RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/texas-bars-protest-civics-and-crt/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

The Texas legislature has just passed House Bill 3979, a landmark education bill. It is the first law in the country barring not only the core concepts of Critical Race Theory (CRT) from K–12 schools, but “protest civics” as well. The practice of protest civics — mandatory student protests and lobbying after school (invariably for leftist causes) — is every bit as much a threat to K–12 schools as CRT. Even if every state legislature in the country were to bar CRT, the federal civics bills being considered right now in Congress could still force leftist indoctrination on the states via protest civics. That is why the passage of Texas H.B. 3979 is so important.

The momentum coming out of Texas is significant. Already, Ohio representative Don Jones has introduced a bill broadly similar to what just passed in Texas. Other states are considering legislation that also take on both protest civics and CRT. We may soon see a wave of expanded K–12 protections sweep over the states. That means the news out of Texas — and now Ohio as well — is very good.

That said, the Texas bill emerged from its legislative struggle a bit raggedy. Democrats fought the measure tooth and nail. While they failed to undo the protections against protest civics and CRT, Democrats did manage to weigh the bill down with a long, scattershot list of readings that inappropriately forces a detailed and highly debatable curriculum onto local districts. Quite apart from arguments about the readings themselves, states should not dictate curriculum to districts at this level of specificity. Democrats also managed to block a number of important technical fixes to the bill.

None of this is prohibitive. Governor Abbott should certainly sign H.B. 3979. Abbott would be well-advised, however, to pare down the vastly over-extended list of required readings and make some additional technical fixes during September’s special session.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/banning-critical-race-theory-11622670206?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

An emerging reality of the current American presidency is that any normalcy Joe Biden may have promised was entirely fake.

The latest exhibit is the first anniversary of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis occurring as about six states are enacting or planning restrictions on teaching what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota are calling “critical race theory.”

This was the sort of hyper-polarization Mr. Biden was supposed to arbitrate. Instead, he marches leftward, covering his trail with pixie-dust rhetoric.

As always, it defaults to the media to substitute its own explanations for the country’s social tension. Two reporters for the New York Times connected the dots in a piece this week: “Republicans’ attacks on critical race theory are in sync with the party’s broad strategy to run on culture-war issues in the 2022 midterm elections.” Little wonder so many say they are tuning out politics and the media. The reductionism is hopeless.

This new divide is a textbook example of the Founding Fathers’ (if one may still cite them) fears about destructive political factions. “By a faction,” James Madison wrote in his now constantly cited Federalist No. 10, he meant citizens “who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens” (emphasis added). We are there.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/ami-loose-video-duke-university-north-carolina-frontpage-editors/

Filmmaker Ami Horowitz is back with another “Ami on the Loose” video exposé. This time he catches a shameful, major antisemitism conference on film! Check out the short video below:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/rutgers-university-surrenders-anti-semitic-pro-joseph-klein/

Anti-Semitic attacks against Jews in the United States have surged since the latest war between Israel and Palestinian terrorists in Gaza erupted last month. People of good will, regardless of their religion, ethnicity, or background, would condemn such hate crimes because they represent a dark blot on our common humanity. New Jersey’s Rutgers University-New Brunswick did just that at first and condemned anti-Semitism – the world’s oldest continuing form of bigotry. But in a blink of the eye Rutgers’ high-level administrators bowed to pressure from the anti-Semitic Rutgers Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and apologized for having done the right thing. We are living in a sick society when a major public university cowers to anti-Semites and walks back its clear condemnation of anti-Semitism that has exploded to the surface once again.

On May 26th, the chancellor of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Christopher J. Molloy, and the provost, Francine Conway, released a statement declaring, “We are saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States.” The statement condemned other forms of bigotry as well, but its focus on anti-Semitism enraged the hate-filled Rutgers branch of the Students for Justice in Palestine. They demanded an apology from the university’s administration for daring to express compassion and concern for Jews being harassed – even beaten – simply because they are Jews. It is no surprise that SJP is serving as the propaganda arm on U.S. campuses for both the Hamas terrorists and the pro-Palestinian mobs who are largely responsible for the most recent hate crimes against Jews in the United States.

Indeed, caravans of pro-Palestinians launched unprovoked attacks on Jews in New York City, Los Angeles, and places in between. The Jew-haters have been out in force in New Brunswick where the Rutgers campus that Chancellor Molloy and Provost Conway represent is located. Rutgers Hillel has reported that ”in New Brunswick in recent weeks, identifiably Jewish students have been verbally assaulted” and that some of them have had their car tires slashed. AEPi House, a Jewish fraternity, had been previously vandalized on Holocaust Memorial Day.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/muslim-prof-claims-islamic-scholars-have-placed-andrew-harrod/

Islamic scholars historically have placed “too much emphasis on jihad as basically a violent” rather than nonviolent doctrine, stated Mount Holyoke College international relations professor Sohail Hashmi in an April 11 webinar. Hosted by the Muslim group Critical Connections in Hashmi’s Pioneer Valley region of Massachusetts, his lucid lecture on “Jihad vs Just War: A Comparative Analysis” provided detailed, disturbing insight into Islamic doctrines of jihad warfare.

As in a previously analyzed webinar, Critical Connections founder Mehlaqa Samdani moderated and worried in her introduction about “Islamophobic groups” dominating discussion of hot-button issues like jihad. Her “Islamophobia” reference ironically recalled the religiously repressive nature of the terrorism-sponsoring Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the home of her co-moderator, Karachi University student Rutaba Tariq. She represented Pakistan’s branch of the Model Organization of Islamic Cooperation (MOIC), a student affiliate of the OIC, whose fifty-seven member states (including “Palestine”) have long sought to ban “Islamophobic” criticism of Islam worldwide. While Hashmi took no critical notice of the OIC, she encouraged viewers to join MOIC; additionally, Georgetown University professor John L. Esposito, an apologist for these efforts and all things Islamist, made a brief cameo appearance.

Yet Hashmi’s presentation did not deny that serious concerns about jihad are well-founded, not irrational, even as he claimed that Christian just war and Islamic jihad doctrines are “extremely alike.” He argued that Jesus’ teachings in the New Testament are “very heavily biased in the pacifist direction,” such that Christian thinkers developed just war theory largely on the basis of self-defense in natural law. More disturbingly, although “jihad is a very broad concept,” which “means simply to struggle,” in the eighth-ninth centuries Islam’s “classical jurists spent most of their time talking about what we could call an expansionist or an offensive jihad.”

This was a “jihad to expand the Islamic empire, to expand the realm of Dar al-Islam,” Hashmi noted. The “fundamental aspect of Dar al-Islam is that this is the territory where Islamic law is supreme” and “Muslims are not necessarily the majority.” Thus Muslim-conquered areas like Mesopotamia and Egypt “remained primarily non-Muslim for centuries,” he explained.

This “imperialist jihad” in the classical view, Hashmi explained, would supposedly benefit non-Muslim “benighted peoples.” “Once non-Muslims had lived under the benefits of this divine law, of this Islamic law, they would of their own accord realize the merits of Islam, the religion, and they would of their own accord, of their own free will, convert to Islam,” he said. He later specified how the modern Islamic Republic of Iran’s constitution advocates the “spread of an Islamic community of nations.”

https://www.jns.org/opinion/anti-semitism-at-rutgers-isnt-all-academic/

(June 1, 2021 / JNS) It’s a little hard to combat a phenomenon by kowtowing to its promoters, but leave it to academia to make a feeble attempt at doing so. Having spent the past few decades favoring sophistry over the imparting of knowledge, American institutions of higher learning are well-versed in double-speak.
Imagine their surprise, then, when even their best efforts at intellectual manipulation are met with derision by the very “woke” bullies whom they aim to please. Take the latest brouhaha at New Jersey-based Rutgers University as a case in point.

It all began on May 26, when the school’s chancellor, Christopher Molloy, and its provost, Francine Conway, issued a joint statement “against acts of anti-Semitism.”
In an e-mail addressed to the “Rutgers-New Brunswick Community,” Molloy and Conway wrote: “We are saddened by and greatly concerned about the sharp rise in hostile sentiments and anti-Semitic violence in the United States. Recent incidents of hate directed toward Jewish members of our community again remind us of what history has to teach us. Tragically, in the last century alone, acts of prejudice and hatred left unaddressed have served as the foundation for many atrocities against targeted groups around the world.”
Taking care to eliminate the particularity of anti-Semitism—a no-no in intersectional circles that consider the Jews to be born of “white privilege”—the two Rutgers honchos hastily turned their attention to George Floyd. His “murder” last year, they asserted, “brought into sharp focus the racial injustices that continue to plague our country, and over the past year there has [sic] been attacks on our Asian American Pacific Islander citizens, the spaces of Indigenous peoples defiled, and targeted oppression and other assaults against Hindus and Muslims.”
Patting themselves on the back for having paid required homage to any and all victims of “racial injustices,” they didn’t bother with something as banal as proofreading, but at least felt safe enough to return to their original subject.
“Although it has been nearly two decades since the U.S. Congress approved the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act, the upward trend of anti-Semitism continues,” they stated. This was right before going on to equate the Jewish state with the terrorists bent on its annihilation.
“We have also been witnesses to the increasing violence between Israeli forces and Hamas in the Middle East leading to the deaths of children and adults and mass displacement of citizens in the Gaza region and the loss of lives in Israel,” they wrote.
They continued by mentioning the general, rather than specific, “death, destruction and ethnic strife” caused by the “ravages of the pandemic and proliferation of global conflict,” boasting that “the university stands as a beacon of hope for our community … a model for institutions that respect and value the dignity of every human being.”
You get the gist, which is that the Rutgers administration wanted to stress its denunciation of “acts of hate and prejudice against members of the Jewish community and any other targeted and oppressed groups on our campus and in our community.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/05/29/moms-learn-lengths-a-wa-school-board-will-go-to-silence-complaints-on-crt-and-masks-youll-want-to-sit-down-for-this-n1450563

It’s hard to single out the most absurd part of the story of what happened to three moms who signed up to speak about critical race theory (CRT) and mask mandates at the school board meeting in a small southwest Washington town.

Was it when board members picked on one of the parents and then blamed a “disruption” on her?

Was it when the parents were locked out of the meeting?

Or was it when the cops were called?

It’s such a target-rich environment of outrage that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s give it a go.

The three moms, Tatyana Stepanyuk, Patricia Bellamy and Melissa Mcilwain, signed up to speak at the Washougal, Wash., school board meeting on May 11. The town sits on the Columbia River just across from Portland.

The three signed up to address mask mandates at the schools and critical race theory being added to the curriculum under orders from Governor Jay Inslee.

But they never got to speak.

The sparsely attended in-person meeting, which was also broadcast online, barely got off the ground before the school superintendent and her underling insisted that the one person in the room without a mask should put one on. Stepanyuk invoked the governor’s words that she wasn’t required to wear one due to medical and religious exemptions. She noted that everyone else had a mask on so they were protected, no problem. Yet, the masked officials spent their valuable meeting time pedantically explaining to the woman how she needed to comply. But for the actions of Superintendent Mary Templeton and the board disrupting the meeting it would have progressed as normal. But that was not to be. Instead their superintendent and board caused a cluster storm of reaction from which the district may not soon recover.

Stepanyuk’s friends, Bellamy and Mcilwain, wore masks but told the superintendent that they had no problem with her not wearing one, assuming that transmitting the COVID virus was the school official’s concern.

It wasn’t.

For more than 20 minutes, the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and a board member took turns standing over the woman and lecturing her. Stepanyuk took video of the last eight minutes of the lecture, calmly recited the law, and remarked about how she was sorry that these educators hadn’t educated themselves about the mask law.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/05/another_teacher_stands_up_against_wokeness_in_louisiana.html

The Family Research Council (FRC) published an article, “Unequally Woked: One Teacher’s Stand to Stop the Left” that warns there is a stealth woke indoctrination process hidden within a BrainPOP animated teaching aid intended for K–12 schools.  However, the hundreds of BrainPOP video titles on their webpage BrainPOP that I quickly scanned appeared mostly harmless.  The one sample video that was available last Friday for viewing explained the origins of Memorial Day.  It was in a short, simplistically animated format similar to those produced by PragerU.  I found it both accurate and informative.

However, Jonathan Koeppel, a young, courageous teacher in the Saint Tammany Parish school district in Louisiana, where the use of BrainPOP videos had been approved, “knew something in his classrooms was wrong — and if he didn’t say anything, he worried no one else would.”  “When I found out that kids in my community were being exposed to this wokeism — woke curriculum and woke education — I said somebody needs to expose it.  Somebody needs to let the public know what’s going on,” he explained.  “I just happened to be the guy to do it.”

According to the FRC article, “When Jonathan stood up in the school board meeting last month, his goal was to warn local parents.  Thanks to his powerful message that caught fire online and was picked up by Fox News and Newsmax, he said a lot more.  “A man cannot menstruate,” he argued when it was his turn for public comment.  “A man cannot lactate and breastfeed a child.  You cannot give birth if you’re a man.  If you want to be an adult and do whatever you want with your life, I’m okay with that.  Don’t push this ideology on children.  I’m not going to work in a district that’s okay with that[.] … Parents are already pulling their kids out of public school[.] …  Their going online is going to increase as this liberal ideology comes into our schools.  This isn’t a political indoctrination camp, okay?  It’s public education.  We want to teach education, not left-wing ideas that aren’t backed up by facts or science.”

The Biden administration is pushing divisive Critical Race Theory ideology, the lies in the discredited 1619 Project, and gender madness to indoctrinate our school kids in wokeness nationwide, so it should be no surprise that an otherwise fine resource like BrainPOP would be used to assist with the fundamental transformation process.  I fear that thanks to the radical left’s domination of our MSM, Hollywood, universities and even Big Business, most newly minted educators (including many school board members) are likely to have been fully indoctrinated with woke ideology and eager to share it.  Therefore, it will be difficult to protect our kids from exposure.  However, it will be impossible to stop the process if parents or courageous teachers like Jonathan Koeppel remain silent despite knowing there will be a price to pay in our cancel culture.

One recent example of the sort of educator resulting from the left’s indoctrination process is clearly demonstrated here.  This young white female Oregon teacher put it like this to her colleagues: 

If you’re not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you’re making yourself obsolete. … Our district is only getting browner and browner [with respect to students]. … Obviously, you can’t change your melanin, all right? But you can change your mind so that you can actually function in a district that is full of BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] children. So if you’re being resistant, I understand that. But you’re gonna have to eventually come to the light.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/should-public-schools-ban-critical?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxNDc5

If you want to understand how Critical Race Theory functions you can’t do much better than watching this recently leaked clip of a teachers’ meeting in Portland, Oregon. Here, an eighth grade teacher (pronouns: “she, her, we and us”) tells her colleagues that “you can’t change your melanin, alright, but you can change your mind.” She compares teachers that don’t adopt “antiracism” to to sex offenders and warns them: “If you’re going to keep with those old views of colonialism it’s going to lead to being fired.”

Is it fair to call this an example of Critical Race Theory? Academics would say absolutely not. They will point out that CRT is, exactly as the name suggests, a theory — one developed in the 1970s by legal scholars to expose the way racism was baked into the structures and systems of American life. 

But the reason that moms and dads across the country are discussing Critical Race Theory at their dinner tables is not because they’ve all just discovered critical theorists like Derrick Bell. It’s because that academic idea — or worldview, really — has captured schools across the country. It’s because it is affecting what their children are taught about America and about themselves.

If you’re new here — welcome! — let me catch you up on a few flashpoints that will give you a sense of what I mean:

An elementary school in Cupertino, California, instructed third graders to rank themselves based on their power and their privilege. 

The San Diego Unified School District told white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murdering” black children. 

California’s Department of Education is proposing to eliminate opportunities for accelerated math in the name of “equity.” That means discouraging algebra for eighth graders and calculus for high schoolers. 

Most recently, the University of California system decided to scrap the SAT and the ACT on the argument that the tests themselves are biased against low-income applicants of color.

Those are just a handful of examples from California, where I’m currently living. I could pull similar headlines from other public school systems in other states. And this is to say nothing of the country’s private schools: The more elite the school, the more in thrall they are to this ideology, for reasons I explain in depth here.

If you are reading this, I suspect you are disturbed by an ideology that segregates people by race; that insists on a racial hierarchy in which entire racial groups are monolithically good or bad; that does away with race-blind tests in the name of progress; and that insists that any inequality of outcome is evidence of systemic discrimination.

Those are bad ideas at odds with our most foundational American values. On Friday, Andrew Sullivan published an essay arguing that CRT removes the “bedrock of liberalism.” I agree.

The question is: What should be done about it?