RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/campus-struggle-sessions-matthew-vadum/

Ritualized humiliation and self-abasement are becoming the norm for those in higher education who defy the campus enforcers of wokeness.

In a scene out of Communist China’s Cultural Revolution, current law professor Jason Kilborn and former college administrator Jodi Shaw — both white people — are the latest victims of mandatory reeducation at the hands of the race-weaponizing radicals who run the academy.

This disturbing move in the direction of normalizing academic brainwashing comes as things go the opposite way for parents nationwide who, thanks to well-publicized examples of arrogant leftist educrats’ damaging public admissions, are making great strides attacking critical race theory (CRT) at the local and state levels.

But taking on school boards over CRT doesn’t help Kilborn, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. He has been ordered by his employer to endure mandatory reeducation as punishment for using an abbreviated version of a racial slur in a legal hypothetical about race-based employment discrimination on an exam. The issue was whether the information concerned in the hypothetical was work product.

Students whined that the use of the term, even with 5 of its 6 letters redacted, was hurtful, and the school’s Black Law Students Association demanded that Kilborn be fired.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/thursday-happy-un-woke-year-larry-sand/

Watching teachers unions, government school honchos, the media, etc., deny that Critical Race Theory (which makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims) is taught in our schools reminds me of that memorable scene from an otherwise forgettable movie, A Guide for the Married Man. A husband gets caught by his wife in bed with another woman, and he simply denies it. And he does so, vociferously and repetitiously to the point that his wife actually starts to believe him.

A typical example of this gaslighting is “Who is Behind the Attacks on Educators and Public Schools?,” posted earlier this month by the National Education Association on its website. The union claims, “Small groups of radicalized adults, egged on by…bad actors, have been whipped into a furor over…the false notion that children are being taught ‘critical race theory.’” At the same time that NEA is denying that CRT is taught, the union published its Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide, in which teachers are advised how to directly address issues such as white supremacy, implicit bias and acknowledging how race influences their work.

In November, an American Enterprise Institute report definitively showed “how legacy and education media refuse to acknowledge the hard evidence — numerous clear examples of CRT curriculum taught to students, a CRT pledge on a state website, and the political implications of parents speaking out about CRT at school boards.” And just last week, John Murawski at RealClearInvestigations gave us abundant evidence that CRT does indeed exist in our schools. One of the myriad examples he gives is Manuel Rustin, a high school history teacher, who helped oversee the drafting of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. He discloses “Ethnic studies without Critical Race Theory is not ethnic studies. It would be like a science class without the scientific method. There is no critical analysis of systems of power and experiences of these marginalized groups without Critical Race Theory.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-democrats-education-lunacies

On Meet the Press Daily last week, Chuck Todd featured a small item about the 23 Democrats not planning on running for re-reelection to congress next year. Todd guessed such a high number expressed a lack of confidence in next year’s midterms, and his guest, University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, agreed. “This is just another indicator that Democrats will probably have a bad year in 2022,” said Sabato, adding, “They only have a majority of five. It’s pretty tough to see how they hold on.”

On the full Meet the Press Sunday, Todd in an ostensibly unrelated segment interviewed 1619 Project author and New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones about Republican efforts in some states to ban teaching of her work. He detoured to ask about the Virginia governor’s race, which seemingly was decided on the question, “How influential should parents be about curriculum?” Given that Democrats lost Virginia after candidate Terry McAuliffe said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Todd asked her, “How do we do this?”

Hannah-Jones’s first answer was to chide Todd for not remembering that Virginia was lost not because of whatever unimportant thing he’d just said, but because of a “right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents to fight against their children being indoctrinated.” This was standard pundit fare that for the millionth time showed a national media figure ignoring, say, the objections of Asian immigrant parents to Virginia policies, but whatever: her next response was more notable. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones said. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/a_law_school_forces_maoist_reeducation_on_a_professor_who_ran_afoul_of_black_students.html

Mao’s deadly Cultural Revolution germinated in academia when students embraced it and began to terrorize their professors by accusing them of anti-Maoist wrongthink. The movement lasted for a decade, during which hundreds of thousands to millions of people died, while China’s irreplaceable cultural and historical heritage was destroyed. We are experiencing a Maoist revolution in America and, as in China, academia is ground zero for the great terror. The latest example is being visited upon Prof. Jason Kilborn, a law professor at U. Illinois-Chicago John Marshall Law School, for using the “n” word, literally, as in “n____.”

Legal Insurrection has the whole story and I urge you to visit it for the details but I’ll give the short version here. I will precede it, though, with a short anecdote from my own years a few decades ago at law school.

In my torts class, the professor called upon an extremely shy young man to discuss a medical malpractice case that involved a woman complaining about injury to her vagina and anus during childbirth. When the student summarized the case, every time he came to those anatomical words, he choked. I’ve never forgotten the teacher telling the student, “When you represent a client in court, you must be able to speak firmly and without shame about anything that advances your client’s interests. There is no place for shyness or sensitivity if you’re to be a good lawyer.”

How things have changed.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nikole-hannah-jones-parents-shouldnt-decide-whats-being-taught-in-schools/

Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator and curator of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, said she did not “understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught” in schools, during an appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday.

“I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have an expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job,” she continued.

Hannah-Jones, who has promoted the integration of the controversial 1619 Project into public-school curricula, also decried the “outsized voice” of white parents in education policy, though she didn’t offer any examples.

The comments echoed Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s infamous gaffe during a September gubernatorial debate in Virginia. McAuliffe had declared that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Discussing McAuliffe’s position on Sunday, Hannah-Jones lamented that he was “panned,” for it, but defended him, arguing “that’s just the fact.”

Ironically, Hannah-Jones also submitted that schools “should teach us how to think, not what to think,” a common refrain of McAuliffe’s opponent, Republican governor-elect Glenn Youngkin — who relentlessly attacked McAuliffe for the gaffe — on the campaign trail.

Hannah-Jones’s interlocutor, Meet the Press‘s Chuck Todd, concurred with her that “at the end of the day, this politicizing of this, it’s clearly been weaponized.”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/12/24/the-fightback-against-wokeness-has-begun/

One of the most significant events of 2021 was the revolt of frustrated and angry parents in Virginia, against the teaching of so-called critical race theory in local schools.

The revolt precipitated the shock defeat of a one-time Virginia governor, Democrat Terry McAuliffe, at the hands of Republican Glenn Youngkin in November’s gubernatorial elections. This was not just a serious setback for the Biden presidency, in a state the Democrats won easily in 2020; it also demonstrated, perhaps for the first time in the current phase of the culture wars, that the social-engineering efforts of America’s cultural elites can be contained – and perhaps even defeated.

The parents’ revolt certainly laid bare the arrogance of the cultural elites. This was personified by McAuliffe himself, who responded to parents’ concerns about their children’s education with undisguised contempt. ‘I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach’, he declared during a televised debate.

McAuliffe wasn’t alone in this. As the parents’ revolt spread throughout the United States, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) wrote a letter to the president demanding that parents’ protests at school-board meetings be treated as ‘domestic terrorism’. US attorney general Merrick Garland seemingly agreed with the NSBA, and called on the FBI to act against those parents threatening ‘school administrators, board members, teachers and staff’.

Others attempted to dismiss this parents-led rejection of woke pedagogy as a Republican stunt. Former US president Barack Obama told Virginia voters to ignore what he called ‘trumped-up culture wars’, and dismissed parental concerns as ‘fake outrage’.

These attempts to denigrate or dismiss the protests ignore their main driver – parents’ concern about the academic and moral education of their children. Many adults may silently put up with manifestations of woke culture in everyday life, but they will react when they realise their child is being encouraged to adopt values antithetical to their own.

This is not confined to the US. Parents in Great Britain and other parts of the Western world are also confronted by similar attempts to inculcate a woke worldview in their children.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/22/no_critical_race_theory_in_schools_heres_the_abundant_evidence_saying_otherwise_808528.html

Mary Nicely, who is now second-in-command at the California Department of Education, went on her personal Facebook page this summer to denounce conservatives who oppose teaching critical race theory in schools as “yet another White right and education reformer distraction.”

Nicely also reposted a newspaper column in July defining critical race theory as a key used in law schools to expose racism in the legal system: “It is taught, if at all, in law school — not high school.”

Randi Weingarten, teachers union leader: Her denial about critical race theory in schools is at odds with the evidence.

Her claim echoed other education experts, like Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who tweeted: “We could explain until our last breath that CRT is not taught in K-12, but the actual definition of CRT doesn’t matter anymore in these debates.”

These denials, which have been amplified by many news organizations, are at odds with overwhelming evidence – documented by class lessons, school curricula, focus groups, teacher surveys and public statements by educators – that CRT is not only taught in class, but is also heavily promoted by the K-12 education establishment.

Some high schools are already teaching lessons and units on CRT, where students write papers demonstrating their facility with applying the theory, while other schools are introducing CRT concepts, such as systemic racism, white privilege, microaggressions, implicit bias and intersectionality.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/its-time-abolish-teachers-unions-larry-sand/

The above caveat about government unions – usually known by the kinder and gentler “public employee unions” – was not issued by the Koch Brothers or Donald Trump. The statement was made by none other than progressive icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Additionally, George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO for 24 years, once stated, “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Both men understood that the very nature of government makes it wrong for its leaders to enter into negotiations with any union. When government unions negotiate, they often sit across the table from people they helped put in office with generous campaign contributions. And when these unions go on strike, they walk out on the taxpayer.

In the private sector, if a business is forced to pay its workers more money, those costs are passed on to the consumer. If the cost of a product is raised too high, the purchaser can choose to go elsewhere. Most unions get this and realize they can’t bargain for excessive salaries and perks. But some unions push things too far and ultimately price their members out of a job. An example of the latter is the United Auto Workers, whose exorbitant demands drove car buyers to Japanese models and automakers to produce cars elsewhere, thus sending Detroit down the road to ruin.