RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/banned-books-kelce-2024-pandemic?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_

The left claims that progressive books are being censored in public schools. But my research proves the opposite is true.

Over the last couple years, the media have peddled a narrative of “book bans” sweeping the nation. Book bans (ostensibly by the right) are “eating away at democracy,” according to The Guardian, and are “taking an emotional toll,” warned CNN. The outrage has reached such a fever pitch that free-speech advocacy group PEN America co-filed a lawsuit (along with parents, authors, and publisher Penguin Random House) against Florida’s Escambia County School District and School Board, accusing them of removing books “discussing race, racism, and LGBTQ identities.” Oral arguments in the court case began on January 10.

But the truth is a lot more complicated. 

Last spring, I wrote about the hijacking of high school debate for The Free Press. I detailed how judges disqualify students for advancing conservative arguments that the judges personally disagree with—effectively taking the debate out of high school debate.

Since that article, I’ve spent time meeting with students, parents, teachers, and school board members. Several students complained that their school libraries had become one-sided, offering only books in line with progressive orthodoxy. 

So I decided to investigate just how one-sided things actually are. I surveyed the library catalogs of 35 of the largest public school districts in eight red states and six blue states, representing over 4,600 individual schools. All of these records are publicly available online. (Here are just three online catalogs I searched: Broward County, FL, Austin, TX, and Oklahoma City, OK.) What I discovered isn’t so much a problem of banned books. It’s that kids are often exposed to only one side of the story. 

For example, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which argues that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” is stocked in 42 percent of the U.S. school districts I surveyed.

Meanwhile, only a single school district—Northside Independent School District (ISD) in San Antonio, Texas—offers students Woke Racism by John McWhorter, a book that challenges the borderline religious “anti-racist” ideas advanced by Kendi.

https://www.thefp.com/p/john-sailer-the-dei-rollback

When he took office in 2021, Utah governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, made advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” a key priority. He appointed a high-level diversity officer to his administration. His senior leadership was put through a “21-Day Equity Challenge,” which instructed them in microaggressions and antiracism.

The universities were on board. Utah State’s annual diversity symposium featured talks such as “Decentering Whiteness.” The university also required DEI statements from applicants to the faculty, explaining how they infused diversity and equity—a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of “marginalization”—into their work. Even for positions in fields such as insect ecology and lithospheric evolution. 

Then, in December, Cox announced a different priority: reversing the excesses of DEI. At a press conference he said, “We’re using identitarianism to force people into boxes, and into victimhood, and I just don’t think that’s helpful at all. In fact, I think it’s harmful.” So harmful that he announced his intention to bar the use of diversity statements in faculty hiring, condemning the practice as “bordering on evil.”

Spencer Cox is not alone. After what appeared to be an inexorable rise of the DEI bureaucracy through government, higher education, and business for the past few years, many now feel like Cox—and are taking action. Legislators have proposed and passed laws curtailing DEI practices. Businesses have trimmed their DEI positions. Some universities have voluntarily ditched mandatory diversity statements. DEI is still deeply entrenched at our institutions—but retrenchment is well under way.

https://victorhanson.com/the-hysterical-style-in-american-politics/

The post-Joe McCarthy era and the candidacy of Barry Goldwater once prompted liberal political scientist Richard Hofstadter to chronicle a supposedly long-standing right-wing “paranoid style” of conspiracy-fed extremism.

But far more common, especially in the 21st century, has been a left-wing, hysterical style of inventing scandals and manipulating perceived tensions for political advantage.

Or, in the immortal words of Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

The 2008 economic emergency crested on September 7, with the near collapse of the home mortgage industry.

Obama took office on January 20, 2009, more than four months after the meltdown. In that interim, the officials had finally restored financial confidence and plotted a course of economic recovery.

No matter. The Obama administration never stopped hyping the financial meltdown as if it had just occurred. That way, it rammed through Obamacare, massive deficit spending, and the vast expansion of the federal government. All that stymied economic growth and recovery for years.

In 2016, Donald Trump was declared Hitler-like and an existential threat to democracy.

Amid this derangement syndrome, any means necessary to stop him were justified: the Russian collusion hoax, impeachment over a phone call, or the Hunter laptop disinformation farce.

Eventually, the left sought to normalize the once unthinkable: removing the leading presidential candidate from state ballots and indicting him in state and local courts.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/18/biden-has-delivered-for-the-american-people-all-right-and-they-want-a-refund/

Rep. James Clyburn, who is a co-chairman of Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, recently tried to explain the president’s predicament by saying that he’s “delivered for the American people in such a way that nobody seems to grasp.”

As campaign slogans go, that’s not exactly “Morning in America.” But the truth is that everybody grasps what Biden has delivered. It’s what he’s delivered that they don’t like.

Clyburn, talking on MSNBC, said the public just needs to “look at the facts and stop listening to all of this tweeting and stuff that’s going on out there that’s not good for the American people.”

We took the South Carolina Democrat’s word for it, and here’s what we found that Biden has delivered, at home and abroad.

The cost of living has skyrocketed. Prices have climbed by almost 17% since Biden took office three years ago. Food prices are up 20%. Gasoline is up 26%. Electricity up 24%. Car insurance up 30%.

Real wages are down. Because wages haven’t kept pace with inflation, even workers who’ve been getting raises have been falling behind.

Poverty is up. Last fall, the Census Bureau pegged the poverty rate in 2022 at 12.4%, up from 7.8% in 2021.

The national debt has exploded. Gross federal debt now tops $34 trillion, which is $6 trillion higher than when Biden got the keys to the White House.

Deficits are on the rise. As we reported here last week, deficits in the current fiscal year are running 21% higher than they were last year, setting the stage for a $2 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2024 – nearly double what it was in 2022.

Illegals are flooding across the border. December set a new record for illegal border crossings, bringing the total to 6.8 million under Biden’s open-border policies. Even Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admits that most of them are simply released into the country. These numbers, mind you, don’t count the “gotaways” – the criminals, cartel members, terrorists, and other undesirables who avoided border patrol agents.

Attacks on the U.S. are up. America is coming under increasing attack since Biden took office. Iranian-backed proxies have attacked U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria at least 150 times, most of them since Tehran-supported Hamas terrorists invaded Israel.

https://victorhanson.com/the-dei-ruse-is-imploding-part-four/

DEI is racist. After lying before Congress that she had to consider “context” and “free speech” before considering discipling anti-Jewish behavior and speech on her Harvard campus, and after being caught plagiarizing in some 60 percent of her meager scholarly output, Claudine Gay pulled out all the racist stops to save her job.

She enlisted Harvard, its attorneys, and 700 of its faculty to lie that her plagiarism was not really serious because—the plagiarized did not always complain; because the whistleblowers were anonymous in many cases; because the New York Post had no right to run the story; because Gay claimed she adhered to the highest standards in her scholarship; and because her critics were inordinately conservative.

Consider, it was supposedly anti-black to force her removal from the leftwing Harvard Corporation. Ok, but not so when Stanford forced white male president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign for far lesser scholarly misconduct? What about the University of Pennsylvania that coerced its white president Liz Magill to quit for ethically challenged testimony, similar to Gay’s but without any hint of scholarly plagiarism in Magill’s resume? Does DEI mean lifetime tenure on the rationale that once standards are no longer purely meritocratic in hiring, they must similarly remain nonmeritocratic for lifelong tenure?

Note how most of the current architects of the woke/DEI movement cut their teeth in their youth with overt racist diatribes and racial stereotyping—in far more academic and sophisticated forms than the old anti-Semitic blasts of Louis Farrakhan (“gutter religion”), Jesse Jackson (“That’s all Hymie wants to talk about is Israel; every time you go to Hymietown, that’s all they want to talk about”), Al Sharpton (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s “personal pastor” (“Them Jews ain’t going to let him [Barak Obama] talk to me), Malcolm X (“bloodsuckers”), or Rep. Ilhan Omar (“It’s all about the Benjamins baby”).