RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/the-backlash-against-critical-race-theory-is-real/

No matter how much progressives want to claim otherwise, parents are genuinely concerned about a divisive worldview being imposed on their children.
Returning once again to the shallow well from which she has pulled the majority of her journalistic water, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer suggested last week that the escalating pushback against critical race theory “has all the red flags of an dark money astroturf campaign.” We are stuck, it seems, in Stage One of the Kübler-Ross Scale of Progressive Political Grief.

If they wish to, figures such as Mayer can spend the next few years insisting that the resistance to critical race theory that we are seeing from parents across the country is little more than a mirage. Fingers firmly in ears, they can maintain that their detractors have invented the controversy from whole cloth, that an astroturfing effort by the Koch Brothers or the Manhattan Institute has tricked them, or that their objections ring hollow because they don’t know what critical race theory “actually” is. Sneering, scoffing, and laughing off the revolt, they can submit in anger that those complaining about the development are suffering from “white fragility” or are engaged in a “moral panic” or are just trying desperately to prevent their kids from learning about slavery and civil rights.

What they can’t do, however, is make any of that true.

Precision in language is important, and yet, after a certain point, it matters less what we choose to call a given trend than that we acknowledge that said trend exists. And mark my words: The backlash against critical race theory most certainly exists. It is being driven by real people, many of whom I have seen with my own eyes; it has been constructed atop a discrete and comprehensible set of objections; and it is being fought on behalf of a class of citizens — children — whose interests arouse the rawest emotions in all of politics. Those who dismiss this development too harshly or too pedantically do so at their peril.

What are the parents leading this charge angry about? In essence, they’re angry about the idea that any form of racial essentialism would be taught in schools. They’re worried by the prospect of their children — black, white, Asian, Hispanic, whatever — being told that, as the result of their immutable characteristics, they will play a fixed role within a fixed system within a fixed world.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/uva_to_host_class_on_mueller_investigationtaught_by_mueller.html

The University of Virginia is planning to host a class on the Mueller investigation of former President Trump, otherwise known as the Great Russian Collusion Hoax. The investigation, which spanned most of three years and cost millions of taxpayer dollars, ended with a whimper, but only after an armed SWAT team, guns drawn, conducted a pre-dawn raid on the home of 66-year old former Trump associate Roger Stone and his wife, an embarrassment to Mueller and law enforcement in general. This would be akin to sending Delta Force to pick up Nancy Pelosi for jaywalking. As Stone said of the 29 FBI agents in 17 vehicles that swarmed his property, “They could have contacted my lawyer.”

The University, which Thomas Jefferson founded, recently announced that its School of Law course will take students “inside the investigation that dominated headlines during the Trump administration.” The news release added that the course will “offer an inside look at the role of special counsel,” and will be taught by former members of Mueller’s team…and Robert Mueller himself!

What a concept! No bias here! The release noted the Stone prosecution but somehow omitted the part about the entire investigation being a sham of epic proportions, a political witch-hunt for the ages. The UVA class will almost surely also forget to mention that a prosecutor attached to Mueller’s Special Counsel probe is being investigated for falsely testifying to Congress.

Axios reported, “The course will begin with the start of the investigation and Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. It will then focus on the special counsel’s relationship with Congress and the Justice Department, how the investigation related to the White House and the Roger Stone prosecution.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/18/pro-critical-race-theory-teachers-reward-extra-credit-to-students-who-testify-on-anti-crt-bill/

A group of Rhode Island teachers in favor of implementing critical race theory in their schools offered extra credit to their students who agreed to testify on an anti-critical race theory state bill.

Documents obtained by Parents Defending Education show that at least two educators across different departments at Barrington High School in Barrington, Rhode Island offered five extra points to students to be used on their next exams if they chose to verbally testify or offer a written comment on the legislation. Emails also show the educators praised students who chose to submit testimony.

The bill prohibits teaching certain divisive concepts that have infiltrated government schools at the taxpayers’ expense, as well as some private schools. Those concepts, which make up the bedrock of the racist so-called critical race theory, include “an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” “an individual, by virtue of their race or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” and “meritocracy or traits such as hard work ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.”

The social studies teacher who created the original email “strongly urged” her students to partake in the hearing while offering her own left-leaning commentary on the legislation, which she said would prevent her from teaching “the unit on Race or Gender.”

The teacher, Alison Grieco, claimed she believes “every opinion is valuable in my classroom as long as it is respectful” and that “good civics discourse only happens when multiple sides of an issue is discussed” — but she made those comments only after clearly opposing the legislation. “This bill essentially states that there should be no discussion of race or gender in classrooms,” she lamented.

Although Grieco also claims she always encourages her students to involve themselves in the political process, saying she “[doesn’t] care if they testify for, against or no position (you must select one of those three options when testifying and I have gone over all three with students),” she also wrote in an email that she encourages students to testify on legislation “that would relate to them.” The examples she listed are all on Democrats’ wish lists: “lowering voting age, funding for mandatory civics education, and this bill.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-university-

The lack of backbone in American higher ed leaders is astounding. They’re so afraid of getting on the wrong side of the aggressive leftists on campus that they won’t defend good faculty members who come under attack for having offended some Social Justice Warrior.

In today’s Martin Center article, Giovanni Gravano of FIRE writes about a case at Central Michigan University (CMU). A journalism professor, Timothy Boudreau, quoting from court documents, spoke the “n-word.” That was enough to cause a student to file a complaint against him.

How did the CMU administration react? By telling the student to behave like an adult rather than a whiney child? Of course not.

Writes Gravano, “Following class that day on June 22, 2020, a nine-minute video was posted by one of his students, labeling Boudreau ‘racist’ and criticizing his choice to quote the slur in the classroom. As is often the case on social media, a single post criticizing a professor’s speech or course content quickly became an amplified movement to have him punished or fired.”

After the dust had settled, Boudreau was forced into retirement, accepting a small settlement from the school. Remaining faculty at CMU will no doubt have learned to avoid even quoting the forbidden word, but also to worry about anything else that might “trigger” some student with a grudge.

Gravano concludes, “And as universities continue to fail to protect faculty speech, students suffer as good professors decline to return to classrooms. For students to miss out on the opportunity to learn how to properly deal with differences or study the breadth of their respective subject matter is a failure of educational institutions.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/06/18/a_plan_to_get_divisive__radical_theories_out_of_our_schools_145946.html

As a candidate, Joe Biden’s number one promise was to “unite” America. Yet in his first months as president, his number one priority has been to divide our country by race and gender at every turn.

There is no clearer example than the Biden Administration’s new effort aimed at indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren with some of the most toxic and anti-American theories ever conceived. It is vital for Americans to understand what this initiative would do, what drives it, and, most importantly, how we can stop it.

For decades, the America-blaming Left has been relentlessly pushing a vision of America that casts our history, culture, traditions, and founding documents in the most negative possible light. Yet in recent years, this deeply unnatural effort has progressed from telling children that their history is evil to telling Americans that they are evil.

In classrooms across the nation, students are being subjected to a new curriculum designed to brainwash them with the ridiculous left-wing dogma known as “critical race theory.” The key fact about this twisted doctrine is that it is completely antithetical to everything that normal Americans of any color would wish to teach their children.

Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, it teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice. Far from advancing the beautiful dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.—that our children should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”—the Left’s vile new theory preaches that judging people by the color of their skin is actually a good idea.

Teaching even one child these divisive messages would verge on psychological abuse. Indoctrinating generations of children with these extreme ideas is not just immoral—it is a program for national suicide. Yet that is exactly what the Biden Administration endorsed recently in a rule published in the Federal Register aimed at inflicting a critical race theory-inspired curriculum on American schoolchildren.

The rule explicitly cites the New York Times’ discredited “1619 Project” as a motivation

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/a-florida-graduate-student-wanted-to-correct-the-record-on-covid-deaths-rebekah-jones-tried-to-ruin-his-career-over-it/

Jon Taylor had a disagreement with Jones over COVID data, so she falsely accused him of sexual harassment.

Jon Taylor’s desire to help Floridians understand a pandemic that was remaking their lives nearly cost him his career.

Taylor, a 37-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the Florida Atlantic University College of Business, waded into the world of COVID data analysis last spring after being informed that he had been in contact with someone who tested positive for the virus. When he looked at the data for himself, what he found disturbed him: The way the Florida Department of Health was presenting the pandemic death toll was confusing members of the media who lacked a background in data analysis.

News outlets, local and national, were conflating the actual number of Floridians who had died of COVID on a given day with the number of COVID deaths that had been entered into the system on that day — a total that included deaths that had occurred days and sometimes weeks before the entry date.

The misunderstanding was a dream come true for news editors eager for attention-grabbing headlines detailing Florida’s “record-setting” daily COVID deaths.

Taylor, an affable and apolitical mathematician, thought he could clear things up by presenting the data in a more transparent way, so he and his academic adviser created their own COVID tracker, which relied on the state’s data but presented it on a timeline that accurately captured the number of deaths in the state each day.

Unbeknownst to Taylor, who studiously avoids political media, he had just stepped on a hornet’s nest.

By creating a tracker that showed the situation in Florida to be somewhat less dire than enemies of Governor DeSantis preferred to believe, he had left the staid world of academia and entered the world of politics, where facts are subordinated to the question of whom those facts might help and whom they might hurt.

And in Florida, the foremost enforcer of the dire COVID narrative was a woman named Rebekah Jones, the former COVID dashboard manager for the state health department.

“In the process of building the tracker, of course I found Rebekah Jones. You can’t do Florida COVID work without running into her,” Taylor told National Review.

https://www.thecollegefix.com/black-law-scholar-explains-how-critical-rac

The following is written by Dr. Carol Swain, former political science and law professor at Vanderbilt University. Her essay is adapted from her contribution to the 1776 initiative, which aims to counter the flawed and divisive narrative put forth by The New York Times’ 1619 project.

I reached my formative years before critical race theory and cultural Marxism gained a dominant foothold. Even though I was born and grew up in rural southern poverty during the era of segregation, I was not taught to hate white people or to hate America. Instead, my black teachers stressed our need to work hard and excel. I grew up to be a proud American who never doubted she lived in the greatest country in the world. No one around me encouraged me to see myself as a victim. I never fixated on the fact that I was black, poor, and female. Had I done so, I doubt I would have achieved anything.

The 1619 Project is a misguided effort to keep open historical wounds while telling only half of the story. It is flawed because it is connected to critical race theory and the diversity-inclusion grievance industry that focuses on identity politics and division. Blaming today’s families for the mistakes of our ancestors is not a prescription for unifying the country or empowering racial and ethnic minorities.

Critical race theory is an analytical framework to analyze institutions and culture. Its purpose is to divide the world into white oppressors and non-white victims. Instead of traditional forms of knowledge, it uses personal narratives of marginalized minority “victim” groups (blacks, Hispanics, Asians) as irrefutable “evidence” of the dishonesty of their mostly white heterosexual oppressors. The ultimate goal of this theory’s proponents is to remake society so that the victim class eventually displaces the oppressors and becomes the new ruling class.

Within this framework, white privilege and its unearned benefits are responsible for economic, health care, and social disparities in minority communities. It advances a narrative of blame that declares white America guilty for the plight of blacks. When it comes to education, members of the victim classes do all the teaching. It is a worldview and narrative that commands white people to sit in obedience and listen quietly to the arguments about their unjust gains as well as their obligation to provide a remedy for — in this case, black Americans, whether they are descended from slaves or not.

http://mit.imodules.com/controls/email_marketing/view_in_browser.aspx?sid=1314&gi

To the members of the MIT community,

I am delighted to share the news that Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and a professor of political science, has agreed to serve as MIT’s next chancellor. She will begin her new role August 18th. 

After earning her undergraduate degree in history from Brown – where she somehow found time to host a jazz radio show on the college station – Melissa headed to Yale for graduate school in political science. Shortly after earning her doctorate, she joined the faculty at MIT. In the years since, she has established herself as a sought-after teacher with a gift for making history come alive; a pioneering scholar on questions of racial and ethnic politics and retrospective justice in society; and a widely respected leader both in her professional associations and in many different roles at MIT.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/blm-bds-bigotry-not-new-ucla-lloyd-billingsley/

“Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, will deliver the 2021 Commencement address for the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs,” the prestigious UC campus announced back on March 30. According to UCLA dean Gary Segura, “Patrisse Cullors is at the heart — and the foundation — of a movement for human rights, social change and genuine equality under the law.” So Patrisse Cullors “is the ideal person to deliver a message of mission to our 2021 graduates.”

What Cullors told the graduates in her June 11 virtual address is hard to find. On the other hand, the Black Lives Matter co-founder drew attention for her 2015 statement at Harvard Law School that “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa, and if we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed.” As it happens, a call to abolish the state of Israel is not out of step for UCLA.

Under “Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion” Jerry Kang, UCLA became a safe haven for Jew-hatred.  Groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) enjoyed free reign – and even encouragement – by faculty and administrators. The strongest response to this hatred came not from within UCLA but  from “outside provocateur” David Horowitz.

Posters reading “Students for Justice in Palestine” and “#Jew Haters” began appearing at UCLA. Horowitz called on UCLA to remove campus privileges and funding of SJP because they are a hate group and as such violated UCLA’s “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.” On April 19, 2016, Jerry Kang responded with a letter to the entire UCLA community.

“Back in November 2015,” Kang wrote, “someone put up hostile posters accusing two student organizations – the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) – of being murderers and terrorists.” These were posted anonymously but “an outside provocateur named David Horowitz eventually took credit.” This harkened back to the days when reactionary administrators blamed “outside agitators” for activism they didn’t like.

As the provocateur explained in a letter to Kang, the posters targeted only Students for Justice in Palestine, not the Muslim Students Association. The posters did not accuse SJP of being murderers and terrorists. Horowitz described them as Jew haters “because they support the murderers and terrorists of Hamas, which they do.”