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CHAPTER 22: What Is Social Justice? Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release July 2024) by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27834/chapter-22-what-is-social-justice

The inherent child abuse in Drag Queen Story Hour described by Charlotte Cushman in Chapter 21 is part of the greater Marxist social justice campaign that is attacking America through politicized education in both public and private schools. Cushman defines social justice and explains its political objective in the social justice link[i] on her Authentic Montessori Education[ii] website:

What Is Social Justice?

Social justice is grounded in Marxism, the ideology of communism. Marxists seek to destabilize society so that they can take power. They want an unstable population so they create an educational system that keeps the population uneducated and weak. Then they create constant conflict which results in revolutions. The conflict created is over the issue of oppression. Marxists hold that society is divided into two classes, the oppressed and the oppressors, and seek to take from the oppressors to give to the oppressed. They attempt to make the “oppressors” feel riddled with guilt so that they will cooperate more easily when discriminated against.

Social justice claims that certain groups are inherently evil. For example, they claim that all people that are white are racist. It places groups higher than individuals, and holds that all groups should be equal. If there are any disparities in group outcomes, it is attributed to discrimination and group injustice rather than individual choices and actions, and therefore the more successful groups need to be punished. This results in groups constantly fighting with each other. Currently, social justice sees America as inherently racist and it therefore holds that our country must be dismantled (also known as the Great Reset).

The American ideal of individual justice is equality under the law regardless of group affiliation—such as race, sex, religion, etc.—whereas social justice seeks to reward or punish individuals based on their group affiliation. Actual justice means that every individual must be judged for who he/she is and treated accordingly. If individuals work to earn their living, they can keep the fruits of their labor. If individuals violate the rights of others (stealing, murder, etc.), it means the violators go to jail.

Justice applies to everyone. Therefore, to add the concept “social” is an attempt to change the meaning of justice from equality under the law to equity, equity meaning everyone has a right to something whether or not he has earned it. That requires the use of force to take from one person for the benefit of another. This is racist and the very antithesis of justice. The real purpose of social justice in education is to change innocent children into racists. This will assure class (group) struggles and conflict.

How the West was lost at Oxford University By S.R. Piccoli

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/how_the_west_was_lost_at_oxford_university.html

Once upon a time, we were told that the peoples of the Western world — which includes countries like Australia and New Zealand, although located in the Eastern Hemisphere — are heirs and trustees of Western civilization, imbalances and excesses included.  Often referred to simply as “the West,” Western civilization is a broad concept used to understand the cultural, social, political, and economic norms, traditions, values, and institutions that originated in or are associated with Europe.  It has its roots in Ancient Greece and Rome as well as in Christianity, humanism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. It values rationalism, democracy, and individual freedoms and rights.

Later on, Marxist and otherwise far-left historians argued that the history of the West is marked by exploitation and conflict among different social classes, from feudal lords and serfs in the Middle Ages to capitalists and workers in the modern era.  Marxists, in particular, introduced the concept of cultural hegemony, formulated by Antonio Gramsci to describe ideological domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.  In other words, according to this type of approach, the dominant cultural norms and values of Western civilization serve to maintain the power of the ruling class.

As of now, the left-wing narrative is that Western civilization is an illusion.  Postmodern and deconstructionist historians have claimed that the West is a late invention of the 18th-century philosopher. Skeptical of the grand narratives that have historically been used to describe Western civilization, such as progress, enlightenment, etc., they argue that these narratives often oversimplify complex histories and marginalize alternative perspectives.

It is in this context that the new book How the World Made the West, written by Josephine Quinn, professor of ancient history at Oxford University, needs to be read.  It’s aimed to bring to fulfillment the goal and the dream of legions of leftists the world over and from time immemorial.  Quinn’s purpose is not to trash what generations of schoolchildren and college students have been taught to take pride in as Western values and achievements.  Rather, she wants to demolish the underlying concept of what she calls “civilizational thinking,” which suggests that there is no such thing as “Western civilization.”  By the way, as she puts it, this “civilizational thinking” provided the cultural rationale for western European supremacy during the 19th century, enabling colonial expansion and racial hierarchies.

CHAPTER 21: Montessori and Drag Queen Story Hour Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release July 2024) by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27820/chapter-21-montessori-and-drag-queen-story-hour

For readers who may be under the impression that private schools are exempt from the humanitarian hoax of whole child education and its sociopolitical intent, I have included an informative article written by retired Montessori educator Charlotte Cushman, published online in American Thinker[i] and on her website, Authentic Montessori Education,[ii] on January 21, 2023.

Charlotte Cushman taught the Montessori Method for over 40 years, and co-owned and operated two Montessori schools. She is appalled by today’s woke (Marxist) trend in Montessori, and advocates a return to authentic Montessori and its founder’s principles:

Not in the service of any political or social creed should the teacher work, but in the service of the complete human being, able to exercise in freedom, a self-disciplined will and judgement, unperverted by prejudice and undistorted by fear. ––Maria Montessori

The Real Purpose of Drag Queen Story Hour

By Charlotte Cushman

Those who have voiced concerns about the dangers that drag events, such as Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH), pose for children (namely, sexualization and grooming) have been told that those concerns are baseless, that the events are harmless, that it is all just entertainment and fun, and that attending drag events is a way to understand the gay culture.

On January 25, 2021 an academic paper entitled “Drag pedagogy: the playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood” was published online in Curriculum Inquiry, an educational journal. The paper, recently called out by James Lindsay here and here and also by Christopher F. Rufo here, was written by Harper Keenen and Lil Miss Hot Mess (a founder of DQSH), who describe themselves as “a genderqueer drag performer/scholar and a trans scholar.” (p. 443)

Right off the bat, the abstract tells us the purpose of DQSH:

Ultimately, the authors propose that “drag pedagogy” provides a performative approach to queer pedagogy that is not simply about LGBT lives, but living queerly. (p. 440)

Then the authors state,

Through this programme, drag artists…[are] positioning queer and trans cultural forms as valuable components of early childhood education. We are guided by the following question: what might Drag Queen Story Hour offer educators as a way of bringing queer ways of knowing and being into the education of young children?

Living in a Free Society Is Not a Passive Endeavor Horace Cooper

https://townhall.com/columnists/horacecooper/2024/06/01/living-in-a-free-society-is-not-a-passive-endeavor-n2639748#google_vignette

For years, the progressive Left, ambitious self-serving politicians, and the elites of the administrative state have chipped away at the American dream, the promise of opportunity, and the shared reverence for the founding principles of our society that once propelled our success. Though it may seem like America is beyond saving, the best days of America are yet to come, says George Landrith, all we have to do is let freedom ring…again.

George Landrith III’s “Let Freedom Ring… Again: Can Self-Serving Truths Save America from Further Decline?” is an exceptionally compelling work that portrays the uncertainty of America’s future and the urgency with which we must act to save America from its current trajectory into darkness. The book, filled with insightful thoughts from Landrith, skillfully diagnoses the problems afflicting American politics and the Left at large while also providing carefully crafted solutions that offer hope for a better future.

Throughout the book, Landrith accurately exposes the Left’s parasitic relationship with their voters. From enticing welfare programs to failing schools, “Whenever leftists propose a solution to society’s problems, they make themselves more powerful and/or they make the people more dependent,” says Landrith.

This intentional feat of Leftist policy is best seen in California, where not so long ago Governor Gavin Newsom passed California’s AB5. In an effort to “protect workers,” California essentially banned independent contractors, forcing small businesses to hire people they can’t afford, putting gig workers like independent truckers out of the job. Indeed, since its inception, AB5 has destroyed self-employment, making exodus or welfare the only option for many Californians.

The smearing of JK Rowling How the lies of trans activists turned a beloved children’s author into an international hate-figure. Lauren Smith

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/05/28/the-smearing-of-jk-rowling/

If you’d have said 10 years ago that JK Rowling would become the No1 hate figure of the cultural elites, people would have thought you were mad.

Until quite recently, she was a beloved children’s author, whose Harry Potter series is credited with turning a generation of young people on to literature. The only people who raged against her were ultra-religious Christians in the US, terrified that her ‘Satanic’ novels would teach their children the ways of witchcraft.

For most of her career, Rowling was embraced by the great and the good. After all, she was immaculately liberal-left. She voted Labour. She loved Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. She voted Remain in the EU referendum. She was outspoken about feminism and women’s rights. What could she possibly be demonised for?

The answer? She believes in a thing called biological sex. She doesn’t believe that men can become women – views that are held by the vast majority of the population.

In 2018, her dark secret began to surface. Rowling had long been an active user of X, or Twitter as it was known back then. And it came to light that she had ‘liked’ a tweet describing transwomen as ‘men in dresses’. This was back when the trans issue had barely entered mainstream consciousness. So, when Rowling’s spokesperson claimed she had liked the tweet by accident, there was an element of plausible deniability.

Then, in 2019, Rowling made her views plain. This was the year that researcher Maya Forstater was forced out of her job at a think-tank due to her trans-sceptical opinions. Forstater took her case to court and eventually established that gender-critical beliefs must be protected from discrimination under the UK Equality Act. Rowling tweeted her support.

‘Dress however you please’, she said, ‘call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya.’

This raised the hackles of some among Rowling’s audience. But it wasn’t until the next year that the campaign against her really took off.

In June 2020, Rowling took to Twitter again to mock the use of awkward and nonsensical ‘trans-inclusive’ phrases to describe women. Responding to a headline which used the phrase ‘people who menstruate’, Rowling quipped: ‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’

Later that month, she responded to this Twitter controversy with a lengthy essay on her blog. Here, she clearly – and compassionately – articulated her position on the gender issue. In it, she made clear that she has no problem with transgender people. But she is concerned that the attempt to erase biological sex threatens hard-won rights. She is worried about the effects trans ideology might have on female healthcare, education, child safeguarding, freedom of speech – all completely valid concerns, you might think.

CHAPTER 20: In Their Own Words: The Sexual Revolution Begins in Kindergarten Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is (forthcoming release July 2024)

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27806/chapter-20-in-their-own-words-the-sexual

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Planned Parenthood[i] is the instrument of “transformative sexual change” in the United States. Marketed as scientificand evidence-based, transformative sexual change advocates changing restrictive laws that hinder the exercise of reproductive rights, and transforming social norms that perpetuate prejudices on reproductive rights. Over 40 percent of the organization’s revenue comes from your tax dollars in the form of government reimbursements and grants. Planned Parenthood (PP) is a political organization that disguises its political agenda as health education. My last book, The Collapsing American Family: From Bonding to Bondage (Chapter 10, “The Scheme and the Schemers Determined to Reeducate America”), exposes Planned Parenthood’s infiltration of the classroom, and its catastrophic Marxist agenda.

In an August 20, 2020, Daily Signal article, “Problematic Women: Planned Parenthood Ideology ‘Killing the Family,’ Ex-Volunteer Says,”[ii] Monica Cline, former volunteer and “comprehensive sex educator” at Planned Parenthood, is quoted. She explains how children were being pressured and deliberately sexualized in school because no adult was offering them the alternative of abstinence.

At one point she asks a group of thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, “Guys, do you realize you don’t have to have sex? You don’t have to have oral sex, vaginal sex, or anal sex. And if you don’t, you never have to come in contact with someone else’s body fluids.” A little girl raised her hand and said, “Ma’am, no one has ever told us that.” That was the turning point for Monica Cline. She finally and fully understood:

There is a “huge movement to normalize childhood sex.” The sex education program of Planned Parenthood is “encouraging children to dehumanize themselves and each other, making them sexually active at a young age, normalizing every sexual behavior…. By doing that those children become dependent on getting condoms and contraceptives and getting treated, and yes, even getting abortions. And so, once that dependency occurs, and the parent who is purposely left out of the picture, there’s no one else who’s really guiding those children…. They empathize with them and say, “Oh, yeah. Your mom and dad would probably be really mad to know you are sexually active. But we know it is perfectly normal, and we’re here to help you.” … It sounds so positive. But what they are really doing is creating a barrier between a family and their child, the guidance of a parent.

Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, a look at how some of the most educated people in America lost their minds—and how she almost did, too.

As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco  neighbors and friends—until she started questioning  whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,” Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.

In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” and trying to please the New York Times’s “disinformation czar,” she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.

Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.

The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation by Victor Davis Hanson

“In The End of Everything, Hanson tells compelling and harrowing stories of how civilizations perished. He helps us consider contemporary affairs in light of that history, think about the unthinkable, and recognize the urgency of trying to prevent our own demise.” — H. R. McMaster, author of Battlegrounds

War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization—sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and epochs. Though much has changed over the millennia, human nature remains the same. Modern societies are not immune from the horror of a war of extinction. 
 
In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war’s drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again. 

China’s Dream, America’s Nightmare Daryl McCann

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/05/chinas-dream-americas-nightmare/

Talk of a future war between Beijing and Washington is obsolete. Communist China is already at war with the United States even if, to quote Churchill, “all the great responsible authorities” have stood “gazing” at this disturbing truth “with vacant eyes”. So writes Peter Schweizer in Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye while China Kills Americans. Supported by an extensive research team, Schweizer chronicles the key methods the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employs to pursue “disintegration warfare” against the United States, from fuelling the fentanyl crisis and arming criminal gangs to commandeering Hollywood and maximising the deleterious effects of COVID-19 on the American population: “It is often said that China is in a cold war with America. The reality is far worse: the war is hot, and the body count is one-sided.”

Disintegration warfare, writes Schweizer, is a modern-day adaptation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, holy writ for every leader of the People’s Republic of China from Mao to Xi, and since 2006 required reading for members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Sun Tzu, an ancient Chinese strategist, suggested that “all warfare is based on deception” and “the supreme act of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting”. The strength of Blood Money is that it comprehensively outlines how Xi Jinping and his coterie are going about the business of stealthily disintegrating the one power standing in the way of the Middle Kingdom resuming its place as the dominant force in the world. The mighty United States must, too, become a tributary state of China, but for that to occur America must be broken and defeated, preferably “without fighting” back or in any way defending itself.

Blood Money is mostly about how the CCP aims to defeat America (and the West) though there are moments when the discussion turns to why. For instance, Schweizer provides a
telling quotation from the Supreme Leader contained in a textbook given to all PLA officers. China and the West, according to Xi, are essentially incompatible because of differing ideologies and social systems: “This [incompatibility] decides it. Our struggle and contest of power with the West cannot be moderated. It will inevitably be long, complex, and at times extremely sharp.” The history of the CCP, after all, is a case study of destroying the independent integrity of everything that comes into its purview, from Tibet to the World Health Organisation. The only question is whether the politburo ever believed the Tibetan Autonomous Region would be, in any sense, self-directed. The belligerent paranoia of the CCP is a function of its Leninist nature and millennial fancies. Today the utopian vision is not Mao’s Great Leap Forward but Xi’s China Dream, though the same Leninist impulse prevails: the enemy must be “disintegrated”.

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left by Daniel Greenfield

The secret history of the American Left.

The Left is America’s oldest enemy.

It was here long before the 1960s, calling for the execution of George Washington, plotting to stop the ratification of the Constitution, and collaborating with foreign enemies.

Stolen elections, fake news, race riots, globalism, and socialism aren’t new problems; Americans faced them from the very beginning.

Domestic Enemies reveals the true origins of the Democratic Party and its radicals, who—even two centuries ago—were calling for the redistribution of wealth, the end of marriage, and the use of schools for political indoctrination.

From political battles to street fights, Domestic Enemies takes you into the heart of a century of forgotten struggles between America’s greatest heroes—such as Washington, Hamilton, Davy Crockett, and Abraham Lincoln—and radical villains like Aaron Burr.

This is a 1619 Project for the American Left: a history of the Democrats as you’ve never heard it before, told through the political debates, naval battles, race riots, scandals, secret societies, and domestic terrorism that made the Left what it is today.

Learn how the Founding Fathers defeated the Left before, and how we can beat it again.