It goes without saying that the Left would like to derail the American Experiment. As Lincoln so eloquently stated in his Lyceum speech, there is not likely going to be a military attack from a foreign power, but rather an invasion from within.
As outlined here, there is strong evidence that the Left has no compunction against committing election malfeasance. Fortunately, over the last four years, the Right has made strong gains in securing election integrity, thanks to competent and committed warriors like Cleta Mitchell. Due to her and other allies, numerous State organizations have taken hold (e.g., here), State election laws have been tightened, the RNC has finally been aggressive regarding lawsuits, poll watchers have come out in droves, etc., etc. The 2024 election results were due in no small part to these efforts at improving election integrity.
That said, the Left has an even more powerful and devious plan to win US elections — and almost no one is paying attention!
To appreciate this, we need to fully comprehend the reality that while those on the Right are almost entirely focused on short-term solutions, the Left is very comfortable also playing the Long Game. In other words, they are perfectly willing to adopt a strategy that might not come to fruition for 10 to 20 years… Since conservatives would almost never do that, they don’t ordinarily think in those terms — so even though the evidence is in black and white before them, they have difficulty grasping such a strategy. Big Mistake!
The Left’s Long Game
The number one fear of the Left is to have Critically Thinking citizens. I can not overstate the importance of fully grasping that pivotal understanding.
Since the Left is petrified of that happening they have expended enormous time, effort, and resources trying to ensure that the US has the absolute minimum of Critically Thinking citizens. After considerable research, they decided that their absolute best way of restricting the number of Critically Thinking citizens was to take control of the US K-12 education system. What does this mean?
“Taking Control” means that the Left is calling the shots in
almost every important aspect of the US K-12 education system. For
example:
) they have captured the teacher certification process,
) they write the subject standards [e.g., Common Core Math],
) they determine the classroom subject textbooks,
) they purposefully introduce anti-Judeo-Christian topics like SEL,
) they see that anti-American values are attacked by infusing text and library books approved by the ALA (e.g., see here and here). Etc.
For good measure, they have also indoctrinated professors at colleges to reinforce the K-12 brainwashing for those students who go on to that level, etc.
The Left’s Focus on K-12 Science
Of their K-12 program, their most insidious influence is that they make sure that both Knowledge and Skills are skewed to promote Progressive ideology — particularly in the subject area of Science.
They have focused on Science standards as they are acutely aware that
Science is the most appropriate subject for teaching children how to be
Critical Thinkers — which they adamantly oppose.
With the Next General Science Standards (NGSS) they not only do not teach the skill of Critical Thinking to K-12 students, they purposefully teach the OPPOSITE!
The antithesis of critically thinking students are those who are
easily led to comply, as they don’t ask sufficient questions, or don’t
intelligently critique the answers they are given. These students are
intentionally trained to be conformists, submissives, sheeple, etc.
How are students taught to be compliant? In the NGSS there are multiple subliminal messages supporting conformity, like:
a) go along with whatever is politically correct, b) defer to authority, c) accept at face value the statements of experts, d) concur with consensus views, e) buy into one-sided presentations of information, f) don’t question computer projections, etc., etc.
All of these have the same subconscious message: People a lot smarter than you have made a determination here, so we do not need — or want — any input from you. In other words, they are communicating: We do not want you to do any critical thinking!
The definition of Science is: Science is a process. What that process is is a continuous and well-organized (e.g., the Scientific Method) refinement of what are the truths of our existence. As such, one of the hallmarks of a true scientist is that they are a skeptic. In other words, they are a person who instinctively ask questions, like: who? what? why? when? etc. Interestingly Critical Thinkers are also people who do not just robotically accept what they are told: after they ask questions they are not swayed by light-weight answers.
Where the Rubber Hits the Road
So let’s be perfectly clear: over the last few decades (remember: the long game) the American K-12 school system has been set up: 1) to indoctrinate students with progressive ideology, and 2) to produce non-critically thinking graduates.
Every year there are about 4 MILLION graduates from the American K-12 school system.
Shortly thereafter most of those graduates become American voting citizens!
How long can the American Experiment survive when there are 3± Million voters added: 1) who have been thoroughly propagandized with Left-leaning ideology, and 2) who have been trained to be compliant conformists?
Briefly, this is the Left’s plan to legally steal elections, and no one is doing anything meaningful to stop it…
Transforming the Department of Education is the absolute best option we have to stop this tsunami from undermining our electorate.
I
have stated, several times now, that the most horrifying consequence of
not fixing what is being taught in US K-12 schools (the curricula), is
that these schools graduate, every year, some 4 million non-critical thinking, Left-leaning propagandized students — who shortly become new voting citizens!
4± Million non-critical thinking, Left leaning new voters EVERY YEAR!
The obvious conclusion is that America can not survive without this being fixed.Quickly! Yet — stunningly — no major US Conservative organization (like Heritage) is doing anything meaningful about this!
This next information just came from PragerU (8-13-24). Maybe the maps below will bring home this extraordinary point better than I have been able to…
This first map shows how hardworking Americans and patriots feel about our country. In EVERY state (even California, Oregon, and New York!), the majority of citizens age 45+ voted Republican, in the last midterm elections…
Below is how 18-29-year-olds voted in the last midterm elections. In EVERY state (even Texas and Florida) the majority of those people voted Democrat…
This second map shows the current future of America, as things have been headed for the last decade or so. Further, as years go by there will be fewer voters in the upper category (due to deaths), and more in the lower one (due to more K-12 graduations)…
How did this happen?
The
major reason is that we have allowed our K-12 public education system
to be infused with Leftist ideology. Their objective is to teach
impressionable children WHAT to think, rather than HOW to think — and
the WHAT is things like SEL, DEI, CRT, etc. This is especially
problematic in Science (e.g., the NGSS) and History.
Critical Thinking is not only not taught, but the OPPOSITE of Critical Thinking is being effectively communicated: be a conformist.
That
means accepting without question what is currently politically correct,
following without questioning what the consensus positions are,
acquiescing to authority without questioning, going along without
questioning what computer projections say, etc., etc.
That is the mindset of 4± Million new US voters, every year!
So the choice is simple: 1) shrug your shoulders and say “What can I do?”, or 2)
start getting your fellow citizens educated about this tsunami threat
(e.g., by getting ALL of them to subscribe to this free Substack!).
PS — You can also send a donation to a courageous woman who is sticking her neck way out trying to fix this. She is Michele Morrow,
a Christian Conservative who is the GOP candidate for Superintendent of
Public Instruction in North Carolina. She is an outside-the-system
reformer and an ardent supporter of Critical Thinking. If she wins it
will be one of the most significant developments in the US K-12
education space in a hundred years… She has an 80%± chance of winning,
but is being heavily outspent by her Democrat opponent who has more
funds. Please be generous for this worthy cause!
Here are other materials by this scientist that you might find interesting:
Check out the Archives of this Critical Thinking substack.
WiseEnergy.org: discusses the Science (or lack thereof) behind our energy options.
C19Science.info: covers the lack of genuine Science behind our COVID-19 policies.
Media Balance Newsletter:
a free, twice-a-month newsletter that covers what the mainstream media
does not do, on issues from COVID to climate, elections to education,
renewables to religion, etc. Here are the Newsletter’s 2024 Archives.
Please send me an email to get your free copy. When emailing me, please
make sure to include your full name and the state where you live. (Of course, you can cancel the Media Balance Newsletter at any time - but why would you?
Thanks for reading Critically Thinking About Select Societal Issues! Please pass a link to this article on to other associates who might benefit. They can subscribe for FREE to receive new posts (typically about once a week).
At first, it seemed too absurd to
believe. Surely, there must be more to the story than meets the eye.
It turns out that what was reported
was quite accurate: a Christian pro-life leader in England was arrested not
simply for standing in front of an abortion clinic. She was also arrested for
the crime of praying while standing there, even though she was simply praying
in her own head. Talk about being prosecuted for a “thought crime.” This really
and truly happened.
In the words of Isabel
Vaughan-Spruce, leader of the UK March for Life, “It’s abhorrently wrong that I
was searched, arrested, interrogated by police and charged simply for praying
in the privacy of my own mind. Nobody should be criminalized for thinking and
for praying, in a public space in the UK.” ..................“In yet another
assault on Christianity in Britain, a pro-life activist was arrested for
silently praying outside an abortion clinic in Birmingham, England.” Embedded in the article was...... a video of the arrest. ...............Do I need to add my standard caveat, “I’m not making this
up!”?
She wasn't confronting anyone, she wasn't blocking the way for anyone, and in point of fact she was doing nothing except standing and thinking. These kind of violations aren't restricted to "silent" praying either. It turns out the City of Birmingham have passed laws that criminalize any who may be "perceived" to be engaging in anything someone doesn't like, especially if the "someone" is a leftist misfit, much like these police and the city officials. But in England Muslims can have mass prayer time blocking entire streets and not only are they not arrested, the police protect them.
There is no "Constitution" as we know it in the UK:
"The United Kingdom constitution
is composed of the laws and rules that create the institutions of the
state, regulate the relationships between those institutions, or
regulate the relationship between the state and the individual. These
laws and rules are not codified in a single, written document."
In short, nothing is real, nothing is permanent, nothing is guaranteed and everything is subject to caveats of the moment, which we're seeing taking place in the courts of America. There is no Bill of Rights as exists in the US Constitution. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 really only dealt with government rights and restrictions, and so too did the original US Constitution, not the rights of individuals. That's why America's religious leaders pushed for the Ten Amendments. Those deal with the rights of individuals, unalienable rights that were derived from God, not from the state.
England has no such thing, and unlike America where our rights are derived from God, any "rights" in the UK are derived from Parliament and the King, and they have no right to individual Freedom of Religion or Freedom of Speech rights as we know them encoded in law. Is it any wonder the Canada Free Press states, "Because without America, there is no free world."
However, the Brits are in violation of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights Article 10 dealing with Freedom of Speech in that, “everyone
has the right to freedom of expression”. The only problem is, once again, there are caveats. These so-called freedoms “may be subject to formalities, conditions,
restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a
democratic society”.
In short, these aren't freedoms at all, it's all just wall paper that can be changed by the next philosophical flavor of the moment, especially when it comes to Judaic/Christian values and those individuals who hold those values.
Freedom of Religion has never been an enumerated right for
the Brits, nor has Freedom of Speech, but one has to wonder where did all these civil rights groups disappear to now. Make no mistake, this kind of leftist insanity is here now, and it's happening here now, and all round the world and all these "rights" groups were formed to destroy those rights by using our own values against us.
Suppression of speech, thought and religion has been foundational in everything the left has been working for in America for over 120 years, and there is no tolerance for Judaic/Christian belief, principles or practices in this New World Order, and it started with public education over 120 years ago.
From it's very beginning the goal was to make sure the "apple" fell as far away from the tree as possible. Neither the parents nor the churches were to be the moral arbiters for the nation's children, it was the state. All of which was promoted by John Dewey, an out in the open socialist. The state was to be God, and that's why fixing education in America must be Job One! As for Britain, what they're doing to their children assures the end of Britain as we know it.
England is done, get over it!
U.K. Govt’s Child Transing Horrors Revealed Hundreds Under 6 Sent to Disgraced NHS Clinic Even 3 and 4-Year-Olds! - by Oliver JJ Lane 7 Dec 2023 - Children as young as three years old have been
referred to Britain’s socialised medicine’s ‘Gender Identity
Development Service’ transgender clinic, with hundreds of young children
referred in the past decade. 382 children aged six and under have been referred to
the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in the Tavistock and
Portman Trust, known commonly as the National Health Service’s
transgender clinic, in the past ten years new figures from the Trust
reveal. The numbers, published by the Daily Mail,
reveal how even the youngest children have been pushed into interacting
with the controversial clinic, and that the numbers being referred to
GIDS have soared in recent years.
The clinic, which has no official younger age limit to those it will
see, has had 12 three-year-olds referred to it between 2010 and 2020, as
well as 61 four-year-olds, 140 five-year-olds, and 169 six-year-olds.
The number of young people being sent to GIDS year-on-year shows how
quickly the concept is spreading, with 136 referrals in 2010-11 to 3,585
a decade later.............Over a thousand families are reported to be launching legal action against the clinic for misdiagnosing their children and in many cases allegedly caused enormous harm, including teenagers having body parts cut off..........
The Heartbreak and Outrage of Socialized Medical Tyranny - By Rich Kozlovich - I've followed the Indi Gregory story from early on, and I have to ask: How can anyone look at this picture and not have this story break their heart? Yesterday Bob Unruh published the latest update saying: Father of baby condemned to die felt 'pull' of hell. This baby had a serious genetic disorder, so the British judiciary in collusion with the National Health
Service decided it was "better for her"
if she was taken off life support, and die! There's one problem with
that. This was against the parents wishes, and here's what really upset
me. Not only was she denied life-saving treatment from the NHS,
but she was also cruelly prevented from obtaining it elsewhere. In her
final days, Indi and her family became prisoners of the U.K. government.............
11-Year-Old Forced to Have an Abortion - ByAubrey GulickOctober 26, 2023 - U.K. judge says the birth would be too traumatic. “My body, my choice,”
the Left loves to scream. But that slogan apparently doesn’t apply if
you’re an 11-year-old victim of an alleged rape and, despite that
trauma, still want to have the baby. In a private September ruling, a U.K. judge in London ordered
that an 11-year-old girl, who, at the time of the hearing, was 14 weeks
and six days pregnant, be required to kill her child — despite the
girl’s expressed desire to have the baby and her mother’s promise to
support her decision. The reason? The judge decided that an abortion
would be in the girl’s best interest. Her and her parents’ wishes were
deemed irrelevant..........
Doctors and courts in the UK reanimate the Third Reich’s ‘death panels’ corpse - September 15, 2023 By Olivia Murray - The
National Health Service (NHS) is the umbrella term for the gargantuan
socialized medicine institution of the United Kingdom—in fact, it apparently holds the title for “the largest single-payer, single-provider health care system in the world.” In
that context, you should be completely unsurprised to learn that
medical staff at an NHS hospital petitioned the judicial system to
greenlight the “removal of life-saving medical treatment from a
19-year-old young woman identified only as “ST” which would, in effect,
be a death sentence; ST needs routine dialysis and other intensive
remedies, but she is completely cognizant, of sound mind, and wants to
live. From a report published just two weeks ago:.....
School Kids Taught About ‘Rough Sex’ with Strangers and Masturbation in Lessons Hidden from Parents - Kurt Zindulka British schoolchildren have been taught about
how to masturbate and the virtues of “rough” and anonymous sex as well
as leftist theories surrounding topics such as “gender fluidity” as if
it was established fact in lessons hidden from parents, a dossier
compiled by Conservative MP Miriam Cates has revealed. A report submitted to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak by
the New Social Covenant Unit think tank established by Tory MP Miriam
Cates has claimed that pre-pubescent students in schools across Britain
have been subjected to radical ideas on sex and gender by far-left
organisations such as the LGBTQ charity Stonewall following ambiguous
guidance from the supposedly ‘Conservative’ government in 2019 on
Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) classes...........
England's NHS promoting prostitution to pay for gender transition treatments - April 9, 2022 By Eric Utter - One of England's National Health Service–funded clinics is promoting prostitution as
a way for transgender people to pay for their transition treatments.
Being a sex worker 'can be useful and
sometimes empowering', according to a guide produced by CliniQ, a sexual
counseling service for transgender people at King's College Hospital
in London. It adds: 'It can help us pay for parts of our transition.' The
booklet by CliniQ, which is part-funded by King's College NHS Trust and
three London local authorities, also suggests that transgender men —
people born in female bodies but transitioning to male — can hide the
fact that they are trans when visiting gay sex parties........
What does it mean to be British, who knows now since so much immigration
from Muslim nations has turned cities like London into Londonistan, and
British leaders have no tolerance for any objection to that, or for
standing up to the reality of Islam, a political criminal movement
masquerading as a religion. The leaders in England are absolutely contemptible allowing Muslim "grooming gangs" to sexually brutalize the young girls of England, and they're turning these vile and disgusting wolves loose on English society.
UK: Muslim rape gang leader strolls around near the scene of his crimes after serving half of his sentence - Jul 21, 2022
By Robert Spencer - It looks as if British authorities are still too terrified of being
seen as “racist” and “Islamophobic” to keep this monster in prison for
his full sentence, or to prevent him from returning to his old stomping
grounds. “EXCLUSIVE Fury as Rotherham grooming gang member enjoys stroll in
the sunshine just miles from scene of his crimes after he was released
from prison having served HALF of his 10-year sentence..............The
report commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council found that children as
young as 11 were raped by multiple perpetrators, abducted, trafficked
to other cities in England, beaten and intimidated…..........Taxi drivers were able to pick children up from care homes and
schools and take them to places where they would be raped, abused and
forced to watch others be sexually assaulted. There were reported
cases of girls being doused in petrol and threatened with being set on
fire while others were warned that the gang members would go after their
mothers and younger sisters..............Around 200 people in Rotherham have so far been arrested by police
investigating multiple claims of abuse involving 1,000 victims. But
only 20 men , predominantly of British Pakistani descent, have so far
been convicted and jailed for a total of around 250 year............
UK: Afghan Sex Offender Gets Short Sentence for Trying to Cut Teen’s Throat on Public Bus - Jack MontgomeryAn Afghan migrant still in Britain despite
being convicted of 23 offences including a sexual assault has received a
short sentence for trying to slaughter a teen boy like an animal on the
floor of a public bus in Runcorn, England. Hamid Akhonzada, who arrived in Britain supposedly aged 16 claiming
to be a refugee from Afghanistan’s Western-backed government ten years
ago, evidently faced no significant punishments for his many crimes,
given he was a free man last March when the attack took place. Chester Crown Court heard that Akhonzada, who claimed he was “close
to God” heard voices, “held [his 17 year-old victim’s] head back and
drew a bladed article described as a steak knife across the throat”, as
one might slaughter an animal, after sitting behind him and his
girlfriend, 16, on a public bus.........
How Christians Became a Minority in the UK and How It’ll Happen Here - November 29, 2022 by Daniel Greenfield - “Only 3% of 18-24 year olds identify as Anglicans, and only 5% as Catholics.”Mass migration and the collapse of religion among the young have transformed Europe. And it’s transforming America at a slower rate. Christians now account for less than half of the UK
population for the first time in census history, government figures
reveal.............Muslim mass migration is obviously a factor, but the biggest factor
is that few younger people in the native population are religious.
There’s a massive increase in irreligiosity that far outstrips the
changing demographics due to immigration.............What you’re seeing is the result of cultural programming that has all
but eliminated Judeo-Christian religiosity as a source of values and
identity among the young and replaced it with pop culture and politics...............
Christian Preacher Paid £10K by London Police After Wrongful Arrests for Reporting Islamist Threats - Kurt Zindulka
22 Oct 2022 - A Christian preacher has been awarded £10,000
in damages from London’s Metropolitan Police for two wrongful arrests
after she had complained to officers that she was facing threats and
harassment by Islamists.
Hatun Tash, a Turkish-born evangelist and mainstay of
Speakers’ Corner who is frequently critical of the Qur’an, has received
£10,000 in financial compensation and an apology from the Met for being
wrongfully arrested in 2020 and last year. During both incidents, she had informed officers that Muslim
protesters were threatening her, however, rather than seeking to protect
her, the police arrested Tash for “breaching the peace”........
Why White British Children as Young as Eight Are Pledging Their Lives to Allah Imam: "They say they are British, yes, but they are Muslim first. Eyes shining with excitement, the nine-year-old English boy in a dark
Parka jacket holds up a certificate showing he has just converted to
Islam. ‘You’re a Muslim, Rudi!’ cheers the imam as he hugs the child, whose
hand he has held throughout a short ceremony at a Lancashire mosque. In his piping voice, the youngster has just recited the words of the
Shahada, a strict Islamic creed pledging that there is ‘nothing worthy
of worship but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger’.
London Police Arrest Man Carrying Sign Calling Hamas a ‘Terrorist’ Group - London’s Metropolitan Police have come under heavy
criticism for arresting a man carrying a sign calling Hamas a
“terrorist” organisation during a pro-Palestinian protest in the British
capital on Saturday. Niyak Ghorbani, a 38-year-old Iranian-born man who
lives in London was arrested by police while holding a sign saying
“Hamas is terrorist” during the latest anti-Israel rally in the city. Footage posted on social media showed officers dragging the
counter-protester to the ground as he shouted out: “Shame on you!” and
adding: “I wrote down Hamas is a terrorist organisation… but they
arrested me”......
Report: U.K. Foreign Office Staff Told Not To Call Hamas ‘Terrorists’ - UK Foreign Office staff were reportedly told that
it was wrong to call Hamas terrorists and that Israel, as a “white,
settler colonialist” nation, was ultimately to blame for the conflict in
the Middle East. A report from the London-based Jewish Chronicle
claimed that the Foreign Office held a seminar for civil servants in
which they were lectured by four academics, Professor Jeroen Gunning
from King’s College London, Dr Tristan Dunning of the University of
Queensland, Dr Anas Iqtait of Australian National University in
Canberra, and Dr Martin Kear of the University of Sydney, on how to
discuss the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the wake of the October
7th terror attacks.
Watch: Pro-Palestinian Activist Slashes Historic British Painting - A radical pro-Palestinian activist defaced a
historic British painting depicting Lord Arthur James Balfour at
Cambridge University over his ties to the formal establishment of the
Jewish state of Israel. Police have launched an investigation after an
activist from the militant ‘Palestine Action’ activist group destroyed a
1914 portrait of Lord Balfour at Trinity College of the University of
Cambridge on Friday. The activist slashed the painting with a knife and
threw red paint on it......
When the Empire Strikes Back, you get Britain’s degradation in 2024February 25, 2024 by Andrea Widburg-
One doesn’t have to support colonialism to acknowledge that its colonies
allowed Great Britain to ship the idea of liberty around the world.
Beginning with the Glorious Revolution in 1689 and continuing through
the Enlightenment and the Victorians’ muscular (but not murderous)
Christianity, Britain believed in its values. Therefore, it accepted the
(racist) “white man’s burden” to bring those values to the world. It
established an admittedly imperfect Empire, the furthest reaches of
which are now striking back. The latest evidence is Hamas’s rising power
over the British parliament.....they're scared.......
England is doomed, the EU is doomed, and Europe is doomed. They're insanely destroying the very foundational social paradigms and fabric of European societies. They're all economically, intellectually, philosophically, religiously, morally, and rationally bankrupt, and we need to accept that and take our marbles and go home.
Education was once a very noble profession, in fact the best. So where did we get off base? We
got off base when the National Education Association ceased to be a
professional association which sought to improve education, to one that
simply lobbied for more money for teachers. Education hearkens
back to the great philosophers of the past. Aristotle and Plato are
just historical examples of men whose goal was to educate all those who
would listen. The Founders of America were well acquainted with the
works of these great men and many of their ideas were included in our
founding documents. Even Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of
Independence, was the architect of the University of Virginia, and
first rector of the Board of Visitors (the governing body). This was in March of 1819.
Historically, education was the job of
parents..........In early America there were no public schools,
but every parent understood that they were to educate their own
children. Every parent took this responsibility seriously and as a
result a very high percentage of children grew up being good readers and
well educated............But this tradition was very gradually set aside, here a little, there a little. In 1857 the National Education Association was founded; first as the National Teachers Association. It had very worthy goals.............but the NEA was gradually taken over by the Democrat party and
their liberal agenda, a form of Marxism.............If we expect to remain free, we will have to retake control of our education system.............To Read More....
Today's ray of hope number one: Students at Edison High School in
Huntington Beach, California, a coastal city famous for its surfers,
audibly groaned in protest of their teacher foisting an LGBT Pride video
on them — in math class. The students told their indoctrinator instructor to "stop" and "turn it off." One even asked the "educator," "Why are you showing this to kids?" Sadly, yet predictably, the "teacher" then tells the students to be quiet — and warns them that they will be forced to come back and watch the video on Saturday if they continue to express their opinions and feelings.
According to reports, the unnamed teacher
said, "Hey, I'll warn you guys now, if you're going to be
inappropriate, I will have supervision down and give all of you Saturday
school for [indiscernible]. So knock it off." The tolerant, inclusive "educator" essentially snarls, Stop it! Stop with your input! Or we will compel you to come back and watch this important video again this weekend!
This happened in math class? That is shockingly "inappropriate."...........To Read More.....
‘Reparations Math’ Fused with Critical Race TheoryCarole Hornsby HaynesThe new radical “Reparations Math and
Reparations History” curriculum teaches how slavery “led to a wealth gap
for African Americans.”.............
Shutting Down School Book ChallengesAmy ContradaThe Biden regime has devised a deceitful
scheme to shut down citizen efforts to remove schoolbooks containing
LGBT themes, obscenity, or explicit sexuality...........
Don’t listen to the teachers union if you care about your kids By Silvio Canto, Jr.
June 27, 2023 -Back in the thick of
the pandemic, I remember watching a TV report about two mothers who
lived on the same street in Chicago. Mom A sent her kids to the
Catholic school. Mom B was dealing with school closures. Mom A was
happy and Mom B was not. Moving forward, Mom A and Mom B are probably reacting differently to the state of their kids' scores. This is the story: ............
America’s parents must teach their kids to be ideological commandosJune 27, 2023The worst leftist indoctrination takes
place in government schools where the kids on the front line need to be
armed with truth and strong values. ...........By now, it should be clear that the dead center of the woke strategy to destroy our nation is the destruction of our families by perverting our children to the woke ideology. It is in the government schools that the
full panoply of hoaxes and perversions come to bear on our children.
Here, the woke roll out their hoaxes of global warming and their
perversions of grooming, sexualization, transgenderism, etc. Saving our
children from the perverted woke monster is saving America and is the
hill to die on...................
Conservatives often
quote famous leftists (e.g., Hitler, Stalin, Mao) and then point out
that modern Democrat policies align perfectly with those quotes. A Moms
for Liberty chapter, which exists to defend children from government,
learned that the left now goes after those who use those quotes
inartfully. Meanwhile, California is pushing another purely leftist
initiative to take children from their parents.
One of the things the Nazis did really
well was to co-opt children. This was not an accident. It was, instead, a
deliberate plan because Hitler either knew what Lenin said or intuited
it. And what Lenin said in one way or another (there are lots of
versions of the quote) is, “Give me just one generation of youth, and
I’ll transform the world.” Or “Give us the child for 8 years, and it
will be ours forever.” Or something like that.
Lenin was right:
Those first years are the formative years, for a child is both a blank
slate and a sponge. The child will believe anything, and those beliefs
form the baseline on which everything else develops ..........To Read More....
Brutal Minds: The Dark World of Left-Wing Brainwashing in Our Universities,
Stanley K. Ridgley, Humanix Books, 2023, xiii + 275 pp., $27.99
hardcover, review by M.D. Allen (posted May 23, 2023 by Mary
Grabar, Image used under license from Freestock.com).
Many (most? all?) conservatives will have seen the face of a
dinner-party hostess freeze in contempt and anger as an inadvertent
utterance suggests the possibility that she has invited into her house
someone who does not subscribe to leftist pieties, indeed someone who
may well have voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. Many (see previous
parenthesis) conservatives will have realized that a long-standing
friend has clicked in the necessary box to avoid seeing their Facebook
posts, although at least we have not, in this case, been peremptorily
unfriended. And a good number, alas, will have been told by the
college-educated offspring they could previously talk to without stress
and strain, quite the contrary, and been told, moreover, with precious
little humility, that sex is medically assigned at birth and the Navajo
(God save the mark!) have “many gender identities.” What is the reason
for this contempt and anger? Wherefore the pain, whence the derision?
Stanley K. Ridgley suggests, with vigour, with full
and careful documentation, and with a refreshing malicious wit, that we
can blame the nature and role of the contemporary university. Nor,
incidentally, do our hostess, our friend, or our offspring need to have
spent years at Yale or Princeton. Such is the willed and shameless
politicisation of higher education, such is its widespread degradation,
that a couple of semesters at Dogpatch State U. will do the job just as
well.
Brainwashing sessions
Ridgley’s first chapters deal with brainwashing sessions, and after
reading them, with their explanation of unfreezing, changing, and
refreezing, one does not jib at the phrase. At first the reader may be a
little afraid that Brutal Minds is going to be excessively
sweeping and theoretical, but any such fear vanishes after the first
fifty pages, when a certain Sherry K. Watt makes her perniciously
concrete appearance. Also treading the boards are bell hooks, whose
dicta one remembers seeing in the signature blocks of the less
impressive of one’s colleagues, and Barbara Applebaum and Cheryl E.
Matias, neither of whose names one has previously heard.
The horrifying “motherscholar” at the University of Kentucky
The most horrifying, and the most contemptible, of these is the last
named. Professor Matias teaches in the Department of Curriculum and
Instruction, which ought not to exist, at the University of Kentucky,
and perhaps nowadays that ought not to exist either. Her university
webpage tells us that she takes a “feminist of color approach to
deconstruct the emotionality of whiteness in urban teacher
education”—whatever on earth that may mean; furthermore, she takes an
interest in “motherscholarship and supporting woman [sic] of color and motherscholars in the academy.” (Incidentally, her 30-page c.v. is also available online, and is not to be missed.)
Bullying interventions
Matias’ students are required to write regular journal entries, which
are then screened for wrongthink. One student who resisted the
indoctrination was taken to task in a private communication: “We want
you to . . . personalize the correct information from the readings . . . . In order to better support you through the process of emotionally investing in our learning process we request an appointment to go over the readings and your thoughts and feelings about them” (qtd. p. 80, my italics).
First, this sort of clumsy, tin-eared prose (two processes
in eight words) is typical of Matias’ field of “Race & Ethnic
Studies,” the specialization area of her Ph.D., as is the emphasis on
“feelings,” although probably not the feelings of her
patronised and despised white students; secondly, one notes the
self-conscious virtue and the emotional bullying, and wonders what would
have happened had the “request” been received with less than perfect
submission. Ridgley quotes two students who understandably could not
take the strain, and cracked. The tone of their confessions is weirdly
reminiscent of those from the cells and camps of the former Soviet
Union, although the terms in which they acknowledge defeat and
submission (racism, white supremacy, white privilege, white male) are
different.
But, as Ridgley reminds us, we are here dealing with a brutal
neo-Marxism, in which race replaces class in the oppressor-victim
dichotomy. Another difference is that Professor Matias, unlike the
coarse Soviet louts, has attained her aims—that is to say, she has
penetrated, then overthrown, then perverted the intimate sense of self
of her subjects—without needing to resort to the imposition of
shattering physical labour, or protracted semi-starvation, or the threat
or reality of physical torture, such is the clear technical
superiority, the complacent smoothness, of her modus operandi. Such,
too, is the complicity of the institution in which she works and the
society in which she lives.
Get a master’s degree in education. Work in student services!
You want unprofessional? Here is the notorious Curricular Model
instituted at the University of Delaware in the Autumn of 2007, as
described by Professor Jan Blits of UD and Adam Kissel, a reporter: “a
mandatory education, or re-education, program for all seven-thousand
students living in the university’s dorms [, combining] intimidation and
humiliation, coercion and indoctrination, to inculcate a hard-left,
anti-America stance favored by the ResLife officials. The program looked
as if it had been designed by the North Korean Minister of Propaganda”
(qtd. p. 99).
Indeed, it is ResLife and its allotropes that are the focus of the
second half of Ridgley’s book. The latter chapters employ the metaphor
of a three-headed Cerberus: the Faculties of Education, which
notoriously accept the least academically promising of students; the
offices of Student Affairs, aggressive and burgeoning, which offer the
Faculties’ product (and it is difficult to think of them in other terms)
a materially secure niche and a scope for action; and the professional
clubs for those in Student Services, the ACPA (American Colleges
Personnel Association) and NASPA (National Association of Student
Personnel Administrators), which set standards and requirements for
education schools’ graduate programmes in “Student Affairs” and
“Educational Leadership.” The clubs also publish journals, the articles
in which attempt to theorize, legitimise and dignify the programmes and
interventions of Student Services by creating—or rather stealing from
the faculty—a factitious and pretentious philosophy that would situate,
justify, and exalt them.
So, with the possible exceptions of the various “grievance” studies
departments, there can be no area of education more devoid of any
understanding of what education is, more bereft of intellectual pith and
savour, more monolithic in its attitudes and beliefs, more defensive,
more fearful of the only diversity that counts than, paradoxically,
Faculties of Education. Here, as Ridgley justly writes, personal offence
is taken at disagreement, and criticism can never be made in good faith
but only as an attack on that validity of personal experience on which
everything depends (p. 196).
What to do
Nor can there be any sector of the contemporary university more
catastrophic in its influence. What to do? Ridgley plausibly suggests
that university authorities are often either actively breaking US law
regarding racial discrimination or looking the other way when it
happens; he suggests too that events organized by Student Affairs and
even classes taught by faculty that are intended to break down student
resistance to leftist dogma, sometimes causing acute distress, could
break laws regarding the necessity of informed consent before
experimentation on human subjects. These are avenues that could
profitably be explored.
But one needs no specialist knowledge to warn one’s children,
grandchildren, and nieces and nephews of what may well await them at
university before they have even finished unpacking: mandatory
orientation sessions that intentionally attack the students’ faith in
the goodness of their parents, their family, their church, and the
society in which they live.
It this the year of school choice or the decade of school
choice? The answer is yes to both. Look at the statewide school choice
plans that have been recently enacted.
The Wall Street Journal has a celebratory editorial about the big news from the Hoosier State.
…the latest good news comes from Indiana. Hoosier
lawmakers passed the state budget last week, and it expands the school
voucher program so nearly all students will be eligible. …The new law
raises the income cap to 400% of the free- and reduced-price lunch
income level, which is now about $220,000 for a family of four.
The bill also removes the other criteria for eligibility so that any
family under the income limit can apply. …“We would say it’s universal,”
Betsy Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education told the Indiana
Capital Chronicle. Early estimates suggest only 3.5% of families with
school-age children in Indiana would not be eligible for the program
under the new income limit… The principle at work here is that taxpayer
education money for grades K-12 should follow the child, rather than
school districts.
The new law doesn’t provide school choice to every family, but I’ll
take a victory that provides choice to more than 96 percent of children. This is great news for education.
What’s especially amusing is that this progress almost certainly would not have occurred if it was not for teacher unions. They got too arrogant and their leftist agenda has now backfired.
P.S. I can’t wait to see what this map looks like next year.
[Crenshaw] warned
that the rightwing battle against racial justice education not only
threatens US democracy, but encourages a revival of segregationist
values and policies.
Someone
get this lady a real history book! A “revival of segregationist
values”? Remind me again which president re-segregated federal agencies?
Oh, that’s right — Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat. What
party was responsible for Jim Crow laws? Democrats. Who said he didn’t
want his children growing up in a “racial jungle”? None other than Joe
Biden. I could go on and on….She’s steeped in misinformation, and it really is dangerous…. Yesterday, the Daily Mail reported the following:”.............. To Read More
How a Liberal White Teacher Became a Race Realist - "I came from a “do-gooder” family and was fed the story of black
victimization for years. I truly believed it with all my heart and
decided to become an inner-city teacher. I was determined to help right
the wrongs done to these poor kids by “institutional racism” and do my
part to educate them and help them escape from the yoke of oppression.
Boy, oh boy, was I in for a rude awakening! From day one, my work life
was a living hell. The young teens destroyed property, brutalized one
another, and intimidated the staff. I caught teenagers smoking crack,
13-year-olds having sex in the bathroom, and kids bringing guns to
school. Anyone who tried to learn and behave was beaten for “trying to
act white,” and several girls who were known to be virgins were sexually
harassed by boys and bullied by other girls until they would have sex.
Neither the teens nor their parents placed any value on education,
bettering themselves, or moving ahead in life. They were convinced that
the white man was “keeping them down,” and that it was no use bothering,
anyways. I eventually stopped insisting on parent-teacher conferences
for the black students because not a single parent would show up. Ever.............
And no student can read at grade level in 30 Illinois schools.
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner, February 14, 2023
Spry Community Links High School, in
the Heart of Little Village in Chicago, says its vision is to “provide a
challenging and supportive environment…to enable our students to
succeed in the 21st century.” Number one on the school’s focus list?
“Increasing reading and math scores to or above grade level.” But a look at state data that tracks reading and math scores for each
Illinois school reveals two frightening facts about Spry. Not a single
one of its 88 kids at the school can read at grade level. It’s the same
for math. Zero kids are proficient.
Spry is one of 30 schools in Illinois where not a single student can
read at grade level. Twenty-two of those schools are part of the Chicago
Public Schools and the other eight are outside Chicago. The failure list in math is even longer. There are 53 schools statewide where not one kid is proficient in math.....To Read More..
First, let me get this off my chest.
The professor in question is Yusuke Narita. This narcissistic twerp is
an assistant professor of economics at Yale. Narita is thirty-seven
years old but looks like a delusional twelve-year-old, often times
wearing glasses that have one round rim and one square one.
More frightening than his eyewear, is what comes out of his demented
mouth. Remember when Ivy League schools where considered among the best,
if not THE best in the country? That is now a memory, as the “Poison
Ivy League” has become a hot bed for far-left indoctrination and one of
the main reasons is because of “so called professors” like Narita............To Read More....
My Take - More absolute evidence we need to stop funding higher education, and education in America has become a snare and a racket.
Academia is a cancer eating away at the flesh and bone of the body politic, but more importantly, it's eating away at the very moral foundations that created America in order to create a fractionalized multicultural society that has become thoroughly tribalized and Balkanized in order to destroy America.
We really do need to get that! The evidence has been there for decades, so why is that so hard to grasp?
In the news reports about the anti-police mayhem by young people in
Austin Texas, one common element is missing: the obvious fact that
Austin is a college town, home to one of America’s once-great
educational institutions.
This fact is not peripheral to the outbreak of lawlessness that tore
apart Austin that night but central. Like virtually every major academic
institution in America, the University of Texas is a bastion of
anti-American, anti-police, anti-white hatreds, and has been so since
conservatives were purged from its liberal arts faculties beginning in
the 1970s, to be replaced by ideologues rather than scholars, whose
agendas were and remain not scholarly but political.
Having written five volumes describing the transformation of American
universities into institutions hostile to America and its
constitutional foundations, it is apparent to me that the source of our
current ills – the lawlessness in our streets, the destruction of our
borders, the racist “equity” policies of the Democrat Party, the “woke”
derelictions of our military leaders, can all be traced to the
indoctrination of our educated classes in hatreds spawned by cultural
Marxism. Marxism is a creed that has resulted in more than 100 million
deaths in peacetime, and continent-wide suffering on a scale
unprecedented in the annals of human history...........To Read More....
The Right Cannot Afford to Abandon Public Education , By Kevin Portteus, February 21, 2023
-
Our schools and universities are ours. We built them, we paid for them, and we want them back.
In his latest offensive to rid
Florida’s educational system of revolutionary Marxism, Governor Ron
DeSantis announced what amounts to a new direction for one of the most
liberal educational institutions in the state: the New College of
Florida. DeSantis appointed a slew of new trustees to the college,
including the anti-Marxist journalist Christopher Rufo, Claremont Review of Books Editor
and political scientist Charles R. Kesler, and Matthew Spalding of
Hillsdale College. The president of the New College, Patricia Okker,
appeared before the board and said that she could not cooperate with the
board or with DeSantis’ plan for the institution, and she was promptly
terminated...............
Is it always financially worthwhile to obtain a four-year college degree? Answer: no.
It depends on the return on investment
(ROI). The ROI is calculated by estimating the future earnings from the
undergraduate degree less the costs of obtaining that degree, including
the income lost while attending college or university to get the
degree. The future earnings from the degree will depend on the economic
value of the degree. Some degrees have much more economic value than
others.
An Austin think-tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), has performed the herculean task of creating a database
of the ROI for 1,775 public and private universities and 30,000
bachelor's programs. Want to know the highest-ROI major at Arizona
State? It's construction management, with a positive ROI of
$1,035,357. Want to know the worst at ASU? It's a degree in music,
with a return of minus $391,887. Of the ten majors at New Mexico
Highlands University, would you like to know the only one that has a
positive ROI? It's all here...............To Read More....
A Charter Academy Delivering a "Classical" Education Grows in Popularity, Frederick M. Hess - Great Hearts Academy launched, in 2001, with 130 students. Today,
it operates 33 classical K-12 schools serving more than 25,000 students
in Arizona and Texas. At a time when there’s a lot of interest in
classic liberal arts school models, and with Great Hearts seeking to
expand its offerings via pre-K and online offerings, it seemed like a
good time to chat about their work with CEO Jay Heiler, who’s been on
the board of Great Hearts since its founding and spent more than a
decade as chair of the Arizona Charter Schools Association. Here’s what
he had to say..............
Another reason for school choice, February 21, 2023 By Silvio Canto, Jr.
The Texas
legislature is debating school choice. The arguments are not new. The
GOP wants to give parents choice and the Democrats say that it would
destroy public schools. School choice is gaining because the public schools are not performing, as we see in failing schools in Baltimore, and some teachers are out of control. Here’s an example of what I'm talking about.
This is another example of a teacher more concerned with his
"understanding" of history than consulting or respecting the parents. ............
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) — it’s the mantra repeated endlessly by virtually every significant institution in our country except, very recently, for the governments of a few red states. But with that sole exception, every institution you can think of, from universities, to major corporations, law firms, art museums, symphony orchestras, Hollywood, charitable NGOs, etc., etc., not to mention the federal government and all of the blue state governments — all of them are on fully on board. While the DEI concept might have a few nuances here and there, stripped to its basics it means one simple thing: we commit to having 13% or more of our high status positions (high paying jobs, executives, board of directors) be African Americans.
Let’s put aside for the moment whether such a commitment can be accomplished consistent with the law prohibiting discrimination in employment, and consider an even more basic question: Is it even physically possible for every significant institution in the country to accomplish this result at the same time? Where are the people going to come from to fill all the positions?
The problem is that there is a fundamental disconnect between two main planks in the progressive platform for our utopian future. In that platform, DEI is plank A. But plank B is that the black children must be forced to attend failing Democrat-run unionized public schools in big cities.
This disconnect sprang onto the front pages in the past few days when something called Project Baltimore analyzed some data from the Maryland Department of Education, and reported that there were 23 schools in the Baltimore City district where not a single student tested at the “proficient” level on the state math exam. From the Daily Caller, February 10:
In 23 Baltimore City Schools, zero students tested proficient in math in 2022, according to a report by Project Baltimore. Through an analysis of 150 Baltimore City Schools, 23 of them, including 10 high schools, eight elementary schools, three high schools and two middle schools, no students met math grade-level expectations, according to a report by Project Baltimore.
And it wasn’t just that 23 schools had not a single student testing proficient in math. More generally, only about 7% of the students from all of the schools met state math proficiency standards:
Approximately 7% of third through eighth graders at Baltimore City School met grade level expectations in Math in 2022, according to the Maryland State Department of Education.
And the results in reading were not much better. In many articles that I have found discussing this subject, absolutely nobody dares mention the race of the students. But here is a racial breakdown on the Baltimore City public schools from U.S. News: 75.7% black, 14.2% Hispanic, 7.5% white, and a tiny smattering of others. It’s completely obvious from the data that the Baltimore City schools are completely failing to get the black kids to learn basic reading and arithmetic.
Is it just Baltimore? Absolutely not. Throughout the country, the African American kids are heavily concentrated in Democrat-run cities with unionized public schools, and in every single case the schools are failing to teach the kids. Consider just a few examples:
Detroit. From Public School Review, September 15, 2022: “Detroit Schools: District Is Failing Its Students According To Test Scores. Dismal test scores have been released for Detroit public schools. The numbers show that not only are few Detroit students considered proficient in math and reading, but the improvement has also been nearly non-existent over the past decade in the city. . . . CNS News reports that according to the U.S. Department of Education, only seven percent of the eighth-graders in Detroit are considered proficient in reading. This figure comes from recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test from 2011. To make matters worse, math scores for Detroit were even lower, with just four percent of Detroit eighth-graders scoring proficient on the national math examinations.”Detroit public school enrolment is 82% black, 13.6% Hispanic, and 2.4% white, with a handful of others.
Chicago. From the Daily Caller, February 14, 2023: “In 55 Chicago Public Schools, not one student met grade level expectations in either math or reading during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Wirepoints report. Out of 649 Chicago Public Schools, 22 schools have zero students who met grade level expectations for reading while no students were proficient in math in 33 schools during the 2021-2022 school year, according to a Wirepoints report.”Chicago schools are 35.8% black, 46.5% Hispanic, and 11% white.
You can check out the data for essentially any big city school system, and the results will be the same.
In its article on Chicago, the Daily Caller found a comment from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. She came up with the preposterous explanation of “Covid”:
“The bottom line is everyone suffered in the pandemic.. because of the pandemic,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in October. “The disruption was everywhere, and it was bad regardless of whether schools were remote or in person. We are focused now on the urgent need to help kids recover and thrive.”
As long as these schools are the only option for most black kids, the odds that thousands of institutions professing their deep commitments to DEI can all meet their goals at the same time are about zero.
The entire apparatus can be restaffed
and employed to help dismantle all the bogus, intellectually vacuous
programs, departments, and initiatives whose sole purpose is to foster
permanent grievance.
As the plague of woke totalitarianism
continues to besiege American universities, I note that we are finally
beginning to see a little pushback. Public universities in Texas offer
typical examples of this ying-yang process. As the Daily Signal reports,
Several Texas
universities have begun the practice, in the staff hiring process, of
requiring statements in favor of diversity, equity, and inclusion
policies, or DEI, as well as examples of ‘anti-racist’ behavior. Job
applicants are required to state multiple times in which they have
participated in ‘anti-racist’ behavior in an effort to ‘deconstruct
white supremacy.’
Call that the strophe.
The antistrophe was not far behind: “One bill introduced in the Texas Legislature would pull every cent from these programs.” It’s a development I like to see. .........To Read More....
