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February 2017

College to Host Workshop on Anti-Bias Training for Toddlers Apparently there are a bunch of racists and sexist tots out there who need to be educated. By Katherine Timpf

Evergreen State College is planning to host a workshop “to help family members interested in anti-bias education for children ages 3-6.”

The program, called “A is for Anti-Bias,” is scheduled for Feb. 17, according to a description of the event on the school’s official website.

Now, my first thought when I heard this was to wonder whether or not there are actually a bunch of racist, sexist toddlers running around out there that I’ve been unaware of who are inspiring this sort of thing. I mean, I’ve always thought that toddlers were more into things like The Wiggles, temper tantrums, and cookies than white supremacy.

An article in Campus Reform seemed to consider the purpose of the workshop to be to help prevent toddlers from learning racism before it was too late rather than to rehabilitate toddlers who are currently active Nazis, and it’s not clear from the event description itself what exactly the reasoning is.

In any case, I’m not exactly convinced that this is going to do anyone any good, no matter what the aim is. After all, a recent study conducted by researchers from several major universities found that the lessons taught during implicit-bias trainings have very little to do with how people actually act. If these kinds of trainings aren’t doing adults any good, are they really going to have any kind of impact on a human who is still trying to learn how to stick a straw in a Capri Sun juice by himself?

The workshop is sponsored by Children’s Center.

The Federalist Paper: The Publication Neil Gorsuch Helped Found at Columbia Gorsuch has been a sensible voice for conservatism in liberal circles since his college years.By D. Keith Mano

Editor’s Note: We honor our late former colleague, D. Keith Mano, by sharing over the next weeks several of his acclaimed columns, which were published in National Review every fortnight from 1972 to 1989. The following piece was first published in the February 13, 1987, issue, under the headline, “The Federalist Paper​.”

You can still get a good education at Columbia – yes, and Soviet fishing trawlers still do fish. Nonetheless, in that maison tolérée of academic leftism, where political truth is found torso-murdered daily, one student publication had a shocking headline – Divest now in the USSR. This at Columbia, where all right-brain functions are lobotomized during freshman week: first major university to divest from South Africa. They call that one student publication The Federalist Paper (after Columbia alumni Hamilton and Jay) and Vol. I, No. I came out last October. Came out written in elegant, witty, temperate diction, with a fine sense of place and moral errand. FP’s molto is Veritas Non Erubiscit (Truth Doesn’t Blush). And, to quote the first Statement of Purpose, “it will not be shouted down.”

These seven or eight young men who are reinventing conservatism at 116th Street and Broadway make up an extraordinary and diverse group. Brilliant, as you might suppose. But also mature and remarkably poised. They hold their audience in high and affectionate regard—that poor Columbia student intellectually lung-shot and left for dead by campus radicalism. Moreover, though their mean class level is sophomore-junior, they have considerable journalistic experience. Neil Gorsuch, Dean Pride, and A. Lawrence Levy were all associate editors of another conservative publication, The Morningside Review. “The Review.” Gorsuch said, “is more of a magazine. It addresses national and international issues, and it simply isn’t read on campus. What we’ve done here is try to establish something that has a broader base of interest. More people read The Federalist than ever read The Morningside Review.”

Readership matters, of course—so much so that no one on the FP staff will admit to being conservative. This is in part, an honest distancing from Reaganism, Republicanism, Falwell, whatever. In part, too, it is careful policy. “If our first issue had been far right, we might’ve been written off before we got started,” board member P. T. Waters thought. “We try to show that you can be liberal as hell, but still disagree with all those crazy knee-jerk liberals out there.” And Levy took that up: “We’re just trying to be an alternative. At Columbia that usually means you’re right-wing or moderate-to-right, because the mainstream is so far left.” And yet issues one and two belong in a liberal phobia clinic. The Promise of SDI, for instance. Or The ANC is not the only solution. Plus an incisive repudiation of mandatory gay seminars for freshmen. Plus damning information about the Reverend William Starr, leftist Episcopal double agent on campus. Plus a vivid Month in Review short-take section, which imitates NR up front pretty consciously. Like so:

CAPITALISM ON THE MOVE

During recent Warsaw Pact maneuvers in Czechoslovakia, authorities discovered that four Soviet soldiers traded their tank to a tavern owner for 24 bottles of vodka, seven pounds of herring, and some pickles. The owner dismantled the lank and sold the pieces to a metal-recycling center.

At Columbia they give you an equivalency diploma for that kind of reportage. Equivalent to ostracism.

Problems of self-definition attend. “We’ve basically been sitting back,” Gorsuch admitted, “and reflecting on what the Left has said and using our month to review it. They choose the issues—South Africa, military recruitment on campus, pornography, SDI. But now I think we have to come out with something.” Waters concurred: “We’d like to change the debate, not just reflect it.” That will be more difficult. These are sharp and idiosyncratic minds from all over America: D.C, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. The general atmosphere at FP might be characterized as center to right with a libertarian strain. From that composition, manifestos don’t quickly arise. “Reason why we can be so diverse.” said Gorsuch, “is that there is so much room to the right. It’s not a matter of having to be a conservative 10 be identified with the Right, it’s a matter of being a thinking man or woman.”

American Security and Islamic Reform The government must vet aliens for sharia-supremacist ideology. By Andrew C. McCarthy

‘Do you think Islam needs reform?”

Wouldn’t it be interesting, wouldn’t it get us to the crux of the immigration debate, if our best news anchors — I’m looking at you, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier — would put that question to every major politician in Washington?

Instead, the press is asking not just the wrong question but one that utterly misses the point, namely: “How many terrorist attacks have been committed by immigrants from this handful of Muslim-majority countries?” It is the same wrong question posed by the imperious federal judge in Seattle who suspended President Trump’s temporary travel ban on aliens from those countries — seven of them. It is the same wrong question that animated the incorrigible Ninth Circuit appeals court in upholding this suspension — and intimating along the way that Trump, and by implication all who fear for the future of our country, are anti-Muslim bigots crusading against religious liberty (the Ninth Circuit being notoriously selective when it comes to protecting religious traditions).

Does the Trump administration realize it’s the wrong question? I wonder. Instead of attacking the question’s premise, the administration undertakes to answer it. It seems not to grasp that the security argument is not advanced, much less won, by compiling a list of terrorist plots.

Let’s try this again.

Islam does need reform. This is critical to our national security for two reasons that bear directly on the question of which aliens should, and which should not, be allowed into our country.

First, reform is essential because the broader Islamic religion includes a significant subset of Muslims who adhere to an anti-American totalitarian political ideology that demands implementation of sharia — Islamic law. This ideology and the repressive legal code on which it rests are not religion. We are not talking about the undeniably theological tenets of Islam (e.g., the oneness of Allah, the acceptance of Mohamed as the final prophet, and the Koran as Allah’s revelation). We are talking about a framework for the political organization of the state, and about the implementation of a legal corpus that is blatantly discriminatory, hostile to liberty, and — in its prescriptions of crime and punishment — cruel.

The Ninth Circuit’s Power Grab By The Editors

The Ninth Circuit’s decision against President Trump’s immigration order is worse than wrong. It is dangerous.

To review, Trump issued an executive order blocking entry by refugees and aliens from seven Muslim-majority countries. The travel restriction is to be short-lived: a period of months while better vetting procedures are developed. The administration, moreover, did not pluck the seven countries from its allegedly anti-Muslim imagination. They were cited in a statute enacted by Congress and signed by President Obama, based on the richly supported conclusion that these countries — Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan — are riven by anti-American jihadism, besides having governments that are either non-functional or implacably hostile to the U.S., rendering any efforts to screen their citizens uniquely difficult.

A federal judge in Seattle, James Robart, issued a temporary restraining order against the travel ban at the behest of two states, Washington and Minnesota, run by Democratic governors. Now, the Ninth Circuit has upheld this single, unelected jurist’s usurpation of the power to make American national-security policy.

According to the three-judge panel, even illegal aliens, to say nothing of aliens holding non-immigrant visas or permanent-resident status, have due-process rights against government actions to protect Americans from foreign threats. Therefore, the president and Congress (i.e., the branches of government constitutionally responsible for national security) may not take such actions unless and until the judiciary (the branch with no such responsibility) has approved those actions.

That aliens are not citizens and have no constitutional right to come to the United States is apparently superseded by their newfangled “right” to be welcomed into the United States courts. And even if they are not here already, even if they remain in the far reaches of the globe, this alien “right” may be asserted by state governments. The states’ interest in having foreign students and scholars at their public universities, we are told, outweighs the public’s interest in excluding aliens who may be terrorists, law-breakers, public charges, or hostile to our Constitution and culture.

The unanimous ruling is the type of lunacy with which the Ninth Circuit has become synonymous. It is also the inevitable result of a turn-of-the-century judicial power grab in the realm of national security.