A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto. A beloved educator was branded as a bigot in a series of DEI sessions. The Free Press reveals the details—and exclusive audio—from a story of public shame. By Rupa Subramanya and Ari Blaff

https://www.thefp.com/p/a-racist-smear-a-tarnished-career-suicide?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Kike Ojo-Thompson, a diversity trainer in Toronto, was explaining to her class of 200 or so public school administrators that Canada is a much more racist country than the United States.

“Canada is a bastion of white supremacy and colonialism,” Thompson said to a sea of nodding heads squeezed into Zoom. “The racism we experience is far worse here than there.”

It was April 26, 2021, and Thompson was leading attendees through a session on systemic inequity.

Thompson acknowledged that this might be hard for Canadians to accept, explaining that Americans “have a fighting posture against, at least, the monarchy. Here we celebrate the monarchy, the very heart and soul and origins of the colonial structure.”

It was at that point that Richard Bilkszto, the principal of Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute and Adult Learning Centre, put his hand up. (Burnhamthorpe is a high school that caters mostly to students in their twenties who previously dropped out.) Bilkszto had trained in the United States, he was a devout progressive, and he was mystified by Thompson’s comments.

“I just wanted to make a comment about the Canada–U.S. thing, a little bit of a challenge to it,” Bilkszto offered.

Listen to Kike Ojo-Thompson’s claims about Canada in the DEI session here:

And Bilkszto’s challenge to her claims here:

Citing Canada’s public schools, tax regime, and socialized healthcare system, and no doubt drawing on his own experience teaching in a predominantly black high school in Buffalo, New York, he said: “We’re a far more just society.”

There was a momentary silence. None of the other attendees waded in.

Then Thompson, who is black, laced into Bilkszto, who is white.

“What I’m finding interesting is that, in the middle of this Covid disaster, where the inequities in this fair and equal healthcare system have been properly shown to all of us. . . you and your whiteness think that you can tell me what’s really going on with black people—like, is that what you’re doing, ’cause I think that’s what you’re doing, but I’m not sure, so I’m going to leave you space to tell me what you’re doing right now,” she said.

Bilkszto shut up.

That seemed like the end of that.

In fact, it was just the beginning of Bilkszto’s harrowing, two-year descent into an ordeal of public shaming and isolation that ended only when he took his life last month.

FBI Finds 200 Victims in Two-Week Child Exploitation Operation By Catherine Salgado

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/08/02/fbi-finds-200-victims-in-two-week-child-exploitation-operation-n1715567

Soon after mainstream media mocked anti-child trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” as a QAnon conspiracy theory, a report has come out that the FBI found 200 sex trafficking victims and over 125 suspects during just a couple weeks of a child exploitation operation. Indeed, child exploitation is a severe and increasing problem, not a conspiracy theory.

Libs of TikTok provided a nice visual of multiple leftist outlets that denigrated or scoffed at “Sound of Freedom’s” exposé of child sex trafficking, from NPR to Rolling Stone to CNN:

Stopping child trafficking and exploitation shouldn’t be a politically partisan or divisive issue.

Related: Advisor: Trump Will Reinstate Title 42 to Fight Child Trafficking on Day One

Of course, the problem of child sex trafficking is anything but a “QAnon” “fantasy fit,” despite what the mainstream media claimed. And the latest confirmation of this sobering truth is a report that the FBI found 200 sex trafficking victims and over 125 suspects during just two weeks of a child exploitation operation, “Operation Cross Country.”

NBC News reported Tuesday:

The FBI found 200 sex trafficking victims and more than 125 suspects during a two-week child exploitation operation in July, federal officials said Tuesday…

The FBI-led initiative in partnership with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) “focused on identifying and locating victims of sex trafficking and investigating and arresting individuals and criminal enterprises involved in both child sex and human trafficking,” federal officials said.

This work should be a major priority for the federal government. Instead, the Biden administration’s disastrous border policies are actually facilitating trafficking!

The Asservo Project’s Joe Sweeney, who rescues victims of child exploitation and educates children and adults about the problem, noted in recent exclusive comments to PJ Media that the rise of social media exponentially exacerbated the problem of child exploitation. “This [human trafficking] is a global humanitarian crisis of modern-day…currently it’s over 50 million people…that are believed sold into slavery globally, boasting a $150 billion enterprise,” Sweeney told me. He also said, “The United States is the biggest consumer — and producer, at times — of child pornography in the world.”

That’s very disturbing. How did a country that was founded on the principle of liberty become a major fueler of the child exploitation crisis?

Communist Tactics and Martin Amis’s Blindness By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/communist_tactics_and_martin_amiss_blindness.html

I recently read Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) which lays bare the enormity of the Stalinist legacy where more than 20 million people were murdered. It is deeply puzzling to read an author who documents the horror of the Left but who in 2016 also claimed that he “[was] Left of left.  Not very far left, but left, and [he] was that when [he] was 20, and [he’s] that now.”

Amis despised President Trump, whom he hated  and called a totalitarian.  But it was Trump who asserted “that America will never be a socialist country — ever.” And it is undeniable that socialism is the first step toward communism. In fact, it is Biden who seems the embodiment of all that Amis elaborated upon in his book. 

Let’s begin with attacks on religion.

In 1921 Lenin instructed a Red Army Commission to “give the most decisive and merciless battle to the [clergy] and subdue its resistance [.]”  (Amis 29).

Fast forward and repeatedly the Biden administration has nominated individuals to the highest levels of government who exhibit disdain for those they are charged to serve. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra “displays not just an unwillingness to protect the rights of conscience but an overt antagonism toward people of faith.” In addition, “Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and 19 GOP state attorneys general are demanding answers from the FBI and Justice Department and threatening legal action after a leaked internal FBI memo revealed that the agency had efforts underway to identify and treat Catholics as “potential terrorists.” 

‘Elites’ cannot hide from the consequences of their actions By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/08/elites_cannot_hide_from_the_consequences_of_their_actions_.html

In classical Greek mythology, hubris is a fatal flaw that inevitably leads to tragedy.  No matter how admired the hero, any mortal who dares to behave like a god is punished in the end.  Mankind never seems to learn this lesson.

The “elites” of every generation delude themselves into believing that they are superhuman and inherently different from those they consider beneath them.  They are not.  Whatever afflicts ordinary people will eventually come for those who build extravagant sanctuaries intended to rival Mount Olympus.

No “elite” ideology has caused as much suffering as communism for a simple reason: it is a false doctrine that feeds on hubris.  “Communism begins where atheism begins,” Marx wrote.  It permits “elites” to deify themselves.  Because of that delusion, it remains a “spectre” that still “haunts” the world.  

Wherever Marxism has reared its ugly head, it ultimately brings death and desolation.  Wherever communist “elites” believe that they can rule over a land of peasants while remaining safe and secure behind castle walls, those barriers eventually prove as fragile as any Potemkin village constructed from empty promises and outright lies. 

No matter how many hundreds of millions of lives socialism and communism have destroyed, Western “elites” remain enamored of Marxism.  Any system that eliminates private property for all but the aristocratic few and cultivates a slavish devotion to the State is attractive to arrogant human beings who believe it is their birthright to control others.

The “spectre of communism” haunting the world today comes in the form of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” or the United Nations’ planned technocratic tyranny.  It exists wherever one group of “experts” believes it has the moral prerogative to tell everyone else how to live and what to do.  Vladimir Lenin argued both that “medicine is the keystone of the arch of socialism” and that the “establishment of a central bank is ninety percent of communizing a nation.”  Together, central banks and global health authorities are the gateway drugs for communism.

Fresno Lab: China’s Operation to Exterminate Americans by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19858/prestige-biotech-china

There were on site at least 20 potentially infectious pathogens including those causing coronavirus, HIV, hepatitis, and herpes.

We know enough to be alarmed, however.

The lab was supposed to be producing COVID-19 and pregnancy tests, but the facility contained items inconsistent with that explanation. The seizures at the lab strongly suggest China’s regime is preparing to spread disease in America, undoubtedly in the months before a war.

In all probability, it is from locations like this one where China will “fire the first shot” in the next war.

General Chi Haotian, when he was China’s defense minister two decades ago, reportedly gave a secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans with disease. His plan was to clear out the hills, plains, and valleys of North America so that the Chinese people could settle in the vast spaces left uninhabited.

Since then, the mass murder of Americans has been a popular theme in Chinese society. The Communist Party, which tightly controls discourse in the People’s Republic of China, permits and even encourages incitement to kill Americans . “We are ahead of schedule in terms of overtaking the United States…. There will be no problem reaching this goal in 2027. The U.S. will not survive.” — LI Yi, prominent Chinese sociologist, October 2020.

Americans now have to assume that China’s Communist Party is executing a plan to exterminate Americans.

Will Americans, now warned, act to protect their society? After the discovery of the kamikaze lab near Fresno, they should act first and ask questions later.

Americans now have to assume that China’s Communist Party is executing a plan to exterminate Americans.

Welcome to Trans Kindergarten School districts across California are on a recruitment spree. by Larry Sand

https://www.frontpagemag.com/welcome-to-trans-kindergarten/

School districts across California are on a recruitment spree, doing what they can to enroll the state’s 4-year-olds into their year-old pre-K or “transitional kindergarten” (TK) program. Districts are trying to sell parents on TK by using school banners, bus bench ads, billboards, and texting and robocall campaigns. The $2.7 billion plan aims to have 400,000 4-year-olds enrolled by 2025, but it has been off to a sluggish start. Estimates from the Legislative Analyst’s Office put average daily attendance for the 2022-2023 school year at about 91,000, well short of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s estimates.

The idea of having the government in charge of educating 4-year-olds has been promoted for years. Most recently, in his State of the Union speech in February, Joe Biden asserted that “children who go to preschool are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a two- or four-year degree.”

Right before he became governor in 2019, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom told supporters in San Francisco, “Our role begins when babies are still in the womb, and it doesn’t end until we’ve done all we can to prepare them for a quality job and successful career.”

President Obama touted the preschool idea in his 2014 State of the Union address, claiming research has shown that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is “high-quality early education.”

The National Education Association extols the virtues of TK on its website, claiming that children in early childhood education programs are less likely to repeat a grade, less likely to be identified as having special needs, more prepared academically for later grades, more likely to graduate from high school, and be higher earners in the workforce.

But all the rah-rah talk falls apart when the data are examined.

Anything Democrats Don’t Like is a “Threat to Democracy”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/03/anything-democrats-dont-like-is-now-a-threat-to-democracy/

When a handful of Democrats introduced a bill to impose a progressive wealth tax on millionaires and billionaires, they didn’t just say that income inequality was bad. They called it a threat to democracy. Apparently, anything and everything the left doesn’t like is now a threat to democracy.

Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Barbara Lee, Summer Lee, and Jamaal Bowman – four of the most far-left lawmakers in Congress – introduced the OLIGARCH Act (we won’t bother spelling out the acronym) to “tax extreme wealth, reduce inequality, and combat the threat to democracy posed by billionaires.”

“The bill ensures accountability and is an effort to restore democracy,” the press release states.

Tlaib says “billionaires are threatening our democracy.” Not to be outdone, Barbara Lee calls them a “major threat to democracy.”

How exactly do the rich threaten Democracy?

Summer Lee claims that “the 400 richest Americans have 22,000 times the political influence of the bottom 90%” – citing the conclusion of one research paper published 14 years ago.

Lee Siegel The Poison of Accusation Trying to kick up a political storm about educational materials on slavery, the Left just makes things up.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-lefts-poison-of-accusation

Among all the instances of elite projection and cynical opportunism over the past few years—the censoring Left sees fascism everywhere; the concept of systemic racism offers a blessed distraction from the purges of #MeToo; the agenda-driven media deplores Donald Trump’s bending of the truth—Joe Biden’s demagoguery has got to be the most glaring. It’s bad enough that the self-appointed savior of indebted students is the same man who, as a U.S. senator from Delaware, was instrumental in passing legislation that made it impossible for students to discharge student debt through bankruptcy; Delaware, after all, is where the credit-card empires have their headquarters. Now we have Biden decrying the country’s “divisions,” even as he multiplies them himself. He has gone from disdainful opponent of busing—Biden in 1975: “I oppose busing, it’s an asinine concept”—to bold defier of “Jim Crow 2.0.”

The latest example of truth-bending and rabble-rousing comes from deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates. Bates was responding to a comment by Greg Gutfeld, a Fox News host who was discussing a section in the Florida Standards for Teaching Black History that addresses, as the Standards state, “various duties and trades performed by the slaves.” The Standards advise teachers to instruct students in “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Referring to Viktor Frankl’s classic work on the Holocaust, Man’s Search for Meaning, Gutfeld said, “Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility! Utility kept you alive.”

The Biden White House/campaign apparatus leaped. Bates thundered to CNN: “What Fox News allowed to be said on their air yesterday—and has so far failed to condemn—is an obscenity. In defending a horrid, dangerous, extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of Americans who suffered from the evil of enslavement, a Fox News host told another horrid, dangerous and extreme lie that insults the memory of the millions of people who suffered from the evils of the Holocaust. Let’s get something straight that the American people understand full well and that is not complicated: there was nothing good about slavery; there was nothing good about the Holocaust. Full stop. Americans deserve to be brought together, not torn apart with poison.”

Hungary and the Future of Western Conservatism Simon P. Kennedy

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/07/hungary-and-the-future-of-western-conservatism/

At the centre of Europe lies Hungary, a country of 10 million souls with a long and proud history that can be traced back to the tenth century. Hungary is rapidly becoming the hub of intellectual conservatism in the West. This is in part due to the remarkable success of the stridently conservative Fidesz government, led by Viktor Orbán, which has been in power in Hungary since 2010.

One of Orbán’s leading advisers, and one of the most influential people in the conservative renaissance in Hungary, is Balázs Orbán (no relation; above). He is the political director for Prime Minister Orbán, a member of the Hungarian Parliament, and the chairman of the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest. He also chairs the advisory board of the National University of Public Service (Nemzeti Közszolgálati Egyetem). However, Balázs Orbán is more than a politician. He is the equivalent of a court scholar, if such a thing still exists in a modern-day parliamentary democracy. He has been a lecturer in law, has completed his Juris Doctor, and is working on his PhD at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. He has also recently published a book, The Hungarian Way of Strategy. For these reasons and more, Balázs Orbán is the ideal person to ask about Hungary’s history, the Fidesz government’s philosophy and success, and Hungary’s perspective on this fraught geopolitical moment. I spoke with Mr Orbán in his offices in Budapest, and the following is an edited version of our discussion.

SK: Hungary is simultaneously understood in the West as a leading light of conservative political action, and a totalitarian dictatorship. Having spent several months in Hungary myself, the former is obviously the truth. But plenty of people in the West believe the latter. What do you think underlies the division of opinion about Hungary?

John D. Sailer When Curing Cancer Isn’t the Priority San Diego State University included a DEI litmus test in its search for a new cancer biologist.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/san-diego-state-universitys-dei-litmus-test

Last year, San Diego State University conducted a search for a cancer biologist as part of an initiative focused on increasing faculty diversity. While ideal candidates’ expertise could be in tumor biology, cancer immunology, or other areas of hard science, they would also be expected to demonstrate a focus on health disparities and a commitment to diversity. SDSU required each applicant to fill out a form describing their contributions to “building inclusive excellence”—their version of the now-ubiquitous “diversity statement.”

Through a public-records request, I have acquired SDSU’s “building inclusive excellence” form. It symbolizes a remarkable statement of the university’s priorities and demonstrates how even the most high-stakes areas of scientific research must now genuflect to social justice.

The form, published on the National Association of Scholars website, requires candidates to describe their “inclusive excellence” contributions across eight categories, which include “demonstrated knowledge of barriers for underrepresented students and faculty within the discipline,” “demonstrated commitment to teaching and mentoring underrepresented students,” “demonstrated commitment to integrating understanding of underrepresented populations and communities into research,” and “research interests that contribute to diversity and equal opportunity in higher education.”

Far from being merely a symbolic nod toward diversity, these criteria have teeth. Per SDSU’s hiring guide, the chief diversity officer appoints separate “Building Inclusive Excellence” screeners, who examine candidates’ “inclusive excellence” contributions. Screeners won’t advance candidates to the final stage unless they meet two criteria. Departments can appeal a screener’s decision, but only with the approval of both the chief diversity officer and the provost. In other words, even cancer biologists now risk limiting their job prospects unless they demonstrate a commitment to DEI.