RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/17/the-inevitable-fruits-of-critical-race-theory/

A black man went on a multistate shooting spree over the weekend. The suspected gunman, Justin Tyran Williams, said he specifically targeted white men in his rampage that left five wounded. “Basically, [Williams] explained throughout his life, specifically white males had taken from him, and also what he described as military-looking white males had taken from him,” Columbus (Georgia) Police detective Brandon Lockhart testified Monday. 

A racially motivated mass shooting would be the number one news story on CNN . . . were the races reversed. But a black man intentionally shooting white men is just not that interesting to those outside of conservative media. 

One could dwell on the lack of coverage or how it’s closer to the average mass shooting than the stereotype pushed by the media. (The majority of mass shooters are actually black.) But the most heinous aspect about this crime is the shooter’s motivation. It would be easy to dismiss it as the fixation of one deranged individual. Antiwhite resentment, however, is actively encouraged by the prevailing ideology in our schools and institutions. Critical race theory wants all of its adherents to think the same way as Justin Tyran Williams. 

Most likely, Williams didn’t learn his violent hatred from critical race theory or in school. But it can’t be denied that CRT teaches that white men take everything from nonwhites and the reason why minorities fail is due to white supremacy. It encourages its adherents to hate whites and possibly even wish violence upon them.

Just take a gander at the latest examples of antiwhite racism promoted by our institutions. The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, a respected outlet in the field of psychology, published an article that claimed “whiteness” is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition” that effectively turns its white hosts into “perverse” monsters who attack non-whites. The article grimly concludes that there is no “permanent cure” for this condition. 

Last week, a Fairfax County, Virginia school board member told graduating high school seniors that they must wage “jihad” against the world of “white supremacy” that surrounds them. 

The prestigious Spence School in New York City shows middle schoolers videos that humiliate and mock white women as racist “Karens,” further encouraging racial animus among minorities and racial guilt among whites.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/17/counterfeit-civics/

The National Association of Scholars opposes the proposal, “Educating for American Democracy.” The proposal has attracted some well-meaning supporters, but they are mistaken about what Educating for American Democracy—EAD—would bring into being.

Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy is a “framework” that prescribes how American K-12 schools should teach civics. That word “framework” is part of EAD’s official self-description, and it deserves a closer look. In this case, the so-called “framework” is really a well-developed plan to impose a politically progressive program of instruction on almost all American students. The framework determines the ideas to be taught and the means by which these ideas would be conveyed and enforced. The content of EAD is antithetical to how the vast majority of Americans understand our country.

Precedents

We have been here before, several times. In the early 1990s, the academic Left hijacked the National History Standards. Under the Left, those “standards” projected a dismal view of the nation’s past, but a public outcry, led by former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lynne Cheney, prompted a retreat. In January 1995, the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 to repudiate those standards.

Though they were officially shelved, the National History Standards retained a strong following among college history professors and a hefty number of high school history teachers. Those educators helped the National History Standards to become a kind of stealth curriculum in many of the nation’s schools, which goes some distance toward explaining the formation of political attitudes among people who attended school in that era. It also contributed to the popularity of works of pseudo-history such as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

Among the successors to the National History Standards was the 2014 revision of the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History Standards (APUSH). Twenty years after the 1994 standards were officially set aside, the College Board imposed essentially the same partisan view on the nation’s most important (and most popular) secondary school history curriculum and examination. The National Association of Scholars blew the whistle on this capture-the-flag maneuver, and the College Board officially backed down—though once again, more in appearance than in substance.

Lately, the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” reconfigured by the Pulitzer Center as the centerpiece of a new history curriculum, has been introduced into tens of thousands of classrooms around the country. Controversy has rightly erupted over teaching this body of false premises and fake facts. The National Association of Scholars has been in the thick of this with our “1620” rebuttal.

-https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/16/biden-doe-

The Department of Education (DOE) under President Joe Biden announced that it would reverse the Trump administration policy on Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The Biden DOE will effectively flip the meaning of “sex” on its head, determining that “discrimination on the basis of sex” includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This means the DOE sanctions transgender invasions of women’s private spaces and women’s sports in schools, which arguably violate Title IX.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona defended the new policy by referencing the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), in which the Court ruled that discrimination on the basis of “sex” in a 1964 civil rights law included discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Justice Samuel Alito condemned this notion — which Congress and the president could not have even conceived in 1964 — as “preposterous.”

“The Supreme Court has upheld the right for LGBTQ+ people to live and work without fear of harassment, exclusion, and discrimination – and our LGBTQ+ students have the same rights and deserve the same protections,” Cardona said in a statement on Wednesday. “I’m proud to have directed the Office for Civil Rights to enforce Title IX to protect all students from all forms of sex discrimination. Today, the Department makes clear that all students—including LGBTQ+ students—deserve the opportunity to learn and thrive in schools that are free from discrimination.”

Contrary to Cardona’s rhetoric, however, extending this protection from alleged discrimination to transgender students does not come without a cost. The move merely shifts the burden away from one group and toward another.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/california-public-school-teachers-latest-dupes-richard-l-cravatts/

No sooner than Israel had initiated its campaign to suppress Hamas’s rocket fire from Gaza, resulting in some 3400 rockets targeting southern Israeli towns during the 11-day conflict, than students and faculty at universities around the country began their noxious, though predictable, effort to once again slander the Jewish state, issuing statements of solidarity with the ever-aggrieved Palestinians and denouncing Israel for its alleged aggression, continued ethnic cleansing, oppression, and immorality for the inevitable deaths of Gazan civilians, including children.

The cognitive war against Israel has been waged on university campuses for more than a decade, during which time activist groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine have promoted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel and have sought to galvanize anti-Israel support—especially at those times when Israel is forced by Palestinian aggression to suppress hostilities in defensive military maneuvers.

But the liberal worldview in which there are oppressors like Israel and oppressed like the Palestinians has seeped into public school systems now, as well, where woke elementary and high school teachers are suffused with concepts of the intersectionality of oppression, post-colonial views of the world, and the Left’s perennial notion that victims are guiltless and hegemonic powers (such as Israel and the United States) are founts of imperialism, militarism, and racism.

On May 19th, as one troubling example, the 6200-member United Educators of San Francisco teacher’s union passed a grotesque “Resolution in Solidarity with the Palestinian People” which, in addition to calling on the Biden administration to end all aid to Israel, denounced Israel’s alleged “forced displacement and home demolitions” of Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem and its imposition of “a regime of legalized racial discrimination.”  Like many other statements issued during this latest conflict, Israel was denounced as an aggressive, militaristic oppressor whose military capriciously murders Arabs, seemingly without provocation. “Since May 10 the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has began [sic] an intense campaign of bombing and mortar fire on the territory of Gaza,” the resolution reads, and “nearly 200 people, more than a quarter of them children have been killed. Over 1,300 have been wounded, and 40,000 Gazans have lost their homes.” Conveniently missing from this language, of course, is any mention of Hamas, the terrorist group of psychopaths who have been lobbing rockets and mortars at southern Israeli towns for over 15 years now, some 20,000 of them (and 3400 alone in this latest skirmish), with the express purpose of murdering Jews. The fact that each time Hamas indiscriminately fires one of these rockets into civilian neighborhoods constitutes a war crime has seemingly never occurred to these woke educators, who only condemn Israel’s efforts to defend its citizenry, as any sovereign nation would do, from being murdered by terroristic foes.

https://www.realcleareducation.com/2021/06/14/the_backlash_to_critical_race_theory_is_on_the_way_50031.html

Michelle Goldberg complains in the pages of The New York Times about how it is the left wing that is currently a victim of cancel culture—thanks to the right, which is trying to destroy “critical race theory.”

Sounding alarm at the global counter-movement, she writes that

Critical race theory, the intellectual tradition undergirding concepts like white privilege and microaggressions, is often blamed for fomenting what critics call cancel culture. And so, around America and even overseas, people who don’t like cancel culture are on an ironic quest to cancel the promotion of critical race theory in public forums.

What are some examples of cancellations? Donald Trump’s order to cancel federal critical race theory propaganda, now reversed by the Biden administration, and the state-led fightbacks in Great Britain and France. 

Goldberg is not the only one being swept away in this narrative. Jeffrey Sachs is bitter in the pages of Arc Digital on why the left is the original victim. Apparently, government after government is legislating the woke out of academy. Not just right-wing regimes such as Poland, Hungary, or Brazil, but also Britain, France and, of course, state governments in the United States. 

But is that purge actually happening? Some differences can be seen in K-12 education and higher education, but the rejection of critical race theory, and the supposed threat this rejection represents, is vastly exaggerated. 

Sachs cites Republican leadership targeting critical race theory in the states, such as a proposed New Hampshire bill discussing “harmful divisive concepts,” similar bills in West Virginia and Oklahoma, and bills in Georgia that would bar schools from teaching about pseudoscientific concepts like oppression and privilege. 

Likewise in Arkansas, a bill might be introduced to stop any school from offering anything that foments division between races and classes. Missouri, Arkansas, South Dakota, and Mississippi have introduced bills banning the 1619 Project. Iowa is proposing a ban on the 1619 project, as well as informing parents whenever schools plan on asking pronouns from their children. Goldberg raises similar objections to these proposals. 

A few of those bills have become law, such as H.B. 3979 in Texas, but most have only been proposed, are currently being debated, or have died/been withdrawn. 

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/06/07/washington-and-lee-maintain-name-face-opposition?utm_campaign=https:

After much conversation, pushback and debate, the Board of Trustees at Washington and Lee University has voted not to change the institution’s name. The latter part of the name honors Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate States Army and former president of the institution. The board voted 22 to 6.

The name had been the topic of serious conversation at Washington and Lee for the past few years, and advocacy for a change was redoubled after the murder of George Floyd. In the wake of national protests, many colleges and universities re-evaluated their institutions and made changes to symbols and traditions.

The board took up the issue last July and said it would consider and vote on the decision this month.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/16/this-florida-mom-who-spoke-out-against-crt-in-schools-warns-parents-to-be-vigilant-about-curriculum/

Quisha King is not going to sit by and allow her children, or anyone else’s, to be indoctrinated into the racist lies of critical race theory without putting up a fight. The Floridian mother of two went viral from a speech she made at a school board meeting, in which she spoke in favor of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s proposal to ban critical race theory from public schools in Florida, which the state Board of Education passed unanimously last week.

Many states are not so lucky, however, with the racist ideology being enacted in schools across the country, in both blatant and subtle ways, from prep schools in New York and New Jersey to government primary schools in the Midwest.

I spoke with King about her activism to prevent these racist lies from pervading schools. That viral speech is far from the start of her fight, as she noted: “I’ve been learning about CRT for over a year now, and I’ve been seeing a lot of the policies that are being pushed onto our children from the school board. I have been speaking at local school board meetings as well about CRT and them putting our children down, essentially. Putting them in these ‘oppressor,’ ‘oppressed’ categories. When I saw that a vote was coming up, I thought it was important that I make my voice known.”

“I know a lot of parents feel the same way I do, but some are just, quite frankly, a little intimidated or scared to speak up about it,” she added.

As a mother of two black children, King is particularly concerned about how critical race theory will harm black kids, who are being told they are less capable and will accomplish less than their white peers, due solely to their skin color.

“That is destructive for any young mind to believe that they can never rise up to the level of their own dreams, goals, and the things that they want to accomplish,” King said. “I think that’s a terrible way to start kids off into life, by telling them they are oppressed, especially today. Black Americans are the most successful black people in the entire world, so why in the world would we tell black children or any child that they are oppressed? If you tell a child they can’t do something, eventually, they won’t even try.”

One of King’s children attends public school while the other attends private school, thanks to school choice.