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Daniel Shuchman Richard Bernstein Warned Us About DEI The late New York Times journalist was troubled by university leaders’ weak commitment to free expression and intellectual diversity.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/richard-bernstein-dei-universities-dictatorship-of-virtue

Decades before terms like “virtue signaling,” “anti-racism,” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” became ubiquitous, one author foresaw how they would come to dominate American universities and other elite institutions. Richard Bernstein, an esteemed New York Times journalist whose career spanned assignments from Europe to China, died last month at 80.

Among his books was Dictatorship of Virtue: How Multiculturalism is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, Our Lives (1994, updated 1995). In it, Bernstein identified these concepts in their early stages. He acknowledged the appeal of these ideas, which could sound like aspirations for “a fuller realization of American pluralism.” But over time, he argued, they evolved into an intolerant political program which makes people afraid to say what they truly think. Bernstein predicted that this political movement, which he called the “new consciousness,” would reshape American culture, deepen polarization, and ultimately spark a fierce backlash—one with its own potential perils.

As Bernstein’s reporting makes clear, feckless leadership and rigid quasi-religious ideologies are nothing new at American universities. While his focus in Dictatorship of Virtue is the University of Pennsylvania, Bernstein insists that Penn was “fairly typical” of other elite universities, where “diversity training [had become] an exercise in the advancement of radical political ideology.”

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE CULTURE BY DIANA WEST

If one were to look for a unifying theme in the books and journalism of Diana West, one would quickly discover that West, by turn, is provoked, curious and relentless when it comes to campaigns of deception continuously run in media, politics, culture and academia to influence and manipulate. Such deceptions depend on twisting or, worse, omitting key facts or, almost worse than that, the lazy journalism that is no better than deception’s echo chamber.

In Wake Up and Smell the Culture and other selected essays, West skewers numerous counter-narratives and episodes of “court history,” shining a light on lost context and hidden facts. With characteristic verve, West delves, for example, into the pre-WWII origins of “America First” (no, it was not pro Nazi); examines the very real clues to “Pizzagate” (no, it was not “fake news”); and proves how conservatives to this day have been duped into carrying on Josef Stalin’s assault on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who, as readers of American Betrayal (2013) will recall, is one of West’s historical heroes.

Indeed, in the tradition of The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2019), West newly unspools communist associations in the pasts of Judge Tanya Chutkan and Victoria Nuland. In the spirit of bi-partisan targeting, West also exposes the shocking conservative crack-up, circa 2016, over the candidacy of Donald Trump in the must-see-it-to-believe-it compendium, “The Right’s Anti-Trump Lexicon.” West also turns her sprightly pen to popular culture in a series of magazine essays she wrote on the way to The Death of the Grown-Up (2007). In all, an invaluable collection from one of our most provocative writers.

Robert VerBruggen Will Universities Embrace Class-Based Preferences? A new book makes the case for considering applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/richard-kahlenberg-class-matters-book-universities-affirmative-action

Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, by Richard Kahlenberg (PublicAffairs, 384 pp., $26.99)

Richard Kahlenberg is an old-school liberal, committed to narrowing the gap between rich and poor. He’s also one of the leading critics of racial preferences in college admissions, having served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court case that effectively ended the practice. In his new book, Class Matters, Kahlenberg lays out the connection between these commitments.

Notably, Kahlenberg’s opposition to affirmative action doesn’t seem to be rooted in instinct or ideology. His concerns are practical. First, racial preferences divide the working class, making political solidarity harder to achieve. More significantly, the gatekeepers at selective colleges seem far more invested in race than in class—eliminating racial preferences, he argues, might finally force them to focus on economic disadvantage.

FBI analyst targeted in Kash Patel’s book placed on leave Ken Dilanian

https://www.aol.com/news/fbi-analyst-targeted-kash-patels-180323914.html

The FBI has placed an analyst on leave whose name was on a list of alleged “deep state” actors in a book written by FBI Director Kash Patel, two people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

This was first reported by the New York Times. It’s unclear what reason the FBI gave for the move, and the agency declined to comment.

Brian Auten, a Russia expert, was the employee who was placed on leave. He was also among the FBI employees recommended for internal discipline by former FBI Director Christopher Wray over mistakes made in connection with the 2017 investigation into links between then-candidate Donald Trump and the Russian government.

A later review by the Justice Department inspector general found no evidence that any FBI employee acted out of political bias in the Russia investigation.

Patel included Auten on a list of roughly 60 alleged “deep state” actors in his 2023 book, “Government Gangsters.” Patel denounced the FBI analyst by name, writing: “The fact that Auten was not fired from the FBI and prosecuted for his part in the Russia Gate conspiracy is a national embarrassment.”

Patel also accused Auten of downplaying information found on the laptop of former President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.

The FBI director has disputed that the list in his book is an enemies list.

Patel has his own links to the 2017 investigation into ties between President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government.

Revisiting Revisionism Diana West

https://dianawest.substack.com/p/revisiting-revisionism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

There was always something serendipitous if not downright miraculous in the fact that Ronald Radosh failed to receive his review copy of American Betrayal in a timely fashion. He asked for one early enough to have been out of the box with his “take-down” as the book came out in the spring of 2013; however, despite St. Martin’s and the US Mail’s best efforts, he didn’t get his book (and was too cheap to buy one, thank goodness!) until the summer. That gave the book a little over two months to be read and reviewed and talked about, and me plenty of time do a number of interviews and appearances and write some articles before the campaign of lies began. (Newcomers can catch up on this shocking history in The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners.)

So, in the history of American Betrayal, there is a period that predates the the Disinformation Campaign which began in earnest on August 7, 2013 with “McCarthy on Steroids” at Frontpage magazine.

There is a three-hour-interview I did with Brooks Agnew from this early period. It was on the night of June 2, 2013 when the book was barely a week old. That show came to mind recently, what with all the talk of revisionism and Churchill and Hitler and Joe Rogan and Darryl Cooper, and, now, Douglas Murray and the “experts,” including Andrew Roberts. I had thought the audio was lost but I find that some very dear person unknown to me uploaded the interview in hour-long segments to Youtube (links below). For added context, I will close with an email I received after the interview, as quoted in a post published at my dear old “cancelled” website, dianawest.net in which I linked to the Brooks Agnew interview.

“Communism, China & Senator Cotton’s New Book” Sydney Williams

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“I have seen the future, and it works” – words written by Lincoln Steffens following a visit to the newly formed Soviet Union in 1918. Last year, while in Shanghai for a store opening, Apple CEO Tim Cook was obsequious in his praise of China: “I think China is really opening up…it’s so vibrant and so dynamic.”

For more than a hundred years many, supposedly perceptive Western geopolitical analysts, journalists and business leaders, have chosen to ignore the evil that is Communism. In his 1919 book, Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed, scion of a wealthy Oregon family, wrote sympathetically of the Russian Revolution that he had witnessed in Petrograd. Warren Beatty turned the book into a 1981 film, Reds, nominated for an Academy Award. In 1937, after spending months with Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, American journalist Edgar Snow wrote Red Star Over China, a glowing portrait of life in Communist areas. He contrasted his experience with Mao and his Communist followers with his depiction of the gloom and corruption of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang’s government, which relocated to Taiwan in 1949.

For Americans, Communism has never approached the revulsion felt for Nazism, yet the similarities are far greater than their differences. In the February 5, 2018 issue of The New York Review of Books, Ian Johnson responded to an earlier article by Timothy Snyder, “Who Killed More, Hitler or Stalin?” Johnson wrote that the question was slightly off: “…it should have included a third tyrant of the 20th Century, Chairman Mao. And not just that, but that Mao should have been the hands-down winner, with his ledger easily trumping the European dictators’.” According to his research, Stalin killed somewhere between 6 and 9 million people, Hitler between 11 and 12 million, and Mao between 35 and 45 million, most during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Nazism and Communism both practice(d) genocide, are (were) authoritarian, and have (had) no regard for individual rights or human life.

Antisemitism: History & Myth An important new masterpiece from Robert Spencer. by Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/antisemitism-history-myth/

One would have thought that, in the wake of the barbaric massacre of over 1200 Israelis on October 7, 2023 by Hamas savages, not to mention the ongoing hostage crisis, that there would have been a worldwide outpouring of sympathy for the victims and condemnation of the terror organization’s war crimes. If so, one would be horribly wrong. Instead, the world has witnessed a tsunami of support for Hamas and a virulent hatred for the kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered Jews.

What explains this surge of Jew-hatred, manifested in violent demonstrations on the campuses of prestigious universities and in the streets of major Western cities worldwide? What are the roots of this murderous bigotry and how has it been sustained over the course of millennia? Why do demonstrably false blood libels and conspiracy theories – such as fiendish Jews kidnapping Christian children for macabre rituals, or a secret network of Jews running the world – continue to thrive? What is the truth about Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

To answer these questions and more, one cannot do better than to pick up a copy of the latest book from Freedom Center Shillman Fellow and Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer – Antisemitism: History & Myth. Of this book, no less an authority on the subject than Dennis Prager has said, “I do not believe a more important book on anti-Semitism has ever been written.” Considering what we have seen since the October 7 attacks, Prager could have added that a timelier book on antisemitism has never been written, as well.

An EdTech Tragedy:A groundbreaking UNESCO book on the damage wrought by ed-tech during COVID school closures around the globe Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/edtech-tragedy?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In The Anxious Generation, we focused on the emergence of the adolescent mental health crisis that began in the early 2010s. However, since the book’s publication one year ago, we have learned even more about worrisome trends in education that closely mirror those in mental health: after decades of stability or gradual improvement, test scores in the U.S. and around the world began declining notably in the 2010s.

While widespread attention to declining test scores intensified during and after the COVID-19 pandemic—with many experts attributing the downturn primarily to COVID restrictions and the rapid movement to full remote learning—the declines actually began much earlier. Evidence from The National Assessment of Student Progress (NAEP) clearly illustrates this earlier decline. As shown in Figure 1, after decades of slow and steady gains, American students started to give back those gains after 2012, particularly among students who were already performing at lower levels.

But as with the mental health crisis, it wasn’t just an American thing. In December 2023, Derek Thompson wrote an essay in The Atlantic titled, It Sure Looks Like Phones Are Making Students Dumber.

Here’s a figure from that essay (re-graphed by us), showing that the decline is happening across the dozens of countries that participate in PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). As with the mental health declines, these decline started after 2012, not 2020.

What could cause such an international decline in learning? One plausible explanation is the arrival of the phone-based childhood, which, as we showed, arrived between 2010 and 2015. However, there is a related hypothesis that is more proximal to the educational decline: the sudden appearance of a laptop or tablet on every student’s desk. To be clear, the intentions here were good. In 2010, for example, the U.S. Department of Education recommended that schools provide every student with “at least one Internet access device…Only with 24/7 access to the Internet via devices and technology-based software and resources can we achieve the kind of engagement, student-centered learning, and assessments that can improve learning in the ways this plan proposes.” But the outcome seems to be bad for most students—especially students who were already struggling.

Let’s Fix Education: Episode 193, “Big Picture Thinking” Celebrating the work of Linda Goudsmit by Bruce Deitrick Price

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28433/let-fix-education-episode-193-big-picture-thinking

Pundicity page: goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com

BIG PICTURE THINKING

I want to celebrate the work of Linda Goudsmit. She is that rare miracle today, a big thinker. Her topic is understanding life in the 21st-century, the forces that are dragging it down, and how we can make it better.

The academic world forces scholars into small niches. They must all be specialists of something in particular. So, you won’t find big thinking there. I think we need more big thinking. Linda Goudsmit shows, in clear candid prose, what that looks like.

Knowledge-phobia, that’s the disease so prevalent in our world today. Apparently, the public schools will have to call 911 if any students start to learn anything. Oh, the horror. I think we need more knowledge. From K onward.

Some of the world is just lazy. Another big part of the world is constantly propagandizing. No matter what they pretend to care about, they are always pushing the same message. I think we need less propaganda, more love of Truth.

A few years back, I sent an email to Linda Goudsmit asking her what is the most important theme in her work. She said freedom. I had already decided that was the single word I would pick for that question. We had never discussed philosophy but somehow knew that if you don’t have freedom, you don’t really have much else.

Myself, I am a rampant generalist. Pretty much all my life I’ve been a novelist, painter, poet, art director, and now a passionate voice for education reform. But compared to Linda Goudsmit, I am stuck in a rut. So I readily appreciate her range and the tremendous amount of work that goes into studying all the facets she studies.

Now Linda Goudsmit deserves some sort of Oscar. Her most recent book is titled Space Is No Longer The Final Frontier — Reality Is. There are more than 370 pages, in 45 chapters. You will find a tremendous range with chapter titles such as:

Nora Kenney Faith in the Age of AI Ross Douthat’s book offers modern readers reason to believe.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/believe-why-everyone-should-be-religious-ross-douthat-review

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, by Ross Douthat (Zondervan, 240 pp., $26.99)

Religious belief can feel like the last refuge from pervasive technology. When New York Times columnist Ross Douthat called our society “decadent” in 2020, the threat of such technologies seemed comparatively distant. Innovation appeared stagnant, and our most pressing crises were updated versions of age-old conflicts—battles over “identity,” a scolding progressive moralism, and a plague.

Just five years later, the landscape has shifted. Drone warfare, cyborg defense experiments, and ChatGPT are among the signs of rapid technological acceleration. These developments make religious faith feel more urgent—not as a reactionary impulse, but as a steadying force. “Can religion save us from artificial intelligence?” asked a 2023 Los Angeles Times piece. Perhaps—but that religion would need to be something solid and enduring, not “moralistic therapeutic deism,” tribal wokeism on the left, or neo-paganism on the right.

Enter Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. His new book doesn’t frame itself as a response to technological advances, but in the wake of his The Decadent Society and developments since, it’s easy to read it that way.