RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/san-francisco-votes-rename-schools-named-founding-sara-dogan/

In the latest excess of radical left cancel culture, the San Francisco School Board has voted to rename 44 public schools after a biased and historically inaccurate report judged their namesakes to be unworthy of the honor.

Famous Americans whose names are to be stricken from the schools include Founding Fathers George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as well as less obvious targets such as California Senator Dianne Feinstein, a radical Democrat. Feinstein’s crime? While mayor of San Francisco in 1984, she replaced a Confederate Flag which stood as part of a larger display outside City Hall, after it was vandalized and removed by activists. The display featured 18 flags and was intended to showcase the stages of America’s history. 

So flagrantly politicized were the renaming decisions, that they sparked the furor of Democratic activist group, Families for San Francisco, which denounced the school board’s decision-making process in a lengthy report. 

Families for San Francisco condemned the School Names Advisory Committee which selected the 44 schools to be renamed, noting that “The Committee was not guided or informed by professional historians or any other parties with the historical expertise required for the Committee to do its work” and  “As a result…The Guiding Principles used by the Committee was a ‘Just One Thing’ test, where a historical figure was to be removed from a school name on the basis of just a single incident from a list of criteria.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/high-tech-lynching-depaul-joseph-klein/

The Left’s thought police at DePaul University in Chicago have come after Dr. Jason D. Hill, a tenured professor of philosophy and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The leftwing fascists treat every expression of views they don’t like on a controversial issue as evidence of bigotry against one or another so-called “oppressed” minority. The censors demand conformity or punishment for dissenting views.

In Dr. Hill’s case, one of his former students, Grace Gallant, charged that he is “violently transphobic.” Gallant claimed the professor “said that we would be discussing ‘if a biological man could ever be a woman.’” Gallant complained that this alleged remark Dr. Hill is accused of making was “not just offensive and hurtful, but it’s so archaic, useless and immature to have these kinds of conversations in class.”

DePaul’s student-run school newspaper, The DePaulia, ran a feature article hyping Gallant’s accusation, which Professor Hill has categorically denied. “The accusations made by [a student] against me… are inaccurate. I do not have a transphobic bone in my body,” Professor Hill said.

Dr. Hill’s accuser would like to see Professor Hill cancelled. “I’m shocked that [Hill] still has a platform at DePaul,” Gallant said, as quoted by the school newspaper. “It’s one thing to be open to all views, which I do value. But when the view is challenging the validity of student’s identities, there is a line crossed.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/campus-hate-speech-and-its-use-tool-against-richard-l-cravatts/

“Everyone is in favor of free speech,” Winston Churchill once wryly observed. “Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”

Churchill’s prescience is obvious on college campuses today, especially concerning how students, on the one hand, support the general principle of free speech but, when pressed further to reveal their attitudes, admit that certain classes of expression should be suppressed and proscribed—sometimes even punished. On campuses where identity politics has manifested itself in a protected language of victimization and members of historically marginalized” groups seek (and most often receive) protection from criticism and judgment, who may say what about whom is carefully controlled.

Part of that process has involved categorizing speech and deciding what speech is acceptable, which views are not to be challenged, what parameters there are to major issues affecting race, sexuality, religion, and ethnicity, issues with which students grapple on a regular basis. In their zeal to purge from campus any dissenting views which question the prevailing orthodoxies, students quickly learn how to use the status as a member of a victim group to insulate themselves from critique and opprobrium.

In that process, a new tactic has emerged, namely, the designation of certain expression of being what is called “hate speech,” a contrived category of speech that has the effect of making some views beyond the moral pale, outside of acceptable standards for dialogue, thoughts that, by their very nature, are to be prohibited and labeled as not deserving of First Amendment protection.

https://www.realclearpublicaffairs.com/articles/2021/02/03/civics_and_history_education_is_at_a_crossroads_658767.html

In the current academic climate, teaching social justice has become more important than content. This is especially true in the fields of history and civic education. For example, teacher training at the University of Illinois is centered around social justice, as more than one student teacher has related to me during informal interviews. Where once the emphasis was on such topics as Bloom’s taxonomy and classroom management, social justice topics seem to have taken precedence.

If alarm bells are not going off in your head right now, they should be.

Those of us who teach history or civics, whether at the high school or collegiate levels, are at the forefront of this battle. (Yes, it is not incorrect to call this a battle.) History is oftentimes in conflict as those who want to forward a political agenda are often pitted against those who seek to teach honest historical inquiry so that students, through prudent study, can arrive at their own conclusions.

History is not wrong. Those who teach it with a bias in order to forward a set of political ideals are.

Historiography, the way history is researched and told, has tentacles of different stripes based largely on time period. The Ancient Greeks and Romans told their histories in an effort to influence morality and what they considered to be the qualities of good men. Eventually, days and dates were included so as to preserve the great deeds of kings and queens for posterity’s sake, with critical histories being published only after the death of a monarch.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/02/child-suicide-covid-19-and-the-unions/
If teachers and their unions are truly concerned about dead kids, they should get back to work before the suicide rate for young people goes any higher.

The teachers’ unions’ resistance to opening schools is killing kids . . . literally.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about six percent of U.S. children aged 6 through 17 are afflicted with autism, severe anxiety, depression, trauma-related mental health conditions, and other serious emotional or behavioral difficulties. Due to forced school lockdowns, many of these children who depend on schools for access to vital therapies are being deprived.

So, it is not surprising that mental health problems account for a growing proportion of children’s visits to hospital emergency rooms. In November, the CDC reported that from March 2020, when the pandemic was declared, to October 2020, the figure was up 31 percent for those 12 to 17 years old and 24 percent for children ages 5 to 11, compared with the same period in 2019. And when severe mental health problems exist, suicides escalate.

The National Institutes of Health reports (pre-lockdown) about 70 children in the U.S., ages 5-14 kill themselves every year. While we don’t have national data yet for 2020, that reported number is likely to skyrocket. In Nevada’s Clark County alone, there were 18 youth suicides in the last nine months of 2020.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/systemic-racism-and-the-biden-administration/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=second

The first two weeks of the Biden administration have been dominated by promotion of “racial equity” and eradication of “systemic racism.”

Setting aside the fact that structural/institutional/systemic racism is largely a canard, and the administration’s invocation thereof is primarily a tool to expand progressives’ power, there’s one inarguable case of systemic racism that the administration could address, but likely won’t: the blatant and staggering discrimination against Asian Americans in college and grad-school admissions.

The Trump Justice Department filed a brief supporting the appeal to the Supreme Court by Asian-American students who maintain that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans in admissions. Evidence adduced in the case shows, e.g., that the combined SAT scores of Asian Americans admitted to Harvard between 2010 and 2015 were 218 points higher than those of similarly situated black admittees. Similar disparities, including those involving GPAs, occur in colleges throughout the country.

It’s widely expected that the Biden administration will switch the government’s position on the case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. If it does, that will tell you all you need to know about the administration’s concerns about systemic racism.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/01/georgetown-professor-islamic-slavery-is-freedom

“Slavery cannot be intrinsically evil in Islamic law,” Georgetown University professor Jonathan Brown stated during a July 20, 2020 webinar. This disturbing assessment came during a 2019-2020 series of presentations on his 2019 book, Slavery & Islam, whose theses have hardly improved upon this Muslim convert’s past scandalous comments on slavery.

On February 7, 2017, Brown had caused furor while presenting a paper on slavery and Islam at the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Thereby he noted the traditional Islamic doctrine expressed in Quran 33:21 that Islam’s prophet Muhammad is an “excellent pattern” of behavior. Therefore this example sanctified the slavery practiced by him and his companions, including sex slavery, a doctrine that had justified slavery throughout Islamic history.

Once public, such views completely negated Brown’s disclaimer at the presentation’s beginning. “I always make some hyperbolic statement that really makes sense in the context,” he noted, such that he would face accusations of “calling for slavery.” Given such concern over criticism, he expelled this author from the presentation before it started.

Brown’s elaboration of his views during his subsequent book tour has been hardly more reassuring, for slavery is “simply a fact of life in the Quran” and perhaps even “part of the DNA of Islam.” “Every area of Islamic law is permeated by slavery,” something that “sharia, without exception until the 20th-century, validated.” Muslim scholars have even speculated about a “time when the laws of slavery will actually be needed again,” such as in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max-like world, he has noted.