsford noted:

The name change has been a long time coming.  We have heard from countless youth leaders who understand their genders and sexualities to be uniquely theirs and have moved beyond the labels of gay and straight, and the limits of a binary gender system. For several years, students have been naming their individual school-based clubs in a way that reflects the values and identity of its members.

Brelsford further explained the “function” of school GSA clubs had “evolved.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/08/a_teacher_planned_to_erase_whites_from_her_classroom_dcor.html

It’s that time of year when the dog days of summer give way to the excitement of going back to school. Children tow their parents through the store, on the hunt for trendy backpacks, lunch boxes, and outfits. Parents shell out thousands of dollars to make sure their children have everything they need, and much that they don’t, for the coming year. The biggest concern of most families is that their child receives quality instruction while having an enjoyable experience in the classroom.

However, in Utah, parents of children attending William Penn Elementary near Salt Lake City got a nasty shock when a 4th grade teacher announced on social media that it was her first year teaching at a majority White school and she was interested to see whether “posh white parents” would be opposed to her classroom, which was designed to cater to non-white students.

The backlash was swift. Concerned parents reported the incident to the school. To her credit, the school principal took swift action, issuing a statement that it was her “personal commitment…to ensure every student feels safe and welcome,” and that it is “inappropriate for any employee to make students feel unwelcome in any way, shape or form.” The teacher removed the offensive post and apologized. The district is now investigating to determine if any of its policies have been violated.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/big-business-enables-race-based-discrimination-matthew-vadum/

Corporate America is awash in racism and racist brainwashing, so it’s not surprising that it is defending the anti-white and anti-Asian racism practiced at the nation’s colleges.

It’s gotten so bad in the world of business that hurting people with the wrong skin color is now a Fortune 500 best practice.

This corporate racism has only intensified since violent career criminal and drug addict George Floyd died of Fentanyl poisoning while he happened to be in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, 2020, and was instantly transformed by leftists into a symbol of police brutality for the ages.

Since St. George’s martyrdom, big businesses have funneled untold millions of dollars to the terrorist outfit known as Black Lives Matter, embracing the faddish lies of the 1619 Project as they race to one-up each other in their embrace of “anti-racism,” the misnamed brainchild of racism-profiteer Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers), who insists that the only way to get rid of racist discrimination is to perpetrate it against white people.

These corrupt companies seem to be fulfilling Vladimir Lenin’s much quoted aphorism turned cliché that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Businesses nowadays compel employees to embrace Black Lives Matter and denounce themselves as racist for the sin of being born white. As Cynical Theories author James Lindsay has said, this is cult programming, not responsible human resources management, because it teaches employees that they are defective and in need of correction.

And as Christopher Rufo writes, diversity consultants teach that “all whites have unconscious, ‘implicit’ bias that they must vigilantly program themselves to overcome.” This “has become an article of faith across corporate boardrooms, academe and law enforcement, even though the premise is unscientific and impossible to verify.”

In the pursuit of so-called racial justice, the Walt Disney Co. terrorizes its employees, intimidating them into unquestioning acceptance of the most orthodox tenets of Marxist-derived Critical Race Theory. American Express gives managers bonuses for firing white employees. Hollywood increasingly refuses to hire white, especially white male, writers. Wells Fargo cruelly gives fake job interviews to minorities for jobs already filled in order to satisfy internal diversity interviewing quotas. Dropbox openly discriminates against whites in the hiring process.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/pen_works_to_destroy_education.html

Controlling education is the grand prize in today’s culture wars. Why worry about elections if voters arrive at the polls fully ideologically indoctrinated? The Left has recognized this reality for decades and its long march through the institutions to control schools is now finally paying off. How else can one explain why such views as Critical Race Theory now infuse the curriculum from the earliest grades to graduate seminars in elite universities?  

While the Left has been conquering education for decades, conservatives have now finally awakened and are fighting back. The recent election for governor in Virginia and legislation in Florida, for example, illustrated what can happen when parents discover that junior is learning about his/her/them White Privilege. Meanwhile school board elections now can draw national attention.  

The Left is aware of this conservative counterattack and has predictably mobilized to crush all those insisting that education is about acquiring skills such as literacy versus knowing that the Founders were evil rich white slave-owners. The Left’s push back is an all hands-on-deck enterprise, total mobilization in military terms, to sustain its ongoing conquest of American education. Even groups that ostensibly have nothing to do with education have been conscripted to the Left’s crusade.

Such conscription is illustrated by how the venerable organization,  PEN, whose purpose is  to “Defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture” has joined the fray. This is a major mission shift since for over a century PEN had protected controversial authors from censorship, especially imprisonment in dictatorships, and it remains a prestigious free-speech organization worldwide. Now, however, it has focused on K-12 education and joined the woke army’s assault on traditional American values.

In a recent report PEN embraced tactics, notably demonizing opponents, lying, and twisting language that is commonplace among today’s social justice warriors. For the report’s authors, when a state legislature regulates school curriculum in a way antithetical to the Left agendas, it is labeled “imposing a gag order” and “an attack on education.” This “attack” may also mandate “curriculum transparency” (scare quotes in original) that permits parents to discover and then report via hotlines to state authorities what their children are being taught.