Exclusive: Arizona Legislature Threatens to Sue Nat Assoc of Attorneys General over ESG Investments

Breccan F. Thies 1 Mar 2023

“Consider this letter a litigation hold notice,” Republican leadership in the Arizona legislature told National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) executive director Brian Kane after Breitbart News revealed the group’s ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investments..............To Read More.....Investments

• Senate Votes to Kill Biden's Woke ESG Rule for Americans' Retirement Accounts
• Congress Passes Bill to Scrap Biden Environmental, Social, and Governance Rule

Main Line Madness

Schools in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, adopt critical pedagogy—and face a parental backlash.

Michael Torres September 1, 2021 @ City Journal

Lower Merion Township’s beauty and wealth belie its proximity to the impoverished neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, which borders the township just east on Route 30. Being the first suburb on the Main Line, Lower Merion is home to many of the region’s wealthy residents. With a median income of nearly $140,000 per year has come an extraordinarily well-funded, high-achieving public school district.

The 83-percent-white township is also unabashedly progressive. The town has about 2.8 times as many registered Democrats as Republicans. The school board is run exclusively by Democrats. Local church lawns are filled with colorful T-shirts emblazoned with the names of black people killed by police. And shoppers at Suburban Square, a high-end local shopping center, are enveloped in the pride flags that decorate shops and sidewalks every few steps in the month of June.

But despite the town’s progressive vibe, a battle over local schools’ embrace of critical pedagogy is burgeoning. To try and understand this cultural conflict in a place where “wokeness” is part of the atmosphere, I spoke with public and private school parents and a person with experience on the school board, and I attended a meeting of local residents and Republican Party officials. All involved requested anonymity.

When local Republicans hosted a meeting in late June at a home not far from Lower Merion High School, about two dozen people stood in the living room, Rolls-Royces and Honda Civics alike parked along the ornate stone curb. Following a brief overview of local budget issues and political polling came the main issue of the evening: the school district’s left turn. Such terms as “race essentialism” and “transgenderism” were tossed around. Still, agreement on the origins and shape of the ideology that these people found themselves contending with remained elusive.

Finally, the last speaker picked up a children’s book that had been sitting on the coffee table: Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness. Its final page is “a contract binding you to whiteness,” telling white children that they’ve been permitted to “get stolen land, stolen riches, special favors” and to “mess endlessly with the lives of your friends, neighbors, loved ones, and all fellow humans of COLOR for the purpose of profit $.” The book then asks the child to sign on a red line, below which a note says: “Land, riches, and favors may be revoked at any time, for any reason.”

The book, the speaker explained, was taught to fourth- and fifth-graders. The attendees were taken aback.

Yet it became clear that despite universal agreement that something terrible was happening to local kids, this group of parents and residents—including an academic, a reverend, activists, lawyers, and party officials—remained divided, even dazed. Many had only recently heard of “critical race theory.” The proposed courses of action ranged from robust confrontation to “finding the good and removing the bad.”

But one small group of parents, some of whom attended the meeting of Republicans, have taken an organized approach—and cite incidents that pushed them in such a direction. A parent of an elementary student in the Lower Merion School District described one such incident that allegedly happened last fall. “We heard him sitting in the other room and he just kept saying ‘peach,’ ‘peach’,” the parent said. “I walked over to his desk, and they seemed to be on a Zoom class where there were circles with different colors on the screen, and the kids were announcing to the entire class what color they were. I just thought that was completely inappropriate, no matter what color my child is.” The parent showed me his note from the incident, which was partially drawn from Not My Idea.

A Lower Merion middle-school parent of devout Jewish faith detailed another event that allegedly happened this June. “When the kids got to school, they were given a questionnaire,” the parent said, and told to answer what race they associate with and what their sexual orientation is. The parent, discussing the same incident, recalls hearing that a student later made an announcement over the school PA system about the “goodness of being gay, transgender, or queer.” Incidents like these have created a sense of urgency among some parents, who have started to request curricula from the district and are discussing the path forward with peers.

But the school district is deeply invested in educating children through the lens of racial and gender identity, and its response to questions about its agenda has been defiant. On June 14, a man stood up during a largely empty Lower Merion school board meeting to ask “if critical race theory is part of the curriculum.” The school board’s vice president, Melissa Gilbert, responded, “I just want to say, I’m a professor at Temple University. I’m a critical race theorist as well as a feminist theorist. . . . While critical race theory as legal theory, and what subsequently came after that, is not being taught in our school per se as critical race theory, I do think we have an anti-racist curriculum . . . we certainly do not want to be teaching a racist curriculum.”

The man seemed frustrated and reiterated his question. “What I’m asking is, is it a required course in order to graduate here?” Gilbert said no, and her answer was echoed by director of school and community relations Amy Buckman in response to a request for comment. “CRT is neither academically nor developmentally appropriate or understandable for young learners,” Buckman said. “LMSD’s curriculum does teach cultural proficiency and strives to be culturally responsive.” The school district declined to comment on any of the specific incidents alleged in this article, calling them “hearsay.”

Gilbert and Buckman may be correct that the legal-academic writings of Derrick Bell or Gary Peller aren’t being taught in elementary schools, but their answers are an evasion. Consider that at the same school board meeting, the district’s new diversity, equity and inclusion policy was enacted—a document shot through with extreme concepts that began in twentieth-century academia and have trickled into the school district in recent years. A closer look at the history of Lower Merion schools shows the parents’ concerns to be well-founded.

According to a person with administration experience in the Lower Merion school district, the racial achievement gap had been an issue of discussion and concern for decades. The board was constantly troubled with the question of why, in a place with so much money, an achievement gap still remained.

At first, efforts to reduce the gap sought to improve academic achievement. In the 1990s, the district started a Committee to Address Race in Education. In 2004, it began working with the Delaware Valley Consortium for Excellence & Equity, a project run out of the University of Pennsylvania School of Education. While both programs distinguished students by race, each attempted to fix the problem by instilling “higher cognitive expectations for all students.”

That began to change around 2011, two years after Gilbert was elected to the school board. One bullet point in the district’s 2010 strategic plan began to overwhelm all others: “Conducted training on issues of student identity.” “Around 2011, they started cultural proficiency training for teachers,” said the person with district administration experience. By 2013, “Cultural Proficiency Action Plans” for elementary, middle, and high school were created—antecedents to today’s material. Teachers began meeting “once a month to discuss various topics related to socio-cultural identity,” an action plan reads; the high school plan instructed teachers to read the book Multiplication is for White People.

The goal of bringing lower-achieving students up to meet “higher cognitive expectations” was eventually shelved for racially distinguished expectations. A 2014 training called “Why Race and Culture Matter” discussed the work of University of California Riverside critical race theorist Tara J. Yosso, who argues that U.S. schooling merely attempts to “fill up” nonwhites with white culture and that education should conform to identity. Academic opportunities—like those for gifted Lower Merion math students to attend Villanova University—slowly disappeared, according to the person with district experience. And programs such as Welsh Valley Middle School’s “Points of View” program transformed from an effort to make interdisciplinary connections among subjects to teaching all subjects through “the lens of social justice.” This move earned one of the school’s social studies teachers an award from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, parents say, the district experienced a moral panic, and the infusion of education with identity politics accelerated. The administration created “affinity groups,” segregating students by race and other identities. High school elective courses have been themed by affinity. Books such as Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped have moved from an intra-faculty book club to “systemic integration” into the eighth-grade curriculum.

Teachers and administrators presided over the push. The district’s director of elementary education, Jennifer Gaudioso, helped to implement hyper-racial curricula with a goal of getting students to say, “I know that race is one important part of my identity, and talking about race is important.” She is also implementing a “Gender Expansive and Transgender Curriculum” with lessons for fifth- and sixth-graders.

The schools also took cues from political figures. Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf signed, and the state Department of Education implemented, an “equity and inclusion” policy, which Lower Merion’s policy resembles. The district’s equity policy uses resources provided by the Pennsylvania School Board Association, which now also provides an equity-themed podcast, webinars, and online forum for district discussions statewide. And lessons on “cultural competence” that underscore the fetishization of “difference” in terms of personal identity enjoy support from the National Education Association.

All this has culminated in Lower Merion teaching a contradictory hodgepodge of identity politics to young children. As relayed by a parent who reviewed and transcribed portions of the elementary-level cultural-competency curriculum (under the watchful eye of the assistant to the superintendent), proclamations such as the following are formulated for third-graders: “Race is an idea that is created by people to divide people into groups based upon physical and cultural differences. Racism is a part of our country’s history that we must learn to recognize so that we can stamp it out.” Lessons for students as young as kindergarten through sixth grade, on the other hand, teach that “we all have skin/race and our skin is all a different shade of brown,” and that “skin color is one way we are all different and special.” Kindergarteners present on the book Skin Again by Bell Hooks. Students throughout elementary school are made to profess the district’s version of empathy by talking about race and its personal and public importance.

Accompanying this top-down inculcation of identity politics is a mass reshaping of culture within the district. Teachers and students alike now police each other. One parent alleged that his son’s fourth-grade teacher asked each student to reveal whom their parents voted for after the 2016 election. “My son asked twice not to say, but the teacher forced him to.” When Trump sought to halt immigration from some Muslim-majority countries, the Lower Merion High School basketball team wore T-Shirts saying, in part, “I am a Muslim.” As one parent explained: “The regime of social pressure, that’s the new game.”

Three other parents alleged a recent incident in a history class in Lower Merion High School, having heard about it from their children. “The teacher, a white, female teacher, was discussing a new program on African American History,” one of the parents said. “A student interrupted and told her that she shouldn’t be discussing such the subject, a black person should.” The teacher, perhaps suddenly nervous about her value and authority due to her race, “broke down in tears,” the parent said.

A common theme emerged in my discussions with these parents. While each expressed a desire for their children to treat others with dignity, all felt that their sense of autonomy as parents had been violated, that their trust in public schools has been betrayed, and that their children are being used as pawns in a cultural revolution. Yet they feel surrounded by a web of organizations, from teachers’ unions to political parties, that are passively going along with—or actively supporting—that revolution.

Not wanting to jeopardize one’s social position can discourage action. The head of the local Republican committee, a parent pointed out, also serves as a trustee at the Baldwin School—an all-girls private school that has trumpeted its diversity, equity, and inclusion policy. “If you’re a lawyer with business in Philadelphia, you’re not going to fight for curriculum changes because you’d risk your business,” the parent said. “If you’re a trustee at a school that started teaching critical race theory and you’re more interested in that status, then you aren’t going to stir up trouble. And that same situation holds true all over Lower Merion.”

Surrounded by an unfavorable political environment and state education bureaucracy, parents have found that their only allies are one another. A local Chinese-American mom shared a survey of Chinese-American parents in Lower Merion, finding that most respondents did not support the Penn Wynne School’s Cultural Proficiency Plan and opposed the district’s holding events like BLM rallies without parents’ prior knowledge. She is now organizing local Chinese-American parents, hoping to explain to them what their kids are learning. Another group is sharing what it has learned about requesting curricula, questioning administrators, and potentially taking legal action.

Private school parents in similar environments have shared notes with these groups. “I grew up in a country that was very tribalized,” one private school parent said. “When my brother, who lives in New York City, called during the riots last year saying he was going to defend his store, I realized the time for sitting on the sidelines had ended and I volunteered to be on the DEI board at my kid’s school. . . . Just by being there and asking questions, it gave school leaders a bit more fortitude to say, ‘Hey that may be a bit too far,’” he said. “Then parents started hearing about us standing up and they started to say ‘thank you’ and even send their own letters to the school. Now, we feel like we are steering our way out of chaos and keeping the school from being sucked into what is truly insane.”

Parents across the country are engaging with their schools’ embrace of critical racial pedagogy, but in progressive locales like Lower Merion, pushback requires organization and cooperation among those who want the best for their kids. The move to insert divisive racial politics into American schools might inadvertently give Americans something to unite over.

The Jewish parent who had related the PA system incident concluded our conversation with another story. The parent’s child saw a student wearing a BLM shirt while being dropped off for school.

“Can I wear a t-shirt that says Jewish Lives Matter?” the child asked.

“No,” the parent replied.

When the child asked why, the parent replied, “Because I know what will happen.”

Michael Torres is the director of media at the Commonwealth Foundation. Follow him on Twitter @MindofTorres. Todd Shepherd, chief investigative reporter at Broad + Liberty, contributed to the research for this article.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

Race-Crazed Disney Backs Down

Resisting woke corporations works

By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--May 20, 2021 @ Canada Free Press | 23 Comments

A humiliated Walt Disney Corporation scrubbed its bizarre critical race theory-based employee indoctrination materials from the Internet after a think tank scholar exposed them.

Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow and director of an initiative on critical race theory at the Manhattan Institute, celebrated Disney’s conspicuous retreat from the Left’s rarefied anti-white anti-Americanism, the New York Post reported May 13. Rufo defines critical race theory as “racialized Marxism.”

Disney “has removed its entire antiracism program from the company’s internal portal,” he said, “effectively scrubbing it out of existence.

“Disney was peddling the most toxic elements of critical race theory”

“This is a major victory in the war against ‘woke capital,’” he said, noting a “significant backlash from the public” after his initial report.

“Disney was peddling the most toxic elements of critical race theory — and my reporting led to immediate changes within the company,” Rufo said.

The environment at Disney has become increasingly politicized in recent months, Rufo reported employees telling him. The account appeared in a City Journal article he penned, titled, “The Wokest Place on Earth.”

There are “almost daily memos, suggested readings, panels, and seminars that [are] all centered around antiracism,” one said. Disney is “completely ideologically one-sided” and discourages conservative and Christian employees from expressing their views.

“I attended several [training sessions] at the beginning just to see what the temperature of the discussion would be and to gauge if I would be able to bring up my own objections in a safe way—safe meaning for my career. And I’ve continually gotten the unspoken answer: ‘no,’” an employee told Rufo.

“It’s been very stifling to feel like everyone keeps talking about having open dialogue and compassionate conversations, but when it comes down to it, I know if I said one thing that was truthful, based on data, or even just based on my own personal experience, it would actually be rather unwelcomed.”

“Despite these internal warnings, there is no sign that Disney is slowing down its efforts to achieve ideological purity,” he wrote.

Walt Disney Corp. terrorizes its employees, intimidating them into unquestioning acceptance of the most orthodox dictates of critical race theory

“The company recently fired actress Gina Carano for expressing a conservative point of view. Content managers have modified and added ‘content advisories’ to films such as Dumbo, Aladdin, and Fantasia, which, according to an internal video that I have obtained, executives have denounced as ‘racist content.’ In the same video, Executive Chairman Bob Iger pledged that the company ‘should be taking a stand’ on political controversies and no longer ‘shy away from politics’ in the future.”

“Disney is playing with fire. The premise of the company has always been to provide an escape for middle Americans, but Disney’s executives seem to have growing contempt for the very people who visit their amusement parks, watch their films, and buy their merchandise.”

And what did Rufo discover in the Disney document dump?

Rufo found that Walt Disney Corp., which touts its amusement parks as “the happiest place on Earth,” terrorizes its employees, intimidating them into unquestioning acceptance of the most orthodox dictates of critical race theory.

Over the past year its corporate leaders have transformed critical race theory into corporate dogma, besieging hapless workers with trainings on “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “white fragility,” while creating racially-segregated “affinity groups” at the head office.

Rufo obtained what he called “a trove of whistleblower documents related to Disney’s ‘diversity and inclusion’ program, called ‘Reimagine Tomorrow,’ which paints a disturbing picture of the company’s embrace of racial politics.”

Disney attempts to indoctrinate its employees through a series of training modules dealing with “antiracism”

Disney attempts to indoctrinate its employees through a series of training modules dealing with “antiracism.”

In one the company directs employees to “take ownership of educating [themselves] about structural anti-Black racism.” Instead of relying on black colleagues to enlighten them, they need to take the initiative because it is “emotionally taxing” for blacks to have explain themselves.

The United States, according to the paper, has a “long history of systemic racism and transphobia” and white employees have to “work through feelings of guilt, shame, and defensiveness to understand what is beneath them and what needs to be healed.”

Employees can become good “allies” by “challeng[ing] colorblind ideologies and rhetoric” such as “All Lives Matter” and “I don’t see color.” The latter two phrases are “harmful and hurtful, as it is a form of erasing the real and specific ways racial identities affect lived experiences.” Employees must also “listen with empathy [to] Black colleagues” and must “not question or debate Black colleagues’ lived experience.”

And woe to the Disney employee not up to speed on every aspect of intersectionality.

“Consider the ways multiple dimensions of identity (e.g. race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, socio-economic, veterans) can make people vulnerable to interlocking forms of bias or systems of exclusion,” the document states. “For example, Black transgender and gender non-conforming people face one of the highest levels of discrimination.”

Just because you have black friends and colleagues or are yourself a minority doesn’t mean you’re not oppressing blacks:

“21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge”

“Reflect on the diversity of your personal and professional networks and how racial and other dimensions of your identity give (or do not give) you access and advantage. Proximity to Black people or being part of a marginalized group does not mean you cannot harbor bias.”

Employees should “[c]ontribute to the Black community by consistently supporting Black/ African American-owned businesses and/or volunteering for organizations that advance racial equity and justice.”

Employees should also snitch on other employees if they see “problematic posts” on “company approved social channels,” a Disney document states.

In another module Disney instructs employees to reject “equality,” with its focus on “equal treatment and access to opportunities,” and instead aim for “equity,” with a focus on “the equality of outcome.” Workers have to “reflect” on America’s “racist infrastructure” and “think carefully about whether or not your wealth, income, treatment by the criminal justice system, employment, access to housing, health care, political power, and education might be different if you were of a different race.”

Disney partnered with the YWCA to create something called the “21-Day Racial Equity and Social Justice Challenge.” Participants are required to affirm that they have all “been raised in a society that elevates white culture over others.” They complete a white privilege “checklist,” which includes check-off options such as: “I am white,” I am heterosexual,” “I am a man,” “I still identity as the gender I was born in,” “I have never been raped,” “I don’t rely on public transportation,” and “I have never been called a terrorist.”

Abandoning their ongoing infantilization of blacks and brainwashing of American society

Participants learn about “white fragility,” and are made to believe that treating people of different races the same is proof they have somehow internalized their racism and white fragility. They are informed they must figure out how to “pivot” from “white dominant culture” to “something different.” Values that “perpetuate white supremacy culture,” such as “competition,” “individualism,” and “timeliness” must be rejected, they are told.

Disney also urges employees to read how-to guides including “75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice” and “Your Kids Are Not Too Young to Talk About Race.” White employees learn they must “defund the police,” “participate in reparations,” “decolonize your bookshelf,” “don’t gentrify neighborhoods,” and “donate to anti-white supremacy work such as your local Black Lives Matter Chapter.” Parents are encouraged to commit to “raising race-consciousness in children” and contends that “even babies discriminate” against members of other races.

It’s hard to believe America has gotten so screwed up that people anywhere take diversity and inclusion scams seriously, and that they are willing to put up with the kind of woke bullying that Disney forces on its employees.

Although there is little evidence that the hipster-fascists of the woke corporate world are mending their ways and abandoning their ongoing infantilization of blacks and brainwashing of American society, it is good to know at least that they can be embarrassed and beaten back.

Matthew Vadum -- Bio and Archives

Matthew Vadum,  matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.

His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)

Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

Workplace wokeness: The moment I couldn't take it anymor

By Bob Kingsley 

 My company provides services to insurance carriers.  Recently, a large, nationally operational third-party administrator issued a directive, excerpts of which I have included. 

 Hello Team,

We wanted to send out a note regarding this, as the Carriers do not want to see the word "tranny" or "trans" manually entered when referring to a transmission or transmission fluid as it is a Political Correctness issue.  We understand that it has been used for a while and is considered industry slang however, in today's society it can rub some the wrong way and create legal issues.  Please be make sure going forward you are not using these slangs on your estimate.

If you have any questions, please let us know. Thank you. 

After about three minutes of thoughtful consideration, I dashed off the following in response. 

In a world of insane hyper-sensitivity, wouldn't the phrase "rub some the wrong way" also have sexual overtones for those sad people that have nothing better to do than see if they can figure out a way to be offended?  Instead, normal, high-functioning people ought to rise up and tell that sad 1% of the easily offended to go and piss up a rope.  Tired of the P.C. BS.

Having been in business for over 35 years, I can afford to make such pronouncements in protest to a world gone crazy.  I do so on behalf of all of the younger people and their fledgling businesses who are afraid to stand up to this nonsense and fight back...............To Read More

 

New Coalition Formed to Fight ‘Woke’ Corporate Culture

By AG News Staff  March 31, 2021

A new coalition of concerned groups has formed to fight “the increasing dictates of ‘woke’ capital and cancel culture.”  The Back to Neutral (website: stopcorporatetyranny.org) coalition mission explains:

We reject the Left’s weaponization of corporate America against traditional beliefs and values. We work to dissuade corporations from engaging in activities that undermine free enterprise, individual liberty, limited government, free speech and the rule of law. Companies must instead return to their primary role—as fiduciaries for their investors. We seek to restore a healthy understanding of, and respect for, liberty, free enterprise and American culture all of which is being corrupted by corporate oligarchs.

The groups that make up the coalition are “fed up with liberals weaponizing big business to achieve their political goals. Whether it is under the guise of ‘ESG’ (environmental, social and governance), “wokeness,” or “stakeholder” capitalism, make no mistake, all these terms are just cover for liberals weaponizing big business in ways that would have shocked and horrified almost any successful American investor or businessman just 15 or 20 years ago.”

Members include: 60 Plus, Economic War Room, The Political Forum, Americans for Limited Government, Independent Women’s Voice and Independent Women’s Forum, Tea Party Patriots, and the National Center for Public Policy Research..............You can visit the website at: Stop Corporate Tyranny.......To Read More....