The Issue is the Revolution

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

“There is only one solution, intifada revolution,” mobs of college students chant at terror rallies.

What is there to ‘revolt’ against in New York City, Los Angeles or Chicago? The Hamas rallies like the BLM, environmentalist and other radical rallies take place in cities run by mayors and city councils who support their efforts and sometimes even show up to their events.

Even before New York City and other municipalities paid out millions in voluntary settlements to the BLM rioters who had assaulted police officers, the dirty secret of the radical mobs was that the authorities were on their side. And will continue to be on their side no matter what they do.

The revolution is also the thing that it’s revolting against.

Democrats secured control of the country’s major cities only to be faced with the timeless leftist challenge of making the intensification of their rule look like revolution rather than totalitarianism. The USSR and Cuba directed the ‘revolution’ outward by invading, conquering and intervening in other countries. Democrat cities nationalized their politics, building entire campaigns around Trump, abortion and (to their eventual regret) declaring themselves to be sanctuary cities.

As long as Republicans existed anywhere, urban Democrats could not sleep soundly at night.

Democrat control of cities and states didn’t end bipartisan politics, just turned it into a somewhat real and somewhat fake grudge match between the party’s really crazy and less crazy wings. Craziness was a variable like ‘X’ that was defined not by the common sense brakes of intellectual diversity, but by how far the really crazy wing could push the less crazy wing.

In 2010, open borders, freeing all the criminals, men pretending to be women and support for Hamas were fringe positions of the really crazy wing. By 2024, they’re Democrat positions.

The difference between the really crazy wing and the merely crazy wing is not that they have fundamentally different beliefs, but different tactics and comfort zones. It didn’t take long for the next generation to come home for winter breaks and win over the Democrat moms and dads to police defunding, drag queen story hour and the mass murder of Jews. But first the cultural establishment had to make these horrifying things seem respectable and normal.

Had to fit banning cars and Hamas on a lawn sign right under “in this house, love is love”.

What will the really crazy wing of the party normalize next? Check the academic calendar for the next year, social media for the year after and then the protest calendar for the next five years.

The ‘revolution’ is just about the radicals running the streets getting the feckless ex-liberals running the actual show to adopt some horrendous policy derived from the ravings of a 19th century philosopher and then given a glow up by activist academics and public intellectuals.

Classic town hall politics, limited constitutional government, and checks and balances in a bipartisan system would have prevented American cities from turning into the Paris Commune, but urban politics had made a rapid transition from Tammany Hall political machines to corporate consultants to Marxist struggle sessions with little democracy to be found in any of it.

Cities aren’t run by voters but by ‘stakeholders’. Lifelong community activists and their community groups, municipal unions and their members, and a few political clubs harvest ballots, turn out votes and then end up running cities. That 1% actually runs our lives.

A new generation of young radical activists with dot com money backing and social media savvy like AOC found it easy enough to harness the power of hipster grad students living in $3K a month walkups to disrupt the system and carve out their own extremist slice of the pie.

The new red guard, like the old, however had to find something to do besides stealing money.

The lofty promises of universal health care require more money than is available even if the wings of the old crazy party and the new really crazy party stopped stealing all the money. Defunding the police by moving money from law enforcement to their leftist activist social allies is easier. And a good pogrom against Jewish stores and synagogues is a great distraction.

The revolution isn’t about killing Jews (or not just about killing Jews) but wiping out entire classes of people, reactionaries, shopkeepers and whoever else ended up in the killing fields of Siberia, Guangxi and Choeung Ek for the power and profit of a rising new political elite.

The less crazy party thinks it will never have to come to that, but as with its views on men showering with girls or exposing schoolchildren to violent pornography, this is subject to change.

Life as an urban/suburban bourgeoise with regular stops at Starbucks, Crate and Barrel, and Whole Foods before charging the Tesla in the driveway is pretty comfortable, but being a pol commissar with a dacha in the Outer Banks and the power to gulag your enemies might just be better. All of that will require not just one revolution but a cycle of intermittent revolutions.

The causes matter less than the trajectory. One day it’s the police, the next day it’s car owners and then it’s the Jews. (Say what you will, but the Jews are always a popular one.) The issue, as a certain Marxist once said, is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

Causes provide narratives. Berkeley professors and Wall Street personal assistants who have no idea where the river or the sea may be are chanting for the destruction of Israel because it’s a nice change of pace. Like all of us, leftists like to feel that they’re growing as people by embracing new murderous causes. Freeing all the criminals didn’t work so well, but freeing all the terrorists to kill Jewish people thousands of miles away feels both heroic and safe.

But the exoticism of chanting for an “intifada” boils down to a call for revolution here and now.

Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted that the ultimate purpose of the anti-Israel BDS movement is “eradicate America as we know it.” Eradicating America as we know it might seem a bit off-putting to the suburban soy dads and wine moms who make up the middle class base of the party, but they’ll come around just like they did on turning Tim into Tammy and Tammy into Tim. What else are they going to do anyway: become Republicans and have people sneer at them in Whole Foods and risk their kids refusing to come home for the holidays?

The revolution is about eradicating America as we know it. A lot of it’s gone already, but there’s still plenty of work of destruction to be done until we’re all on the right side of history. Or dead.

Revolution is all about being on the right side of history. And the revolution consists of old liberals who are terrified of being on the wrong side of it, stammering their way through pronouns and handling popular critical race theory texts like they were the sacred scriptures of a religion they don’t believe in, and young radicals certain that they are on the right side of it.

But ‘revolution’ is also just dictatorship misspelled. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” The dictatorship in urban and sub Democrat areas is already here.

The stream of monthly revolutions make the deepening totalitarianism, the higher confiscatory taxes, the daily government scrutiny of everything from trash content to social media posts (in cities where violent muggings earn thugs no more than a free therapy session) and the ideology tests for employment, seem like liberation. But that’s what the Russians called it too.

Each revolution makes us more enslaved and less free. We are not free to walk the streets, not free to think for ourselves and not free to even work for a living. We are however free to protest.

But only as long as it’s for the revolution of the political machine taking away all our freedoms.

The issue isn’t drug dealers shot while assaulting police officers. It’s not Israel. It’s not oil or illegals. Those are just the levers which make the dictatorships running our lives more extreme. They are also how those dictatorships pretend that there’s a vibrant system of political dissent.

The issue is not the issue. The issue is that the fake revolutions are a tyranny. The issue is that we have become the slaves of a system that keeps promising to liberate us from our freedoms.

The issue is that we cannot go on living this way.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.  Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Daniel Greenfield Unleashed

By Rich Kozlovich 

Another week with Daniel Greenfield, and it's worth the time. This week we've had the usual leftist clabber over racism and how black criminals need to be treated with respect, and that's coming from the elected leaders of the nation who swore to uphold the Constitution, the nation's laws, protect the innocent, and punish the guilty.  All of which they're failing to do, and truth be told, the people elected these misfits and will get exactly what the voted for, and what they deserve. Schadenfreude! 

Anyone with delusions about America's leaders in government or commerce supporting America and Americans need to disabuse themselves of such silliness.  It's like that cold war joke that went around dealing with the mess created by Stalin's "five year" agricultural plans.  It went something like this:  

The manager of the state collective farm was dreading his annual meeting with the Commissar for Agriculture to discuss the harvest which, once again, had been dismal and far below state quota.  From behind his desk, framed photos of Stalin and Lysenko on the wall above him, the Commissar opened, “And so, Comrade Manager. Tell me about the potato harvest.”

Thinking quickly, the manager blurted out, “Comrade Commissar, there are so many potatoes you could pile them up past God’s knees.” The Commissar was genuinely taken aback by this casual repudiation of official atheism. “Comrade Manager! You surely know there is no God!”  “And, Comrade Commissar, you surely know there are no potatoes.”

Virtually everything we're seeing has now exposed what's been going on with the leadership in America today, and it's just another cold war joke.  Surely, we know there is no integrity in government, commercial interests, academia and science sold any integrity they possessed long ago joining the Church of Wokeness. 

Quoting Jared Peterson:

America’s  ruling elite bears the overwhelming share of responsibility for the Biden catastrophe. It was they at all levels -- finance, corporate, governmental, security agencies, media and judiciary -- that engineered and enabled the Biden coup. And I also agree with the author that Biden has been an unprecedented domestic disaster. We will probably never recover from it, certainly never, if Biden gets a second term, which seems highly likely.

House Dems Complain of Arrest of Sheikh Who Called for War on America - "We must wage unceasing war against the Americans".   Remember when Congressmembers would actually appeal on behalf of the human rights of actual political dissidents, not terrorists, murderers and enemies of the United States? The Arab Spring and its horrors are mostly in the rearview mirror but the Muslim Brotherhood and its imitators are not gone and they haven’t given up. And the D.C. political class has not given up on Islamists. After the arrest of Tunisia’s Islamist leader Rashid Ghannouchi, House Democrats, under the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement “following the sudden arrest of #Tunisia’s opposition leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi”. The statement blathers on about “forcibly closures of political party offices and bans on free assembly of certain political groups” without ever mentioning that those certain groups are Islamists and quite dangerous.........

Intel Letter Calling Hunter Biden Laptop a Russian Op Arranged by Biden Campaign - The House Judiciary Committee got one of the 51 intel signers to flip - It only took two and a half years to admit the obvious. That the Biden campaign was behind the letter of 51 ex-intel officers falsely claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian operation was obvious. And the stunt would have been politics as usual if not for the fact that the officials were leveraging official positions and supposed access to secret intelligence to make those claims. And, more importantly, those claims were then used to engage to coordinate a Big Tech censorship campaign to prevent the story from spreading on social media. And the media promoted the letter as a fact and used it to justify not reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop during the election or describing it as Russian disinformation. The House Judiciary Committee got one of the 51 to flip................

Feminist Head of Women’s History Museum Accused of Covering Up Sexual Harassment -The Smithsonian's woke museums need to go. It never fails. I’ve pointed out that Kamala Harris had a history of covering up sexual harassment. So did a number of other top Democrat feminists. Like most forms of leftism, identity politics offers the power to commit the abuses it claims to fight. Why should the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum be any different?.........

Trump DA Bragg Badly Blows Case Before Fed Judge - Like most prog prosecutors, there’s no reason to think that DA Alvin Bragg is any good in the courtroom. Some prog prosecutors are dedicated fanatics, but genuinely good prosecutors tend to be more interested in doing things than in not doing them. And Bragg has always struck me as lazy, inept and half-assed. His office’s feeble attempts to battle against a House GOP subpoena in front of a federal judge make that case............

Biden Admin Obstructing Afghan Investigation On All Fronts. - These are serious grounds for impeachment. Nearly a year after I wrote this, House hearings made it clear that the Biden administration is still illegally obstructing the Afghanistan watchdog. In June, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s office (SIGAR), dispatched letters to Secretary of State Blinken and Samantha Power complaining that the State Department and USAID were stonewalling its investigation of waste, corruption and terror cash................Fast forward to late April 2023 and SIGAR is still being illegally obstructed by the Biden regime............

Credentialism, Crisis and Censorship: How the Left Eliminated Debate  - Everything that progressive fascists believe is now an official fact.  “The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of the Big Lie,” authored by a CBS reporter and a political activist, is the latest effort by leftists to wrap themselves in the banner of truth. Media bias has shed its protective coloration of neutrality and blares that its side, leftists, represent the truth and conservatives the ‘lie’. The title of the “The Big Truth”, an otherwise forgettable exercise in virtue signaling, is interesting only because it so perfectly encompasses a media feed that is a mad libs game of “X Republican lied, Y Democrat hopes truth will win out.”..............

Biden Shows ‘White Lives Don’t Matter’ - Sorry, wrong race. Try losing the love of your life while being black next time.  The cases of Ralph Yarl and Kaylin Gillis are all over the news now. Both Ralph and Kaylin were shot by elderly homeowners who were overreacting to what they may have thought were trespassers. Both cases are in the news. But they’re getting a very different treatment. One guess as to why. Ralph Yarl armed only with ‘black skin,’ family lawyer says.  That’s true, insofar as Ralph’s skin color was the only reason his case is being blown up and treated as a racist attack despite the lack of a single shred of supporting evidence.............

Biden’s Black Astronaut Reads Anti-White Poem to Prep for Mission  - Don’t know if we should be calling these woke folks, ‘astronauts’ or ‘cosmonauts’. But it was also expected that the people they picked for a hypothetical lunar mission would be leftists who hate America. Their experiments will likely consist of measuring equity on the moon and claiming that low-gravity environments have a disproportionate impact on people of color. And this garbage is starting early. Really early.

NASA astronaut Victor Glover, recently named as the pilot of the Artemis II mission around the Moon, listens to Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon” twice a week on the way to work.

Maybe doing some actual mission prep would be more helpful? But we’re dealing with wokes here. So signaling their virtue and, in typical fashion, preemptively dumping on whatever task they’re going to screw up anyway is more important than the actual mission..............

Stop Enforcing the Law and People Will Start Killing Each Other - See if you can spot what these two stories have in common. 

1. Saratoga County Woman Killed After Turning into Wrong Driveway – Albany Times Union 84-
2. Year-Old Is Charged in Shooting of Black Teenager Who Went to Wrong House – New York Times

The media, by which I mean the Left, has with utter racist predictably begun waving the bloody shirt about the second case. The tawdry movement is cheerfully organizing a lynch mob for an 84-year-old man, not on the merits of the case, but because of the racial identity markers in that headline. Had the races been reversed or if both participants in the tragedy were black or white, we would either not hear about it or the story would be about “gun violence”.................

How Bush’s Globalism Gave Us a Transgender Bud Lite -What happens when American companies stop being American.  The story of how Budweiser went from a patriotic traditional values company to launching a creepy Bud Lite campaign featuring Dylan Mulvaney, a man who claims to be a little girl, began with the Bush administration when, after 150 years, Anheuser-Busch ceased to be an American company. Today it’s just another subsidiary of a Belgian-Brazilian multinational. Except for its St. Louis employees, few noticed the difference when Anheuser-Busch became InBev, and the United States government failed to object to the hostile takeover. While the majority of Americans, and the governor of Missouri, opposed the move, the Bush administration did not. The media fashionably sneered at a campaign against the hostile takeover which called for fighting the “foreign invasion”. Eventually the company surrendered...........

New Chicago Mayor Warns Against Demonizing Thugs Who Beat Man -"It is not constructive to demonize youth who have otherwise been starved of opportunities"  I warned that whatever came after Mayor Lori Lightfoot was going to be much worse. And it’s happening.  Mayor-Elect Brandon Johnson, the democratic choice of Democrat Party ballot harvesters and the Cook County Cemetery Voters Association is making it clear once again that he stands with criminals and against victims...............Starved of opportunities? Who starved them? Of what opportunities? ........

Store That Endorsed BLM Forced to Close Due to “Safety Issues” - Woke companies thought that they were drilling a hole in our side of the boat when they endorsed racist mobs and shutting down the police. Little did they understand that they were in the same boat with us. During the BLM riots, outdoor retailer REI promoted its support for the racist movement...............Sorry community, REI’s running for the hills. Good luck achieving your ideals in your community while being robbed, shot and stabbed by BLM’s heroes...........

TikTok Kills Another Child - Jacob was on a ventilator for almost a week before he died. A 13-year-old in Ohio has died after “he took a bunch of Benadryl,” trying a dangerous TikTok challenge that’s circulating online, according to a CNN affiliate and a GoFundMe account from his family. Jacob Stevens was participating in a TikTok challenge with some friends at home when he ingested the antihistamine, the family donation account states. Jacob was on a ventilator for almost a week before he died, according to WSYX. Quite a few kids have died due to TikTok challenges being pushed into their timeline..........

 NYC Mayor to Cut Carbon Emissions by Cutting Off Food - The American Left is just Pol Pot in slow motion. The global warming scam is just an excuse to take everything away from you to save the planet. Everything? Yes, everything............Just like cars and individual liberty, the food will have to go. New Yorkers will look back nostalgically for the days when Mayor Bloomberg merely wanted to cut salt and ban soda. They’re coming for your meat, fish and eggs.............

Cartoon of the Day

Corporate Safe Spaces: How Racial Affinity Groups Radicalize Companies

Daniel Greenfield October 27, 2021

 Workplace chat software like Slack is probably the single most effective tool for making companies go woke. Organizing workers was a difficult challenge in companies that did not have unions. But while companies closely monitored union organizing, they actively encouraged the use of workplace chat software that made it all too easy for leftists to network, identify opponents, get them fired, and use those incidents to radicalize the company.

The second most effective tool is the identity politics affinity group.

Affinity groups or ERGs have become a popular tool by HR departments to organize internal woke caucuses. Corporate affinity groups are a counterpart of campus student groups and were promoted as a way to enable the same kind of experience in the workplace. Identity politics student groups, usually dominated by students and faculty from identity politics studies departments, were the biggest players in campus radicalization and protests. Affinity groups replicated black, Latino, and gay student groups in corporations with executives as their faculty sponsors. The executives were often picked based on their own student activist backgrounds.

During the campus wars, some conservatives had dismissed the student protests as an unreal university bubble. “Just wait until they get into the real world and have to find jobs,” they said.

But campus radicalism had always been meant as a training ground for institutional radicalization. The student activists were being taught how to take over government agencies, companies, and any organization they become part of using internal networking and political pressure. The students didn’t change to accommodate the workplace, instead workplaces changed to accommodate them, making the activist culture a part of corporate culture.

The same system that had ousted conservative faculty, intimidated conservative speakers, and transformed courses had been copied and pasted into the corporate workplace. On college campuses, students were the customers, but workplace affinity group members were employees. Except that corporations began treating the affinity groups as stakeholders who became more important than the actual customers. Affinity groups applied internal pressure that ousted conservative employees and dropped conservative customers and businesses.

Much as student groups had advocated defunding investments in oil companies or Israel on college campuses, affinity groups pressured banks to drop firearms manufacturers and Republicans. Companies that refused faced internal revolts, staged resignations, and pressure on key investors and shareholders that would claim the jobs of CEOs and principled leaders.

The conquest of corporations was swift and effective because it utilized existing leftist revolutionary organizational principles that exploited new technologies while their victims, often liberal and conservative, failed to understand that the discontent, the demands, and the new entities and language invading the workplace were not some odd millennial trend, but part of a plan. Even now the backlash against wokeness has hardly come to terms with the infrastructure behind it, touching mainly on the stories of individuals who were purged for political offenses.

What the testimony of the victims neglects is an understanding of the machinery of the purges.

The affinity groups were not truly new, but their spread and pervasiveness has been breathtaking. Black, Latino, gay, and other identity politics affinity groups not only exist in most corporations but, as revealed in the Freedom Center’s recent booklet, Disloyal, in the military. They’ve become ubiquitous in the non-profit sector and across all levels of the government.

Officially, racial and sexual affinity groups are meant to make minorities more comfortable in the workplace, provide mentoring, and the favorable treatment that enables “diversity”. In practice affinity groups are widely used to advocate for political issues in the same way as minority leaders. Essentially, affinity groups embedded a Sharpton in every company and institution.

Affinity groups claim that they are structurally disadvantaged and that certain corporate moves make them feel “unsafe” or “threatened”. A key affinity group tactic is pressuring executives to state that the company suffers from “systemic racism” and that minorities are at risk. This is the familiar campus safe space ethos transplanted to some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies.

Once the affinity groups have established the need for corporate safe spaces, they begin pressuring companies to impose political tests on all employees and fire those who disagree. Affinity groups begin by establishing their oppressed credentials before pivoting to become the oppressors. Once executives begin surrendering to them, they’ve established that the company is a dangerous environment for an identity politics group and the leadership “needs to do better.”

While affinity groups typically tend to claim that they represent black, female, or gay employees, they’re just another embedded leftist front group which silences or suppresses those employees who are there for mentorship or work instead of politics. Where unions at least had democratic vestiges, affinity groups have little to none. Like the NAACP, the HRC, or any number of advocacy groups that claim to represent the voices of a group, which has no way of ratifying or removing their representation, affinity groups claim to represent a people as a political group.

And since affinity groups typically have the support of HR and executives, few employees are willing to dissent or speak out against them. Fortune 500 companies now routinely pressure their employees to join affinity groups, including pushing white employees into “white allies” groups for maximum political indoctrination in the workplace. This setup, not at all coincidentally, resembles the old “soviets” which the Bolsheviks began to use as their political power base.

Modern wokes are using the same basic methodology as 19th century revolutionaries but with the added benefit of the internet and smart devices to provide them with far superior coordination. The underlying objective though remains the familiar process of horizontal consolidation of power within an organization, a group of organizations, and then an entire industry, and vertical consolidation across different organizations and industries.

Horizontal consolidation is how leftists took over specific university departments, entire fields of study, academic organizations, and then entire universities, and much of academia. The same process was also used to consolidate the field of education, and is being replicated everywhere from Big Tech to medicine. And, as discussed in Disloyal: the United States military.

Vertical consolidation might use the media, medical experts, and government officials to advance a particular program, or academia, Wall Street, and the clergy for another.

The basis for the mass censorship of conservatives was coordinated between the Justice Department, the media, and Big Tech. Such improbable alliances only seem unlikely until you understand that vertical consolidation transforms culturally incompatible organizations and industries into the components of a single machine whose true mission is that of the Left.

Leftists create cells within each organization. The members of those cells see themselves as members of the “resistance”, the term they embraced during the Trump administration, “working within the system” to achieve a total takeover of society. The old dream, the one advanced by Communist organizations, got a shot in the arm from the new possibilities for organizing and coordinating operatives. Before the internet, communications were a problem requiring in-person meetings, magazines and newsletters, but the rise of the internet, and then social media, and finally workplace chat enabled this brave new world and its social credit system.

The affinity groups merge traditional identity politics organizing with corporate workplaces. The Left has abandoned its old working class politics to focus on the upper middle class and it has accompanied its new base through student identity politics to their workplaces. The stereotypes of dysfunctional millennials unable to cope with adulthood led corporations to create frictionless workplaces that made the transition from college to corporate life as smooth as possible.

It’s also no coincidence that Big Tech, the arena where the top talent was guided into corporate campuses meant to replicate their old college campuses, is also the epicenter of safe spaces, radical politics, and affinity groups. The college dropouts who built Silicon Valley aimed to extend the college experience to the workplace with a casual atmosphere, free food, and all-night working hours. It’s no wonder Big Tech became the first corporate casualty of the Left.

But not the last. Corporate America, eager to jump on a new trend, is succumbing to the virus.

Conservatives were behind the curve on campus organizing. They’ve made up a great deal of ground on college campuses even as the generation that was organized is taking over the corporate workplace. And conservatives are once again behind on organizing the opposition.

Making matters more difficult is the insistence that identity politics affinity groups are apolitical, that their messages, whether Black Lives Matter or Trans Inclusion, are “above politics”, and that implementing these groups is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion which many organizations, from Kellogg’s cereal to the United States Space Force, have defined as central to their mission.

And so it will take a good deal more to crack workplace organizing than calls for equal time.

Workplace civil rights is about more than the right of employees to be free of political tests and indoctrination, it’s about more than denying the Left a space to organize and recruit. These initial considerations have to give way to the realization that an organization hijacked by the Left will horizontally and vertically consolidate to conquer organizations, industries, and the country.

A company will funnel money to leftist causes and deny services to conservatives. It will coordinate with other companies and create industry-wide standards that act as cartels. That means firearms manufacturers and gun stores will be denied loans and payment options, conservative candidates will be prevented from being heard on social media and accepting donations. Vocal conservatives won’t be able to buy or sell, have a bank account or a credit card, not to mention a job, or access any services that are mediated by major corporations.

The variety of companies that appear to be making independent decisions to deplatform, fire, and break ties with conservatives are actually acting as one nationwide woke cartel.

That’s not an alarmist prediction, but a growing everyday reality.

Corporations have adopted critical race theory, anti-racism, equity, and inclusion which, despite its name, insists that it is not enough to include if you do not also exclude. Exclusion, from the marketplace of ideas, from public and private spaces, from employment and finally life, has been equated to safety for the “oppressed” who cannot be safe without the power to oppress.

That is how the social credit system comes to America.

It took conservatives a while to embrace student free speech rights. The shift came with the delayed realization that campuses were no longer in a struggle between moderate administrations and student radicals, but radical administrations and student conservatives. Making that same shift with woke corporations purging conservative employees and customers may be a more painful process. And yet it is an absolutely necessary existential matter.

Conservatives could survive woke academia, but not a woke economy.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

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About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center

It's Time for the Adults to Stand up and Be Counted

By Rich Kozlovich

In one of Thomas Sowell’s Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene he made this comment:

“Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural born citizen, a college student said: "What makes a natural born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?"

Although this is humorous I have to ask - is anyone really shocked or even surprised at this? Over educated, under smart, misinformed and uninformed is the pattern. Most disturbing is their lack of common knowledge …. you know…. the kind of stuff that was taught in grade school at one time. 

Whenever "on the street" interviews are conducted with college students, or the young in general, they fail in the most basic knowledge.  Knowledge that supposedly was once considered part of our society's “common knowledge”. Furthermore, their knowledge and understanding of history is abysmal. Even their knowledge of the world’s geography is startlingly deficient.  In one Presidential election an interviewer asked young people if Karl Marx would make a good President.  Almost no one knew who he was, what he stood for, or that he was dead.  Why?

Organized education doesn't teach kids how to think, they teach them what to think, and that's the latest form of leftist clabber.  About ten or fifteen years ago in England they did a survey and found almost all the kids believe CO2 causes global warming.  Yet just under half of them also thought that Winston Churchill was an astronaut.

Of course the young have always thought they were the bearers of “new knowledge” and a “new understanding” that would lead to “better solutions” to the world’s problems.   In spite of the fact they have little experience in life by which to weigh their views. 

We all go through that brilliantly stupid stage, speaking in a demanding nonsensical patois completely unaware we don’t have a clue. We not only don’t they have the solutions, we don’t even know the right questions at that age.  So the real question is:  Why are we paying attention to them?

Actually, the answer is simple.  In days gone by that didn’t matter so much because the adult population was much larger than the young population and could ignore them, and then gradually absorb them.  

It was kind of like the Army.  Remember when they used to advertise "The Army Makes Men".  Well, actually what they did was keep them under control until they grew up.  

But all changed when the baby boomers came on the scene! All of a sudden we had a gigantic explosion of the young and dumb telling the world the way everything should be. This was the population leftists have exploited and continue to exploit. As a result leftist insanity expanded outrageously and powerfully, especially at the university level. 

There is a difference between traditional wisdom and conventional wisdom. Traditional wisdom has stood the test of time. Conventional wisdom is merely the latest philosophical flavor of the day and may not last as long as our memory of the last Super Bowl winner. 

Unfortunately, the young are quick to embrace the latest philosophical flavor of the day, and because their numbers are so large it soon becomes policy, and while waiting for the test of time to prove out these policies for good or ill, devastation may be, and has been, left in their wake,

In his book, Economic Facts and Fallacies, Thomas Sowell defined a logical fallacy in this manner:

“Fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing of ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.” That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment."

What is the most frightening about this group is that they don’t seem to understand, or care, what tragic impact their policies may inflict on humanity. They seem to think that “all problems” are “due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.”  

I wouldn’t mind that so much if they were the ones who had to pay the penalty for being wrong, but unfortunately it's always others who have to pay the penalty for their wrong headedness, and that penalty is often deadly. 

That's always a problem when you never have to face the consequences for your actions:  You don’t have to care, you don’t have to suffer, you don’t have to be responsible or bear the blame for those actions.  Especially when you self-righteously believe you're on the moral high ground, and involved in a grand and noble experiment that will save the world, with humanity as the guinea pig. 

After all, their intentions are good!  Right?  Horsepucky!  Along with those who've suffered as a result of their policies, I am really sick and tired of hearing that. As for those who have died as a result of their policies - they can’t hear it at all - they're dead, and when you add all the dead from the "good intentions of the leftist monsters of the 20th century and the "good intentions of the environment movement" we easily have over 200 million people who've died from their "good intentions".

Whether it's the Climate Change fraud or this pandemic hysteria, what we absolutely know this:  All the evidence we need in order to come to a correct understanding of what's happening right now is available for all to see how wrong they are.  Yet we accommodate them, we excuse them and now even worse, we're crawling into bed with them.

The young at least can be excused for their foolish enthusiasm regarding these things simply because they are young. Baby Boomers no longer have that excuse.   If we Boomers are no longer among the young and dumb!  Where are we now?  

This question needs asked and answered.

Are we willing to accept the responsibility for the consequences of these insane leftist policies?  

Dem Senate Frontrunner Fundraises With Radical San Francisco Liberals to Flip Wisconsin

Mandela Barnes hobnobs in Bay Area with liberal prosecutor Chesa Boudin, state lawmaker who wants to abolish ICE

 Collin Anderson • September 30, 2021

A Wisconsin Democratic Senate frontrunner held a San Francisco fundraiser with the son of left-wing terrorists and a California state lawmaker who wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mandela Barnes traveled to the Bay Area on Tuesday to hobnob with San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin and California state senator Scott Wiener, a photo shared by California Democratic Party vice chair David Campos shows. Boudin—the son of two Weather Underground terrorists who has ended cash bail and repeatedly declined to prosecute serial offenders—faces a recall effort sparked by a murder surge in his city. Wiener, meanwhile, has called for the abolition of ICE, because it is a "force of oppression" that makes "communities less safe." Wisconsin Republicans have pointed to the clip to accuse Barnes of caring "more about appeasing the far left and violent criminals than standing up for public safety."...............Barnes did not return a request for comment.

In addition to Wiener's efforts to abolish ICE, the Democrat in 2016 called for "[California] & other states to become sanctuary states." Boudin also campaigned on his intention to hold "zero cooperation with ICE" and prosecute ICE agents. In 2019, he bragged he "helped pioneer San Francisco's sanctuary city policy." ............

Boudin in 2020 lobbied disgraced former New York governor Andrew Cuomo (D.) to grant clemency to his father, David Gilbert, who faced a 75-year sentence for second-degree murder over his role in a 1981 Brinks truck robbery, which left two police officers and a security guard dead. Boudin's mother, Kathy Boudin, also participated in the deadly heist. Cuomo granted Gilbert clemency before resigning from office in August.

Barnes became lieutenant governor of Wisconsin in 2019 after serving as a state legislator for four years. While a September poll released by Barnes's campaign shows him in a tie with Johnson, the Republican has not yet decided to run for reelection............To Read More....

My Take - If this lunatic is the Lt. Governor of Wisconsin, I couldn't help but wonder whose the Governor.   Tony Evers, and he's as big a lunatic as this Barnes, which of course brings us to the next obvious question. What in the world is wrong with the minds of the people of Wisconsin?

Radical leftists call for armed confrontation for any state that enforces borders

July 6, 2021  By Monica Showalter

As states pursue rule of law at the border amid a record surge of illegal migrants and Biden administration inaction, open border activists are getting busy.  According to The Last Refuge/Conservative Treehouse:

 Several states responded to the call from Texas Governor Greg Abbott asking for allied states to send law enforcement and national guard to secure the southern border after the Biden administration actively, intentionally and purposefully works to keep it open.

With the potential for cooperation from states, what I call “extreme federalism“, to secure the border regardless of the Federal inaction, an assembly of various activist groups are petitioning the White House to confront the states with direct military action.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a far-left communist advance group, is asking Joe Biden to fight the state effort with all measures possible, including armed confrontation.

 Here's the hysteria:..........To Read More....

Biden's Bait-and-Switch Presidency

By Charles Lipson - RCP Contributor

Joe Biden was elected as a moderate-left Democrat, but he is not governing as one. He pledged repeatedly to work across party lines, but he is ramming through the biggest, most expensive progressive agenda in American history without any Republican votes. He is almost certain to try it again with his next two spending proposals, the largest since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. As the White House pushes these mammoth bills with only Democratic votes, Americans are realizing they got a very different president from the one they bargained for, the one they were promised during the campaign. What’s unclear is whether they will recoil from this new reality.

Throughout the summer and fall, Biden ran as a unifier who could work across party lines. He wanted to do so, he said, and he reiterated that comforting message as late as his inaugural address. It was probably his most important policy message, and Americans believed it. They remembered his years in the Senate and his primary victory over socialist Bernie Sanders..........To Read More....

Radical New Rules for Post-America

Americans privately fear these rules, while publicly appearing to accept them.

By Victor Davis Hanson March 31, 2021

 

There are 10 new ideas that are changing America, maybe permanently.  

1) Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much. Prior presidents ran up huge annual deficits. But at least there were some concessions that the money was real and had to be paid back.  Not now. As we near $30 trillion in national debt and 110 percent of annual GDP, our elites either believe permanent zero interest rates make the cascading obligation irrelevant, or the larger the debt, the more likely we will be forced to address needed income redistribution. 

2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore. Joe Biden took an oath to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” But he has willfully rendered federal immigration laws null and void. Some rioters are prosecuted for violating federal laws, others not so much. Arrests, prosecutions, and trials are all fluid. Ideology governs when a law is still considered a law. Crime rates do not necessarily matter. If someone is carjacked, assaulted, or shot, it can be understood to be as much his fault as the perpetrator’s. Either the victim was too lax, uncaring, and insensitive, or he provoked his attacker. How useful the crime is to the larger agendas of the Left determines whether a victim is really a victim, and the victimizer really a victimizer. 

3) Racialism is now acceptable. We are defined first by our particular ethnic or religious tribe, only secondarily—if at all—by an American commonality. Unapologetic and explicit exclusion of whites from dorms, graduations, safe spaces, welfare, and federal aid programs is now noncontroversial. It is unspoken payback for perceived past sins, or a type of “good” racism. Falsely being called a racist makes one more guilty than falsely calling someone else a racist. 

4) The immigrant is mostly preferable to the citizen. The newcomer, unlike the host, is not stained by the sins of America’s founding and history. Most citizens currently must follow quarantine rules, social distancing, stay out of school, and obey all the laws.  Yet those entering the United States en masse and illegally need not follow such apparently superfluous COVID-19 rules. Their children should be immediately schooled without worry of quarantine. Immigrants need not worry about their illegal entry or residence in America. Our elites believe illegal entrants more resemble the “founders” than do legal citizens, about half of whom they consider irredeemable.

5) Most Americans should be treated as we would treat little children. They cannot be asked to provide an ID to vote. “Noble lies” by our elites about COVID-19 rules are necessary to protect “Neanderthals” from themselves. Americans deserve relief from the stress of grades, standardized testing, and normative rules of school behavior. They still are clueless about why it is good for them to pay far more for their gasoline, heating, and air conditioning. 

6) Hypocrisy is passé. Virtue-signaling is alive. Climate change activists fly on private jets. Social justice warriors live in gated communities. Multibillionaire elitists pose as victims of sexism, racism, and homophobia. The elite need these exemptions to help the helpless. It is what you say to lesser others about how to live, not how you yourself live, that matters. 

7) Ignoring or perpetuating homelessness is preferable to ending it. It is more humane for both the homeless and the public that thousands live, eat, defecate, and use drugs on public streets and sidewalks than it is to green-light affordable housing, mandate hospitalization for the mentally ill, and create sufficient public shelter areas. 

8) McCarthyism is good. Destroying lives and careers for incorrect thoughts saves more lives and careers. Cancel culture and the Twitter Reign of Terror provide needed deterrence.  Now that Americans know they are one wrong word, act, or look away from losing their jobs or livelihoods, they are more careful and will behave in a more enlightened fashion. The social media guillotine is the humane, scientific tool of the woke. 

9) Ignorance is preferable to knowledge. Neither statue-toppling, name-changing, nor the “1619 Project” require any evidence or historical knowledge. Heroes of the past were simple constructs. Undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees reflect credentials, not knowledge. The brand, not what created it, is all that matters. 

10) Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity itself. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy, and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter the new Gospels. Americans privately fear these rules, while publicly appearing to accept them.  They still could be transitory and invite a reaction. Or they are already near-permanent and institutionalized.  The answer determines whether a constitutional republic continues as once envisioned, or warps into something never imagined by those who created it.

About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.

 

 

Virginia County School Advisory Board Demands Firing of Teachers who Disagree with Critical Race Theory

By Eric Lendrum March 31, 2021

In Loudoun County, Virginia, an advisory board for the school district demanded that any and all teachers who criticize critical race theory, and other far-left ideas being infused into the curriculum, be fired from their positions, according to Fox News.

The demand was made in an email sent by Keaira Jennings, the head of the Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee (MSAAC), which serves the Loudoun County Public School (LCPS) district. In the email that was sent to the LCPS superintendent, the NAACP, and other officials with the school district, Jennings said that she was “disheartened” by criticism of the new curriculum from teachers within the district.

“That simply cannot and should not be tolerated by anyone employed by LCPS! If our teachers and staff cannot be open and willing to learn how to be culturally competent then they do not need to be in the classrooms any longer,” Jennings declared. “They will only hinder the process and most importantly cause irreparable harm to the vulnerable hearts and minds of our students.”

Jennings also demanded that the district hire an “equity consultant” so that they “can get it right this time” in forcing all teachers to comply with the new policies and curriculum. Jennings claimed, without evidence, that “LCPS has missed the mark in this area time and time again,” before adding that “we are uniquely positioned to stand tall on the right side of history and let hate know it has no place in our community schools.”...........To Read More...

•  'Commitment to Equity' -- Equal Racial Outcomes -- Now a 'Performance Standard' for Virginia Teachers
• Civics Bill Would Devote $6 Billion to Woke Education

Fauci Blames Coronavirus on Our Failure to Live in 'Harmony With Nature'

"Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior."

Fri Mar 19, 2021 Daniel Greenfield

"There's a lot of folks who think that, due to climate change and due to the globalization in general, it is inevitable that we’ll deal with more and more viruses like this," Dr. Fauci told Meet the Press.

The "lot of folks" in question include the patron saint of the pandemic.

In addition to appearing on every single news show on the planet, Fauci occasionally co-authors papers. But "Emerging Pandemic Diseases: How We Got to COVID-19" in the journal Cell is less of an academic paper and more of a survey and an advocacy editorial. It might not be all that significant except that its co-authors are David M. Morens, the Senior Scientific Advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and Fauci who heads it.

If you didn’t know that its authors are prominent figures in the scientific community, you might mistake its contents for the ravings of hippies at an Earth Day rally a generation ago..............To Read More.....

The radicals: Five firebrand Biden nominees and appointments

By Katherine Doyle, White House Correspondent | February 15, 2021

Candidate Joe Biden appealed to voters as a deal-minded moderate and experienced Washington hand. While many of the now-president's nominees and appointments so far have been seasoned Beltway pros, others have raised eyebrows.

Here is a list of Biden’s most controversial picks to date.

Kristen Clarke - Biden’s pick to lead the Justice Department's civil rights division apologized last month for past comments on racial superiority and for hosting an event with a professor who espoused anti-Semitic views while a student at Harvard University.............

Neera Tanden - Tanden’s nomination was charged from the start. She would be the first woman of color and the first South Asian person to run the Office of Management and Budget, but years of indelicate social media broadsides have pitted her against Republicans and members of her party...............

Xavier Becerra - Biden’s pick for health and human services secretary has been labeled “a true radical on abortion” by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one indicator of the opposition he is expected to face appearing before senators as his nomination moves forward............  

Wendy Sherman - Sherman, who Biden has selected for the number two position at the State Department, is a veteran of the Obama and Clinton administrations, spending four years as the lead negotiator of the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran. Biden has vowed a return to the deal after former President Trump exited midway through his term...........

Anita Dunn - Dunn, a senior adviser to the president, is viewed with trepidation even by Democrats, not only because she claims to bear grudges for the president “like an Irishman.” Others have balked at her assertion that Mao Tse-tung was “one of her favorite philosophers.”.............

To Read More....

 

 

 

 

The New Jewish Exodus

January 3, 2021 By Adrienne Skolnik

Three months ago, with great sadness, I terminated membership with my synagogue. I am not alone.  This phenomenon is happening to thousands of religiously conservative Jews throughout our nation who are Republicans.  What would cause thousands of Jews to feel so alienated they would break from tradition and be without a “religious and spiritual home?”  How much sadness has this caused within this segment of the Jewish community?  Even more importantly, When did Judaism stop being Jewish?..............

 Progressive-left ideologies and social justice discourse monopolized conversations and email newsletters.  Even sermons contained political references.  Tikkun Olam (improving the world) by their definition, was not to be questioned.  As a Republican, I didn’t agree with their causes or agendas, so sadly the once peaceful feeling in my “religious and spiritual home” was vanishing.  Many Republican friends were experiencing similar situations and ended their memberships.

Then a series of events occurred.  When Tamika Mallory (a known anti-Semite) spoke at UNC, my Republican Jewish friends peacefully protested.  In the next synagogue newsletter, they were publicly criticized. The author apologized to the black community and hoped it didn’t hurt relations.  My friends wrote a concerned letter to the Board of Directors asking that the newsletter not have political content.  The letter was ignored, so they ended their membership.  (After black radicals killed two Jews and their employee in New Jersey, and attacked Jews with machetes in New York, I asked the author if the black community apologized to the Jewish community so it didn’t hurt relations?  When I heard that members of my synagogue protested with BLM and one got arrested, why weren’t they publicly criticized in the newsletter?) 

Some members even tried to convince me that BLM is an idea.  You can’t see an idea!  Ideas don’t destroy cities, loot and harm people. A Republican Christian friend sent me these videos and an article debunking and exposing the radical Marxist BLM doctrine because there is also a Christian exodus occurring.

Six months ago, an article appeared in the synagogue newsletter presenting, “Jews of Whiteness and Jews of Color.”  This identity politics terminology upset me, since I have an Ethiopian son.  When people ask me if he is black, I answer, “I never noticed.  He’s a Jew.”  Why is this divisive rhetoric in our community?  What is this self-imposed segregation?  It was so offensive I wrote an article called, “Whiteness, the New Evil.”     ............To Read More....

The big radical Demo machine

August 31, 2020 By Marie Richter

Everyone is trying to read the tea leaves in the changing Democrat campaign plans for Joe Biden’s move on the presidency. It’s a miracle. He’s out of the basement. He will travel to campaign in multiple states, after Labor Day of course. Joe even says he will debate President Trump. The anti-Trump media is feigning excitement.

But wait a minute... Something does not pass the smell test. There are dubious and diabolical shifting winds, churning from the Big Radical Democrat Machine. It’s an impressive albeit clunky piece of machinery. Big and bulky but in a discreet and seductive way. What you can’t see under the front hood is the main component, a frozen paradox that confounds Biden’s maneuvers. This part is right between the situational ethics meters which need to be recalibrated every news and poll cycle. T

he nuts, screws and thug bolts think they make it work. But mostly, on days it rains, the Squad (aka pit crew) claim the driver’s wheel. There is a Pelosi plug that comes in handy when the fumes need to be recirculated, for gastric impact to keep the propaganda cylinders in full swing. Antifa axles are greased with socialism and anger, and money stuffed BLM tires run on trained Marxist treads. The duplicitous fuel is CNN low-grade weasel augmented by MSNBC high-performing solar blinders. The hate horn blares nonstop and the brakes are weak when history and heroes get in the way. The machine also has a racism siren that has no off switch..........

It is mind-altering to reflect on the unfathomable and unimaginable string of pre-election events that have beset our nation, courtesy of the Big Radical Demo Machine. This list goes on and on: defunding and dismantling law enforcement, releasing criminals without bail, and locking up business owners with fines; blatant harassing, intimidating, attacking, and beating people on the street with impunity; defacing and destroying symbols of American heritage, heroes and culture; violating religious statues and places of worship; looting, arson and destruction of local businesses; terrorizing and destabilizing communities; along with promoting anarchy and decay of great U.S. cities both physically and psychologically. All of this was laid on our country by the Big Radical Demo Machine on top of the pandemic lockdown. A double whammy following great gains in our economy, national security, and rooting out international terrorism under President Trump’s leadership....To Read More......

Pernicious incitement to looting being pushed by NPR

August 31, 2020 By Andrew Thomas

The twisted logic of author Vicky Osterweil’s new book, In Defense of Looting, would be laughable, were it not so dangerous. Yet it is being taken seriously by NPR and other media outlets that should know better.

In her interview with NPR featuring no pushback from the taxpayer-funded network’s interviewer, Osterweil says of looting: “You're mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it's just hurting insurance companies on some level. It's just money. It's just property. It's not actually hurting any people.”

Nobody gets hurt.  At least, nobody Ms. Osterweil cares about.

Like the shop owners with no insurance because they can’t afford it. And shop owners whose insurance rates skyrocket or have their coverage dropped because of the increased risk. How about the law-abiding residents of the community, who now have lost their stores and restaurants as well as their jobs when the owners move away and don’t rebuild..........It’s just grassroots-level wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor, per the logic of leftists. But it is the honest middle class and poor who end up suffering the most.  ............The Cause is radical collectivist revolution,.......

There are no principles or ethics that supersede The Cause.....Unfortunately, it is now obvious we have a divided country. Nothing is going to put it back together again. The left is too far radicalized, a fate they imposed on themselves. This radical faction has taken over the Democrat party, the news media, the education systems, and even the major global corporations. One side must completely defeat the other and relegate them to a state of irrelevance.............. To Read More

The Dems opened the crazies' box, now it's too late to shut it

By Brent Smith August 28, 2020

The left figured out decades ago that anger and division were their friends and the only way to prevail against common sense and an individual's self-interest.  For decades the left has been able to just crack open Pandora's radical leftist box. They've successfully been able to allow just enough crazy out while sitting on the lid of the box, thus maintaining control of their lunatic fringe.

The Democrats, with the help of their fellow travelers in the media, have for so long been able to control their crazies by placating them with endless promises and granting them a seat at the Democratic table, even if it is just the kids table.

But like the climate, things change. They must.  In their arrogance, their hubris, the Dems wrongly assumed that because they had the strength to hold the box's lid shut in the past, it will always be this way.............But, as I've written and discussed in the recent past, the crazies have something else in mind. And it seems the Dems and their media confederates have underestimated them and overestimated their own ability to close the box whenever it suits them.............But still, regardless of what old Joe mutters, mere words won't close Pandora's box once it's been opened and evil unleashed..........To Read More....

Cartoon of th Day

Woke Foundations

Some of America’s most august charitable institutions are embracing radical politics.
 

James Piereson Naomi Schaefer Riley August 11, 2020

When the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation switched from supporting the arts and humanities to “prioritizing social justice in all of its grantmaking” this summer, its press release described the shift as a “major strategic evolution” and a “reinvigorated mission.” This doublespeak does not cover up the reality that the foundation’s board has abandoned the intent of its donor. Andrew Mellon, who made his fortune as a banker and an attorney and helped finance some of the largest and longest-lasting corporations in America, donated during his lifetime to the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and Carnegie Mellon University. The Mellon Foundation has long been a leader in support of the arts and humanities across the United States.

The Mellon Foundation is hardly alone in abandoning the vision of its founder. Institutions like the Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur Foundations long ago rejected their founding ideals—particularly their belief in capitalism—to follow the latest fads in academia and elite culture. The legacies of these industry titans now flow to the coffers of Marxist scholars who cite racial, gender, or environmental reasons for dismantling our system of free enterprise. Donor funds now go to advocacy groups looking to undermine the rule of law and eliminate the governmental and nongovernmental institutions responsible for American freedom and prosperity............

What’s happening in the nonprofit sector right now is a tragedy. When this moment in America has passed, and we’re left to deal with burned cities, vandalized buildings, and schools lost in a sea of intellectual nonsense, we could really use a foundation or two devoted to supporting the arts and humanities............To Read More....

Editor's Note:  I recommend subscribing to their e-mail alerts.

A Howard Zinn Pandemic

How the Zinn Education Project is exploiting this crisis and inserting their left-wing propaganda into the education and curricula of even more young American students.

By Mary Grabar April 4, 2020 18 Comments | @ American Greatness

In the midst of a global pandemic, left-wing pundits and politicians spin the blame to comport with the propaganda coming from Communist China, the regime responsible for the virus’s spread in the first place.

And as students are forced to take classes remotely, companies such as National Public Radio, Newsela, and the Zinn Education Project—with the assistance of U.S. taxpayers—are ensuring they get the left-wing version of current events along with their history lessons.

Consider a March 27 email from the Zinn Education Project, the propaganda arm for the late Howard Zinn and his Marxist A People’s History of the United States. It began: “It feels impossible to start any email during this strange and scary time without first acknowledging our shared circumstances: a pandemic, an inept, untrustworthy, racist demagogue in the White House; and the disruption to almost every tiny square of our personal and professional lives.” This, by the way, one day after a two-day campaign that offered free e-books of A Young People’s History of the United States.

The Zinn project’s Soviet-style rhetoric serves to introduce new products for teachers and parents educating children at home. Offered were two lessons on pandemics that made connections between the coronavirus and climate change, and another was “The 1918 Flu: How Information Policing and Nationalist Propaganda Worsened a Pandemic a Century Ago.”
 

The Zinn Education Project also announced online mini-classes led by “people’s historians.” The first one, “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” was conducted by Jeanne Theoharis, a Brooklyn College professor who specializes in “civil rights and Black Power movements and the politics of race and education,” and by Jesse Hagopian, who teaches ethnic studies at Garfield High School in Seattle, where he also serves as co-advisor to the Black Student Union and an editor for Rethinking Schools, the nonprofit that produces and distributes materials for the Zinn Education Project.

 

 

The Zinn project also recommends a number of podcasts as “teaching tools”: The 1619 Project, “Democracy Now!” (a show to the left of MSNBC), Code Switch (which “explores overlapping themes of race, ethnicity, and culture”), Justice in America (on mass incarceration), Reveal (“in-depth stories,” such as on the coronavirus and the environment), Scene on Radio (podcasts calling “into question the United States’ claim to democracy”), School Colors (about “Ocean-Brownsville in Brooklyn where Black and Puerto Rican parents tried to exercise power over their schools”), This Land (how a murder case “opened an investigation into half the land in Oklahoma and the treaty rights of five tribes. . . . the Trump administration’s involvement, the larger right-wing attack on tribal sovereignty. . . .”), and Uncivil (profiles of “everyday people whose current circumstances are inextricably tied to the Civil War and its memory” like “Pa Shed, who escaped slavery, joined the Union Army, [and] led a daring and successful raid with Harriet Tubman”). In the line-up were also two products from publicly funded National Public Radio: Story Corps and Throughline.

 

NPR is not Big Bird, as proponents for funding, even during a national emergency, claim. NPR, through these two programs, is partnering with the Zinn Education Project. It seems to be a well-suited match: StoryCorps “interviews highlight people’s memories of movements and events in U.S. history, like the Stonewall riot, voter suppression, Japanese American internment, racial profiling, immigration, and more.”

 

Thoroughline is a weekly series that “explores the history of stories in the headlines today,” with recent episodes covering “the history of vaccinations in the United States, the biography and legacy of [Iranian terrorist] Qasseim Soleimani, LGBTQ activism before Stonewall, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment and more."

 

The Zinn Education Project is also one of 100 partners of Newsela, a news gathering source that adapts articles to grade level and offers teachers labor-saving “assignment planning,” “writing prompts,” and “built-in assessments”—with multiple choice quiz questions devised and graded by Newsela staff.

 

On March 13, Newsela, which is already reaching “90 percent of all schools in the U.S.” (more than “20 million students and 1.8 million teachers”), offered “complimentary access” to help teachers “embrace distance learning” during school closures. As one headline brags, this “content repository” is “replac[ing] traditional textbooks.” And that content, ostensibly created to be “relevant” and to inspire “empathy,” is produced with the help of a “partner,” the Southern Poverty Law Center, which groups discussions around “identity, diversity, justice, and action.” Recently, Newsela added social-emotional learning (SEL) to their list of products and in their March 31 newsletter advertised “SEL content,” along with Distance Learning Collections and Student Reading Clubs, “to help your students adapt, one day at a time, to at-home learning.”

 

Newsela was founded by Matthew Gross, who today is CEO. Gross, a former Teach for America music teacher, claims he was inspired to found the company when he tried to find content to engage students, and help his son, a struggling reader. But Gross also had some connections: he was “Executive Director of the Regents Research Fund, a privately funded affiliate of the New York State Board of Regents and Education Department that helped lead the implementation of Race to the Top-driven education reforms.”

 

Recall that Race to the Top was the Obama-era stimulus program that dangled prize money before states in 2009 and 2010 in exchange for accepting the yet-to-be-written Common Core standards. This young music teacher, amazingly, “played a leadership role in the development of the Regents Research Fellows, a team of nationally recognized thought leaders.” These “thought leaders” helped lead “the implementation of the Common Core,” and next-generation assessments. The name Newsela combines “news” and “ELA” (English Language Arts). Under Common Core, ELA standards replaced much of the literary reading with nonfiction, and emphasized listening and discussion skills.

 

Last year, Newsela raised $50 million, some of it from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Newsela has more than 100 employees, and the highest paid executive makes $490,000; average executive pay elsewhere is around $215,000.

 

Newsela recently adapted six of the Zinn Education Project’s high school-level lessons for four reading levels—between the third and ninth grades. These are “Columbus Discovered the Taino People, Then Tried to Erase Them,” “Explaining the Summer of 1919” (i.e., the race riots), “What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party—but Should,” “The Other ’68: Black Power During Reconstruction,” “Life in an Internment Camp Drove Yuri Kochiyama’s Commitment to Social Justice,” and “Education Project Aims to Set the Record Straight on Historical Myths,” the last a Washington Post column from 2017 that repeats Zinn talking points (which I have debunked) and describes how local students have used Zinn Education Project lessons for activism.

 

As examples, SEED Public Charter School students “joined hundreds of other students from throughout the Washington area in a show of support” for a protest against the Dakota access pipeline (#NativeNationsRise march to the White House). They also began a campaign to change the name of the Washington Redskins football team.

At Capital City Charter, students began a petition drive to rename Columbus Day “Indigenous Peoples Day” and asked the Washington D.C. city council to hold hearings (as the Zinn Education Project “Abolish Columbus Day” campaign kit instructs). As it turned out, the council and mayor agreed to change the name to Indigenous Peoples Day for 2019 (a vote by Congress is needed to make it permanent). Thanks to Newsela, third-graders can learn about the wonderful things the Zinn Education Project does!

Other Newsela partners include the Smithsonian (which hosted two ZEP teacher “teach-in” workshops last fall), The Undefeated (“premier platform for exploring the intersections of race, sports and culture”), and news outlets (who no doubt are happy to provide content to future consumers), like the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Aljazeera, WGBH (Boston public broadcasting), PRI (Public Radio International), The American Prospect, and various local news gathering organizations. Only two—the Council of Economic Education and the Bill of Rights Institute—present non-social justice materials, but their positions rarely find their way into classroom materials. There are no right-leaning news outlets among Newsela’s more than 100 “partners.”

Newsela is no doubt hoping teachers and administrators get so hooked on their product that once schools are back in session, they will keep their subscriptions (paid by tuition and taxpayers, of course). Newsela will offer yet one more means by which the leftist disinformation that is called “A People’s History” can spread, like a contagion, among America’s youth.