A SARASOTA, FLORIDA CASE STUDY: The Evolution of the ‘Political Grooming’ of Children by the State thumbnail

A SARASOTA, FLORIDA CASE STUDY: The Evolution of the ‘Political Grooming’ of Children by the State

By Dr. Rich Swier

“If you can get a child when he is 7 and you’ll have him forever.” – Adolf Hitler

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” – Vladimir Lenin

“Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” – October 21, 2021 headline written by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire in the Washington Post


There is a growing movement in America by some educators, professors and governors to give control back to the parents of children in public schools.

The concern is that public schools are teaching children what to think, not how to think.

Ida Gazzola the concerned mother of 6 girls and one boy who lives in British Columbia, Canada wrote this:

In recent weeks, the following incidents took place, all involving people I know personally who live near me.

  • A middle-schooler was unable to focus at school where a female student who identifies as a boy identifying as a dog kept barking in class. The teacher refused to say anything about it.
  • A girl refused to use the school washroom all day because she didn’t want to use the gender-neutral washroom with boys. Using the girls-only washroom, which is out of the way, would single her out among her peers.
  • A mother was baffled when her teen started spouting words like “colonialism” and “patriarchy” while dressing down her father for not clearing his plate from the table.
  • A grad-year student looking into post-secondary options found the first required course for the local college’s fine arts program is “Intro to Critical and Cultural Theory,” a Marxist-based philosophy that subtly encourages aggression and division.
  • An elementary student borrowed a library graphic novel of Little Women in which Jo comes out as a lesbian and shares a kiss with another girl.
  • A Catholic high school teacher asked students to introduce themselves using their preferred pronouns.

History tells us that as government takes more and more control of a child’s education the family is left helpless to stop it.

Teaching children what to think is not new

Recently Florida rejected 41% of math books containing “Critical Race Theory” and other indoctrinating propaganda that were used to “politically groom” children.

Today, the Marxist/Leninist ideals of diversity, inclusion, equity (DIE) propaganda materials are not only in public school classrooms, but are also in text books and even in reference materials and novels available to children K-12 in public school libraries.

The grooming of children has been taken to a level where the next generation of Americans will not only be unable to read, write and cypher, but will be indoctrinated to hate America and all that it stands for.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are all on life support.

The Political Grooming of Children by the State

We wanted to take a look at the history of grooming children by the state and we found that a powerful way to take control of a child is via membership in youth groups or clubs.

Some of these youth groups are like the Nazis’ Hitler Youth and the former Soviet Union’s Young Pioneers.

Today, public schools have a number of organizations that are pushing Marxist/Leninist ideals of diversity, inclusion, equity (DIE) and the radical environmentalist’s agendas. One, it appears, is in Sarasota, Florida.

Sarasota High School – An Analysis

We decided to look at Sarasota High School (SHS) in Sarasota, Florida and the clubs that the principal and staff have approved. We went to the SHS website and pulled up the list of SHS Clubs and Sponsors for 2020-2021. While many of the clubs and sponsors were innocuous (e.g. ROTC, National Honor Society, The Fellowship of Christian Athletes, etc.),  we found, however, others that were potentially troubling.

Here are SHS Clubs and Sponsors that we found are “potentially politically grooming” SHS students:

  • ACLU – American Civil Liberties Union. Profile: A bi-partisan group concerned with educating students about their individual rights and responsibilities as established in the Constitution and the Bill of rights. Comment: The ACLU is not civil nor does it protect liberties as outlined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. One notable example was discovered by The New Tolerance Campaign that reported, “The New York Times recently published a scathing critique of an alleged racism incident at Smith College that turned out to be nothing of the sort. The ACLU championed the false claim and has yet to retract its statements or apologize for its misleading campaign that seriously harmed an accused janitor and cafeteria worker…In 2018, Smith student Oumou Kanoute claimed that white workers called school security on her while she was minding her own business and eating lunch on Smith College’s campus, where she was working over the summer. She claimed that it was a clear case of racial profiling, and the ACLU, Smith College, and many news outlets took her at her word. The ACLU created the ‘eating while black’ campaign, holding the incident up as proof of everyday racism. Three months later, a law firm hired by Smith College found out what really happened that day. A summer camp rented space from Smith College and thus for the sake of child safety, some areas became off-limits to everyone else. A cafeteria worker told Kantoute that the area was off-limits, but didn’t press the issue. A janitor saw that there was an unauthorized person in the area and followed protocol by calling security. A security guard showed up and politely asked her to leave.” So much for protecting the innocent.
  • Coexistence Club. Profile: Club members provide tours to K-8 student visitors to the Embracing Differences exhibit. While working within their respective schools and local community, these dynamic high school students promote EOD vision of creating a world that embraces diversity, respects differences and actively rejects hatred and prejudice, by helping to make their schools a safer and more inclusive environment for everyone. Comment: This club is designed to push the LGBTQ+ agendas of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. This club has the potential of grooming children from K-12 into the homosexual lifestyle and making underaged children available to pedophiles and pederasts. We have written about a similar club named the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN) which promotes their Day of Silence in schools across America.
  • GSA – Genders & Sexualities Alliance. Profile: Purpose is to…crate a safe environment in schools to support students who have suffered homophobia, transphobia and other forms of aggression. Create a more educated environment about LGBTQ+ issues. To advocate for protection against discrimination, harassment and violence in schools. Comment: This group is clearly more into the “activist” role than is the Coexistence Club. They use the word “advocate” which is code for grooming children to become non-binary, gender queer, cis-gender, gay, lesbian and bi-sexual is telling. Protecting sodomy in public schools is their goal. GSA uses trigger words like “homophobia and transphobia” to show their full and unequivocal support for the dangerous LGBTQ+ agenda.
  • National Green School Society. Profile: To raise environmental awareness at Sarasota High School and in the community through service projects and educational opportunities. Comment: This Society appears to be dedicated to the Green New Deal and all that it entails. In November, 2021 the wrote this about Democrat Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, which is part of the Biden Build Back Better Agenda, “Happy to announce creation of a US Civilian Climate Corps is now in the Build Back Better Act,” the far-left congresswoman recently tweeted. Referencing the public works ‘job creation’ scheme first proposed as part of the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez claimed the initiative will create 300,000 jobs while combating the ‘climate crisis’ and environmental injustice’…Simply put, a dollar spent paying a 19-year-old to plant flowers is a dollar not spent by a private company paying them to deliver food, and so on. So, there’s no reason at all to believe a Civilian Climate Corps would create jobs on net. Perhaps most damning, the Civilian Climate Corps would make a statistically negligible difference in reducing US carbon emissions, the stated goal of the Biden administration’s plans. Even halting all US vehicle emissions would barely make a dent in global emission levels, and make-work schemes like this would have no noticeable impact, simply as a matter of scale. Even many supporters of the idea acknowledge this.” Question: SHS’s National Green School Society a part of the Civilian Climate Corps?

NOTE: We did not add two groups that discuss political issues, one all male Junto and the other all female One-Nine. We were unable to determine if all political positions were discussed in an open forum and free speech environment.

The Bottom Line

In an April 22nd, 2022 Federalist article titled “Amid Public Concern About Grooming Kids, American Library Association Picks ‘Marxist Lesbian’ As PresidentJoy Pullmann wrote:

A large organization that drives the training of U.S. librarians and their use of public funds has chosen a self-described “Marxist lesbian” as its next president amid growing concern about libraries actively connecting children to sexually explicit activities and materials.

Emily Drabinski was elected president of the American Library Association last week by the organization’s members. She will take office in July 2023.

ICYMI: The American Library Association (ALA) just elected a self-described Marxist as its new president. Not what you want to see for the future of libraries. pic.twitter.com/kvbenTv07o

— The Based Librarian (@BasedLibrarian) April 15, 2022

ALA’s approximately 54,000 members include librarians, libraries, library graduate schools, members of library boards and associations, and library students. The vast majority of its membership fees, therefore, are provided by taxpayer funds.

Sarasota High School is hosting a number of clubs, groups and societies that are eerily like those used in the past to further government political agendas.

QUESTION: Is this something that public schools should be doing?

We think not.

QUESTION: Are public schools working against the best interests of parents and our nation?

We believe so.

NOTE: We did not see any clubs dedicated to reading the Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution, and there are no groups that study religions or read the Old and New Testament nor did we find any group that was specifically focused on Conservationism.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Boston College Psychology Professor: “School Has Become a Toxic Place for Children”

RELATED TWEET:

The Barbarians are at the Gate

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 22, 2022

Boston College Psychology Professor: “School Has Become a Toxic Place for Children” thumbnail

Boston College Psychology Professor: “School Has Become a Toxic Place for Children”

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Self-directed education, grounded in play, is most beneficial for youth learning and development.


More families may be flocking to homeschooling and other schooling alternatives over the past two years, but Peter Gray has been urging families to flee coercive schooling since long before the pandemic began. The Boston College psychology professor wrote in his 2013 book Free To Learn: “The more oppressive the school system becomes, the more it is driving people away, and that is good.”

Gray joins me on this week’s episode of the LiberatED Podcast to talk about the harms of forced schooling and why self-directed education, grounded in play, is most beneficial for youth learning and development.

In our conversation, Gray explains that standard schooling today is a key factor in the continuous rise in rates of childhood and adolescent anxiety, depression, and suicide. Its imposed, one-size-fits all curriculum, reliance on reward and punishment as external motivators, and dismissal of natural childhood curiosity and creativity erode learners’ powerful drives for learning and discovery. Stripped of these drives, and increasingly deprived of opportunities to play, explore, and pursue individual interests outside of school without the constant hovering of adults, children and adolescents become more melancholic and morose.

“We adults are constraining children’s lives, in school and out of school,” says Gray in our podcast discussion. “School has become a toxic place for children, and we refuse to say that publicly. The research can show it but it almost never gets picked up in the popular press,” he adds.

Our discussion digs deeper into Gray’s research on the link between standard schooling and skyrocketing rates of diagnoses of ADHD, which Gray asserts is essentially “a failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling.” He talks about the disappearance of childhood play and the corresponding rise in childhood mental health disorders, as well as why parents shouldn’t be too concerned about their children’s screen time use.

Gray believes that parents should remove their children from standard schooling and embrace schooling alternatives that are centered on self-directed education. “I’m cheered by the ever-growing stream of people who are leaving coercive schooling for relaxed homeschooling, unschooling, Sudbury schooling, and other forms of education that allow children to control their own learning,” he wrote in Free To Learn.

The current exodus of families away from standard schooling and toward other, often freer, learning models, may have positive, long-term effects on young people’s intellectual development and emotional well-being.

Listen to the weekly LiberatED Podcast on AppleSpotifyGoogle, and Stitcher, and sign up for Kerry’s weekly LiberatED email newsletter to stay up-to-date on educational news and trends from a free-market perspective.

AUTHOR

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and host of the weekly LiberatED podcast. She is also the author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019), an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a regular Forbes contributor.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column and podcast are republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why Big Media Is so Unoriginal and Shallow thumbnail

Why Big Media Is so Unoriginal and Shallow

By Craig J. Cantoni

Media consolidation and interlocking directorships are the reasons.

If you want to know why Big Media on the left and right is so unoriginal and shallow, a couple of left-leaning sources have the answer.

The sources also explain why the residents of most cities and towns across the country no longer have locally-owned news outlets and thus have to rely on media conglomerates headquartered elsewhere. In-depth investigative reporting on local issues is not in their corporate DNA.

My adopted hometown of Tucson is an example. In a metro area of nearly 1.1 million people, Tucson’s major newspaper, the Daily Star, is owned by out-of-state Lee Enterprises (which will be covered more extensively later in this commentary).

It was the same when I lived in Phoenix and had a column in the Arizona Republic, which is owned by Gannett. And when I had a Texas newspaper as a client of my strategic planning consulting business, the most pressing strategic issue facing the 100-year-old family-owned newspaper was whether it could survive without selling to an out-of-state conglomerate.

There are two reasons for these negative developments: media consolidation and interlocking directorships. 

A lengthy article on these developments can be found at the following link. Click here to open the link.

Excerpts:

. . . whereas 50 companies dominated the media landscape in 1983, that dwindled to nine companies by the 1990s. It got worse from there.

Today, just six conglomerates — Comcast, Disney, AT&T, Sony, Fox, and Paramount Global (formerly known as ViacomCBS) — control 90% of what you watch, read, or listen to. To put this into perspective: that means about 232 media executives have the power to decide what information 277 million Americans are able to access. In 2021, the “big six” banked a total of more than $478 billion in revenue. That’s more than both Finland’s and Ukraine’s GDP combined.

The issue extends to print media and radio giants, too: iHeartMedia owns 863 radio stations nationwide, while Gannett owns more than 100 daily U.S. newspapers and nearly 1,000 weeklies.

As the pool controlling the media keeps shrinking, so does the breadth of the information reported. Hence why today’s thousands of news outlets often churn out embarrassingly duplicative content.

Nowadays, there are entire cities and towns across the country with no local coverage. According to a 2018 study, more than 2,000 U.S. counties (63.6%) have no daily newspaper, while 1,449 counties (46%) only have one. Meanwhile, 171 counties — totaling 3.2 million residents — have zero newspapers whatsoever.

But this consolidation of power extends beyond just monopolies and mergers galore — compounding the issue are shared board members. All media corporations have a board of directors, which is responsible for making decisions that support the interests of stakeholders.

When someone sits on the board at multiple companies, that creates an “interlock.” Scroll through The New York Times board of directors, for example, and you’ll find a certain member is also on the board for McDonald’s and Nike and is chairman of Ariel Investments. Up until last year, a Disney chairwoman happened to be on the board for private equity giant The Carlyle Group.

A 2021 study published in Mass Communication & Society (MCS) revealed that publicly traded American newspaper companies were interlocked by 1,276 connections to 530 organizations. The data showed that about 36% of these connections were to other media organizations, 20% to advertisers, 16% to financial institutions, 12% to tech firms, and 2% to government and political entities.

More specifically, a 2012 list compiled by FAIR revealed the following interlocks:

CBS/Viacom: Amazon, Pfizer, CVS, Dell, Cardinal Health, and Verizon

Fox/News Corp: Rothschild Investment Corporation, Phillip Morris, British Airways, and New York Stock Exchange

ABC/Disney: Boeing, City National Bank, FedEx, and HCA Healthcare

NBC: Anheuser-Busch, Morgan Chase & Co., Coca-Cola, and Chase Manhattan

CNN/TimeWarner: Citigroup, American Express, Fannie Mae, Colgate-Palmolive, Hilton Hotels, PepsiCo, Sears, and Pfizer

The New York Times Co: Johnson & Johnson, Ford, Texaco, Alcoa, Avon, Campbell Soup, Metropolitan Life, and Starwood Hotels & Resorts

The 2012 FAIR report mentioned above can be found at the following link. No doubt, the directorships have changed since then.

The aforementioned 2021 academic study examined whether interlocking directorships have an influence on news coverage and determined that they do. A link to the study and the study’s abstract are pasted at the end of this commentary.  The abstract mentions Lee Enterprises.

My final thought is that the study misses a larger point.  As I know from a lot of personal experience, the boards of directors of America’s largest companies tend to think alike, see the world alike, and look alike, regardless of their race or gender. Most directors are cut out of the same mold and interchangeable unless they were founding entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. If you doubt that, pull up the websites of the biggest companies in America and read the platitudes, banalities, and blather about race, gender, community, the environment, and other subjects du jour. They all sound the same. When a CEO of one of the companies joins the board of another company, the executive has basically gone from one echo chamber to another. Such uniformity is bad enough in the industry but particularly harmful to a free press.

Anyway, here’s the link and abstract for the study:

Today’s media companies seem to be more intertwined than ever. But are they? Do these “interlocks” affect editors and the content journalists produce? This study uses a three-method design to examine the connections among newspaper organizations and corporations. The network analysis examined the interlocks among news-paper companies’ directors. The second phase surveyed editors of newspapers owned by these companies to assess the influence on the newsroom from the board and parent company. In the third phase, news coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was con-tent analyzed for newspapers whose editors perceived pressure “from above.” The network analysis results suggest a monolithic interlocking structure that previous scholars feared. For one-third of survey respondents, corporate parents and the boardroom were seen as influencing the newsroom. These “pressured editors” perceived significantly stronger pressures from the boardroom, “ownership/upper management,” and business interests than editors who did not indicate pressure from above. So, how did pressured newsrooms cover ownership and directors? Routine coverage of directors and their affiliated organizations was lacking. Disclosure of a relationship between a director or affiliated organization and the newspaper was disclosed half of the time and traditional journalistic scrutiny was applied less than half of the time.

Lee Enterprises, for instance, had 20 directors connected via their membership on other boards or work histories to 196 other organizations such as the Associated Press (AP). The AP, unlike Lee Enterprises which was on the seed list of media and parent companies, was connected to 12 organizations. As Figure 1illustrates, directors on the AP’s board were also on the board (solid line) of New Media Investment Group, The New York Times, and News Corp, and some directors had employment ties (dashed line) to Lee Enterprises. Organizations with more connections are more central in the interlock network. Connections among the organizations created a network with four distinct components. The main component included 430 organizations such as Lee Enterprises, Tronc/Tribune, The McClatchy Company, News Corp, and The New York Times. This component illustrates news media organizations’ reach to others and the concentration of ties among media organizations. The three other distinct components were isolated from the main component and centered around Digital First Media, hedge fund Alden Global Capital, and Civitas Media, respectively. Alden’s predatory business“ strategy” for its news organization investments is notorious in professional journalism (Doctor, 2019; Pickard, 2020). RQ2 directed attention to the composition.

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Get a Government Job, Do What You Want

By Bruce Bialosky

When talking points are created or written, they seem to be automatically rejected by the opposition. Using the term “Deep State” will set a liberal’s hair on fire and cause them not to listen. The question is whether federal employees act in a manner of their choosing as opposed to following the wishes of the President and the presidential appointees. If there are government employees who act as though they are “above” supervision (by the person for whom you voted) you should be steamed. There are and it happens frequently.  

I previously wrote about the Federal Government’s Senior Executive Service (SES). The government website states: “Members of the SES serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees. SES members are the major link between these appointees and the rest of the Federal workforce. They operate and oversee nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies.” Think Dr. Fauci. Not stated, however, is that they make a lot of money and cannot be fired. If they do not like what the presidential appointee says they can just nod their head, smile, walk away and do what they wish.  

A study recently came out from the America First Policy Institute by James Sherk, https://americafirstpolicy.com/latest/20222702-federal-bureaucrats-resisted-president-trump.

The study details how our public employees decided to do what they want. If you are a “never-Trumper” you may be celebrating this, but then you are just deluding yourself regarding how much of this goes on during Democrat administrations. Yes, most Washington federal employees are Democrats. Mostly they believe they are smarter and more knowledgeable than those of us in the big wasteland of America and we should follow their lead.  

The relationship between the number of positions that an administration can control versus the overall workplace is minuscule. There are estimated 3,800 positions under presidential control out of 2.2 million federal employees. This situation is made worse by the Senate confirmation process, which regularly drags on as operated today. As of this column’s timing, President Biden has named 516 appointments with 332 confirmations out of a total of 1,200 requiring Senate approval. This is over a year into his term.  

Though the report repeatedly states that many of the staff “diligently and impartially” do their jobs, there are still a substantial number of miscreants. Their tactics are outlined as follows

  • Withholding information.
  • Refusing to implement policies.
  • Intentionally delaying or slow-walking priorities.
  • Deliberately underperforming.
  • Leaking to Congress and the media
  • Outright insubordination.

There are many tales in the report supporting the above points. The personnel in two areas were significantly hostile. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the EPA are the most obstreperous. As the reports cites, career employees treated Trump Administration appointees not as their bosses, but more “like an occupying army to be resisted.”

Under the category of withholding information, the report states this is a common tactic. “Career staff have agency-specific expertise. Career employees can frustrate that agenda simply by withholding their expertise or knowledge.” During the Trump years this was done frequently. National Labor Relation Board (NLRB) career staff presented case precedents to support their own positions as opposed to presenting cases supporting the Administration’s position or cases for both sides or the argument.  

As a tangent to this there are documented cases of staff misrepresenting facts causing political appointees to circumvent them and do their own research. The report cites a particularly egregious case of the FDA doing this about COVID.  

Then there are staff who just will not work on projects they ideologically disagree with. The report cites a case during the Obama Administration where DOJ staff refused to work on a case looking into Ivy league schools discriminating against Asians. Some perceive their employment positions are to advance their own political ideology.  

Another trick up the sleeve of employees pursuing their own agenda is to produce a report that is so deficient it is junk. As stated in the report, “Draft regulations are complex documents with many legal facets. Sophisticated career staff can draft regulations that formally comply with their directives but are unlikely to withstand judicial review.” They waste our money in multiple ways pursuing their own needs. The report cites a case where experienced staff lawyers and top-level staff spent 30 days producing a report that had to be junked resulting in political appointees having to draft their own document.

Leaking information is a frequently used technique that a compliant press eats up, then refers to the source as “government experts.” Though the report identifies many cases of this, you lived through it yourself. Whenever reporters write “experts say,” whatever follows should be perceived as suspect.  

And then there is the last bastion of the disloyal employee – outright intransigence or insubordination. If you cannot be fired and you think the department is your domain to be manipulated with your own political agenda, you resort to just saying “take a leap into the ocean” to your political appointee superior. Or simply ignore them.  

The best case of this is that President Trump issued a hiring freeze when he came into office. At HHS, some staff just erased hire dates and changed them to January 19, 2017, the day before Trump took office.  

We can go on and on and on, but you get the point. The report is easy to read and not that long. It is essential to understand how some federal employees have taken over major swathes of our government for their own means. Major civil service reform is in order, but doubtful, because Democrats receive so much money from federal employee unions. The idea of these being “public servants” has been thrown out the window.  

*****

This article was published by FlashReport and is reproduced with permission from the author.

Wokeness is stalking your kids. Here’s how to protect them thumbnail

Wokeness is stalking your kids. Here’s how to protect them

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Parents need Courage, Clarity, Compassion, and Communication to dialogue effectively with their children.


In recent weeks, the following incidents took place, all involving people I know personally who live near me.

  • A middle-schooler was unable to focus at school where a female student who identifies as a boy identifying as a dog kept barking in class. The teacher refused to say anything about it.
  • A girl refused to use the school washroom all day because she didn’t want to use the gender-neutral washroom with boys. Using the girls-only washroom, which is out of the way, would single her out among her peers.
  • A mother was baffled when her teen started spouting words like “colonialism” and “patriarchy” while dressing down her father for not clearing his plate from the table.
  • A grad-year student looking into post-secondary options found the first required course for the local college’s fine arts program is “Intro to Critical and Cultural Theory,” a Marxist-based philosophy that subtly encourages aggression and division.
  • An elementary student borrowed a library graphic novel of Little Women in which Jo comes out as a lesbian and shares a kiss with another girl.
  • A Catholic high school teacher asked students to introduce themselves using their preferred pronouns.

Examples of wokeism are also taking place in the workforce:

  • A new employee taking diversity/inclusivity training was required to answer Yes to the question, “Does refusing to use a person’s preferred pronouns constitute harassment?”
  • A hairdresser had two customers an hour apart tell her how they “can’t say anything” in the face of woke ideology such as these scenarios. They feel as if their opinions have been nullified.

Then there was an employee who decided to speak out after being required to attend a training session to make the organization more LGBT2SQ-friendly. She wrote a direct and charitable letter to her employer explaining her beliefs. The employer decided to make the training optional.

How radically different my childhood was compared to today’s, when words like colonialism, patriarchy, transgenderism, critical (race) theory, intersectionality, white privilege, and social justice are seeping into my home and into society’s everyday vocabulary. Along with these ideas comes a climate of anger and division. Ironically, all facets of woke ideology instil a victim mentality which ultimately disempowers its adherents.

Hence the anger.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that many woke “values” piggyback on Christian virtues. As Christians, we also want to put an end to racism and injustice. The difference is that in the woke framework there is no mercy, no forgiveness, and no hope.

It has taken me a while to understand the movement.

I started meeting monthly online with a group of moms to discuss the origins and issues facing our children. We studied Noelle Mering, a podcaster and the author of a new book Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology. We examined Catholic Voices resources and invited Peter Nation to present several talks. Having a clear picture of the historical facts behind the movement has helped us in our discussions with family and friends.

Mering exhorts us to have Courage, Clarity, and Compassion: courage for effecting change; clarity for understanding issues in order to dialogue; and compassion for everyone regardless of whether they are a woke fellow traveller or a woke ideologue.

For parents, I would add a fourth “C” – communication. This should be at the forefront of our minds at all times. A river can’t flow if it is blocked.

The teen years present a bigger challenge, so parents have to get creative. Even if a teen is intractable, flowers secretly placed on her desk, extra Rosaries prayed, and perseverance in saying, “Good night, honey” to someone who only grunts can soften the heart for eventual conversation. We work on what we can work on today.

Woke ideology particularly disdains three aspects of Christianity: that we need to forgive; that we need to be open to dialogue; and that we are children of God. Focusing on these positives will instil in children a love for the beauty and truth of the Christian faith.

Forgiving others and being forgiven produces a tangible peace that children easily recognize. This can be fostered in daily interactions and, importantly, for Catholics, in regular confession.

Teaching our children to dialogue with others who hold different views fosters self-confidence and contributes to a healthy society. Even our worst enemies have some good points. Similarly, we can relate to someone with woke values in many ways: all people are equal, whether white or black, woman or man. This can be a foundation to start a dialogue.

We can guide our children in learning about opposite viewpoints, figuring out how each perspective is different and which is most consistent with facts and logic.

Additionally, they need to see that regular dialogue with God is necessary to thrive in this life. For a Christian, the core of personal identity is the fact that we are sons and daughters of God. It is not the colour of our skin, our sex, our gender, our ethnic background, or our nationality. Children are amazed when they realize God planned on creating them specifically, with all their quirks and qualities, before the beginning of time.

These approaches, along with Mering’s constant advice to “have fun in the family,” constitute an effective inoculation against many harmful influences.

Parallel to the internal guidance of our children is keeping an eye on external factors.

Pay attention to what goes on in school. Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson recommends that children whose teachers rely upon words like equity, diversity, inclusivity, white privilege leave the classroom. Why should they be indoctrinated with “radical leftist, neo-Marxist ideology”?

Erroneous ideas often come more from peers than teachers, so getting to know your children’s friends is important. Pay attention to their internet habits. Invest in a parental control or filtering device.

Read books and watch shows together that support your values. There’s a wealth of information available in an entertaining form on the internet – on topics ranging from preferred pronouns to same-sex attraction to social justice.

Helping children to remain loyal to noble human and Christian values has always been a challenge for parents. Imagine what it must have been like to be a parent in Nazi Germany when children were being courted by Hitler Youth groups, or in in the Soviet Union, when everyone was expected to join the Young Pioneers. Love your children, educate them, and entrust them to the Lord. He will open their eyes to the truth.

AUTHOR

Ida Gazzola is the mother of 6 girls and one boy and lives in British Columbia, Canada. Before embarking on the adventure of parenting, she studied and worked in the financial industry. Team Baby: Creating… More by Ida Gazzola

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges’ 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results thumbnail

The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges’ 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The lesson of 1989 is that today’s culture and ideas are tomorrow’s politics and policies.


In August 1989, Poland’s parliament did the unthinkable. The Soviet satellite state elected an anti-communist as its new prime minister.

The world waited with bated breath to see what would happen next. And then it happened: nothing.

When no Soviet tanks deployed to Poland to crush the rebels, political movements in other nations—first Hungary, followed by East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania—soon followed in what became known as the Revolutions of 1989.

The collapse of Communism had begun.

On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges,” describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.

“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders,” wrote Felicity Barringer.

There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.

As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable,” the Times reported.

”There are a lot of people who don’t want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told the Times. (Genovese, who died in 2012, later abandoned socialism and embraced traditional conservatism after rediscovering Catholicism.)

Marxism wasn’t truly retreating, however. It was simply adapting to survive.

Watching the upheaval in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations had convinced even Marxists that capitalism would not “give way to socialism” anytime soon. But this would cause an evolution of Marxist ideas, not an abandonment of them.

”Marx has become relativized,” Loren Graham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.

Graham was just one of a dozen of the scholars the Times spoke to, a mix of economists, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and literary critics. Most of them seemed to reach the same conclusion as Graham.

Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.

”Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race – this is where the exciting debates are,” Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.

Marxism was still thriving, Barringer concluded, but not in the social sciences, “where there is a possibility of practical application,” but in abstract fields such as literary criticism.

Marxism was not defeated. The Marxists had just staked out new turf.

And it was a highly strategic move. “Practical application” of Marxism had proven disastrous. Communism had been tried as a governing philosophy and had failed catastrophically, leading to mass starvation, impoverishment, persecution, and murder. But, in the ivory tower of the American university system, professors could inculcate Marxist ideas in the minds of their students without risk of being refuted by reality.

Yet, it wasn’t happening in university economics departments, because Marxism’s credentials in that discipline were too tarnished by its “practical” track record. Instead, Marxism was thriving in English departments and other more abstract disciplines.

In these studies, economics was downplayed, and other key aspects of the Marxist worldview came to the fore. The Marxist class war doctrine was still emphasized. But instead of capital versus labor, it was the patriarchy versus women, the racially privileged versus the marginalized, etc. Students were taught to see every social relation through the lens of oppression and conflict.

After absorbing Marxist ideas (even when those ideas weren’t called “Marxist”), generations of university graduates carried those ideas into other important American institutions: the arts, media, government, public schools, even eventually into human resources departments and corporate boardrooms. (This is known as “the long march through the institutions,” a phrase coined by Communist student activist Rudi Dutschke, whose ideas were influenced by early twentieth-century Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci.)

Indeed, it was recently revealed that federal agencies have spent millions of taxpayer dollars on programs training employees to acknowledge their “white privilege.” These training programs are also found in countless schools and corporations, and people who have questioned the appropriateness of these programs have found themselves summarily fired.

A huge part of today’s culture is a consequence of this movement. Widespread “wokeness,” all-pervasive identity politics, victimism, cancel culture, rioters self-righteously destroying people’s livelihoods and menacing passersby: all largely stem from Marxist presumptions (especially Marxism’s distorted fixations on oppression and conflict) that have been incubating in the universities, especially since the late 80s.

As it turned out, what was happening in American universities in 1989 was just as pivotal as what was happening in European parliaments.

Especially in an election year, it can be easy to fixate on the political fray. But the lesson of 1989 is that today’s culture and ideas are tomorrow’s politics and policies.

That is why the fate of freedom rests on education.

To advance the cause of freedom for today and tomorrow, please support the Foundation for Economic Education.

Correction: This article originally stated that Gramsci coined the phrase “the long march through the institutions.”

AUTHORS

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

Dan Sanchez

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Reagan’s Goal to End the Department of Education Is Finally Gaining Momentum thumbnail

Reagan’s Goal to End the Department of Education Is Finally Gaining Momentum

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Ending the Department of Education may seem like a radical idea, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds.


The debate over the federal role in education has been going on for decades. Some say the feds should have a relatively large role while others say it should be relatively small. But while most people believe there should be at least some federal oversight, some believe there should be none at all.

Rep. Thomas Massie is one of those who believes there should be no federal involvement in education, and he is actively working to make that a reality. In February 2021, he introduced H.R. 899, a bill that perfectly encapsulates his views on this issue. It consists of one sentence:

“This bill terminates the Department of Education on December 31, 2022.”

This position may seem radical, but Massie is not alone. The bill had 8 cosponsors when it was introduced and has been gaining support ever since. On Monday, Massie announced that Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) decided to cosponsor the bill, bringing the total number of cosponsors to 18.

Though it may be tempting to think Massie and his supporters just don’t care about education, this is certainly not the case. If anything, they are pushing to end the federal Department of Education precisely because they care about educational outcomes. In their view, the Department is at best not helping and, at worst, may actually be part of the problem.

“Unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. should not be in charge of our children’s intellectual and moral development,” said Massie when he initially introduced the bill. “States and local communities are best positioned to shape curricula that meet the needs of their students.”

Massie is echoing sentiments expressed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, who advocated dismantling the Department of Education even though it had just begun operating in 1980.

“By eliminating the Department of Education less than 2 years after it was created,” said Reagan, “we cannot only reduce the budget but ensure that local needs and preferences, rather than the wishes of Washington, determine the education of our children.”

Before we rush into a decision like this, however, it’s important to consider the consequences. As G. K. Chesterton famously said, “don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”

So, why was the federal Department of Education set up in the first place? What do they do with their $68 billion budget? Well, when it was initially established it was given 4 main roles, and these are the same roles it fulfills to this day. They are:

  • Establishing policies on federal financial aid for education, and distributing as well as monitoring those funds (which comprise roughly 8 percent of elementary and secondary education spending).
  • Collecting data on America’s schools and disseminating research.
  • Focusing national attention on key educational issues.
  • Prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education.

Now, some of these functions arguably shouldn’t exist at all. For instance, if you are opposed to federal funding or federal interference in education on principle, then there is no need for the first and fourth roles. As for the middle two roles, it’s clear that we need people collecting data, disseminating research, and pointing out educational issues. But the question here is not whether these initiatives should exist. The question is whether the federal government should pursue them.

On that question, there’s a good case to be made that leaving these tasks to the state and local level is far more appropriate. Education needs vary from student to student, so educational decisions need to be made as close to the individual student as possible. Federal organizations simply can’t account for the diverse array of educational contexts, which means their one-size-fits-all findings and recommendations will be poorly suited for many classrooms.

Teachers don’t need national administrators telling them how to do their job. They need the freedom and flexibility to tailor their approach to meet the needs of students. It is the local teachers, schools, and districts that know their students’ needs best, which is why they are best positioned to gather data, assess their options, and make decisions about how to meet those needs. Imposing top-down national ideas only gets in the way of these adaptive, customized, local processes.

The federal Department of Education has lofty goals when it comes to student success, but it is simply not the right institution for achieving them. If we really want to improve education, it’s going to require a bottom-up, decentralized approach. So rather than continuing to fund yet another federal bureaucracy, perhaps it’s time to let taxpayers keep their money, and let educators and parents pursue a better avenue for change.

This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter. Click here to sign up and get free-market news and analysis like this in your inbox every weekday.

AUTHOR

Patrick Carroll

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

RELATED ARTICLE: ‘Canceling’ Student Debt is Unfair to Graduates Like Me Who Sacrificed to Pay Off Our Loans

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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‘The Dumbest Generation Grows Up’

By The Geller Report

An English professor Mark Bauerlein, saw what was happening to young people. In 2008, he wrote the The Dumbest Generation, arguing that millennials would become increasingly ignorant, vain, and immature because of their chronic use of digital technology.

Thanks to the Federalist for bringing this read book to the fore.

The Dumbest Generation Wallows In Mediocrity And Self-Pity.

By: Auguste Meyrat, The Federalist, April 18, 2022:

In Mark Bauerlein’s ‘The Dumbest Generation Grows Up,’ the notable English professor offers a bleak but accurate diagnosis of the millennial generation’s problems.

In the early 2000s, when millennials were coming of age, many people were optimistic about their prospects. They were growing up with the internet, entering a brave new world where everyone was connected, engaged, and more affluent than ever. All this awesomeness was compounded when smartphones came out less than a decade later.

During this wonderful time, few people dared to suggest that all these new high-tech amenities and continual indulgence would spoil millennials. Rather, many people really believed they would be the most successful generation in history.

However, there were a few voices in the wilderness, calling for sanity and a sober analysis of these innovations. One such voice was English professor Mark Bauerlein, who saw what was happening to young people. In 2008, he wrote the The Dumbest Generation, arguing that millennials would become increasingly ignorant, vain, and immature because of their chronic use of digital technology.

Thirteen years later, Bauerlein’s predictions have largely become true. As he explains in The Dumbest Generation Grows Up, a sequel to The Dumbest Generation, many of today’s millennials are not thriving as predicted, but instead are “ending up behind a Starbucks counter or doing contract work, living with their parents or in a house with four friends, nonetheless lonely and mistrustful, with no thoughts of marriage and children, no weekly church attendance or civic memberships, more than half of them convinced that their country is racist and sexist.”

And yes, they are still the dumbest generation, reading less than any previous generation and knowing next to nothing about the world they inhabit.

The Most Illiterate Generation

With an obvious desire to tell the world, “I told you so!” Bauerlein begins his book recalling the false predictions of success for millennials. Even though they had every reason to be concerned about the vast amount of idiotic online content young people were consuming, they preferred to see this as a good thing: “Lighten up, we were told, instead of fearing these kids who were passing them by, said the most progressive admirers of this new generation gap, the elders had a better option: ‘What Old People Can Learn from Millennials.’”

Realists like Bauerlein were berated as spiteful curmudgeons who failed to appreciate the many virtues of the internet. Curiously, it wasn’t the software engineers and programmers making this argument (many of them limit their children’s exposure to screens), but the humanities instructors who saw the new technology as a shortcut to developing critical thinking skills and being knowledgable.

Besides struggling with the basics of adulthood, Bauerlein also argues millennials are dangerous to civilized society. They are entranced with the idealized utopias and “can’t understand why that blessed condition shouldn’t materialize here and now.” This has resulted in a noticeable radicalization among young people, who violently protest any views that differ from their own. Although most of these self-styled social justice warriors justify their actions as a noble resistance to true evil, so much of it amounts to collective temper tantrums.

Baffled by these outbursts from otherwise privileged young adults, Bauerlein seeks to understand the underlying motive—assuming there is one. After making a few inquires and observing millennials in their natural habitat, Bauerlein settles on two vapid but nonetheless serious mantras: “Everyone deserves to be happy,” and “It doesn’t matter who you love.”

Even a cursory knowledge of literature would dispel these notions. As though happiness were something you could complain into existence. As though all forms of love always work out for everyone involved.

Keep reading.

RELATED ARTICLE: Exporting American WOKE: Midwives are told not to using proper words for anatomy so trans patients won’t be upset

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: We cannot do this without your support. Fact. Our work is made possible by you and only you. We receive no grants, government handouts, or major funding.

Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

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Starting the Brainwashing Early: New game Called ‘Playing with Pronouns’ is Pitched to Kids Ages 4-9 thumbnail

Starting the Brainwashing Early: New game Called ‘Playing with Pronouns’ is Pitched to Kids Ages 4-9

By Jihad Watch

2+2=5, Winston. If you refuse to accept that, you are an enemy of the state.


EDITORS NOTE: Here’s the promotional video for Playing with Pronouns:


Ready, Set, GROOM! Teachers are Recruiting Our Kids Into the Transgender Life with Books and Games

by Kevin Downey Jr., PJ Media, April 15, 2022:

For a group who “isn’t grooming kids,” the left is grooming lots of kids.

Before we get started, I just want to remind you that a transgender boy in a skirt anally raped a girl in a school’s ladies’ restroom, and his school district tried to cover it up. No one was sent to jail. The rapist was transferred to another school, where he sexually assaulted another girl.

Even though we have been assured that there is no grooming going on in schools, the video below shows a lot of attention-starved, science-denying leftists brainwashing kids in schools….

There’s a new game for kids age 4-9 called “Playing with Pronouns.” From the seller’s  website:

Read more about our Playing with Pronouns Card Deck. Simple card games to breakdown stereotypes, practice inclusive pronouns & expand everyday understanding beyond the binary for ages 4-9.

Playing with Pronouns is an educational card deck for young children designed to expand gender while learning and playing games. It rose directly from our experience as parents. We needed ways to foster inclusion and respect that were fun and could easily expand into our everyday life.

What is this game based on?

Based on our children’s books, They She He Me: Free to Be, and They, She, He easy as ABC  this revolutionary card deck uses PLAY and PRONOUNS as a familiar way to address gender with young kids.

But I thought the left wasn’t grooming kids? Games and books dedicated to normalizing a mental illness sure seem like grooming to me.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED ARTICLE: NYC: High school principal fired for fraud, punished with seven years of a cushy desk job

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

PODCAST: School Nurse Suspended for Exposing 11 Students Who Changed Their ‘Gender Identity’ thumbnail

PODCAST: School Nurse Suspended for Exposing 11 Students Who Changed Their ‘Gender Identity’

By Martin Mawyer

When school nurse Kathleen Cataford wrote on a ‘mom’s page’ that 11 students were identifying as gender non-binary – 9 without parental consent – she was suspended within a week at Richard J Kinsella Magnet School in Hartford, Connecticut.

WATCH: ​School nurse gets booted for exposing too much

She did not disclose the names or ages of the children, only the fact the school was keeping this life-changing, dangerous information a secret from their parents.

Throughout the country, schools are coercing children into deciding whether to accept their biological birth or switch to the opposite sex.

The writing is on the wall for parents to clearly see:

Schools will soon begin counseling children how to receive “gender-affirming medical care” – that is, hormone treatments, puberty blockers and actual genital mutilation – without parental knowledge, much less consent.

In this episode of Shout Out Patriots, we examine parents’ options if they discover their school is funneling puberty blockers – or other ‘gender-affirming-medical-care’ – to their child without expressed permission.

Be warned, however. The law is likely on the side of schools rather than the parent.

In an arguably similar case regarding parental rights, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that it was perfectly legal for a school guidance counselor to help a 15-year-old girl obtain a secret abortion.

Now, parents are faced with a new danger as they confront an orchestrated movement to dismiss parents regarding their child’s ‘gender welfare.’

In fact, a school district in Wisconsin made this abundantly clear last month.

Teachers at the Eau Claire School District were told NOT to inform parents if their child no longer identifies with their biological sex.

Parents need to ‘earn’ that right, the school district declared.

Teachers were shown a slide that read:

‘Remember, parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.’

Parents are ‘not entitled’? Parents have to ‘earn’ that right? Schools are positioning themselves as ‘lifeboats’ to protect children from angry, backward-thinking, gender-conforming parents.

So, what would you do upon finding out your school helped coerce your child into their changing gender identity without permission or your knowledge? Or even given puberty blockers?

A better question is, what could you do?

©Shout Out Patriots. All rights reserved.

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Florida Rejects 41% Of Math Books Containing ‘Critical Race Theory’ and Other Indoctrinating Propaganda

By The Geller Report

Math books with CRT?

Florida Rejects Dozens Of Math Books Containing ‘Critical Race Theory’ And Other ‘Indoctrinating Concepts’

By  Tim Meads • Apr 16, 2022  • Daily Wire”

The Florida Department of Education announced on Friday that after a recent review, 41% of proposed K-12 mathematics books intended for use during the 2022-2023 public school year did not meet state academic standards due to their apparent inclusion of Critical Race Theory principles and other controversial approaches to education.

“Reasons for rejecting textbooks included references to Critical Race Theory (CRT), inclusions of Common Core, and the unsolicited addition of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) in mathematics,” Florida’s Department of Education said in a statement.

“The highest number of books rejected were for grade levels K-5, where an alarming 71 percent were not appropriately aligned with Florida standards or included prohibited topics and unsolicited strategies,” Florida’s D.O.E. added.

“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said in a statement.

In January 2020, The Daily Wire reported that “DeSantis announced new academic standards for the state, shoving out the Common Core standards that had been implemented in the state in 2010, just one year after he started pushing for jettisoning those standards.”

The new standards were titled, “Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking,” or “B.E.S.T.” According to the press release sent out Friday, Florida’s government had been straightforward in the instructions given to textbook publishers during the 2021 submittal process for the 2022-2023 school year, the first year “B.E.S.T” would be put into place:

In fact, FDOE proactively informed publishers in June 2021 that textbooks must align to the B.E.S.T. Standards, state laws regarding required instruction, and that they should not incorporate unsolicited strategies such as SEL in their instructional materials.

“We’re going to ensure that Florida has the highest-quality instructional materials aligned to our nationally-recognized standards,” Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran said in a statement.

“When it comes to education, other states continue to follow Florida’s lead as we continue to reinforce parents’ rights by focusing on providing their children with a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts in our classrooms,” Corcoran added.

DeSantis has long been an opponent of Critical Race Theory in classes. In June 2021, the governor called it “poison,” while adding that Florida was “happy to have banned it.”

While SEL has been around for decades, in recent years, many believe it has transformed into a vehicle for pushing many of the same principles of Critical Race Theory, such as the concept of equity, privilege, and systemic racism.

According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social Emotional Learning, equity goes hand-in-hand with SEL:

While SEL alone will not solve longstanding and deep-seated inequities in the education system, it can help schools promote understanding, examine biases, reflect on and address the impact of racism, build cross-cultural relationships, and cultivate adult and student practices that close opportunity gaps and create a more inclusive school community. In doing so, schools can promote high-quality educational opportunities and outcomes for all students, irrespective of race, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, and other difference

RELATED VIDEO: Governor Ron DeSantis on Banning Critical Race Theory in Florida

RELATED ARTICLES:

Florida Rejects Publishers’ Attempts to Indoctrinate Students

The state of Florida rejects 41 percent of submitted math textbooks on the grounds that they contain CRT, Common Core, and social emotional learning

Florida’s Anti-Woke Crusade Has a New Target: Math Textbooks

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Quick note: We cannot do this without your support. Fact. Our work is made possible by you and only you. We receive no grants, government handouts, or major funding.

Tech giants are shutting us down. You know this. Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Adsense, Pinterest permanently banned us. Facebook, Google search et al have shadow-banned, suspended and deleted us from your news feeds. They are disappearing us. But we are here.

Subscribe to Geller Report newsletter here — it’s free and it’s critical NOW when informed decision making and opinion is essential to America’s survival. Share our posts on your social channels and with your email contacts. Fight the great fight.

Follow me on Gettr. I am there. click here. It’s open and free.

Remember, YOU make the work possible. If you can, please contribute to Geller Report.

NYT Columnist Admits Schools Are Grooming Children Into LGBT Identities thumbnail

NYT Columnist Admits Schools Are Grooming Children Into LGBT Identities

By NATHANAEL BLAKE

A New York Times columnist has again confirmed that social conservatives were right: educators are pushing LGBT ideology on students.

Is Michelle Goldberg a conservative plant at The New York Times? Although she claims to be a liberal feminist, some of her recent columns are essentially admissions that social conservatives have been right all along. In another entry in this genre, she purports to critique the “freakout over sex and gender identity in schools” — only to tacitly admit that schools are indoctrinating children into LGBT ideology and grooming them into LGBT identities.

Goldberg accuses conservatives of stoking a “moral panic” akin to the “‘satanic panic’ of the 1980s, a frenzy of accusations of ritual child abuse that resulted in the conviction of dozens of innocent people.” Yet she then demonstrates the current fears are reality-based.

Her evidence that this is a panic consists of highlighting some unfounded rumors about educators indulging students with a furry fetish. She then admits that “there’s been a great evolution in how students think about gender and sexuality” with “an even bigger generational shift with trans issues. Many middle-aged liberal parents I know have different ideas about gender than their more radical adolescent kids, and I assume the gulf must be even larger in many conservative families.” In short, the sexual orientation and gender identity revolution is real, even if a few internet rumors about it are not.

Similarly, in response to the huge increase in LGBT identities among the young, Goldberg writes that “It’s obvious that more kids are going to come out in high schools where they’ll be accepted and celebrated than in those where they’ll be bullied and abused.”

True, and it is also obvious that this does not explain the mass conversions of adolescents, especially girls, to rainbow identities. Goldberg herself relays, without dispute, the example of a summer camp from which “a third of the girls came back saying that they were nonbinary or queer or gender nonconforming.”

This self-refutation continues to Goldberg’s conclusion. She does reiterate her ugly victim-blaming regarding the infamous Loudoun County rape case — why is a supposed feminist shaming a teenage girl for being raped in circumstances inconvenient to the agenda of men in dresses?

Yet she ends with a quote the victim’s mother had given to the Daily Wire, noting how her daughter was still drifting along with the gender revolution: “’Where does she get these ideas? From school, obviously,’ the mother said. ‘It’s not from our home.’”

The Left’s Contradictions

Once again, Goldberg has confirmed that social conservatives were right: educators really are leading students in a sexual and gender identity revolution, which is then furthered by social media and peer pressure. Nonetheless, Goldberg is probably not a closet conservative writing esoterically to get past her editors.

Rather, she seems to be ensnared by the contradictions of the left’s current orthodoxy on sex and gender. This sort of confusion, along with her apparently unwitting confirmations that conservatives were right, is inevitable because the LGBT movement’s justifying mantra of “born this way” is false, as demonstrated by what is happening in schools.

The born this way creed posits that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate and immutable, and that an authentic and flourishing life requires accepting these inborn identities. Thus, teaching young children about sexual orientation and gender identity is necessary to help them discover and live as their true selves, otherwise they will be repressed, miserable, and perhaps even suicidal. This is the logic behind the constant references to “LGBT youth” and “trans kids,” as well as President Joe Biden’s support for chemically and surgically transitioning children.

The True Source of Gender

But this view has been discredited. There is no gay gene. Nor is there an established biological basis for transgender identification. The case for transition rests on shoddy social science; some researchers even lie about their results. This is why transgender advocates rely on the abusive emotional blackmail of suicide threats.

The truth is that sexual inclinations and one’s sense of gender arise from a mix of biological, environmental, and cultural factors, of which genes are only a minor part. The interactions of these elements are complex and are not the same for everyone. We may have predispositions, but no one is predestined to identify as LGBT.

We can see this complexity and fluidity playing out in our culture, especially among the young. It is not just that youth are much more likely to identify as LGBT, but that they are deconstructing and recombining sexual and gender identities, often encouraged by their educators and under the influence of social media.

Educators Pushing LGBT Ideology

Nonetheless, the legacy of the (very politically successful) creed of “born this way” persists. It encourages teaching children about rainbow identities at young ages, justified by the presumption that some of them are already among the LGBT elect, even if they don’t know it yet. But rather than drawing out and nurturing intrinsic identities, instructing young children in LGBT ideology shapes their identities. Activist educators claim to protect trans children, but they are actually helping create trans children.

Horrifying examples are emerging of educators pushing young children into trans identities, even against the wishes of parents (some schools even hide these changes from parents). The Libs of TikTok Twitter account exposes a steady stream of such abuses — and these are just the activists dumb enough to boast online about what they are doing. In New Jersey, new state teaching standards have school districts distributing sample lesson plans instructing first and second graders in gender ideology and sexual orientation.

The LGBT educational agenda has more red flags than the Soviet army, from teachers talking to young children about sex to school counselors helping them to keep sexual and gender secrets from their parents. Groomer is as good a term as any for pedagogues who are eager to inform five-year-olds about sexual orientation, or who respond to the gender confusion of a troubled adolescent girl by encouraging her to inject testosterone, grow a beard, and have her breasts amputated.

The youth LGBT revolution is not a natural development among children expressing innate identities. Rather, it is an artificial social contagion encouraged by adult ideologues indoctrinating students — a six-year-old does not conclude on his own that a boy can have a vagina and a girl can have a penis. This is why parents are in revolt against the education establishment and why a liberal feminist writer can’t help admitting that the grooming is real.

*****

This article was published in The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

Do Greedy Countries Have Higher Inflation? thumbnail

Do Greedy Countries Have Higher Inflation?

By Nicolas Cachanosky

Blaming high inflation on corporate greed has become a favorite pastime of some prominent politicians. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has accused large corporations of driving inflation, a view that is out of sync with the data. More recently, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) joined the chorus. “Corporate greed is Tyson Foods raising the price of beef by 35 percent while its owner became $1.6 billion richer during the pandemic, its profits skyrocketed by 140 percent last quarter to $1.12 billion and its CEO got a 22 percent raise last year to $14 million,” Sanders tweeted, “It’s not inflation. It’s greed.”

If inflation is the result of greed, as Sanders claims, one should expect to see more inflation in more greedy countries and less inflation in less greedy countries. But that’s not the case.

The 2021 CAF (Charities Aid Foundation) World Giving Index ranks countries based on (1) the amount of help given to strangers, (2) money donated to charities, and (3) time volunteered to an organization. The higher the score, the higher the giving. To the extent that giving is (negatively) correlated with greed, one can use the CAF World Giving Index as a measure of how greedy a country is. The higher the score, the lower the greediness of the country.

The following figure plots the CAF World Giving Index score and inflation rate for 66 countries. There is no relationship between greed and inflation. And, to the extent that there is any relationship, it goes in the opposite direction than suggested by Senators Warren and Sanders: Greedy countries have slightly lower inflation rates.

Figure 1. Inflation and greed across countries, 2021

If the Warren-Sanders greed hypothesis were correct, one would observe a negative trend between inflation and the CAF World Giving Index with countries relatively close to the trend line. Instead, there is a slightly positive trend line, with countries located all over the place. Japan and Italy are greedier than the US, but they have significantly lower inflation rates. India and Thailand do not differ much from the US in terms of greediness, but both countries have lower rates of inflation than the US. Estonia and Pakistan, on the other hand, are greedier than the US and have higher rates of inflation. Needless to say, the correlation between inflation and the CAF World Giving Index offers no support for the Warren-Sanders greed hypothesis.

The lack of correlation between greed and inflation is not the only empirical problem for the Warren-Sanders view. The data also show that, at least relative to other countries, the US is not very greedy. Indeed, it is one of the most charitable countries in the world. In terms of greed, the US ranks 54th out of 66 countries. It has the 10th highest inflation rate.

Blaming big corporations for inflation no doubt serves the political interests of Sens. Warren and Sanders. But it is inconsistent with the available data. That is not surprising: It is inconsistent with standard monetary economics as well.

*****

This article was published by AIER, American Institute for Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

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Schools Are Outdated. It’s Time For Reform

By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

By continuing along with this standardized type of schooling, we are putting millions at a disadvantage.


The public education system we currently know has been around for more than 150 years. However, the basic schooling model remains the same. Roughly 20 to 30 kids of the same age are stuffed into a classroom and taught by one teacher.

Even though the curricula have developed, the essence has stayed the same. Children are still taught in a standardized and industrialized way. As with anything that comes from centralized control, it is highly inefficient, bureaucratic, and wasteful.

Yes, the overall educational system has changed in many regards. However, the way we are taught has not. A teacher at the front and the children seated is the optimal way to learn for some students, but others struggle in this environment.

Children learn best in different ways. Some children are best suited to learn through visual stimulation. Others may learn best through hands-on education. The reality is that the current educational system doesn’t really accommodate any learning style, nor does it aim for anything other than high test scores.

Children rarely are allowed to be children. Play is stifled. Students are crammed into a classroom and taught in a standardized way. Creativity is restricted. They aren’t allowed to harness their inquisitive minds. Questioning things is part of the analytic mind and a key to societal development, but this takes a backseat to examinations.

The very nature of tests relies on memorization, repetition, and regurgitation: Tests infrequently harness the analytical mind. They train students to know the answers. However, they don’t train them on how to find the answers.

Faculty aspire to develop students’ thinking skills, but research shows that in practice, we tend to aim at facts and concepts in the disciplines, at the lowest cognitive levels, rather than the development of intellect or values.

Critical thinking is key to creating free and individual minds. It is also increasingly important in today’s age, where the line between information and facts is so fine. In fact, 95 percent of statistics are made up. A critical mind will question where this actually came from. Where did this statistic come from? Is it actually reliable?

The issue we have today is that students are taught to test. Whether the information makes sense or not is irrelevant as long as it is correct. This comes at a cost. Schools teach students what to think as opposed to how to think. There are important critical skills that aren’t taught. Do students truly question whatever they read or accept any claim blindly? Or, perhaps, do they accept it as long as it confirms their biases? The current system is failing because it is offering the wrong type of education. We must develop individual minds, not mindless zombies.

Each child is unique in their own right. Each has a different personality and preferred way of learning. Under the current system, each child is bundled under one standardized umbrella. When considering the different types of learners, it is easy to see why some get left behind.

The four learning styles include: visual learners, auditory learners, reading/writing learners, and kinesthetic learners. However, the idea of learning styles is not definitive. That is to say that you are not exclusively one type of learner or another.

Research from Pashler et al. disputes the evidence of specific learning styles.

Rather, these learning styles are preferences rather than “hard-coded.” This is to say that these preferred learning styles can change over time. When a specific learning style is preferred, it is easier for students to take in that information. For example, some students may prefer visual stimulation to emphasize a point, so graphs and charts may be useful. If this engages the students, they take more in. This inevitably affects educational outcomes.

Kinaesthetic learners are probably the biggest anomaly in the classroom. For students who learn best by being active, the classroom is the last place to be. It is no wonder why there are always a few individuals who are consistently disengaged. These individuals are often sporty and have high levels of energy. The traditional football captain who struggles to maintain his place on course may spring to mind. By continuing along with this standardized type of schooling, we are putting millions at a disadvantage.

Whether you buy into learning styles or not, it is evident that the current classroom system is outdated. Literacy rates have stagnated since 1971, while there has been no progress in math since 1990. So what are the causes of this stagnation?

The New York Times would have you believe the issue is underfunding. Throwing more money at something is a classic proposal used by modern-day liberals.

This problem cannot be solved with money alone, however. Kansas City, Missouri, provides us with a perfect example. It currently spends roughly 63 percent of its entire budget on schooling. Benefiting from the best-funded school facilities in the country, student performance has failed to improve. Furthermore, the US spends more on education than any other OECD country besides Norway.

At the same time, it is receiving little value for the money. Outcomes are average, but mathematic results are particularly poor. Countries such as Vietnam, Hungary, and Slovakia score higher.

So why is testing such a bad thing? It teaches children how to absorb information. Children “learn for a test.” However, once the test is taken, is the information truly absorbed? How long does it stay present in the mind? Research by neurobiologists Blake Richards and Paul Frankland suggests it isn’t very long.

According to the neurobiologists, the brain quickly disregards information that is no longer required. Forgetting is an evolutionary strategy to promote the survival of the species. Richards and Frankland state:

From this perspective, forgetting is not necessarily a failure of memory. Rather, it may represent an investment in a more optimal mnemonic strategy.

It is true that repetition can help with memory retention. However, if that specific memory is not recalled, it is eventually forgotten. Further research from Bacon and Stewart studied individual students for up to two years following course completion. They concluded that most of the knowledge gained during the course was lost within two years.

It is clear that the current system is generally based upon memory—who can memorize the most information to prepare for the test. Is this really arming kids with the tools they need for adulthood?

One potential solution for education would be to start “formal” schooling at age seven. Research from the University of Cambridge concludes that there are benefits of later starts to formal education. This evidence relates to the contribution of playful experiences to children’s development as learners and the consequences of starting formal learning at the age of four to five years of age.

There also needs to be a reduction in the level of testing. We have developed a system whereby teachers have a strong incentive to “teach to test.” It’s about memorizing as much information as possible rather than learning how to think.

Furthermore, the testing culture is putting a strain on both teachers’ and students’ mental health. Test results are the be-all and end-all. It is for that reason that many teachers are already leaving the profession. Reforming this testing culture would not only reduce teacher and student stress but also relieve teacher turnover rates.

Thirdly, school vouchers are a viable option. There are already a number of states that have experimented with this. Mostly, there has been large success across the board. The benefits of school choice are widely documented. The vast majority of existing studies find positive effects. Not only are test scores improved, but graduation rates and civic engagement are also enhanced.

AUTHOR

Paul Boyce

Paul is a Business Economics graduate from the UK and currently an editor at http://boycewire.com.

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Giving Our Money Away Again

By Bruce Bialosky

President Biden thinks his real title is “Spender in Chief,” not Commander in Chief. He is always throwing our money around. It seems every answer he provides has him committing our money without any clear explanation of his authority. His recent failings have caused him to refocus his efforts on a new, but recurring subject – student loans.

Biden is not the only one who wants to spend wildly. He has gotten immense pressure from his party (particularly the Left). Now that the Build Back Better boondoggle has tanked, the Left and other Democrats feel compelled to spend money somehow. They want to relieve the debt from student loans, and they are using the pandemic as a front for their battle on the issue.

Student loan repayments have again been deferred until August 1, 2022, with no interest accruing during the deferred period. Biden had said the deferral to February 1, 2022, would be it, but that did not hold for long. This is the sixth time the repayments have been deferred during the pandemic with zero evidence that the people who owe the loans are not capable of repayment.

The drumbeat for relief rolls on. Katrina vanden Heuvel who writes for the Washington Post and is a darling of the Left wrote “But the move also raises the question: Why restart payments at all?” She states, “89 percent of borrowers reported they are not ‘financially secure’ enough to resume payments.” That is some new financial standard that has been created. Loans used to be based on whether someone had the financial capability to repay the loan, not their state of mind.

There is extensive duplicity being displayed by the people favoring loan relief.

While people argue to eliminate college loan debt, they likewise encourage people to attend college. They tell young adults how much more they are going to make than with only a high school degree. If you get a bachelor’s degree, it is estimated you will make on average 75% more over your lifetime — or roughly $1.2 million. Those with a master’s degree will earn an additional $400,000 above a bachelor’s degree and it gets even better for a Ph.D. who will earn $1.2 million more than a bachelor’s degree. Coming in at the top is a professional degree which will earn a stunning $1.9 million more over their careers than having a bachelor’s degree.

That begs the question: Why would we let any of these people off the hook for their student loans? It seems like people are making a conscious investment in their future. A lot are obtaining their degrees or advanced degrees with the idea they will make more money, and statistics prove that out.

My favorite Senator, Lizzie Warren, sponsored a resolution with Majority Leader Schumer and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass and Squad member) urging Biden to cancel up to $50,000 of student loan debt which supposedly would relieve 36 million people from their loans. This equates to $1.8 trillion. There is no mention of President Biden’s “authority” to cancel any student debt in the resolution. Once again Congress is shirking its own responsibility by not passing its own bill. Methinks the reason they sponsored the resolution is because they could not get a bill through Congress.

None of these proposals are accompanied by any procedures to change the accumulation of this debt in the future. As has been previously discussed in this column, colleges shovel these loans out to students with one concern – feeding the colleges’ coffers to pay the fat salaries of their overstuffed staff. There is no counseling by perhaps asking someone if it might be a bit nuts to get a master’s degree in sociology with no prospects for a job when you graduate that will allow you to repay the $150,000 you borrowed. There is no explanation that once you graduate from college with your $75,000 debt you will have to start making payments of $600 per month and how long it will take to pay off your debt. There is no mention of the fact that 40% of people with college degrees are working in positions that don’t require having a college degree.

There are three major objections to these proposals:

1. What about parents who went into debt to make sure their child doesn’t acquire these student loans? Or how about the many people who have paid back their student loans? Or the 70% of Americans who do not attend college who will be saddled with this debt.

2. These college graduates earn more than high school graduates. They made investments in their futures so why should they be relieved of their investment obligations?

3. If we relieve these debts if we piled that $1.8 trillion or more onto the national debt, what are we doing to stop the same situation from reoccurring ten years from now? We are doing nothing at present. We are not requiring these universities to be more financially responsible as evidenced by them loading up on average 45 staff for DEI. We are not requiring outside people to advise these students of the risks involved in taking on these loans.

This is a manufactured crisis to continue to feather the beds of a major constituency of the Left – university personnel. We are looking at relieving debts for people who by definition are the less needy of Americans. Relieving this debt will do nothing but put our national government in a bigger hole from which it cannot dig itself out. It is feathering the nest of special interest groups to get them to vote for Democrats for the remainder of their lifetimes. It is inherently un-American for someone to shift their debt onto the backs of other Americans when they are capable of repayment.

Call me when the problem has been fixed going forward by taming costs and properly educating borrowers by a disinterested third party. Until then this is the ultimate boondoggle.

*****

This article was published by FlashReport and is reprinted with permission from the author.

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An Easter Essay: Why Did Jesus Come?

By James Rousseau

As we approach Easter, we might ask ourselves what is its real meaning? Is it about Easter egg hunts and cute bunnies or is it more than that?

Nowhere else do we celebrate two events each year focusing our attention on one person, Jesus. The first event is Christmas. The word has “Christ” in it. At Christmas we celebrate the Virgin birth of the Savior, Jesus Christ, Jesus being his name and Christ his title. Jesus is the Lord’s human name given to Mary by the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:31). The meaning of ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek word Christos, meaning ‘anointed one’ or ‘the chosen one’. This is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word Mashiach, or ‘Messiah’. His birth, His coming and His earthly mission was prophesized many times throughout the Old Testament.

The second event, Easter Sunday, acknowledges and celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. He told us in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (gospel meaning ‘good news’) that He would rise from death three days after His death and burial. The resurrection would confirm to the world that Jesus was more than mere man. He came to us as God in human form, called the Son of man, i.e., the Son of God in the form ‘of’ man.

Why would Jesus Christ come from the pristine environment of heaven, being in the presence of God the Father, to a world marred by sin, strife and bitter dissension? The answer is that God is totally devoid of sin. Man’s nature is flawed and sinful in its natural state. God, the creator of all things, is devoid of sin. Man is unable to have a relationship with God in his fallen, sinful state. Jesus came to earth to bring forgiveness and redemption to fallen man, opening the path to eternal life beyond our mortal life.

Jesus, as man, was unlike any other human being. He was born of a Virgin mother, lived on earth without sin and without a fallen nature. He went to a brutal, cruel death by crucifixion, shedding His precious blood and life as the price for forgiveness of our sinful debt. On the third day, He rose from the dead, a resurrection witnessed by many and accepted by so many for over two thousand years since His presence on earth.

As a consequence of His death and resurrection, all who accept and embrace Him, believing in Him as Savior has relationship with the three persons of God’s Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and a path to eternal life. In the Bible, God’s word, we are told in Romans 6:23 “the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” In John 14:6 Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father except through me.”

What Jesus accomplished for fallen man costs us nothing, but cost Jesus, as man, everything. Prior to His crucifixion He was spat upon, flogged and mocked by Roman soldiers who placed a crown of thorns upon His head and a purple robe around Him, laughing as they said “hail, King of the Jews!” He was punched in His face so much that His visage was marred. This was only the beginning of His incredible suffering and pain. As He went to the cross, stripped of His garments, spikes were driven through His wrists and feet as He lay on the cross, and He was again mocked by bystanders: “He saved others but He cannot save Himself.” How did Jesus respond? “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

It is instructive to consider an incident before Jesus’s crucifixion involving Nicodemus, a Pharisee and member of the Sanhedrin, a ruler of the Jews. In Chapter 3 of John’s gospel, we find Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night. Perhaps he came when it was dark not wanting the Jews to see him talking to Jesus. He said to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you have come from God as a teacher, for no one could do these signs unless God is with Him.” Of what signs was Nicodemus speaking? Well known for His miracles, including turning water into wine, healing people with leprosy, restoring sight to the blind, and driving out demons from people, Jesus said to Nicodemus “you must be born again”. Jesus was speaking of a spiritual birth but Nicodemus thought Jesus was referring to a physical birth. Nicodemus should have realized that Jesus was no mortal man since he was a teacher of Israel. Old Testament scripture in many places pointed to Jesus, the coming Messiah. Several of these scripture prophesies are in Jeremiah 31:15, Isaiah 53: 3-7, Psalm 22: 17-18, Micah 5:2, and Daniel 9: 24,25,27.

The Word of God was written by 40 authors over a period of 1400 years – written by men but inspired by God with its ultimate purpose to point us to the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who came that we might have life and have it to the full. Life is full of choices and decisions, but it is my belief that knowing Jesus as Savior is life’s most important decision because it determines our destiny after we have passed from our earthly life. This life changing decision also greatly impacts the way we live in the present life. I believe the more we know about Jesus, the more we learn to love Him. We love Him because of what He provided for us as He went to the cross and His resurrection. As we learn who He was, we are encouraged to be like Him: kind, compassionate, forgiving, loving, always caring for the needs of others, without pride and deceit, so humble and so much more.

My hope for you as you read this article is that you too may come to know Jesus Christ as Savior. The gospel of John is a very good starting point to learn, know and begin or strengthen your relationship with Jesus. As so many Christians for so long have come to know so well, this is the real meaning of Easter. It is about His gift of redemption for us and a relationship with the Lord that brings forgiveness, peace and righteousness in this world and a path to eternal life in the next.

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The Left’s War on Childhood

By Jihad Watch



From Greta Thunberg to children put on puberty blockers, the victims of the war on childhood are everywhere. They show up at environmental or gun control rallies holding up giant signs in their little hands, they’re indoctrinated at school to enlist as child soldiers for the latest cause.

Adults tell them that unless they save the world, they won’t even live long enough to grow up.

At the heart of the exchange of political buzzwords of the culture war is a simple question about whether childhood should exist. Leftists believe that no one may evade political commitments, and that therefore the idea that childhood should be a space apart from adult causes and concerns is a privilege that it is the job of teachers and popular culture to shatter into pieces.

And that is the war on childhood that we see all around us waged from Disney to kindergarten.

What this is really about is the leftist conviction that children cannot be allowed to be children, occupying a separate world of imagination and wonder, but must be indoctrinated into the fight as soon as possible with The Anti-Racist Baby Book and Baby Loves Green Energy. The only way to save the world is by politicizing childhood and turning children into little adults worrying about microaggressions, experimenting with sexuality, and fearing that the world will end.

Utopia, the fantasy land of progressive adults who act like children, has no room for children.

It is the job of adults to save the planet, assuming it needs saving, to debate political causes, to explore whatever sexuality needs exploring, and to build or wreck their lives how they please.

And it is their primary job to protect children from living in that threatening adult world.

Play is the business of childhood. From the Victorian era onward, civilized societies worked to create safe spaces for children to grow and learn before that became a term for whiny adults. Reformers and muckrakers took children out of factories. Growing prosperity enabled the rise of a children’s culture in which a multitude of toys and books meant for children filled shops.

Adults protected children, preserving their innocence while they developed into unique people.

Baby Boomers, a generation whose name is of an era of progeny, may have enjoyed the last golden childhood in American history. And many never grew up. The generations that followed came of age during the breaking of the American family and now the very idea of family. The indirect damage done to children is now being eclipsed by the direct assault on childhood.

The radical leftists who demand safe spaces for themselves are taking them away from children. Children are being put to work again, not in factories, which would be kinder by comparison, but in radical causes, they are being told that they are on the verge of death, that their country is evil, and the world is about to be destroyed if they don’t do something at once.

That’s where the traumatized children screaming angrily at rallies come from.

Children, especially young children, implicitly trust adults and their parents. If they’re told that the world is about to end, that they’re racists, or have to experiment with gender, they believe it.

The adults who deprive them of their innocence and their childhood are the monsters.

Instead of growing up feeling safe and protected, leftist children are traumatized at an early age by being forced to think of the world as a dangerous and evil place their parents can’t protect them from, but that they must take on the responsibility to change or else everyone will die.

The “parentification” of children began as Baby Boomer despair in the wake of the end of “Camelot”, the death of leftist culture heroes, and the collapse of the counterculture, followed by the conviction that the next generation had to take over and fix things. Adults who acted like children insisted that children had to become adults. And these days the precocious children and the immature adults are all around us. They’re also two halves of the same tarnished coin.

Adults who lacked a safe childhood assert the privileges of childhood as soon as they’re economically secure enough to supply themselves with one. They surround themselves with toys, exclusively pursue the most direct pleasures, and clamor for safe spaces and trigger warnings, for the emotional security they lacked as children. But they deny that emotional security to actual children and selfishly traumatize them for their own actualization.

Teachers on TikTok freely assert that their feelings matter more than the safety of children.

The aggressive push to embed sexual politics into elementary schools is how dysfunctional adults, including some teachers, prioritize their own sexual identity over the welfare of children.

It’s also on a par with pushing politics in general on children at the youngest possible age.

The transgender war on children is only the latest in a series of assaults on childhood by politicising everything. When African warlords enlist 8-year-olds to fight for their causes, we think that’s monstrous, but when leftists turn Greta Thunberg, an unstable teenage girl, into a heroine and encourage even preschoolers to protest over global warming, that’s activism.

Activism is how the educational war on childhood began. Now the war is not just about how children see the world, but against their bodies. Child soldiers are expected to be willing to die. The sexual identity political movement expects children to have their minds damaged and their bodies mutilated, taking away their ability to have their own children, as a political commitment.

Even African warlords would find that unfathomably barbaric.

The ancients sacrificed children to the fires of Moloch while progressives sacrifice them to their passion for wokeness. Either one is a symbolic assertion that the obsessions of the adult are more important than the safety of the child. Civilized adults don’t act this way. Barbarians, which is another way of saying children who inhabit the bodies of adults without the disciplined ethics of adulthood, do things like this because they live in a Lord of the Flies world of emotional turmoil, fearful insecurity, and angry selfishness. They see every encounter as a threat to their fragile identities, their insecurities surround them with humiliating microaggressions, and they retreat from their conviction that the world is a threatening place by escaping into fantasies.

Fantasies are supposed to be the business of children, but in the post-modern age, fantasies, supernatural, conspiratorial, political, and utopian, are all around us. And adults sacrifice children to utopian ideologies that promise that a better world is just around the corner.

All it will take is destroying childhood and then children.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

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The BLM Scam

By Thomas C. Patterson

I don’t know about you, but the first time I heard the slogan “Black Lives Matter“ I thought it was, well…curious. Who said otherwise these days? Wasn’t that obvious?

I soon discovered the depths of my naïveté. The tip-off was realizing that “All Lives Matter“ was not a more inclusive iteration of the same concept, but its opposite – racist fighting words. People were vilified and fired for saying them.

It turned out that BLM was a “social justice“ organization focused primarily on “intervening in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes“, i.e. police.

But this wasn’t your typical well-intentioned social advocacy group. Its founders were Marxist activists. BLM’s goals included not only stirring racial violence but destruction of the nuclear family and eliminating capitalism.

BLM started as a loose confederation of underfunded organizers. But their fortunes changed after George Floyd’s death in 2020.   Suddenly, radical racism became a lucrative business. Over $90 million came pouring in, even though BLM did no solicitation and was not even IRS qualified to receive it.

BLM became wildly popular. Its tenets became influential in crafting Democratic party policy. Corporate executives, ever vigilant to burnish their woke credentials, praised it and donated lavishly. Sports teams stitched BLM onto their uniforms.

BLM initially parked the money with sister organizations that had IRS certification. After BLM’s nonprofit status was established, $66.5 million was immediately transferred into its account.

Here’s where the story gets murky. BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors issued an “impact report” in February 2021, claiming operating expenses of $8.4 million and $21.7 million in grants to local affiliates, but no further detail was provided. The rest of the funding was unaccounted for. Moreover, BLM has yet to file its IRS annual report required last November.

Meanwhile, Cullors resigned last May amid reports that absent any other known sources of income, she had purchased millions of dollars worth of prime real estate. The two activists she appointed to assume the helm of BLM declined the offer.

The worm had turned. Charity Watch described BLM as a “ghost ship full of treasure with no captain, no crew no, and no clear direction“. Other philanthropy watchdogs also withdrew their endorsements.

Washington and California ordered BLM to cease fundraising and Amazon kicked BLM off its charity platform. Antagonizing California, Washington and Amazon had to be unprecedented for a radical leftist outfit!

The BLM scam, wasting the funds, was actually a good thing. According to the website Candid, non-profits devoted to “racial equity“ raised $25 billion total post-George Floyd. Yet the “accomplishments“ of these groups have been demonstrably harmful to blacks.

Their main policy goal was to “defund the police”, the prime cause of the everyday genocide purportedly inflicted on young black men. That didn’t turn out well.

In 2019, 7777 Blacks were murdered, 53% of all homicide victims. After the “defund the police“ movement succeeded in jurisdictions across the country, 9941 Blacks were murdered the next year, indicating that 2000 lives were lost due to a failed ideology.

Blacks are repeatedly informed that thousands of unarmed black victims are killed by police each year, but the numbers tell a different story. As Heather Mac Donald points out, in 2019, the year 7777 blacks were killed, police accidentally shot a total of nine unarmed blacks, one for each 800 murder victims.  Decimating and denigrating the thin blue line was a tragic mistake, especially for Blacks themselves.

BLM can’t be reformed because it is based on the concept that there is a social good in driving the races apart since one is inherently predisposed to oppressing the other. Media and academic elites, playing upon the historical realities of black victimhood and white guilt, insist racism is deeply ingrained in American culture, the core influence in our history.

Americans must decide. Do we concede the future of permanent tribalism advanced by BLM, the 1619 Project, and Critical Race Theory?

Or do we still believe in the vision of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and MLK that Americans can achieve another historic first? We can establish a multi-racial society where race really doesn’t matter and we all share the Dream of living united as Americans.

*****

Thomas C. Patterson, MD is a retired Emergency Medicine physician, Arizona state Senator and Arizona Senate Majority Leader in the ’90s. He is a former Chairman, Goldwater Institute.

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How we are being diversified into uniformity

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Russell Jacoby’s book is a fascinating account of how people across the world have come to conform to a particular mode of behaviour and thought, despite claims to the contrary.


On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era by Russell Jacoby, Seven Stories Press, 2020, 152 pp

In a recent article for the online magazine UnHerd, Irish commentator Conor Fitzgerald uncovered some uncomfortable truths about Ireland’s non-profit industrial complex. This small island nation, population roughly five million, boasts no fewer than 33,000 NGOs. And the Irish taxpayer funds them to the tune of €5 billion every year.

Admittedly some of the these NGOs pursue worthy and practical causes, supplying essential health and social services that the Irish government has not taken responsibility for managing itself. However, many others merit further questioning.

Dampening democracy

Fitzgerald focuses on the National Women’s Council, whose latest annual report for 2020 reveals that it received over €800,000 in funding from various government agencies. This contrasts strongly with the mere €40,000 it received in private donations.

Holding strongly partisan views on contemporary social issues, the National Women’s Council was very vocal during the 2018 abortion referendum and in the campaigns leading up to it.

An NGO is meant to be a non-governmental organisation — that’s what the letters stand for. But is an NGO still worthy of the name when the funding it receives from government is twenty times greater than its private income?

This is about more than one NGO, though. The issue raises troubling questions about the health of public discourse in Ireland which our commentariat have been reluctant to explore.

In February, an editorial in The Irish Times weakly pondered whether such NGOs “can… be regarded as truly independent if the Government they lobby happens to provide the bulk of their funding.” Unfortunately it probed no further, uncritically concluding that organisations such the National Women’s Council “contribute to a vibrant civil society and help bring about positive change.”

The possibility that Ireland’s parliamentary democracy and associated web of NGOs are a mere tax-funded social construct has produced no further probing or introspection from our intelligentsia. The editorial’s cowardly attempt to lift the veil on a troubling matter for the nation’s intellectual, political, and cultural life saw it submissively return it to its place once more.

Yet the fine weave of messaging and action produced by this parasitic symbiosis of government, media, and tax-funded NGOs on significant political, social, and cultural issues in recent years should make one think twice about the existence of a genuinely diverse “vibrant civil society” in Ireland in 2022.

Global conformity

Although based on American cultural life, Russell Jacoby’s On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era offers fertile material for observers of Ireland’s monochrome official social, cultural, and intellectual landscape.

Jacoby problematises our contemporary self-concept as “diverse” when the penetrative effects of globalisation in capital and culture are actually leading to greater homogeneity in how many people around the world dress, speak, consume, and think. Positing the “diversity idea” as mere “rhetoric or jargon”, Jacoby argues that “the world is not becoming more but less diverse.”

An American intellectual historian, Jacoby is Emeritus Professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has published widely on aspects of intellectual and cultural history, and in recent years has focused his critical gaze on the increasingly monolithic culture of the modern university. The book is not a simplistic tirade against the global ubiquity of jeans and T-shirts, soft drinks and hamburgers, or the English language — although it does explore some of these tokens of cultural hegemony in its early chapters.

Jacoby’s point is more subtle, and the book’s subtitle is important here. His concern is the eclipse of the individual amid global movements toward material, cultural, and intellectual homogeneity. Jacoby argues that as individuals become less diverse, the distinguishing features of groups of individuals will fade:

“But individual, not group, diversity is my concern. Diversity in its multiple incarnations turns hollow if the individuals are becoming not less, but more alike. And this is happening.”

“Diversity” has unequivocally entered the popular lexicon in recent years, with companies, government agencies, and educational institutions promoting events and awareness campaigns under its banner. Jacoby makes a persuasive case that this is essentially superficial. Those who emphasise their diversity are not really seeking to live out this diversity in a materially or culturally distinct way — but to mainstream it. He argues:

“The legitimate demand here — and of most outside groups clamouring for representation — is to join the mainstream and enjoy its benefits.”

In contrast, those who are genuinely diverse would rather live according to their own rules, even if that means living outside the mainstream. Jacoby cites the Amish and Hasidic Jews as examples: “The Amish and Hasids do not want to ‘blend in.’ They incarnate a diversity that gives lie to its current form, whose adherents only desire to be let in, not left out.” Thus when diversity becomes about fitting in and entering the mainstream, the idea begins to ring hollow.

For Jacoby, “as people become less culturally different, they fetishize their differences.” Irish readers may appreciate this in the context of the St Patrick’s Day celebrations of a few weeks ago, when people around the world donned green hats or orange wigs, ostensibly emphasising diversity and difference (their Irishness, however tenuous). By 18 March, however, those external signifiers of difference had been cast aside, and the indistinctness of the masses returned.

Mainstream diversity (as paradoxical as the phrase sounds) can be worn lightly, at little cost, and cast off when its moment passes. Moreover when so many are wearing leprechaun hats and proclaiming their Celtic roots, is diversity really evident here in the first place? For Jacoby, such diversity is no more than superficial when, underneath the external differences, most people think and dress the same. Ultimately today’s corporate and institutional campaigns to promote diversity are “a façade” and in fact monotonously mainstream.

The book comprises two parts. The opening three chapters consider historical manifestations of diversity in material culture. The final two chapters attempt to trace the history of the idea, particularly through the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill, although Jacoby’s evident wide reading draws amply on the writings of lesser known figures, too — revolutionaries, reactionaries, eccentrics, and romantics — from the lively intellectual circles of eighteenth and nineteenth century France, Germany, Switzerland, and Russia.

Crushing childhood

An interesting exploration of diversity’s material dimension occurs in the third chapter, “Playing with Diversity.” Jacoby explores threads of diversity, and its retreat, through the fascinating, entwined histories of childhood play and boredom.

A circumscribed period of time when children can live and engage in activities specific to their age, childhood is largely a modern, post-industrial development. Improved nutrition, sanitation, mandatory schooling, and limits on child labour have “opened a space between infancy and adulthood” which was previously “strangled” by the “realities of poverty and work.” However as childhood has become more formalised and regulated, Jacoby argues, it has also become less diverse.

What does he mean by “diverse” here? Jacoby evaluates modern attitudes to free time and play. Contemporary children’s games, from organised sports to computer games, are designed by adults. Well-meaning though they are, “as adult-run activities, organized sports, and computer games occupy this space [i.e. childhood], the capacity for diversity shrinks,” Jacoby suggests.

The bleak vista of contemporary “dull playgrounds” have seen sandboxes, seesaws, monkey bars, and high-pitched slides disappear in favour of modular, easy to maintain, colourful tubes, low platforms, and shallower slides. A fatal mix of health-and-safety-ism and fears about litigation have deadened the spirit of adventure and risk in playgrounds. Jacoby notes a remark by the author of one study of childhood play that some playgrounds are now “too safe.”

This erosion of diversity and vibrancy in childhood play is contrasted with boredom. This existentially unpleasant condition is sure to leave many a conscientious reader uneasy. Nevertheless, careful to distinguish boredom from melancholy or sloth, Jacoby provocatively argues that this condition ought to be appreciated as a privilege rather than a nuisance.

We ought to cherish our fleeting moments of boredom since it was once “a marginal phenomenon, reserved for monks and the nobility.” Permitting boredom in childhood, opening up a space for limited, temporal and existential lack of structure or organisation, can foster creativity, flexibility, and resilience — conditions necessary for diversity to flourish. Nowadays, Jacoby writes, “we worry if our kids are not occupied — and they have lost the ability to do nothing.”

Philosophical underpinnings

The final two chapters of the book progress from brief histories of everyday manifestations of diversity and plunge us into the history of the idea itself. The writings of Mill and Tocqueville feature prominently here, although they percolate the entire book too. Both men were concerned about “the ability of the individual to stand up against society — against social homogenization and conformity.”

Tocqueville’s influential Democracy in America queried how “the rise of commercial society based on money and equality undermines the individual.” According to Jacoby, “Tocqueville saw the advance of democracy and equality as irreversible, but worried about its consequences — uniformity, greyness, and even a new despotism.”

Tocqueville wrote of his fears for modern democracies whose leadership “inhibits, represses, saps, stifles, and stultifies, and in the end […] reduces each nation to nothing but a flock of timid and industrious animals” — a remarkably durable and prescient assertion even today among the West’s machinery of capital and opaque managerial bureaucracy.

Assessing the new-born United States, Tocqueville found society there both “agitated” and “monotonous.” Tocqueville, according to Jacoby, identified in the burgeoning post-Enlightenment and post-revolutionary democratic nation state the “twin movements of individual emancipation and individual conformity.”

Mill was heavily influenced by Tocqueville, with one caveat — Tocqueville, according to Mill, mistakenly “attributed to democracy the ills of capitalism.” Mill’s philosophical classic On Liberty argues for “the importance, to man and society, of a large variety of types of character” and the importance of “giving full freedom to [society to] expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.”

Mill was concerned that the growth of commercial activity entailed “the growing insignificance of individuals.” Genuine diversity requires a tolerance for an individual’s own agency and responsibility. Jacoby points out that “unlike today’s diversity boosters, Mill saw diversity not simply as choices or inherited characteristics, but was something deeper, modes of living.” Jacoby regrets that Mill’s pleas for greater tolerance of variety, even eccentricity, in living and doing, for going against the tide, “barely elicit a nod from current academics who write on him.”

Readers expecting a laboured and predictable critique of current political and cultural movements carried out in the name of diversity will be disappointed. This is not the book for them. Jacoby studiously avoids highly current matters. The book attempts to walk a tightrope — between the progressives who ostensibly promote the concept of diversity yet implicitly demand ideological conformity, on the one hand, and the reactionaries who critique progressive notions of diversity because they work against their own interests and values, yet implicitly demand similar conformity to their own worldviews, on the other. Jacoby considers himself a friend of neither camp. Nevertheless, the target for much of his book is the progressive consensus that prevails from campus to corporation today.

Jacoby is a historian, not a philosopher, and “diversity” is not an abstract ontological peculiarity, but manifests itself in real ways that people think and behave. Occasionally the book’s argument in these final chapters is hard to follow. This is understandable given the ephemeral nature of the concept. However, at times one feels that Jacoby could have slowed down his frantic and exhaustive aggregation of source material in order to remind the reader of how they fit the book’s overarching argument regarding the decay of the dignity of the individual amid totalising narratives of diversity. This pitfall is understandable for someone who has spent their career in academia. The highly distilled and at times opaque train of thought in these final chapters neglects to bear in mind the average reader whom it is presumably trying to convince, and to pace its argument for them. However this criticism is, in another sense, a compliment to Jacoby, whose reading and knowledge is as wide-ranging as it is deep, and whose message grows ever more relevant.

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