RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/federal-judge-james-ho-surprises-georgetown-law-with-speech-defending-ilya-shapiro/

Guest speaker scraps original remarks in favor of unequivocal statement on freedom of speech and declares, ‘I stand with Ilya.’

F ederal judge James C. Ho delivered a robust defense of Ilya Shapiro on Tuesday in a speech at Georgetown Law, which recently suspended the respected legal scholar over a poorly worded tweet.

“I stand with Ilya,” Ho declared.

The subject of his address was a surprise to the audience. The judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had been slated to give a lecture titled “Fair Weather Originalism: Judges, Umpires, and the Fear of Being Booed,” in an event organized by the law school’s chapter of the Federalist Society. At the outset, according to prepared remarks exclusively obtained by National Review, Ho said he “was scheduled to talk” about originalism, “but I hope you won’t mind that I’ve decided to address a different topic today instead.”

Ho continued, “I’m going to spend my time today talking about Ilya Shapiro.”

https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/15/creating-a-george-floyd-scholarship-sends-black-kids-the-exact-wrong-message/

Kendall Qualls is a Republican candidate for Governor of Minnesota.

The constant push to virtue signal to the idol of social justice is causing some of our historically trusted institutions of academia, health care, and journalism to lose the public’s trust and is further splintering our nation. Minnesota seems to be in the epicenter of it all.

The Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota recently endowed a new scholarship to honor George Perry Floyd Jr. It’s the wrong decision and undermines the work of the civil rights movement and what we communicate to black American children across the country.

What happened to George Floyd was a travesty. But it is important we remain disciplined in acknowledging that tragedy. When honoring someone’s life in a scholarship at an institution of higher education, we should honor the sacrifice, achievement, and virtues of a person’s life.

With approximately 50 percent of black students graduating from Minneapolis public schools near the bottom of the country in achievement and approximately 80 percent of black children born in fatherless homes in the twin cities, the University of Minnesota should be lifting up models of character and achievement that convey hope and opportunity, not death and despair.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-woke-indoctrination-machine-diversity-equity-inclusion-bipoc-schools-conference-11644613908?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically.

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-real-war-on-science-identity-politics/

Emphasizing wokeness over true scientific inquiry will turn humanity’s pursuit of scientific truth into little more than an exercise in demagoguery.

T he best way to stop racial discrimination is to directly enshrine it into law via affirmative action in universities, according to the head of a major scientific journal.

“As science struggles to correct systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, making it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts—including among scientists,” claimed an editorial in Science’s latest issue. It continued, “The dismantling of race-conscious admissions [to colleges] would deal another blow to equity in science.”

The editorial, titled “Science needs affirmative action,” was authored by none other than Science’s editor-in-chief: Washington University medicine and chemistry professor Herbert Holden Thorp.

Science is the most influential general-topic scientific journal, alongside its rival Nature. The prestigious peer-reviewed outlet boasts a weekly readership of almost 270,000 people and has been published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1880.

Thorp claims affirmative action “gives deserving students a chance that they might not otherwise have, adding excellence to the higher education system. It also acknowledges that not all students have an equal opportunity to excel at objective measures like standardized tests and grades, and it levels the playing field by giving students and universities the chance to spotlight other important attributes and factors in the admissions process.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/down-with-sabra-the-harvard-hummus-protests/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

That’s right, Harvard students are protesting . . . hummus.

Students in Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine (HOOP) are demanding that the Mediterranean spread made by Sabra be taken out of dining halls because of ties to the Israel Defense Forces. This is merely one — albeit the creamiest — of many instances of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)-style protests against Israel on college campuses across the country.

The Harvard Crimson reported that on Tuesday, students gathered in Harvard Yard holding signs that say “Why does your hummus taste like apartheid?” and chanting “Don’t buy products laced with hate, Sabra funds a racist state.” Stickers on Sabra snack cups in dining halls say something similar (picture provided by a student at Harvard):

The QR code takes you to a document that states that Strauss Group, the company that co-owns Sabra with PepsiCo, has “openly and proudly admitted to funding the Israeli army.” Strauss Group is the largest food company in Israel. Sabra itself is headquartered in White Plains, N.Y. (I’ll quickly add that the linked document suggests “moral alternatives” to Sabra, including Cedar’s Hummus. Oh please, Cedar’s? Too much lemon if you ask me. I’ll also add that my Lebanese food snobbery leads me to look askance at Sabra too . . . but I digress.)

Strauss Group sends food and care packages to the Golani Brigade in the IDF. To pro-Palestine activists at Harvard, this amounts to the sponsorship of murder.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/dartmouth_republicans_secure_free_speech__by_fleeing_campus.html

In an ongoing embarrassment for Dartmouth College, the once-venerable institution has repeatedly demonstrated that it is unable — or more likely, ideologically opposed — to allow students the free speech that once breathed air on its “Live Free or Die” campus.

The school’s student Republican organization has found the Dartmouth doors increasingly closed to any effort to discuss the anti-American ideology with which Dartmouth has surreptitiously polluted every aspect of campus life and curricula.  Thugs and criminals rule Dartmouth now, so the Dartmouth Republicans wisely arranged for their latest speaker — nationally acclaimed author James Lindsay — to speak off campus, where free speech is not (yet) verboten.

Dartmouth bureaucrats claim they favor free speech, while they elevate the rights of permitless, foul-mouthed, speech-silencing protesters over those of a peaceful student organization with a permit.  The nation first watched this disgrace when Madison Cawthorn spoke at Dartmouth, and hateful children screamed anti-police epithets to intimidate attendees.  But at least that event went forward, under security reminiscent of inner-city or prison policing.  The college feigns concern over security but has clearly demonstrated it has no concern about assaults on speech liberties.

The Dartmouth Republicans tried yet again, with national speaker Andy Ngo.  This time Dartmouth College canceled the event, claiming vague threats by far-left criminals who appear to have organized with campus Antifa (and perhaps college professors who hate America) to stifle opinions that expose the filth of their hateful cult.  The college silenced Ngo just an hour prior to the event, claiming that students’ free speech rights were protected because they were allowed to proceed remotely by Zoom.  Dartmouth officials claim that this “separate but equal” discrimination was merited by the criminal threats: Dartmouth favors criminals over the tuition-paying students whose rights it throttles.

https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-to-resist-anti-racism/

“Young boys and girls must grow up with world perspectives”. On 22nd April 1965, Martin Luther King Jr, speaking at a meeting of the Massachusetts legislature, lamented the “tragedy” of school segregation. With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the US had finally dismantled the Jim Crow laws — which King had joked about burying a decade earlier. The nation had come to King’s conclusion: “Segregation debilitates the segregator as well as the segregated”.

Almost six decades later, from Massachusetts to Colorado, Jim Crow is being resurrected in public schools — this time through euphemisms such as “affinity circles”, “affinity dialogue groups” and “community building groups”. Centennial Elementary School in Denver, for instance, advertised a “Families of Color Playground Night” earlier this winter, on a marquee board outside the school. Last week, the Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, hosted a “meet and talk” with actress Karyn Parsons from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” — exclusively for its “Students of Color affinity group”. “If you are a student of color or multiracial, please join us!” the invitation from a seventh grade teacher read.

Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/evil-ethnic-studies-matthew-vadum/

The good news is that California education authorities have agreed to drop part of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that encouraged public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities. The quaint religious practices of Mesoamericans about 700 years ago included slicing out human hearts along with flaying victims and wearing their skin.

The ESMC is needed, the devoutest left-wingers insist, to help teach children about the systemic racism that supposedly defines America.

“We are reminded daily that racism is not only a legacy of the past but a clear and present danger,” said California State Board of Education president Linda Darling-Hammond, a leftist who headed the Biden-Harris regime’s education transition team. “We must understand this history if we are finally to end it.”

Worshiping these gods that belong in torture-porn horror movies will somehow advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism, the board of education must have reasoned when it approved the nearly 900-page ESMC in March 2021, making California “the first state in the nation to offer a statewide ethnic studies model for educators,” the board boasted at the time.

Under pressure from the Thomas More Society, a highly effective national public interest law firm that filed a lawsuit last year on behalf of angry parents and the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, the state agency agreed in January to nix the Aztec devotions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/did-university-destroy-archive-documenting-daniel-greenfield/

“I took a pack of Tarot cards. I had found out that they were very superstitious. On arrival at a commune I would ask for their astrological birth signs and tell them mine,” Jillian Becker described her process of investigating the Marxist terrorist Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Officially, the Red Army Faction, but popularly known for its two leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the leftist terrorist group had carried out a string of attacks, including the killings of a number of American military personnel. Becker’s investigations of Soviet backed terrorism had taken her around the world, and now the South African Jewish journalist was in Berlin.

The Baader-Meinhof gang had come out of the communards. The Communards, even more degenerate and deadlier versions of American leftists who flirted with terrorism and terror trolling, embraced Mao and experimented with everything, were not easy targets for journalists.

“I would offer to read two or three fortunes with the cards, saying that for me the process was exhausting so I could not do more than that. They would decide who were to be the lucky ones, and I would go through a routine of getting them to shuffle and lay out the cards in a certain pattern. Then I would pick them up one by one and “tell their fortune”. Becker told me.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/virginia-senate-passes-bill-requiring-parental-notification-of-sexually-explicit-content-in-classrooms/

The Virginia Senate voted 20-18 on Wednesday to approve legislation that would require schools to notify parents before sexually-explicit materials are used in classrooms.

The bill, known as S.B. 656, would also give parents the right to review any such material and to request alternative, non-explicit materials for their child. While the Virginia Senate has a narrow Democratic majority, two Democrats voted with Republicans in favor of the legislation.

The bill will now head to Virginia’s GOP-controlled House of Delegates, where it is expected to pass.

Full passage by the Virginia legislature would give a victory to Governor Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who campaigned in part on issues of parental control over their children’s educational material.

“What we’ve seen over the course of this last 20 months is our school systems refusing to engage with parents,” Youngkin said at a gubernatorial debate in September. “In fact, in Fairfax County this past week, we watched parents so upset because there was such sexually explicit material in the library they had never seen, it was shocking.”

Youngkin added that then-opponent Terry McAuliffe had vetoed “the bill that would have informed parents that they were there.”