RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/wisconsin-teachers-instructed-to-hide-students-gender-identities-from-parents/

Teachers at a school district in Wisconsin are being instructed to hide their students’ changing gender identities from parents on the grounds that “parents are not entitled to know,” and that it is “knowledge that must be earned,” according to leaked training documents.

The instruction was part of several recent staff development sessions for teachers in the Eau Claire Area School District in central Wisconsin that focused on safe spaces, gender identity, microaggressions, and oppression. According to one of the trainers, parents who disagree with their kids about gender identity issues are guilty of a form of “abuse.” The trainers also encouraged the teachers to be activists: “to vote, to demonstrate, to protest.”

Critics of the training sessions called the instruction “blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children,” and they said it sends the message that schools are in control of children, not parents and families.

The fight over teacher training in Eau Claire is the latest skirmish in the national debate over the role of schools in promoting activism, and teaching “woke” concepts about race, gender, and sex.

The training sessions were held in late February, hosted by diversity and multiculturalism staffers from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. The training was first reported by the conservative media group Empower Wisconsin, and by Parents Defending Education, a national nonprofit that fights classroom indoctrination and activists agendas in schools.

One of the slides in the training session reads, “Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned. Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student.”

As part of the discussion on the topic, Chris Jorgenson, director of UW Eau Claire’s Gender & Sexuality Research Center, said that “teachers are often put in terrible positions caught between parents and their students. But much like we wouldn’t act as stand-ins for abuse in other circumstances, we cannot let parents’ rejection of their children guide teachers’ reactions and actions and advocacy for our students.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/big-money-behind-push-1619-project-education-mary-grabar/

Many people have become aware of how Mark Zuckerberg’s Center for Technology and Life nonprofit foundation influenced the 2020 elections.

But few are aware of how his company, Meta, and other far-left companies are also underwriting 1619 Project educational indoctrination programs for future voters. Taxpayers help subsidize these efforts. Those who profit are the world’s largest publisher, Penguin Random House, and the global media company, the New York Times, whose newspaper has the second-highest circulation in the nation.

The New York Times, a for-profit company, had its product promoted by a nonprofit company, the Pulitzer Center, which designed the prepackaged curriculum and pushed it, unvetted, into 3,500 schools immediately after the 1619 Project was published as a special issue of the August 18, 2019, New York Times Magazine. Coincidentally, Sam Dolnick, New York Times assistant managing editor, sits on the board of the Pulitzer Center. The Pulitzer Center also posts promotional materials, such as editor Jake Silverstein’s op-ed touting the 1619 Project books and webinars on teaching the 1619 Project, where subscriptions for the newspaper are pushed to teachers.

Penguin Random House, which published The 1619 Project: Born on the Water, a picture book, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, a pseudo-scholarly, 500-page neo-Marxist expansion of the magazine (copyright held by the New York Times) also enjoys the services of the Pulitzer Center to market its books to educators and librarians, and to fight laws intended to keep it away from students.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/why-george-washington-university-must-oppose-chinese-communist-oppression/

It seems like a no-brainer, but on one American campus, critics of a campaign against a tyrannical regime charge racism.

I n early February, posters criticizing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their subjugation of the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hong Kongers emerged on the campus of George Washington University. The posters, put up anonymously and highlighting the CCP’s reprehensible actions, soon turned controversial.

Student groups complained to university president Mark Wrighton that the posters were offensive and depicted racist caricatures. In a leaked email, Wrighton responded by saying that he too was “personally offended” by the posters. This email received significant press coverage, leading to a statement from Wrigthon in which he clarified his prior ignorance of the posters’ true meaning and reaffirmed his and the university’s commitment to free speech.

Throughout this time, I, along with a number of other students and student groups, have been pressuring the university to divest all of its endowment holdings from companies that enable the CCP’s genocide and persecution of the Uyghur people. Without the exposure of this initial email, we would never have known the extent of the uphill battle we face with the administration.

Universities are supposed to be forums of open and free exchanges of ideas and opinions. On too many campuses across the country, we’re seeing free speech and expression discouraged and even stifled.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/12/its-time-to-decolonize-anti-semitic-jewish-stu

When I was an undergraduate at Northwestern, I took a class in Jewish Studies primarily because I thought it would be easier for me since I had gone to Jewish Day School. In addition, my other classes had reputations for being tough that quarter. I also thought it might be interesting. It was neither. The class, in part, dissected the Bible according to its many supposed authors and their political proclivities. It was mostly based on the hypotheses of German Protestant scholars. The fact that the Bible has long been read by Jews and Christians as a source of wisdom, and by social leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a source of inspiration over millennia, was apparently irrelevant.  

Ironically, this example shows how Jewish Studies Departments have been colonized. Jewish Studies have always examined Jewish culture and history through the prism of Western thought (using whatever narrative had come to dominate academia at a given time), though it obscures this bias and its antisemitic effect. Most other “studies” departments tend to extoll the identity of their subjects. In contrast, American taxpayers and Jewish donors unwittingly continue to pay for degrading and even demonizing—Jews. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/princeton-walks-away-from-chicago/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

In 2015, Princeton University adopted the “University of Chicago principles” on free speech. Edward Yingling and Stuart Taylor Jr. have an article lamenting the way the university has been betraying those principles lately, and in an underhanded way. It has been punishing a professor for expressing his conservative views and then reinterpreting its rules to allow those actions.

For more, see this letter decrying the university’s behavior from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Dear Member of the Board:

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, now in its 26th year, has
unwaveringly advocated for robust academic freedom and strong
protection of campus freedom of expression. It is for this reason that we
once more bring to your attention and to the attention of the public the
way in which the Princeton administration has violated its own stated
commitment to free speech in the matter of Cotsen Professor in the
Humanities Joshua Katz. At stake is whether Princeton University will
maintain the principles of freedom of expression that it has publicly
announced and celebrated.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/florida_parental_rights_in_education_bill_given_the_old_democrat_histrionics_treatment.html

It’s getting to be a pattern with Democrats. A statehouse passes an extremely popular common-sense bill with voters, and Democrats immediately brand it with extremist distortions and say it’s something it’s not. We saw this with voter rights bills, dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0” by the left. We saw it with measures opposing mask and vaccine mandates, dubbed ‘people will die’ laws on the left. We see it with anti-illegal immigration bills, dubbed racist, and with the branding of parents protesting objectionable policies and failure to protect vulnerable students from sexual predators by school boards, as “terrorists.” The histrionics of the left are getting pretty baroque now, but they’re also entirely predictable.

Case in point: Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, expected to be signed by Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, states this:

The two bills in the state legislature, HB 1557 and SB 1834, state that a school district “may not encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” 

Democrats have branded it with the catchy slogan “don’t say gay,” which is found nowhere in the bill. The bill clearly permits age-appropriate discussion for students if there’s a need to use the word ‘gay’ or explain it, but that’s unimportant to the hysterical opponents on the left.

The left is on a tear:

“This would erase LGBTQ+ history and culture from lesson plans and it sends a chilling message to LGBTQ+ young people and communities,” said Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, the executive director of the national LGBTQ youth advocacy group GLSEN.

Apparently, this activist believes that if five-year-olds or seven-year-olds still learning their ABCs aren’t studying and thinking about the Stonewall Riots or the life of Harvey Milk at that tender age, they’ll be scarred for life. 

There’s also the health angle to the hysteria:

“We have to create a learning environment where they feel safe and healthy, or it’s not an effective learning environment,” said Heather Wilkie of the Zebra Coalition, a Central Florida LGBTQ advocacy group.

“When you have laws like this, that directly attack our kids for who they are, it prevents them from learning,” she said. “It prevents them from being able to be healthy.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/silencing-disfavored-speech-richard-l-cravatts/

As further evidence that the campus woke persist in trying to determine what may, and may not, be said on university campuses, activist students at UC Hastings School of Law shut down the appearance of conservative legal scholar Ilya Shapiro at a March 1st event organized by the Federalist Society.

Shapiro, incoming Executive Director of Georgetown’s Center for the Constitution, it will be remembered, experienced the collective wrath and opprobrium of his own school when he tweeted comments criticizing Joe Biden’s pledge to nominate a black woman as the new Supreme Court justice. In a now-deleted January 26th tweet Shapiro remarked that, in his view, “Objectively best pick for Biden is Sri Srinivasan, who is solid prog & v smart. Even has identity politics benefit of being first Asian (Indian) American. But alas doesn’t fit into the latest intersectionality hierarchy so we’ll get lesser black woman. Thank heaven for small favors?” 

The reference to a “lesser black woman” proved to be a most unfortunate choice of words, which Shapiro later admitted, and was interpreted by many on the Georgetown campus as being particularly egregious, racist, and indicative of the type of white supremacist ideology which assumes the inferiority of black people and questions both affirmative action and campaigns for equity and inclusion. For his tweets, Shapiro was denounced by the law school’s dean, fellow faculty, and students, including members of the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) to call for Shapiro’s firing.

So, in March, when Shapiro arrived to speak with liberal Hastings faculty member, Rory Little, at the event entitled “The Breyer Vacancy: The Rise of Contentious All or Nothing Battles for Supreme Court Nominations,” activist students associated with Hastings’ BLSA had already planned to express their dissatisfaction with Shapiro’s views by shutting down the event and utilizing the “heckler’s veto” to silence him for his ideological transgressions.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bill-to-federalize-crt-must-be-stopped/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

You might think the national parents’ rebellion against critical race theory (CRT), along with the resounding gubernatorial victory of CRT opponent Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, would be enough to protect us from federal legislation designed to impose CRT on America’s schools. You would be wrong. It looks like a federal CRT bill is around the corner.

A plan to introduce a revised version of the Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA), a bill that would turn CRT and “action civics” (leftist protests for course credit) into Common Core 2.0, is well underway. The coalition of leftist “civics” groups behind the new CSDA is desperate to rake in the $6 billion windfall the bill would hand them. This is their last chance to tap into the federal gravy train before the Democrats likely lose control of Congress. If passed this year, the revised CSDA would also set these pro-CRT leftists up as the arbiters of a de facto national curriculum, regardless of what happens in the midterms.

The revised version of CSDA only seems to eliminate its radical political elements. Once you understand the latest educational lingo, it’s obvious that this bill will allow the Biden administration to nationalize CRT. The danger is that naïve Republicans, unfamiliar with leftist education theories and eager to associate themselves with anything labeled “civics,” will be duped into cosponsoring this disastrous bill.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-woke-weapon-on-campus-danger/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

The cause of sparing anybody discomfort over anything is making college life miserable — for everybody.

C ollege students face “danger” everywhere they turn. A comment that makes you uncomfortable, an unsavory name on a building, a mask that fell under the nose, a nonprogressive comment in class.

Danger to college students (the woke ones in particular) is subjective — danger to me is danger to all.

The most recent and obvious such danger on college campuses is Covid. Even as the less-virulent Omicron wanes, hospitalization rates plummet, and state and municipal mask advisories are lifted, college students continue to face intolerable levels of Covid precautions.

One Harvard student and former classmate, Julie Hartman, decided to bravely question Harvard’s overzealous Covid policing. On Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal, she wrote about pandemic-related changes to Housing Day, a Harvard tradition put on hold for the past two years:

Sophomores, juniors and seniors storm freshman dormitories to tell first-year students which of the 12 “houses,” essentially big dorms for upperclassmen, they will live in for their remaining time on campus. Having lost two of these days during the 17 months that Harvard sent us home, I was excited to participate in one more traditional Housing Day my senior year. Instead, the student government said it would likely be a modified outdoor event.