RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who is soon to depart, gave a swan-song address in Boston. Recounting a tenure spent treating the U.S. Department of Education like a national school board, he took special pains to celebrate four federal adventures: the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, its dubious new $6 billion School Improvement Grant program, his attempts to micro-manage teacher evaluation in the states via waivers from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, and his efforts to push states to adopt the Common Core standards.

This afternoon, House and Senate negotiators will sit down to finalize the conference bill that would replace No Child Left Behind. To understand how profoundly the bill shrinks the federal role, one need only ask what it means for the overreaching, progressives-at-play education legacy of Obama and Duncan. Race to the Top? Gone. School Improvement Grants? Gone. Federal bureaucrats no longer have the ability to dictate to states on teacher policy. And, when it comes to the Common Core, federal officials are henceforth barred from “encouraging” or “incentivizing” states to adopt certain standards.

Indeed, one can read the bill as a massive, bipartisan repudiation of the Obama administration’s Washington-centric education excesses. More fundamentally, the bill is an important victory for principled, limited government even as it addresses practical concerns about over-testing and ill-conceived federal mandates.

Among politicians and their clingers-on, journalists, nothing takes hold like a bad historical analogy. Thus as politicians — 29 governors chief among them — call for a halt to our Syrian-refugee-resettlement program on the grounds that it might be exploited as a conduit for terrorists, pundits are invoking the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany in an effort to soften American hearts. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote Monday, “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,” while his colleague Ishaan Tharoor contended: “Today’s 3-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” Meanwhile, a Daily Kos headline shouts: “Replace ‘Syrian’ with ‘Jewish’ and we’re back to 1939.”

This is prima facie nonsense, which should be obvious from the terms being compared: Jews, an ethnic group, with Syrians, a national one. An honest, apples-to-apples comparison would line up German Jews and Syrian Muslims — the relevant ethnic group within the relevant political entity. But do this, and the failure of the analogy becomes clear.

The Red Guards were the terrorist vanguard, mainly teenagers and people in their 20s, who helped Mao Tse-Tung execute the Cultural Revolution. Their first skirmishes were waged against the administrations of Tsinghua University and Peking University, which they accused of being blind to what we may as well go ahead and call “privilege,” though the language of the time was probably closer to “elitism” and “bourgeois” tendencies. They were fond of public-criticism sessions and reeducation programs, and the movement they helped launch would eventually persecute tens of millions of people and murder a million and a half. Among those were 23,000 members of minority groups, beaten to death after being judged insufficiently committed to the prevalent ideas of social justice based on their ethnic background.

The idiot children running amok on our college campuses right now aren’t exactly the Red Guards — they’re far too weak and wishy-washy for that. Call them the Pink Guards.

Two points here.

1. Obama Inc. is predictably refusing to slow down or stop Syrian migrant dumping in US states. Including those states which have said no to it.

2. Obama Inc. is refusing to even work with Democratic governors who are pro-resettlement, like Jerry Brown in California, to provide local law enforcement with information about risks.

In a call with senior Obama administration officials Tuesday evening, several governors demanded they be given access to information about Syrian refugees about to be resettled by the federal government in their states. Top White House officials refused…

On the call several Republican governors and two Democrats — New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and California’s Jerry Brown — repeatedly pressed administration officials to share more information about Syrian refugees entering the United States. The governors wanted notifications whenever refugees were resettled in their states, as well as access to classified information collected when the refugees were vetted…

That’s the surprising thing. Obama won’t even throw Jerry Brown a bone.

After making America poorer, weaker, less free, more race-obsessed and balkanized throughout his tumultuous presidency, Barack Obama is gearing up to use his two tax-exempt nonprofits to continue attacking what remains of the republic’s civil society after he leaves office in 14 months.

Obama’s presidency “has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests,” as he “encouraged the nonstop civil unrest exhausting the nation,” writes the Hoover Institution’s Paul Sperry. Obama and his “army of social justice bullies” are going to make things worse before he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017.

Our indefatigable Community Organizer-in-Chief is planning to use Organizing for Action (OfA) and the Barack Obama Foundation to continue punishing America for its imaginary sins and to promote manufactured controversies long after he leaves the White House.

Chicago-based OfA has trained “more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in [Saul] Alinsky street tactics,” according to Sperry. This “army of social justice bullies” will carry on Obama’s campaign to fundamentally transform America.