Is it racist to say that 2+2=4? thumbnail

Is it racist to say that 2+2=4?

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Some educators claim that teaching the objective facts of mathematics and science is an imposition of Western imperialism.

Facts once assumed true by everyone are quickly becoming controversial. This is a trend we have all become aware of. There is, for example, increasing pressure to suggest that pregnancy can happen to women and men. People who wish to express that “all lives matter” may now choose to self-censor for fear of reprisal. You may have even heard that the American Cancer Society, well-meaning no doubt, recently called women “individuals with a cervix”.

In the latest development, it’s being suggested that we could be guilty of Western imperialism if we insist that 2+2=4.

In late 2019, Seattle Public Schools released a new draft curriculum aimed at “re-humanising” mathematics. It suggests that “Western” maths has been used to “disenfranchise people and communities of colour” by posing as “the only legitimate expression of mathematical identity and intelligence.” The document goes on to ask, “Who gets to say if an answer is right?”

This draft curriculum builds on the theory of ethnomathematics — the study of intersections between maths and culture — which began in the late 1970s.

While the historical oppression of minorities should by all means be covered in school curricula, using it to dismantle the universal facts of mathematics is highly questionable. But Seattle Public Schools seem quite serious.

So did many Twitter users in the online debate that followed. Nikole Hannah-Jones, founder of The New York Times’ controversial “1619 Project”, weighed into the debate, tweeting,

“I wonder if folks always talking about ‘standards’ ever stop to consider that it’s their so-called standards that are the actual problem.”

A Brooklyn College professor also voiced her view that 2 + 2 = 4 “reeks of White supremacist patriarchy”. Laurie Rubel objected to “the idea that math (or data) is culturally neutral or in any way objective,” claiming that this is a myth. “I’m ready to move on with that understanding. Who’s coming with me?” she added. Several other academics from American universities and colleges went on to retweet and support her views.

It turns out that this is no isolated discussion.

A New York-based group called Abolition Science was formed in 2018. The community produces a regular podcast and describes itself as “an anti-colonial project” with a mission to “undermine the racial capitalist logics of Western Science and Math”. Their vision statement explains that they are “an abolitionist project that envisions a science and math delinked from racial capitalism, imperialism, and oppression”.

In actual fact, key concepts behind mathematics came to the West from non-Western lands. The concept of the number zero — a revolutionary concept for mathematics — has roots in Mesopotamia and India, for example. Al-jabr, or “algebra” as we call it, came to us from the Middle East.

Moreover, mathematics is embraced far beyond the West today as the basis for just about every modern advancement — from smartphones to medical research to skyscrapers.

This is important context before dismissing mathematics, as we have always understood it, as being “oppressive”.

These are ominous signs of our times. For good reason do many describe ours a “post-truth” world. Social theorist Thomas Sowell, who is himself African-American, was sharp in his analysis that “we are living in an era when sanity is controversial and insanity is just another viewpoint”.

English philosopher G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) saw the early signs of the West’s abandonment of objective truth, and in a cheeky tone, he warned:

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

But there is another eerie backdrop to these developments.

The phrase “two plus two equals five” was made famous by George Orwell’s dystopian classic Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). In that story, the totalitarian government that ruled Oceania brainwashed its citizens to say and believe absurd things. Under threat of torture, protagonist Winston Smith was forced to declare that two plus two equals five. This was part of the ruling Party’s push to replace “thoughtcrimes” with approved ideas known as “Newspeak”.

Could it be that in coming years, insisting that 2+2=4 will become as risky as saying that there are only two genders?

It is good to question our assumptions and challenge our biases. And yes, let’s continue to root out injustice and oppression if we encounter it. But sometimes fashion goes too far. In the all-consuming desire to critique Western civilisation, we may well end up dispensing with truth itself. That won’t help us — and it’s doubtful that sowing this kind of distrust among the next generation will bode well either.

With so much cultural upheaval that has taken place in recent years, now might be a good time to ask yourself: is 2 + 2 = 4 a hill you’re willing to die on?

COLUMN BY

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg

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

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Zombie Marxism

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By Mike Gonzalez

This December we celebrate the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the communist superpower Ronald Reagan rightly named the “Evil Empire.” Yet everywhere today, Marxism still stalks humanity. Indeed, today we can paraphrase Karl Marx and write that its specter haunts not just Europe, but the entire world.

We must understand this as a global threat. Since its birth in the 1848 Communist Manifesto by Marx and Friedrich Engels, communism has been a call to arms that knows no borders. But we must also understand—as the Kremlin in its time certainly did—that the big fight is over the United States. Once Marxists seize that most elusive jewel in the crown, they have the world. That’s why this essay will focus mostly on the U.S.

Before we catalog the dangerous state of play with communism, we should remember the good news. Marxism may be resurgent, but it is being vigorously confronted by the same force that defeated the Soviet Union: the American people. They have joined what some may dismiss as “culture wars,” but is really a consequential battle of ideas. Surveys show Americans, writ large, reject these ideas, and are starting to discern the stakes.

We need discernment because Marxism’s breakthroughs today are the result of different strategies and tactics. Gone are frontal military threats, such as along the Fulda Gap in Germany, or in the actual wars in the fields of Central America in the 1980s. Just as we face constant mutations of the Coronavirus, today we face a different, mutant form of Marxism.

Yes, today’s ascendant American Marxists have their supporters in the halls of power in Beijing and Caracas. But it would be a mistake to see them as Chinese or Venezuelan agents, as some of their predecessors were Soviet stooges in the 20th century. The leaders of Black Lives Matter groups, the creators of the 1619 Project, and the architects of Critical Race Theory may be internationalists who believe in the Manifesto’s call for world revolution. But they are a very American phenomenon. We must understand and confront them in those terms.

Much is different today from the last time America faced a concerted communist threat. Communists now realize that domestic revolutions to overthrow the bourgeoisie are not viable in every place, if they are possible in any place. Today, revolution comes at the end, not the beginning. It must be preceded, or replaced, by the arduous work of 1) organizing people, 2) indoctrinating them, and 3) convincing them to become domestic agents of cultural replacement. That’s the mutation we confront.

The current efforts to besmirch the American story—indeed to change its origin story itself, as we see with the New York Times’ 1619 Project—amount to a campaign to transform America’s societal structure that has been underway for at least three decades. It rapidly accelerated after BLM was founded in 2013, and then it exploded into society after the George Floyd riots of 2020. The result? The Critical Race Theory indoctrination that has so angered parents.

The architects of the 1619 Project and the academics who created CRT are equally part of the effort to replace America’s narrative. (The term “white supremacy,” which is meant to replace such ideas as “Land of the Free,” appears no fewer than 38 times in the foundational text of CRT). It was BLM, however, that created the propitious environment to replace America’s narrative, and it is on these organizations that we must focus.

Once we do, we discover that the founders of the Black Lives Matter organizations are at the center of the destructive unrest that led to the hacking of our cultural software. They are not just “trained Marxists,” as BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors labeled herself and another co-founder, Alicia Garza (in a video that has now disappeared from public view). But they were recruited and trained by Marxists steeped in this new view of how to build revolutionary consciousness through recruitment, organizing, and indoctrination.

The Gramscian Moment

Today’s Marxism can be tailor-made to each circumstance. This adaptability has replaced the rigid ideas expressed in the Communist Manifesto. Today’s successful Marxists understand that, no, the economy does not determine all of man’s actions, as Marx once wrote, and, no, the internal contradictions of capitalism will not constantly produce revolutions.

These are Marxists who have boned up on the lessons of the 1920s Italian communist leader Antonio Gramsci, or the theoretical works of his German contemporaries at the so-called Frankfurt School, which produced Critical Theory (of which Critical Race Theory is an American offshoot). It was these Europeans who incubated the mutant strains.

Gramsci’s basic theory was simple, even if the ramifications were complex. Writing in the 1920s and ‘30s, after the failure by Italy’s workers to set up a communist state in 1918, Gramsci said the proletariat was consenting to his own enslavement. How so? He buys into the cultural trappings of his bourgeois oppressor—the church, the family, the nation-state, etc. As a result, in countries with rich civil societies, such as those in Western Europe and the United States, communists needed to undertake a “war of position.” This involved a long-term effort to organize the masses and indoctrinate them into Marxist ideas.

The German Critical Theorists, for similar reasons, came up with a similar explanation: the worker had bought into a consumerist conceptual superstructure and was unaware of his own crushing oppression. Both concluded that intellectuals had to give the workers revolutionary consciousness.

Gramsci and the Critical Theorists did not repudiate Marx and Lenin so much as expanded on their beliefs. Marx may have written that revolutions would inevitably come when “the material forces of production in society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” But to Gramsci, “‘popular beliefs and similar ideas are themselves material forces.”

Applied Gramsci

According to Harmony Goldberg, a Gramscian cultural anthropologist, Gramsci merely made “several important innovations” on the ideas of Marx and Lenin. As Goldberg put it in her 2015 “brief introduction” to Gramsci’s ideas:

Gramsci upheld the assertion that a successful revolution would ultimately require the overthrow of the bourgeois state…However, because the capitalist hegemony does not function through state violence alone but that it also mobilizes civil society in order to promote oppressed peoples consent to and participation in the system, a successful revolutionary movement would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent.

Goldberg is not just any Gramscian anthropologist. In 1996 she founded the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL). This is the same place where, seven years later, Black Lives Matter founder Alicia Garza, then 22, began her Marxist training.

To Goldberg, the efforts to undermine the American worker’s endorsement of the American way of life today “must go beyond participation in trade union struggles reform; revolutionaries must root their struggles in all arenas of social life and—centrally—must engage in the battle for ideas.” The ruling bourgeois will always be trying to convince workers that they have a stake in preserving capitalism. This is why “Revolutionaries would themselves have to engage in the long-term battle of ideas in order to clarify the need for revolutionary transformation.” All-out ideological war is needed. A crisis can be used to overthrow a society, but the long-term subversion of a culture must come first.

A multi-class alliance, which Gramsci called a “historic bloc,” would be needed, in Goldberg’s words, “to move history forward” by indoctrinating society into the new “national-popular collective will”—the cultural counter-hegemony. But it is important to bear in mind that “in every historic bloc there is a single class that plays a leading role and serves as a cohering force,” according to Goldberg’s interpretation of Gramsci. The job of the cohering force was to organize other classes and instruct them on the need to replace the existing order with a socialist one.

Garza learned these lessons a full decade before a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin in July 2013—the event that supposedly launched Black Lives Matter. It was at SOUL, Garza has said, that she first learned that “social movements all over the world have used Marx and Lenin as a foundation to interrupt these systems that are really negatively impacting the majority of people.”

As SFWeekly wrote in a long profile, “Garza’s summer with SOUL wasn’t just about getting a political education in a leftist ‘analysis around capitalism and imperialism and white supremacy and patriarchy and heteronormativity,’ as she describes it, but a crash course in grassroots community organizing.” Garza found an early opportunity to turn minds when she began “organizing low-income tenants in East and West Oakland” against gentrification. “I spent my summer getting my ass kicked, knocking on doors 10 hours a day. It was really good training. Really, really, really good training.”

Garza thus learned from master theoreticians how to apply the Gramscian rules. We can also now fully grasp what Garza meant when she told Maine liberals in 2019, “We’re talking about changing how we’ve organized this country….I believe we all have work to do to keep dismantling the organizing principle of this society, which creates inequities for everyone, even white people.” What she was trained to seek was a total transformation. The ultimate object, of course, is getting rid of capitalism, since Garza says that “it’s not possible for a world to emerge where black lives matter if it’s under capitalism.”

Garza’s connections to Goldberg’s creations have endured. Today Garza is on SOUL’s board. In 2012, a year before Garza co-founded BLM, Goldberg was publishing Garza on the web platform she founded, Organizing Upgrade, as we can see with Garza’s reporting on Brazil’s Marxist landless movement. The two have also crossed paths over the past two decades in such Marxist groups as the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance. That group sent Garza to Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, after the killing by police of Michael Brown. There, she helped create the nationwide coalition of the hard left that has been key to BLM’s success. The two also work with LeftRoots, whose activists “challenge capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy.” All these groups provide access to different constituencies whom they can first organize and then indoctrinate.

A grand strategy to confront the new Marxist threat would need to understand the mutation.

Patrisse Cullors is at least as important as Garza in building the main organization, Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation. She underwent similar training at the hands of a similarly committed communist visionary. In her case, the ideological mentor was Eric Mann. He is a former member of the Weather Underground who founded the Labor-Community Strategy Center in LA (which Mann jokingly calls “the University of Caracas Revolutionary Graduate School”).

Mann devotes detailed attention to the hard work of creating a multi-class alliance. This will instill Marxist revolutionary consciousness into the population, to overthrow what he calls the “imperialist, settler” state that is America. He narrows Gramsci’s cultural focus to racial issues. Within the cultural sphere, it’s race-related matters that Mann sees as “the material forces” that create the fault line to be exploited.

In a 1996 essay that was later revised, he wrote:

Given the social formation of the U.S. as a settler state based on virulent white supremacy, the racialization of all aspects of political life operates as a material force in itself—shaping and infecting every aspect of the political process. Thus, any effective Left movement must confront the major fault lines of the society…In a racist, imperialist society, the only viable strategy for the left is to build a movement against racism and imperialism.

His version of the historic bloc is black and Latin American. But he calls for  “an agreed-upon Black priority” with African Americans as the “cohering force” in the struggle against capitalism. In the key area of fighting law and order measures—so central to his, and BLM GNF’s, revolutionary strategy—“the leadership clearly came out of the black community,” he notes. Blacks, to people like Mann and Goldberg, will be the revolutionary agents, and the struggle to make the U.S. a socialist state will be fought in the name of black justice.

Early on, Mann settled on Los Angeles bus riders as more easily organizable and indoctrinated than factory workers. They were more destitute, more black, Latino, and Asian, and more female, than the average worker. “At a time when many workplaces have 25 to 50 employees, an overcrowded bus has 43 people sitting and from 25 to 43 people standing,” he wrote. “Ten organizers on ten different buses can reach 1,000 or more people in a single afternoon,” That’s why his Center pioneered the creation of a Bus Riders Union.

It was precisely at the BRU that Cullors was trained after Mann’s Strategy Center recruited her, and where she combined organizing training with ideological instruction. “I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx, and Lenin to my knowledge of [bell] hooks, [Audre] Lorde and [Rebecca] Walker,” she wrote in her 2017 memoir When They Call You a Terrorist. The organizers were trained, according to Mann, to “go beyond narrow ‘trade union’ or ‘bus’ consciousness to build a movement based on a more transformative, internationalist consciousness” and create a “united front against U.S. imperialism—rooted in the strategic alliance of the multi-racial, multi-national working class.” This is what he called “the explosive combination of deep ideological framing and grassroots organizing.”

In his 2011 “organizing manifesto,” Playbook for Progressives—written two years before Cullors reached fame by helping to found BLM—Mann already identifies her as “gifted.” In 2006, Cullors helped found the Center’s Summer Youth Organizing Academy “to recruit and train a new generation of high school youth.” At the time of the book’s writing, adds Mann, Cullors “teaches classes on political theory and organizing.” She was at the Center for over a decade, as other sources have confirmed.

To be sure, a much bigger revolutionary payoff for all training by Mann would come when Cullors founded first BLM, and then BLM GNF, and began in earnest the work of dismantling the American cultural narrative (or hegemony in their language) by getting many Americans, especially the young, to believe that they should destroy their country and culture because it is white supremacist at its core. Not for nothing does Cullors tell us herself that she is a “trained Marxist” and that the only reason she does not use the term communist is that it’s gotten a bad rap.

Other important battles in the war to dismantle America have been won because of Mann’s training of BLM leaders. For instance, Black Lives Matter succeeded in pressuring the Los Angeles School Board to cut the LA Schools Police Department’s $70 million budget by 35 percent on June 30, 2020, after a full month of riots and destruction following Floyd’s death. Afterwards, Mann took a victory lap. Writing on August 21, 2020, Mann cast the victory in Gramscian terms:

We know of no other Defund the Police campaign in a major U.S. City that has made such a major political and material breakthrough…Our campaign was also a major ideological victory. It delegitimized the very existence of police in the public schools and affirmed the experience and demands of the most militant and conscious Black students.…Dozens of angry, articulate, and organized Black students—many from Students Deserve—testified that the very presence of police in the schools was a racist and anti-Black attack on their racial identity, self-worth, self-confidence, and academic performance. Dr. Melina Abdullah, co-chair of Black Lives Matter L.A., testified that all three of her children suffered police abuse in the schools while her son’s first experience of anti-Black police brutality was at the age of six. She described in painful detail how every aspect of a Black child’s life is criminalized and why the demand for No Police in the Schools was a life and death issue for the Black community. (Italics in the original)

That this Marxist-inspired effort to reduce police forces, which followed the determined indoctrination of people, has succeeded to such an extent is bad enough. Without law enforcement, a future crisis like the one precipitated by the killing of Floyd could lead to even greater violence and destruction than we experienced in 2020. Even with police, it was the costliest civil unrest in U.S. history, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and we experienced a 30 percent spike in homicides in 2020, according to the FBI.

“A successful revolutionary movement,” Goldberg explained, “would first have to engage in a long-term effort to undermine that consent” Americans have given to their system. And this campaign to present the counter-narrative to America’s story began very quickly after BLM was launched by Garza, Cullors, Abdullah, and others. This is what BLM and the 1619 Project do today through the curricula they send to the nation’s 14,000 school districts. It’s also what CRT “anti-racism” trainers do in all aspects of our lives.

Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate at Georgia State, detailed in the Tablet in August 2020 how much the media began to sell after the BLM GNF narrative following Zimmerman’s acquittal in July 2013. Prior to 2013, the terms “white,” ”racial privilege(s),” ”of color,” and ”racial equity,” were hardly ever used, wrote Goldberg. Things began to radically change that year, however.

By 2019, on the eve of the George Floyd riots, the frequency with which The New York Times and The Washington Post used these terms had exploded. More importantly, the terms that deprecate America and its founding principles became generalized. “From 1970 until 2014, the combined usage frequency of the three ‘macro-level’ racism terms—systemic racism, structural racism, institutional racism—never exceeded 0.00006% of all words in any of the four newspapers,” Goldberg writes. “By 2014, however, this ceiling was shattered, particularly in the Times and Post. In the final year of the series (2019), the Times (0.0004% of all words) and Post (0.00056%) were using these terms roughly 10 times more frequently than they were in 2013 (0.00004%, 0.00005%).” The media, in other words, had taken an active hand in inculcating the counter-hegemony, whose acceptance is needed before communists can topple a country.

The Need for a New Grand Strategy

Why expose all this? My hope is to make it plain why schools are teaching children these new ideologies, and why workers are being subjected to what can only be described as Gramscian, consciousness-raising struggle sessions at their places of work, and why even the military and the churches are following suit. Revolutionary theoreticians recruited and trained the founders of the BLM organizations. After eight years of existence, they have brought America to the brink of societal change. Once we understand this, we can start to envision a grand strategy that will defeat their efforts.

What that strategy will look like is the subject of an entirely different essay—or hopefully many essays. The purpose of this one is to say, on this 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Evil Empire, that we have a new problem.

A grand strategy to confront the new Marxist threat would need to understand the mutation. It would need to grasp the fact that the new threat relies on organizing people in different environments and then indoctrinating them. It takes place on buses, domestic work, schools, or neighborhoods about to be gentrified. A grand strategy must grasp what is at stake. It’s nothing less than the replacement of the key American idea that “All Men Are Created Equal” with the lie of white supremacy. Such a strategy would have to reckon with what is happening in our schools. It would need to understand that violence will remain central to Marxist success. Dismantling police forces, the prisons, and the court system itself (which Patrisse Cullors calls for in this video) is part of an effort to leave society defenseless. Once enough people are converted, then the revolutionaries need only wait for a moment of crisis.

We will need to understand what people like Goldberg have in store:

In societies that have a vibrant civil society, revolutionary strategy cannot be based on a pre-given Marxist formula in which a moment of crisis makes the oppressive nature of the capitalist system clear and sparks an insurrectionary struggle that smashes the capitalist state and establishes socialism. Gramsci argued that crises are important, but that they do not ensure that oppressed people will believe in the need for a new economy or that they will have the power to wage a successful revolutionary struggle. To Gramsci, an insurrectionary moment will only succeed if it follows a long-term effort to win oppressed people over to a transformative vision and if it builds working class power over time.

Many Americans have begun to grasp all of this intuitively and have begun to rise up and oppose CRT. To succeed, however, they will need our support.

*****

This article was published on December 16, 2021, and is reproduced with the permission of Law & Liberty.

Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.

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DEI Initiatives Create Environment Where ‘inclusion does not apply to Jewish students on campus’

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By Alexa Schwerha

A study published by Heritage Foundation showed a spike of anti-Semitic incidents occurring on college campuses at the same time DEI faculty continue being hostile to supporters of Israel.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs have become popular on campus to expand student comfort and inclusivity on college campuses. These centers serve as a space for students to connect and feel appreciated among their fellow peers, guided by experts and academics at the highest level.

But what happens when a specific group of students is left out of the mix?

It is not a question that college campuses and universities are not always the safe space for academic freedom and self-expression that they claim to be. Repeatedly, students with a specific point of view are criticized and intimidated to maintain a quiet disposition during their four-year journey through higher education. 

Who are these students? Those that are Jewish or are supporters of Israel.

DEI programs cannot fix the prejudices embedded in the swamp that is higher education; in some cases, these initiatives actually compound the discrimination already present.

244 anti-Semitic incidents were reported during the 2020-2021 school year, according to the Heritage Foundation’s report this month.

That number represents a 34.8% increase from the previous academic year. 

But how – or perhaps why – did that dramatic rise occur during a school year largely shunted to virtual attendance during COVID-19?

As Campus Reform has reported, Jewish students and supporters of Israel face intimidation and discrimination whether online or on campus. Incidents this year such as the chancellor at Rutgers University issuing an apology for condemning a “resurgence of anti-Semitism” does not help matters.

One University of Michigan student told Campus Reform in July that “[i]t is scary to be a Jew in America right now.”

In August, a person at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville desecrated the Star of David by eating a sticker depicting the Jewish symbol to protest the state of Israel.

Heritage Foundation’s December 2021 report, “Inclusion Delusion: The Antisemitism of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Staff at Universities,” strongly suggests that DEI staff’s pretense to inclusivity actually makes campuses less tolerant environments for Jewish students and non-Jewish supporters of Israel. 

“What we found in our most recent paper is that higher education diversity bureaucrats—who are paid to promote inclusion—have a strange way of showing it on Twitter. DEI staffers tweet so inordinately and hyperbolically about Israel, relative to China, that they cross the line into antisemitism,” James Paul, a doctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas and the report’s co-author, told Campus Reform.

“Apparently ‘inclusion’ does not apply to Jewish students on campus,” Paul added. 

Heritage analyzed the Twitter feeds of 741 DEI faculty representing 65 universities to determine any favorability when it came to discussions surrounding Israel. The same analysis was conducted for China, in comparison.

Of the tweets, 96% expressed criticism of Israel, while a stark 62% were expressed positive opinions about China. 

“The overwhelming pattern is that DEI staff at universities pay a disproportionately high amount of attention to Israel and nearly always attack Israel,” the report states.

At the average university, Heritage finds that there is an average of 45 DEI staff tasked with the responsibility of creating an inclusive environment. The industry has become extremely profitable for these staffers, as well, and at the expense of the college community.

Ohio State University, for example, pays $10,097,051 to employ 131 diversity administrators.

Thirty of those employees earn more than $100,000 per year, and of the 99 salaried employees, the average salary calculates to $89,168.

Statements made about Israel included accusations of “genocide, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and other extreme crimes,” according to Heritage.

These phrases were non-existent in the language used to refer to China, spare for the favorable use of the word “colonialism.”

Though the Heritage study did find minimal criticism of China for its human rights violations against Uighur Muslims and African residents, it also found that such critiques were less severely worded than language reserved for anti-Israel posts.

[RELATED: POLL: 50% of Jewish students feel they ‘need to hide their identity’ on campus]

“It would be impossible to review the inordinate attention that DEI staff pay to Israel relative to China, the nearly universal attacks on Israel and China without concluding that DEI staff have an obsessive and irrational animus toward the Jewish state,” the study states.

Paul told Campus Reform that the findings only support the claim that DEI staffers are not committed to fostering a true inclusive environment.

Jay P. Greene, a senior research fellow at Heritage and the report’s lead author, agreed with Paul’s assessment.

“After publishing three reports on DEI bureaucracy in K-12 and higher education, we find little evidence that DEI promotes inclusive environments or closes achievement gaps,” Greene told Campus Reform.

The bottom line is that students have a right to feel safe and secure on the campus of their choosing. They should not be subjected to pressure to hide or conform their worldviews to meet the standards of those claiming to provide an inclusive experience.

The prevalence of DEI staff and facilities on American campuses cannot and should not be a vehicle for the woke, liberal mob to continue their suppression of viewpoint diversity under the false banner of inclusivity.

The tweets featured throughout the study bear witness to the biased discrimination being waged on college campuses, and it is hindering students’ abilities to pursue an education in a truly free academic space.

*****

This article was published on December 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from Campus Reform.

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‘1619 Project’ Creator Hannah-Jones: Parents Shouldn’t Decide What’s Taught in School

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By Discover The Networks

Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the widely-debunked 1619 Project which posits that America’s history is grounded in racism, not liberty, declared that parents should not be in charge of deciding what is taught in schools.

“I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught,” Hannah-Jones mused. “I’m not a professional educator. I don’t have a degree in social studies or science. We send our children to school because we want them to be taught by people who have expertise in the subject area. And that is not my job.”

Referring to far-left, former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who sparked controversy when he declared in a recent gubernatorial debate that parents shouldn’t have any say in their children’s education, Hannah-Jones added, “When the governor or the candidate said he didn’t think parents should be deciding what’s being taught in school, he was panned for that, but that’s just the fact this is why we send our children to school and don’t home school because these are the professional educators who have the expertise to teach social study, to teach history, to teach science, to teach literature. I  think we should leave that to the educators. Yes, we should have some say, but school is not about simply confirming our worldview. Schools should teach us to question. They should teach us how to think, not what to think.”

That is precisely the problem. Today’s left-dominated education system is designed to indoctrinate, not to open up young minds and encourage critical thinking. It is designed to promote a far-left worldview. “Professional educators” now are not experts in history, science, and literature, but in political activism, and they proudly perceive their job to be turning students into social justice activists.

Parents realize this now and are fighting to wrest control of the education of their children from this radical brainwashing.

1619 Project

7 Known Connections

Nikole Hannah-Jones was awarded, for her 1619 Project, the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Moreover, the Pulitzer Center, as The 1619 Project’s official education partner, facilitated the implantation of curricula based on the Project into some 4,500 classrooms nationwide between August 2019 and May 2020. As the Pulitzer Center boasts:

  • “Tens of thousands of students in all 50 states engaged with the curricular resources, which include reading guides, lesson plans, and extension activities.”
  • “Tens of thousands of copies of [The New York Times Magazine] were shipped by The New York Times and the Pulitzer Center to students and educators at K-12 schools, community colleges, [historically black colleges], and other campuses.”
  • “Five school systems adopted the project at broad scale: Buffalo, New York; Chicago, [Illinois]; Washington, DC; Wilmington, Delaware; and Winston-Salem, North Carolina.”

The 1619 Project is also supported by the Smithsonian Institution.

To learn more about the 1619 Project, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Networks column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Florida Public Universities Expected to Reject Boycott of the Jews (BDS), Governor DeSantis Says

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By The Geller Report

Governor Ron DeSantis is without question the best governor in America. #DeSantis2024.

Florida Public Universities Expected to Reject BDS, Governor DeSantis Says

By Algemeiner, December 26, 2021

The office of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said on Wednesday that it expects Florida State University to prevent the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), with which it is an institutional partner, from operating a boycott of Israel on its campus.

Earlier this month, MESA members voted during their annual meeting to hold a referendum next year on a resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

Responding Wednesday to questions about the proposed MESA boycott posed by Legal Insurrection, DeSantis’ office shared a statement rejecting “discrimination against the State of Israel or the Israeli people, including boycotts and divestments targeting Israel (the BDS movement).”

“It is our expectation that Florida State University will not permit MESA to operate a boycott of Israel through a public institution, will not accept the academic boycott of Israel, and will not allow university funds to be paid indirectly or directly to any organization that endorses BDS,” the statement continued. “The same goes for any other institution that receives state funding.”

Several other MESA institutional partners, including California State University, University of Arizona, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and University of Michigan, are also in states that have adopted measures against using public funds to support BDS.

The Academic Engagement Network, which opposes efforts to delegitimize Israel on campus, said this month that a MESA boycott “will inevitably and inequitably — discriminate against, exclude, and isolate Israeli scholars by singling out the Israeli academy for boycott.”

The proposed boycott was also lambasted as a threat to academic freedom by a group of progressive academics earlier this week.

Florida State University did not return The Algemeiner‘s request for comment.

RELATED ARTICLE: In Israel, Florida’s governor hailed for making the sunshine state ‘most pro-Israel’ in America

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

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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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Lockdown Policies and Mask Mandates Linked With Lower IQ in Children thumbnail

Lockdown Policies and Mask Mandates Linked With Lower IQ in Children

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By The Geller Report

The Democrat dream – a generation of zombies, enslaved by the government.

The nation’s recent lockdown policies and mask mandates will create a generation of children who exhibit lower IQs and signs of social brain damage, according to a clinical psychiatrist for children and adolescents.

By Tammy Hung, The Epoch Times, December 26, 2021 Updated: December 27, 2021

Dr. Mark McDonald cited an Aug. 11 study by Brown University (pdf) that found that “children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,” during an interview with host Cindy Drukier on a Dec. 25 episode of NTD’s “The Nation Speaks.” NTD is a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

The masks, “Zoom schools,” and lockdown mandates have led to “deprivation overall, of social contact, [of] not being able to see faces, being stuck at home all day long, [and this] has actually caused brain damage to the youngsters,” he said.

In another interview in the episode, professor Carl Heneghan, the director of Oxford University’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, cited evidence that pandemic restrictions and the “fear we instill into children” has led to the worsening of psychological problems.

Heneghan cited his Oct. 2 study, which concluded that “eight out of 10 children and adolescents report worsening of behavior or any psychological symptoms or an increase in negative feelings due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“School closures contributed to increased anxiety, loneliness and stress; negative feelings due to COVID-19 increased with the duration of school closures,” the study reports. “Deteriorating mental health was found to be worse in females and older adolescents.”

Adolescents above the age of 12 also did worse than children under 12, as adolescents face increasing peer pressure, social pressure, and are more aware of messages being delivered globally, according to Heneghan.

“The first thing is to deescalate any fear and anxiety around COVID for children,” Heneghan said. “For children, [COVID] is actually a very safe disease” and children shouldn’t be worried about the impact of COVID “on themselves or their future health.”

He said that “shutting areas like schools was a mistake,” as keeping them open is good for education, “social connectedness, and well-being.”

“We should really prioritize education and those interventions that are in children’s best interest,” he said.

According to a Dec. 20 study, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also showed that mental health-related visits in 2020, when pandemic restrictions were first imposed, increased by 24 percent in 5- to 11-year-olds and 31 percent in 12- to 17-year-olds, compared to 2019 data.

Anecdotally, McDonald noted that he’s seen children who “refuse to make eye contact, who are wetting their pants or wetting the bed at night, cannot go to sleepovers—being away from their mother for extended periods of time.”

Teenagers, on the other hand, come out of lockdown restrictions being “so wrapped up in social media and phones and Zoom school because they’ve been trained for the last year and a half, that they do not even want to go out anymore,” he said.

McDonald called the government and media corporations out for creating a “behavioral conditioning program,” in which children are subjected to “irrational, ridiculous” situations such as eating outside on a 40-degree day and having to run marathons or play sports with masks on.

As of Dec. 27, the Biden administration is recommending that children “too young to be vaccinated” should be “surrounded by vaccinated people and mask in public indoor spaces, including schools,” according to the COVID plan on the White House website. “For those adolescents aged 12 and above who are eligible for vaccination, the most important step parents can take is to get them vaccinated.”

As of Dec. 27, the website states that “over half of the nation’s adolescents have been vaccinated.”

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

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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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Is this the best short film ever about ‘woke’ arithmetic? thumbnail

Is this the best short film ever about ‘woke’ arithmetic?

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By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Every teacher’s worst nightmare.

Comedy is the most effective way to skewer idiocy. Alternative Math depicts a nightmarish student who refuses to accept that 2+2=4. And since Little Johnny must always be right, the teacher’s confrontation with him gets escalated to the school board, with calamitous consequences. It’s terribly unfair, exaggerated all out of proportion … and very funny.

RELATED ARTICLE: The endgame of transgender ideology is to dismantle the family

COLUMN BY

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. More by Michael Cook

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

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MICHIGAN: Similar COVID-19 Case Rates in Schools With No Mask Mandates

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By The Geller Report

And yet schools are expelling students if their mask mandate is violated.

Michigan: Similar COVID-19 Case Rates in Schools With No Mask Mandates

By Jeremy Frankel | Newsmax,  19 December 2021:

The state of Michigan last week published data that shows schools with no mask mandates had “similar” COVID-19 case rates to schools with mandates.

The report, titled Michigan COVID Response Data and Modeling Update,” examined COVID-19 data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and the Michigan Disease Surveillance System as recently as December 3rd, of school students ages 5-18, according to the Blaze.

It stated that “case rates in 5–18-year-olds have become more similar across mask rule types.”

TheBlaze adds that schools with few or no mask rules had fewer 7-day average cases per 100,000 students than schools with strict or partial mask rules, and that the report stated that “differences due to masking potentially being washed out by transmission in other settings.”

However, the report did not elaborate further on why transmission rates, regardless of mask mandates, were similar.

A peer-reviewed study by researchers from the University of Louisville released in August had similar findings, concluding that “mask mandates and use likely did not affect COVID-19 case growth.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

Elite $57,000-a-year New York City private school Horace Mann that counts Betty White and Jack Kerouac among its alumni threatens to EXPEL students who flout mask mandate.

25 States Sue Biden Admin Over Covid Mandates for Children

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

Quick note: 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. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter, and we will not fail. Freedom will prevail.

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

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Microschooling’s Growth In Arizona Is No Surprise

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By Michael McShane

The Roman philosopher Seneca is quoted as saying that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” When the coronavirus hit Arizona and parents were looking for options outside of their closed traditional public schools, they were lucky to find a proliferating network of microschools. But that lucky moment was years, if not decades, in the making.

In a new paper for the Manhattan Institute, I examine the phenomenon of microschooling in Arizona. After hearing from several parents who found microschools to be a godsend after they grew frustrated watching their school boards and administrators dither and prevaricate on COVID policies, I wanted to answer a basic question: Why here?

Executive Summary

Microschools, small schools that educate five to 15 students, have been among the most interesting recent developments in the K–12 reform world. Neither homeschooling nor traditional schooling, they exist in a hard-to-classify space between formal and informal learning environments. They rose in popularity during the pandemic as families sought alternative educational options that could meet social-distancing recommendations. But what they offer in terms of personalization, community building, schedules, calendars, and the delivery of instruction will have appeal long after Covid recedes.

One of the most prominent microschooling networks, Prenda, was founded in 2018 in Mesa, Arizona’s third largest city. It has experienced dramatic growth largely because of the way it attracts parents like those interviewed for this paper. It is no coincidence that Prenda’s emergence and expansion took place in Arizona, which has been a national leader in education innovation for a generation. Arizona’s cultural and policy environment foster and promote experimentation, diversification, and parental choice. The state’s thriving charter-school sector—no state has a higher percentage of students in charters—has developed an expansive, varied set of choice-based public schools. For decades, Arizona’s traditional public schools have been part of the state’s open-enrollment system, making more than a thousand district-run schools part of a choice system. And Arizona has been a national leader on private-school choice, passing the nation’s first “education savings account” program and today, via an array of state programs, enabling more than 100,000 students to access nonpublic schools.

This paper explores microschooling in the Grand Canyon State through parent interviews, a review of decades of public-policy reform and K–12 political battles, and an assessment of student performance data. A key lesson—one that reform-minded advocates in other states should consider— is that one cannot understand microschooling in Arizona without understanding Arizona.

Taking the Leap

Sophia Ortega is a mother in Buckeye, Arizona. In January 2020, her two children were enrolled in a high-performing, well-known charter school. But she was not happy with the school.

Her boys are, in her words, “energetic, rambunctious, and smart,” but too frequently, in their school, the first two characteristics were in tension with the third. A friend who had already pulled her children out of school had heard about Prenda, a small but growing network of microschools. Though Sophia was skeptical, PrendaCon, a gathering of Prenda educators and families, was taking place in two days, so she and her friend decided to check it out.

Prenda founder Kelly Smith’s opening presentation had Sophia hooked. The core values of Prenda aligned with her beliefs about parenting and education. The structure of the school day and the educational environment were what she wanted for her children. She was still hesitant— this would be a new approach to schooling—but the pandemic and the challenges that she faced as a single mother juggling full-time work and two children learning at home persuaded her to take the leap.

In September 2020, she started as a guide (Prenda’s term for a teacher) in a microschool hosted in her friend’s house. That school now enrolls seven students, six boys and one girl, ranging from kindergarten to sixth grade.

On a typical day, students arrive at 9 a.m. and play for about 15 minutes. At 9:15, Sophia starts the “Morning Standup,” where children gather in an “awareness circle” to do deep breathing and center themselves before talking about their goals for the day. Students also have an opportunity to share anything they would like with the group.

From 9:30 to 11:15, students work through “Conquer,” a personalized learning curriculum, on their Chromebooks. The microschool has a sectional sofa and blankets, and students are allowed to work wherever they find it most comfortable. Sometimes, students want some space; other times, they practically stack themselves on top of one another. When they need assistance, Sophia is available, though she is just as likely to see students asking one another for help. Conquer covers math, language arts, reading, and writing.

After a snack break at 11:15, the second part of the day begins: “Create,” in which students pursue individual art projects. Prenda offers students a bank of options, but as they age, they can develop their own projects. Students have to identify what the purpose of the project is and plan all the steps. They can present to their classmates if they wish.

The students break for lunch, 12:45–1:30, with a bit of playtime at the end, and then enter the third component of the Prenda instructional model: “Collaborate.” In this module, which runs from 1:30 to 2:20, students work on group projects, particularly in science and social studies. One example from Sophia’s microschool was a project by fourth- and fifth-graders that tracked a day in the life of a Bedouin, the Arabic-speaking nomadic peoples of the Middle Eastern deserts. As a guide, Sophia works to “get them engaged” and “get them excited about leading their own learning,” as she puts it.

When I asked why she got involved with Prenda, Sophia highlighted the key values that anchor Prenda’s work: “Start with heart,” “Figure it out,” “Dare greatly,” “Foundation of trust,” and “Learning > comfort.” “Start with heart” really spoke to her; it matched her parenting style, and she thought that it was missing from her kids’ previous schools. But she also thinks that “a lot of kids are afraid to dare greatly.” Encouraging students to take risks helps them to “stay at their learning frontier” and grow into happier, more confident young people.

Continue reading this article at Manhattan Institute.

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A Black Heretic on the Church of CRT

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By Craig J. Cantoni

A review of Woke Racism:  How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

________________________________________________________

Woke Racism:  How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, by

John McWhorter, Portfolio/Penguin, 2021, 201 pages.

________________________________________________________

John McWhorter says some important things about wokeness and critical race theory in this book, and as a black man, he can say them without being ensnared by the Catch-22 of CRT, which holds that non-blacks are ipso facto racist if they criticize CRT.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t say it very well, in spite of teaching linguistics at Columbia University. The book appears to have been written hurriedly and loses the reader at times in fuzzy abstractions.

The main theme is that wokeness is a religion, and as such, it is futile to try to change the minds of true believers or to even have an intelligent, rational discussion with them. It’s akin to an atheist questioning the tenets of any of the major religions. 

This brings back memories of religion class in parochial school, when I would question a tenet of the Catholic Church. Instead of addressing my point, the nun would respond, “You have to have faith.” However, unlike the Church of CRT, I wasn’t canceled or called names. Of course, I would’ve been burned at the stake in medieval times.

McWhorter doesn’t say it this way, but we’re still in medieval times when it comes to discussing race in America. I’ve been through it all and was at the vanguard of much of it: civil rights, equal opportunity, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, affirmative action, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, detailed affirmative-action plans, college admission quotas, the Black Panthers, black liberation theology, racial encounter groups, racial sensitivity training, the diversity movement started by R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. and subsequently corrupted, and a lifetime of reading the works of black writers and the history of the evils and blessings of America.

That history is necessary for understanding where we are today and why much of CRT and wokeness is hokum. But McWhorter doesn’t get into that.

He is good, however, at giving examples of today’s cancel culture and how it has ruined careers. He also is courageous for speaking out against it. Surprisingly, though, his three recommendations for saving black America, while sound, doesn’t address a major reason for the widespread and seemingly intractable socioeconomic problems in so many African-American communities. He writes:

What ails black America in the twenty-first century would yield considerably to exactly three real-world efforts that combine political feasibility with effectiveness: There should be no war on drugs; society should get behind teaching everybody to read the right way [phonics instead of the whole word method], and we should make solid vocational training as easy to obtain as a college degree.

McWhorter is silent about the tragic impact of single parenting on black America, especially the absence of fathers from the household. Fathers are absent from African-American households at more than twice the rate of white households and seven times more than the households of certain Asian nationalities/ethnicities. Not surprisingly, those Asian households rank at the top in income, test scores, and law abidance.

The problem of missing fathers has become so entrenched that the words “parent” and “spouse” are now missing from inner-city lexicons, having been replaced by “baby momma” and “baby daddy.” Many baby daddies have children by multiple baby mommas, in a form of polygamy without marriage, a problem that also exists among poor whites, driven by changed social mores and poorly designed welfare programs.

This is a complex problem with a complex history and complex causes, but ignoring it will not solve it. Ever since Vice President Dan Quayle was skewered for his Murphy Brown comment, it has become the third-rail of sociology and politics, and, as such, is largely missing from discussions today about social justice.

As is commonly known, the liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the problem when he was a sociologist at the Department of Labor and wrote his controversial 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Less known is the 1963 book that he co-authored with Nathan Glazer: Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Moynihan would go on to be an esteemed U.S. Senator, and Glazer would go on to publish a book in 1988, The Limits of Social Policy.

In the introduction to a 1970 revised edition of their joint book, Moynihan and Glazer expressed their dismay with new and divisive racial categories and associated thinking, as follows:

In 1969, we seem to be moving to a new set of categories, black and white, and that is ominous.  On the horizon stand the fantastic categories of the “Third World,” in which all the colors, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red (these are the favored terms for Negro, Mexican-American and Puerto Rican, Chinese and Japanese, and American Indian—a biologically and humanly monstrous naming, it seems to us—among some militants of southern California) are equated as “the oppressed” in opposition to the oppressing whites.

Beyond the Melting Pot and The Limits of Social Policy have remained on my bookshelf for decades, because they are scholarly, bipartisan works and thus unlike the propaganda, agitprop, sophistry, banalities, partisan rancor, and axe-to-grind protestations that pass today for intelligent writing and thinking about race, including the specious thinking behind critical race theory.

Woke Racism is better than those other writings, but not good enough to keep on my bookshelf.

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Who is making your choices?

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By Karen Schoen

“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” – Plato

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, while I was teaching, I noticed a great change in the goal of education.  I usually didn’t care what the curricula or text said, I wanted my students to learn the skills I learned in school which helped me make great choices throughout my life. I was teaching my students skills so they could make the best choice for their life.  It was during this time I noticed that instead of teaching knowledge and skills, the teachers manual changed.   We were now to focus on feelings and common thought…

As a math teacher asking, “how do you feel about 2+2=4?” did not compute. How does that help you balance a checkbook or work a profit- loss spreadsheet?? So I never asked those questions. We also were to focus on the group not the individual. We were told individual excellence was not as important as the achievement and success of the group. The group got a name and the group achievement got stars on the wall instead of naming individual students and showing their achievement. Students were given group assignments and the fast learners were discouraged from finishing so fast. The others had to catch up. The dumbing down of everyone had begun.  This evolution took about the entire 22 years I taught. Until one term when we came back to school and there were no more old texts for me to use. Everything was now to be done the John Dewey, Modern Education way. That year marked the end of my teaching career.

During that time, for continuing education,  I attended the John Dewey New School for Social Research, Greenwich Village, NYC.  It was there I learned that all subject matter was to be integrated with the same message. Hollywood, the Media were all to carry the same message which would be reinforced in school. The message:  The Environment, the destruction of the planet is caused by HUMANS. Humans are evil and destructive. They were right at that time. The pollution and smog was so bad is some cities it was almost impossible to breathe.  Environmental groups focused on pollution as the cause for climate change.  In the beginning, the EPA did clean much of the air and water but somehow it was never enough. The rules got stricter and the cost to cure became unnecessarily higher. Try buying a simple item like a gas can.  In 2000, a gas can was about $3-5.00. Today they are over $10. Why?  Because now they have to follow insane EPA regulations on gas and oil as well as gas can design.   Eventually as most people with power do, they abused their power and closed industries which was the original intent. No free thinkers allowed.  The lucrative logging industry came to a stand still and Americans were forced to buy expensive lumber from Canada and overseas. Instead of logging and following good forestry practice which loggers did, the forests now go up in smoke and the lumber is now ash. Because they do not allow opposition, we have a choice of one, whatever they give us. My first car was a 1968 Camero. I got to pick the exterior color (white) and the interior color (Hunter Green) Not today. Today we can choose one of the packages the manufacturer selected for us.  Sadly our children will never have the individual choices we seniors were able to make.

I learned how important messaging is.  How you can take a group of people and motivate them into totally ignoring their own will and vote with the group. The one controlling communication has the power. If you can isolate people, make them afraid, they will give up almost anything to make the pain go away. (masks and mandates anyone). We learned Cloward and Piven, the Hegalian Dialectic, Cognitive Dissonance,  Projection and the Precautionary Principal. I learned about, the ends justifying the means, Conspicuous Consumption and Planned Obsolescence. It was then that I realized we were teaching a communist method. Students were no  longer encouraged to think outside the box. Today they must think inside the box. The pentagon is now purging the military of anyone who doesn’t think as told.  No more individual excellence only collective mediocrity. Today unelected people who had this type of feel good education are making the new rules which make no sense because the new Globalists are void of logic and reason.

I began to notice how all of these psychological theories had one thing in common.  As a math teacher I always look for the common denominator.  They all were fed by EMOTION.  What were we teaching in school? EMOTION. The communists locked onto Edwin Bernays, the grandfather of Marketing and Sales: “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby” – 40 Virginia Slims Cigarette Ads From the Early 1970s introducing women to lung cancer. The thinking was once these kids got out of school, they would be guided by their emotions. As young adults they could be hooked on the fad of the month. Once that happened those in charge using a persuasive argument, trigger words and images can control the masses. You could sell them anything. Sell the sizzle, not the steak. The talking heads on MSM are perfect examples. Do they actually believe their own lies or are they controlled because of money and ego?

The brain is like a filing cabinet. A human can only have ONE thought at a time. The other thoughts are in the locked cabinet. So if all you ever deal with and learn in school is emotion, you will never use logic and reason. Today we are living the results of that type of emotional education. The 1% people running the world for the most part are sociopaths and nihilists. They have NO emotion and could care less about anyone but themselves. They are on a mission for eternal life by merging humans with AI. To them we will become cyborgs programmed to do their bidding. Resistance is futile.  Anything else is just a temporary annoyance.  With money and power, they control the next level of about 10% of the population.  The job of the 10% is to use emotion to spread fear in order to control the sheeple.  People who die along the way are just collateral damage in their never ending quest of money and power.  Killing off seniors, no big deal. Seniors have become the useless eaters digging into their profit. So they continually tells us that the earth is overpopulated, not enough food – all lies. They know the money pot is finite and they resent you for having any. Which is why every time the middle class gets ahead, a bubble of destruction is orchestrated to put us back in our place by making sure we lose our assets while they get stimulus money to get richer.  The money they have really belongs to the middle class.  They essentially stole our money through all kinds of government schemes.  We have it.  They want it. So the communist rulers create  recessions. We lose.

Think about the economy today. People can not return to work because the Globalists have arranged that by: overregulation, mandates, lockdowns, government subsidies,  importing cheap labor and etc..  Globalists hate America, want to destroy America and have instituted a strategy called Death by 1000 Cuts. By owning Education, Wall Street, Media, Pharma, and Hollywood they owned messaging. This same messaging is now seen in every agency and industry in America.  By owning education, they can insure Obedience and Loyalty. The incompetence, corruption, racism and hatred found in every American agency is staggering. What do they want:  Diversity, Inclusion, Equity = DIE

Do you now understand why the border is open? The middle class was making too much money under Trump. The middle class was finally catching up.  However according to the Globalists, the American middleclass was becoming a bad example for the rest of the world. Obama even told a group of Kenya graduates not to think about air conditioning or cars like Americans. No competition allowed under communism. No one except the chosen ones can profit as long as the government gets its cut. Enter China with lots of $$$$.  A new partnership was born with China and the corrupt politicians who arranged favorable trade positions for China to the detriment of Americans.   By following the America First plan of President Trump, the Globalists began to see their income and power shrink and the Middleclass expand. How dare MAGA fight back. You are the enemy. Therefore, anything goes, you deserve to be punished.  Time for a good crisis and they have many: Inflation, Covid, Mass Unemployment, High Gas Prices, Drug, Crimes, Murders, Alcohol, Suicide. Let the Hunger Games Begin.

Globalists are in both parties. Globalists must punish their enemies. Their enemy is anyone who disagrees with them. Americans especially MAGA Americans disagree. Therefore  Americans, MAGA are the enemy and deserve to be punished. This punishment of the evil domestic terrorists, MAGA enables Globalists to justify the political prisoners, riots, mandates, open borders, election theft, censorship. A close defeat is not enough, they must be crushed and replaced with MAGA people who love America.

We can’t let them get away with dictating to us. We can  not allow their lies to stand. We must tell the truth. Did we forgot we are all equal? We must be the truth warriors. Stop letting others choose your destiny.

Is America worth saving?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke

©Karen Schoen. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: POLL: Nearly 60% Of American Parents Are Concerned With What Their Kids Are Learning

Why The Casual Attitude Towards Inflation? thumbnail

Why The Casual Attitude Towards Inflation?

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By Randall Holcombe

The Federal Reserve and the Biden administration seem to have a very casual attitude toward inflation. When inflation started to draw some attention, the Federal Reserve’s official line was that it was transitory.

In June, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said it was temporary, and John Williams, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, predicted inflation for 2021 to be around 3%. In response to this month’s inflation numbers, President Biden said this is the peak, and inflation should decline rapidly after this peak. He blames inflation on supply chain issues.

There is some truth to the claim that the current inflation is in part due to the economy’s recovery from the government’s COVID policies that shut down lots of businesses and put lots of people out of work. But, those factors also contributed to subdued demand and lower inflation in 2020.

The Federal Reserve claims to have an inflation target of 2%. Why the target should even be that high is another question, but let’s look at the inflation numbers in light of the Fed’s target.

Inflation, November 2020 to November 2021 was 6.8%, the highest it’s been since 1982. Inflation from November 2019 to November 2020 was 1.2%. So, the average over the past two years has been 4%, double the Fed’s target rate.

The experience of the 1970s showed that once inflation starts, stopping it is a slow and painful experience. The threat of inflation has been apparent for some time now (here’s what I said about it in May), but those who have the power to do something about it seem to have the attitude that it will go away on its own.

*****

This article was published on December 18, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

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This Microschool Network Is Booming as Families Flee Government-Run Schools

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Acton Academy affiliates are benefiting from the surge in interest in microschools and the growing demand by parents for private education options.

When Jessica Gregory and her husband moved from the Washington, D.C. area in 2020 to a suburban community north of Boston, they expected to find a school for their children that was similar in quality to the one they left behind. They were disappointed to discover that classroom and behavioral management consumed much of the school day, and a rigid curriculum stifled their children’s curiosity and creativity.

“Like so many other families across the country, when the pandemic brought public schooling onto my kitchen table, I was floored,” she told me. “We became the unintended participants in the daily grind of standardized learning plans, un-engaging lessons and burnt out educators – conversations that, until the pandemic, were abstract for many adults,” she said.

Determined to provide her children with a learning environment that nurtures their talents and cultivates their individuality, this fall Gregory launched The Wilder School, a microschool that is part of the booming Acton Academy network. Founded in Austin in 2010 by Laura and Jeff Sandefer, Acton Academy now has more than 250 affiliate schools in 31 states and 25 countries. Each Acton affiliate is founded by entrepreneurial parents like Gregory for whom the network’s philosophy of highly personalized, self-paced, learner-driven education resonates. Since its inception, Acton Academy has received over 15,000 applications from parents who desire to launch an affiliate school.

For Gregory, the chance to build a school from scratch that connects to a vision she believes in was enticing. “Acton offers a unique education model which complements individualized learning plans with small group, collaborative projects,” she told me. “When I found it, I was intrigued. Acton then takes this a step further, implementing the best aspects of the world’s leading learning models in an intimate, community-centered approach that feels like a natural extension of home life. I knew this was the right model for our family because it supports whole-child development, valuing equally the real-world application of leadership and academic skills,” she said.

On the day I visited The Wilder School, a bright, colorful and welcoming classroom in a standalone, home-like building behind the church from which Gregory rents the space, I got a glimpse of how a day at an Acton Academy operates. In the morning, learners of different ages are dropped off and have some free time to prepare for the day. Then, they gather together to set and review daily and weekly learning goals. These goals fall within the broad academic categories of reading, writing and mathematics, but the children, called “heroes” at Acton, decide how and what those goals entail, with help from their instructors, or “guides.”

For Gregory’s two children, ages seven and nine, who are the initial students in The Wilder School, math goals involve completing several units each week using Khan Academy, the free, online learning platform that is used in many schools and homeschools across the country. Reading goals are accomplished using Lexia, a literacy learning software, while writing skills are developed using Night Zookeeper, a playful, game-based platform that makes writing fun and engaging. While these are the learning tools Gregory’s children currently use to meet their weekly goals, children at Acton are free to set personalized learning goals using the tools or resources that work best for them.

After a morning of self-paced, learner-directed academic work, the children take a long lunch break and spend ample time outside before reconvening for collaborative, project-based work in the afternoon. At The Wilder School, that work currently involves participating in an interactive lesson on colonial America, as well as developing a sales pitch for which type of classroom pet to adopt.

At just over $12,000 in annual tuition, The Wilder School, like most Acton Academy affiliates, is a fraction of the cost of other local independent private schools. Gregory has ambitious plans for the growth of The Wilder School in the coming months and years, including expanding her classroom space and introducing early childhood and middle school programs. Her optimism is well-placed, as Acton Academy programs across the country have seen extraordinary growth in recent years, a trend that has only accelerated during the pandemic response.

At Acton Academy Placer, outside of Sacramento, founder Matt Beaudreau says the growth in his programs has been breathtaking. “We can’t build schools fast enough,” he told me, adding that he is already outgrowing the buildings in his three locations which currently serve more than 300 learners, ages four to 18. Beaudreau expects this number to nearly double over the next year, and with full-time annual tuition around $10,000, Acton Placer is more accessible than other area private schools. Some of Acton Placer’s continued growth is due to parents seeking schooling alternatives after nearly two years of frustration with closed schools and ongoing coronavirus policies.

As a private membership association that operates as a learning resource center, Acton Placer was unaffected by school closures and related pandemic policies. Mask-wearing has always been optional for all community members, with individual decision-making a key tenet of Acton Placer’s culture. Each Acton Academy affiliate is free to create its own structure, school culture and procedures, while staying true to the overall Acton educational philosophy. Indeed, decentralization of authority and an elevation of the individual is at the root of Acton Academy’s broader mission. The network was named after Lord Acton, who wrote in 1887: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

It’s precisely this decentralization of power and emphasis on self-directed learning and goal-setting that led Heidi Ross to enroll her 11-year-old son in an Acton Academy in San Diego. A teacher and literacy specialist for 20 years in both public and private schools, Ross values the freedom and flexibility of the Acton model. “He’s learning a lot about responsibility, accountability, speaking up with kindness and respect,” she told me. “He’s also met some really great challenges and been successful in increasing math and reading—the core skills they have at Acton. He sees his progress which really excites him, and has good friendships developing,” she added.

Acton Academy affiliates are benefiting from the surge in interest in microschools that began several years ago and has increased since the onset of the pandemic. They are also tapping in to growing demand by parents for private schooling options. According to a recent analysis by the Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey, private schools have seen enrollment gains during the coronavirus response.

The Wilder School’s Gregory thinks that the growing interest in private education stems from remote learning during school shutdowns that gave parents a close-up look at what their children were learning. “Through this, they have begun to question why school remains so similar to their own experience and how this format will prepare their children for jobs that have yet to be created, spurring droves of families to depart the public school system in search of more effective, flexible alternatives,” she said.

Gregory added: “If anything positive came out of it, the pandemic has raised our collective awareness of education alternatives and the expectation families have for their children.”

This article has been reprinted with permission from Forbes.com.

COLUMN BY

Kerry McDonald

Kerry McDonald is a Senior Education Fellow at FEE and author of Unschooled: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom (Chicago Review Press, 2019). She is also an adjunct scholar at The Cato Institute and a regular Forbes contributor. Kerry has a B.A. in economics from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed. in education policy from Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and four children. You can sign up for her weekly newsletter on parenting and education here.

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

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Mazoola Protects Kids’ Privacy

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By National Center on Sexual Exploitation

Payment apps and online payment options through social media platforms are used to enable child and adult sexual exploitation. These digital payment options give easier access to sexual predators to groom young users. Direct service providers serving child sex trafficking victims have called NCOSE to ask our assistance in advocating that Square, CashApp, and Venmo make changes to their platforms to reduce the ease with which predators can send money to young kids. Georgia First Lady Marty Kemp and online child safety group Bark have found similar trends—predators using these online payment systems to groom and exploit children.

Child sex trafficking survivors have shown NCOSE their phones, explaining that $50 would suddenly show up in their account and they would know their sex trafficker just sold them to a sex buyer.

NCOSE listed Snapchat on the 2017 Dirty Dozen List in large part due to their app feature Snapcash, which was largely used to pay for filmed and in-person sex acts, including those with children. Gratefully, Snapchat disabled the feature, however the trend continues with the #snapcash hashtag still in-use, and Venmo and Square increasingly used as the payment processor. While Instagram remains a hotspot for grooming and soliciting sex from youth, the platform recently announced an upcoming subscription feature (just like exploitative OnlyFans) enabling users to pay and receive money for content on their platform, which is likely to be abused by child predators (we are already in talks with them to ensure exploitation remains prohibited).

In addition to the ease with which online payments are given and received directly to youth to facilitate child sexual exploitation, predators are also known to track the behavior of youth online and then use that knowledge to push kids to do what they want. The lack of privacy for youth online is deeply troubling. This is why our public policy team is advocating to raise the digital age of adulthood from the current 13 to 18 with legislation pending before Congress. Take action below.

In light of these increasing dangers facing youth online, we are especially excited about a new tool that gives parents “digital superpowers” to help navigate their child’s path to earning, learning, and developing essential money management skills, while protecting their financial privacy and providing essential armor against victimization and exploitation online.

We are pleased to recognize REGO and its super app digital wallet platform, MazoolaSM with the Dignity Defense Alert!

Mazoola helps kids earn, learn, and develop essential money management skills, while protecting against victimization and exploitation online. #DignityDefenseAlert

CLICK TO TWEET

Why Mazoola is So Necessary

We all know the threat that social networking sites can pose to children and the ways predators can use data exposed on social media. However, the misuse of data collected during a child’s financial transactions online or in-person via debit cards, digital wallets, and smartcard apps can be just as damaging.

Data thieves are more likely to capitalize on kids’ data. Criminals can often open more fraudulent accounts using a child’s personal information before getting caught than when using an adult’s. In 2017, among people notified that their information was included in a data breach, 39% of minors became victims of fraud compared to only 19% of adults. Over 1 million kids are victims of identity theft each year and children are 51 times more likely to be a victim of identity theft than adults.

That kind of information is rocket fuel for abusers and predators who thrive on grooming, manipulation, and “social engineering” of young children. Personal data about a child’s online and in-person transactions would open massive new avenues to earn trust and break through child’s defenses and instincts.

The proliferation of contactless payments in the COVID-19 era continues to grow rapidly and debit cards and digital wallets are a significant tool that children can use. However, most parents are not aware of the potential threat these new financial payment mechanisms can create. For example, parents may sign up to allow their child to save or make easy, digital payments, without realizing this technology also creates an avenue for predators to anonymously transfer money into their child’s digital wallet. Services like this that don’t provide clear and easy parental visibility create unsafe spaces for children without even realizing it.

Mazoola, as the only COPPA-certified mobile family wallet, is a walled garden that offers parents much-needed reassurance that their children’s financial information is safe while shopping with their favorite retailers online or in-store from their mobile device. Parents get the immediate visibility into every one of their child’s transactions, while helping them build financial independence in a safe, step-by-step way.

A Cycle of Exploitation: Online Harms Facing Youth

The brave whistleblower Frances Haugen has shown how Facebook targets kids with harmful and toxic messages and ads, driving a cycle of exploitation and harm that has victimized thousands. Congress is rightly considering a host of reforms to create a safer, more accountable Internet—including limiting tech platforms’ overbroad Section 230 immunity and even more focused legislation like the KIDS Act that would limit online manipulation and amplification of the most destructive messages.

But overlooked in the debate is an even simpler, more immediate step legislators can take to protect our kids from technology platforms run amok—modernize and strengthen our privacy laws to cut off the data fuel that powers algorithmic abuse and exploitative microtargeting in the first place.

Right now, the federal COPPA law requires companies to get opt-in consent before collecting personal information from children who are 12 and under.  But these new fintech digital wallet companies that are targeting kids, like Greenlight and goHenry, can collect personal data from all children at will unless their parents affirmatively “opt-out”—which often requires running an obstacle course of click-throughs and consent forms that even a determined adult would have trouble navigating. Obviously, very few parents have opted their kids out.

The resulting FinTech Child Privacy Protection (FTCPP) gap is bad enough when our kids are just surfing the web or uploading their personal information to TikTok. But the harm gets supercharged when kids start using non-COPPA compliant payment apps and digital wallets.

Children’s Privacy is Not Prioritized

A recent VICE investigation found the largest kid-targeting payment companies “are willfully stretching the bounds of the Federal Trade Commission’s rules” and reserve the right to collect and share “a shocking amount of data” about our kids—including “names, birthdates, email addresses, GPS location history, purchase history, and behavioral profiles.”  The power to collect and sell the individual financial transaction history of a child to data brokers, which can then be aggregated and combined with the broader universe of data collected on that child from the rest of their online activity poses a clear and present danger to our kids.

Which brings us right back to the Facebook Files—and the risk that all this personal information will end up feeding the abusive ad targeting and addictive engagement tools that are causing so much damage to our kids online. A teenager who buys diet soda or starts visiting the gym shouldn’t find themselves bombarded with manipulative ads and sponsored influencer content promoting extreme weight loss or other unhealthy messages about body image and their lives. Access to this kind of data (or targeting based on it) would let predators refine their approach to potential victims based on an intimate knowledge of the things they like and how they spend their money and time.

If the data were to be breached or leak onto the dark web, it would give a global community of predators an inside track to manipulate and exploit our children.

New Legislation to Improve Child Online Privacy

Senator Ed Markey, (the original author of the COPPA legislation), has proposed bi-partisan critical legislation to close the FTCPP gap—ensuring all kids younger than 16 receive full COPPA-level opt-in protections and banning certain forms of targeting and similar data abuses, and creating a digital data “eraser” button to put families in control of kids’ data. Representative Kathy Castor has also introduced landmark legislation, the Kids PRIVCY Act, to strengthen COPPA and keep children safe online.

This legislation is especially critical to strengthen the security and safety of digital wallets and spending apps, especially as we emerge from a global pandemic that has skyrocketed the use of contactless payment systems—including for in-person sales. And existing products in the market like the Mazoola payment app have already proven it’s possible to provide full COPPA-level protection to older kids and seamless digital payment online or in stores without collecting any personal data at all about children.

Moving forward with privacy legislation as the first step in addressing the crisis of weaponized data and online harm is also smart because Congress has been working on core privacy issues and developing vetted legislative proposals for years. Both Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Protection Act already provide similar strong protections for younger users, offering real-world proof this path is safe and feasible.

We know a lot about the harm too much data can do in the hands of massive online platforms that do nothing. Congress must act to protect our kids.

But in the meantime, smart tech like Mazoola can protect our kids now and let them benefit from the online world without falling prey to it.

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

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Beware of Free College Offered on a Sharp Knife

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By Agustin Blazquez

Sounds pretty cool today, but what happens when soft tyranny hardens?

Something for America’s new indoctrinated youth to keep in mind about Marxist Socialism is that the authorities keep files on each child from birth to death.  So, the free “education” they will be receiving is according to their obedience and unconditional loyalty to the regime at all times.  Some of their duty is to report what their parents and friends say in private that shows of political “deviation.”  No dissent is allowed and they punish the citizens who disagree.  Depending on this loyalty you can have access to a university or college after high school, but they cannot chose their career.

For example, if the regime needs teachers, that’s the ONLY option.  If they need doctors, engineers, architects, mechanics, or other professions, free education is in accordance with the needs of the regime ONLY.  After graduation, the regime sends them to places far away where they are obligated to serve for a numbers of years.  They cannot change jobs unless the regime decides to transfer them to another location. They cannot chose where they want to live; they live ONLY where the regime places them. Vacations are designated by the regime and awarded in accordance with the conduct of the employee at work.  Everything in life is in accordance with your conduct, because everything is political in Marxist Socialist regimes.

However, the children of the ruling elite have special schools separated from the regular citizens, plus other benefits not available to the rest of the population, like free healthcare which is very good for the ruling elite but lousy for the rest of the population.  So much for “equity,” equality” and “social justice”.  That’s a BIG LIE they use to hook people into Marxist Socialist doctrine.  They are masters of deception.

Food and clothing in reality are what the regime allows.  Like in Cuba, we were eating elbow macaroni for lunch and dinners for almost a year.  There was nothing else to eat.  The food was rationed as well as clothing and other items of personal use.  Toilet paper?  Forget about toilet paper!

I am not enumerating all the inconveniences I suffered in communist Cuba because it would take volumes.

So you, the new indoctrinated youth of America, are exchanging all your freedoms and ability to think for yourselves for a highly regulated and dictatorial existence without a future.

©Agustin Blazquez. All rights reserved.

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Why College Degrees Are Losing Their Value

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The signaling function of college degrees may have been distorted by the phenomenon known as credential inflation.

The concept of inflation (the depreciation of purchasing power of a specific currency) applies to other goods besides money. Inflation is related to the Law of Supply and Demand. As the supply of a commodity increases, the value decreases. Conversely, as the good becomes more scarce, the value of the commodity increases. This same concept is also applicable to tangible items such as vintage baseball cards and rare art. These are rare commodities that cannot be authentically replicated and therefore command a high value on the market. On the other hand, mass-produced rookie cards and replications of Monet’s work are plentiful. As a result, they yield little value on the market.

Inflation and the opposite principle of deflation can also apply to intangible goods. When looking at the job market, this becomes quite evident. Jobs that require skills that are rare or exceptional tend to pay higher wages. However, there are also compensating differentials that arise because of the risky or unattractive nature of undesirable jobs. The higher wages are due to a lack of workers willing to accept the position rather than the possession of skills that are in demand.

Over the past couple of decades, credentialing of intangible employment value has become more prevalent. Credentials can range from college degrees to professional certifications. One of the most common forms of credentialing has become a 4-year college degree. This category of human capital documentation has evolved to take on an alternate function.

Outside of a few notable exceptions, a bachelor’s degree serves a signaling function. As George Mason economics professor Bryan Caplan argues, the function of a college degree is primarily to signal to potential employers that a job applicant has desirable characteristics. Earning a college degree is more of a validation process than a skill-building process. Employers desire workers that are not only intelligent but also compliant and punctual. The premise of the signaling model seems to be validated by the fact that many graduates are not using their degrees. In fact, in 2013; only 27 percent of graduates had a job related to their major.

Since bachelor’s degrees carry a significant signaling function, there have been substantial increases in the number of job seekers possessing a 4-year degree. Retention rates for 4-year institutions reached an all-time high of 81 percent in 2017. In 1900 only 27,410 students earned a bachelor’s degree. This number ballooned to 4.2 million by 1940, and has now increased to 99.5 million. These numbers demonstrate the sharp increase in the number of Americans earning college degrees.

Today, nearly 40 percent of all Americans hold a 4-year degree. Considering the vast increase in college attendance and completion, it’s fair to question if a college degree has retained its “purchasing power” on the job market. Much of the evidence seems to suggest that it has not.

The signaling function of college degrees may have been distorted by the phenomenon known as credential inflation. Credential inflation is nothing more than “… an increase in the education credentials required for a job.”

Many jobs that previously required no more than a high school diploma are now only accepting applicants with bachelor’s degrees. This shift in credential preferences among employers has now made the 4-year degree the unofficial minimum standard for educational requirements. This fact is embodied in the high rates of underemployment among college graduates. Approximately 41 percent of all recent graduates are working jobs that do not require a college degree. It is shocking when you consider that 17 percent of hotel clerks and 23.5 percent of amusement park attendants hold 4-year degrees. None of these jobs have traditionally required a college degree. But due to a competitive job market where most applicants have degrees, many recent graduates have no means of distinguishing themselves from other potential employees. Thus, many recent graduates have no other option but to accept low-paying jobs.

The value of a college degree has gone down due to the vast increase in the number of workers who possess degrees. This form of debasement mimics the effect of printing more money. Following the Law of Supply and Demand, the greater the quantity of a commodity, the lower the value. The hordes of guidance counselors and parents urging kids to attend college have certainly contributed to the problem. However, public policy has served to amplify this issue.

Various kinds of loan programs, government scholarships, and other programs have incentivized more students to pursue college degrees. Policies that make college more accessible—proposals for “free college,” for example—also devalue degrees. More people attending college makes degrees even more common and further depreciated.

Of course, this not to say brilliant students with aspirations of a career in STEM fields should avoid college. But for the average student, a college degree may very well be a malinvestment and hinder their future.

Incurring large amounts of debt to work for minimum wage is not a wise decision. When faced with policies and social pressure that have made college the norm, students should recognize that a college degree isn’t everything. If students focused more on obtaining marketable skills than on credentials, they might find a way to stand out in a job market flooded with degrees.

COLUMN BY

Peter Clark

Peter Clark is a blogger and enthusiastic advocate of free-market economics. Find his work on Medium.

For more education related columns please click here.

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

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One Feminist’s Perspective On How The Transgender Agenda Harms Women & Girls

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By Beverly Hallberg & Kara Dansky

The following is the transcript for the She Thinks podcast:

And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And I’m so excited about today’s guest. Kara Dansky joins us to share why she is furious with her party, the Democrat party, for pushing gender identity or what she refers to as gender insanity. Her premise is that the redefining of the meaning of the word sex and gender victimizes women and children. In our conversation, we’ll discuss things that often aren’t allowed to be said in mainstream media. We’ll get into how gender identity has seeped into our laws and the resulting implications, how parental rights are being ignored, and what it has meant for her to speak out on such a controversial issue.

Now to Kara Dansky. Kara Dansky is a feminist, attorney, Democrat, and public speaker. She serves as the chair of the committee on law and legislation for the global human rights campaign, the WHRC, and is president of the WHRC’s U.S. chapter. She has a 21-year background in criminal law and criminal justice policy. Having worked at the mayor’s office of criminal justice in New York, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School and the Society of Council Representing Accused Persons in Seattle. She’s also the author of the new book, “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” Kara, thank you so much for joining us on She Thinks.

Kara Dansky:

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Beverly Hallberg:

There’s so much I want to get into on this topic, but I’d first like to start with why you decided to spend your days fighting for women in an area that is so controversial? Many people don’t dare to touch it. What made you brave enough to not just deal with this issue but put yourself out there in the spotlight?

Kara Dansky:

Thanks for the question. It doesn’t really feel like bravery to me to just stand up and say that women are female and men are male. But the answer to the question is that in 2014, I was talking with a friend and I’ll say, I’ve always considered myself to be a feminist. And as you mentioned in my bio, my career trajectory took a little bit of a different turn. I went into criminal justice, but I still considered myself a feminist. And in 2014, a very good friend of mine brought my attention to the danger of the so-called transgender agenda or gender identity, as we like to say, and I started paying attention and I looked into it and in 2015, I joined the organization Women’s Liberation Front. And in 2016, I joined the board of that organization. That year, Women’s Liberation Front or WLF sued the Obama Administration over a policy memo that the administration had put out. And I’ve been doing the work ever since.

Beverly Hallberg:

Now you talk a lot about how the redefining of the words sex and gender makes victims of women and girls. First of all, explain to us why the words matter so much and what the implications have been?

Kara Dansky:

So the words are absolutely critical. And so I will never use the word transgender without putting it in quotes. And I make the case in my book or at least I try to make the case. I don’t know how well I do it but I make the case that the word transgender was simply invented. And the reason it was invented is that it comes from so-called queer theory, which is an academic theory that essentially obscures the meanings of words that point to material reality. But if the queer theorists had tried to sell Americans on the idea that sex isn’t real, it wouldn’t have worked. Americans know how babies are made. We all know the basic facts of biology. And so they had to make up a word. And the word that they made up is transgender.

Feminist Janice Raymond wrote a book in 1979 called “The Transsexual Empire,” which predicted all of this. And she re-produced it in 1994 with an introduction that talks about the invention of the word transgender and how it’s going to harm women and girls in particular, though we need to be clear, it harms everybody. The abolition of sex harms everybody. We can talk a little bit about that. But I just refuse to use the language of the opposition. And I think it’s really important that feminists and conservatives who are in this battle for material reality and of the right to privacy and safety of women and girls to not use the language of the opposition ever, I think that’s absolutely critical.

Beverly Hallberg:

And so let’s talk about what these words, where they have seeped into. So we may say, it’s fine if people want to use these words on their own, but we are talking about word choice. You were mentioning the Obama administration that has seeped into executive orders, how government agencies work, government departments, that is in pieces of legislation, especially under the Biden administration. Is there a concerted effort to try to change the meaning of words within legislation and bills that come to Capitol Hill?

Kara Dansky:

Literally yes. So, a little bit of history on this, in 2004, the United Kingdom enacted a new law called the Gender Recognition Act. And what that did was provide a legal mechanism for people who underwent a certain amount of hormone change and surgical change to get what in the UK is called a gender recognition certificate. Fast forward to today and we have the United States Congress inserting new language to literally redefine the word sex. So for example, in the Violence Against Women Act, I think it was 2013, Congress redefined the word sex to include the words “gender identity,” which are essentially just made-up words that have no coherent definition. They did it again this year in the Infrastructure Bill and they are seeking to do it in the so-called Equality Act, which would literally redefine the word sex in civil rights law to include things like gender identity, even though the definition of gender identity in the Equality Act is completely vague and incomprehensible.

So that’s what’s happening in Congress. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration for the first six months or so of this year, literally ordered federal agencies to redefine sex to include gender identity throughout federal administrative law. Those orders are the subject of a lawsuit that was filed by 20 states and in which my organization, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign’s U.S. chapter, has filed a brief arguing that in fact, the complete redefinition of the word sex to include gender identity violates numerous provisions of the U.S. Constitution, federal law and several provisions of state law.

Beverly Hallberg:

And what has really surprised me when I think about the women’s movement, feminism, often people think about the decades-long work to try to get women thought of as equal in the workplace. There are a lot of things that we could think of. I even know today, myself as a small business owner, I’m thankful for the strides that women made before me, so that I could be where I am today. And then when we see where it’s gone, it’s now to the point where people are saying somebody who is a biological man, that if he identifies as a woman, then he can break the glass ceiling for women. It’s really just shocking whether it’s in sports or in careers, how they lift up biological men as women and say that this is shattering the glass ceiling. I find that offensive, do most women find that offensive?

Kara Dansky:

I think so, certainly, feminists do. Literally, yesterday was the anniversary of a massacre of 14 women at a school in Montreal and a Canadian news program decided to acknowledge the anniversary of that massacre. And we need to be clear a man murdered 15 young women because they were women, several decades ago. And yesterday was the anniversary and a Canadian broadcasting corporation decided to acknowledge that anniversary by having a man who identifies as a woman speak on their behalf. And it’s just grotesque.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, you talk about the abolition of sex, it’s the name of your book. When we hear people want to use the terminology “gender identity,” it’s usually under the auspices that they’re trying to prevent discrimination, that we don’t want to discriminate, we want everybody to feel welcome and we want to be inclusive. Tell us how dangerous it is to abolish sex.

Kara Dansky:

Well, part of the problem here is that really across the political aisle, it seems to have been generally accepted that the phrase “transgender people” or “transgender athletes” or “transgender students,” that all of these words describe a coherent category of people for whom sex is irrelevant. That’s not true. And if we’re going to win the battle to fight for the right to privacy and safety of women and girls, we have to be very clear about that. So one implication that I think is not well understood is the phenomenon that we are literally seeing playing out today in prisons in the United States is that convicted rapists and murderers who are men are being housed in women’s prisons. A lot of people know that this is happening in California thanks to the Women’s Liberation Front for filing a lawsuit, challenging the law that allows that, mandates that. It’s also happening in Washington State but it’s also happening across the country.

And most Americans are kept in the dark about this because the media will not talk about it. So again, thank you for allowing me to talk about it here. Something else that I think most Americans just don’t understand because they don’t have a way to know this, is that the FBI tracks crime statistics by sex. And to the best of my knowledge the latest data available is from 2020, and it tracks crime according to male and female. And of course, as we all know, the overwhelming majority of violent and sex crime is committed by men against women. If we’re not allowed to acknowledge the reality of biological sex, we can’t talk honestly about the phenomenon of male violence against women. And that’s really, really dangerous.

Beverly Hallberg:

What do you say then — let’s take a specific example or a hypothetical example about a young biological boy, let’s say 13, 14 years old, feels that he is a woman, is bullied in the men’s locker room and wants to be able to use the females’ locker room because that is how he identifies. What do you do with these individual cases where somebody does feel bullied? Because these are the stories we often hear as the reason we need to change. Even the way locker rooms and schools deal with their policies.

Kara Dansky:

This is not a girls’ problem. If boys are bullying stereotypically effeminate men, young men, if boys are bullying gay boys, if boys are bullying other boys who like to wear stereotypically feminine clothing, then that’s a problem for the boys to solve. They need to stop doing that. They need to stop bullying young homosexual boys. They need to stop bullying boys who adopt stereotypically feminine characteristics and just accept these boys for who they are. But the solution is not to subject girls to having boys in intimate spaces. We know, for example, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the school district adopted a policy of allowing young boys into girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

And a young girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom in a high school in Loudoun County, Virginia. And there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the school district to cover that up in order to justify its policy of allowing boys, in this particular instance, the boy wore a skirt, and he was allowed access to the girls’ bathroom on that basis. And he has been convicted of sexually assaulting a girl. The answer is not to allow these young men into girls’ spaces. The answer is to persuade boys to stop bullying them.

Beverly Hallberg:

And when it comes to young people and we think about education, it’s also what they’re being taught, the curriculum, trying to encourage teachers. There have been reports of teachers or counselors at schools trying to encourage young people to embrace a gender identity that is different from their biological sex. And also leaving parents out. The parental rights are not part of even having this discussion with their children. There’s also the cult, as we have seen. Abigail Shrier has written about this, about young girls wanting to or identifying as the opposite sex. So there seems to be almost a way for young girls to become popular if they talk about themselves as being a boy versus their biological sex. So do you see that there is an agenda at schools within the schooling system, education system, to try to encourage young people to identify as something else?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely. And it’s deliberate. And we know this because there’s documentation of the deliberate nature of this industry, as I describe in the book, to indoctrinate children, to confuse them into thinking that there’s some kind of identity that is unrelated to their actual sex. We need to understand that there is a tremendous amount of money behind this movement to persuade young people to disassociate from their bodies. This is all documented for example, in Jennifer Bilek’s blog, the 11th Hour Blog, she tracks the industry. She has done an incredible job of investigative journalism in understanding the power and the money behind this movement.

I want to get to your question about Abigail Shrier’s book but first I just want to make very clear, as you alluded to earlier, there seems to be an assumption that the movement to abolish sex is a bottom-up, grassroots movement to secure civil rights for a defined category of people. That is not what’s going on here. This is a very top down, top heavy, heavily funded industry that is pushing this into our schools, into our boardrooms, into our living rooms. It is capturing almost all aspects of American society. It’s extreme-

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah, it’s damaging young people in the process. I just wanted to ask you this question about the fallout of this, there is a woman, 23 years old, who’s been very brave in talking about her story of taking hormone treatments, testosterone in her teens. It was encouraged by people in her school. And she’s now talking about the harms of that. Are we hearing more stories from young women talking about what the harms have been, whether it has been through different pills, medicines they took, or even those who did go as far as to have surgery?

Kara Dansky:

Just curious, are we talking about Keira Bell?

Beverly Hallberg:

We are not. It’s someone else, I’m trying to remember her name offhand, but she started to become outspoken on this.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, we are definitely hearing more and more. To its credit, I want to give 60 Minutes credit for having a segment that did cover some stories of young people who did go through hormonal and surgical procedures and came to regret it. We’re hearing more and more stories about this. I have personally spoken with a young woman who contacted me for help because she was having trouble at her place of employment. And she had thought she was a boy. She had a double mastectomy and she regretted it. And we need to talk about how heartbreaking this is, especially for girls, and all credit to Abigail Shrier for writing about the phenomenon. It’s very difficult in many ways to be a teenage girl, to start developing, to feel the physical discomfort that comes with that, to feel the discomfort of all of a sudden men starting to pay more attention to our bodies.

It can be a very difficult adjustment and it’s especially hard now because it was hard when I was growing up but today with the total onslaught of pornography, we’re seeing boys watching pornography at younger and younger ages. Of course, it’s hard to be a girl. Of course it’s easier in many ways to be a boy. And it’s understandable why some young women would want to find their way out of being hypersexualized in a society that hypersexualizes young women. But we have to also understand that all of these children, girls and boys both, are receiving hormones that are highly likely to result in permanent sterilization and potential lethality. These are very dangerous drugs that children are being permitted to take and young people, there’s a reason that we don’t allow young people to buy cigarettes or alcohol or vote or drive.

And even though in our society, reasonable people can disagree about what age it’s appropriate to allow children to buy cigarettes or drive, we can have those policy conversations, but if we’re going to limit the choices that young people can make, why on earth would we allow children to make the decision to permanently sterilize themselves? It’s horrible. And yes, the answer to your question is more and more young people are coming to regret their decision. They are also coming to understand, the vast majority of them understand, that what they were dealing with was sexuality and that they were same-sex attracted. And they were struggling with realizing that they were same-sex attracted. And so they made decisions to identify out of their actual sex.

Beverly Hallberg:

I think so much as we start to uncover more and more, as you were saying, the money, the power behind this, the agenda behind this, we find that so much about this is to cover up what they’re really trying to do. So the less that people know, the better it is for them to be able to move forward with their agenda. One area where I think it’s been hard for the transgender movement to gain traction, or at least there has been pushback, has been in the area of women’s sports. For example, there is a recent story that was widely circulated this past week, where a biological boy who identifies as female, name is Lia Thomas, 22-year-old transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, has been shattering women’s records, no surprise, because Lia is a biological man. Do you find in the area of women’s sports that this is where people can really look at what the agenda is and say, “Hey, this isn’t fair. This is absolutely not fair.” Do you find traction in this area for those who view this as we do?

Kara Dansky:

Yes, and shoutout to my friend Beth Stelzer at an organization that she founded called Save Women’s Sports. She’s done a tremendous amount of work in helping lawmakers, especially at the state level, but also at the federal level, succeed in getting legislation passed to protect women’s sports for women. I just want to pause for a second and ask what you mean in your question, you used the phrase, “transgender swimmer,” that’s the kind of language I’m trying to get away from.

Beverly Hallberg:

No, teach me, teach all of us. That’s helpful.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, I really… So, as you said in the introduction, I’m a feminist, I’m a lifelong Democrat. And I have been spending a lot of time, or the past couple years, working across the political aisle because I think this is very important. I think that this should not be a partisan issue and the media has done a tremendous job of framing it as a partisan issue. And I’m very frustrated with most media outlets for doing that. But one of my frustrations is that the Republicans, that I am very happy to work with, often use phrases like transgender athletes or transgender swimmer or transgender students. That’s hurting us. It’s hurting the movement to push back against gender identity, using their language makes it much more difficult for us to gain ground in the movement to push back against the enshrinement of gender identity in the law. So I appreciate you letting me say that.

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah. So out of curiosity then, is the correct thing that you would always encourage people to say in that specific example would be biological boy, just say a boy?

Kara Dansky:

Boy. Yeah.

Beverly Hallberg:

That makes sense. That makes sense. And so I’m glad you brought up the media. I wanted to ask you just a little bit about what it has been like for you as a Democrat, talking about these issues. I read your piece that you had published in the Federalist, it was entitled “Democrats Like Me are Furious with Our Party for Pushing Gender Insanity.” So first of all, can I ask you why as a Democrat, you chose to submit your piece to a conservative outlet, would more left-leaning outlets not publish your opinion?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely not. So I mentioned the 2016 lawsuit that WLF filed against the Obama Administration, Tucker Carlson invited WLF to appear on his show. And I was happy to do it. That happened in early 2017. I’ve been on the show several times since. I was very grateful to the Federalist for publishing that piece. I was very grateful to the New York Post recently for publishing another piece. Feminists like me, who publish in conservative media, get a lot of pushback for it. We get in trouble with a lot of radical feminists who don’t think we ought to be doing that, but we have a story to tell.

And we’re grateful to the outlets such as yourself, who are willing to give us a platform to tell our story. What a lot of Republicans, I think, do not know because there’s no way for you to know this, is there are countless Democrats, rank and file Democrats all over the country who are furious at our party leadership for what they’re doing. You have a lot of allies in a lot of rank-and-file Democratic communities, but the reason you don’t know that is because the media won’t say it.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question I have for you before, well, actually our final, final question will be about your book but the final question I have for you before we get to that, is something that we often hear. And this goes back to the language and the words that we use, we often hear people using different pronouns than the biological sex of a person. So if you, let’s take that athlete, the male athlete competing against women, do you ever use the pronoun “she” for a biological boy or even if one, let’s say, you could take Caitlyn Jenner, do you refer to Caitlyn Jenner as a he or a she?

Kara Dansky:

“He,” of course, because he is. But we should say there are efforts around the world to actually criminalize the use of accurate sex pronouns. And it’ll be very interesting to see whether our first amendment protects us in a way, for example, that Canadian law does not protect Canadians. There’s an effort right now to make the use of accurate sex pronouns a hate crime. And it’s also happening in the UK. It’s happening in Scotland. It’s happening in a lot of places. It may not happen here. Our first amendment may protect us from that but we’ll see. The district attorney of San Francisco has recently issued an order, all of the staff in his office are now required to use so-called preferred pronouns in court, which could potentially mean that a rape victim might be required to refer to a male alleged rapist as “she” on the witness stand, which I would argue would constitute perjury.

But we haven’t seen any of this play out quite yet in the legal system, but it’ll be very interesting to watch. There is one case in the Sixth Circuit coming out of Ohio, where a professor refused to use so-called preferred pronouns. He was disciplined by the public university, his employer, but he was vindicated in court at the appellate level. So that’s a good sign that our first amendment might protect us in a way that, for example, Canadians aren’t protected.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question for you. You tell us about your book. I know we’ve talked about it here but who is the book for? What can people expect if they read it?

Kara Dansky:

So the book is called “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” And I wrote it really for average rank and file, across-the-political-aisle Americans who either might be very confused about what is going on here. And it’s completely legitimate to be confused about what is going on, on topics of sex and gender because there’s a deliberate effort to confuse us or Americans who see what’s going on and want to speak out about it but may not quite feel comfortable doing so for the reasons you laid out in your introduction. These topics can be hard to talk about but it’s not impossible. And I really want Americans to have the tools to talk with one another. If you’re a Republican talk with other Republicans, embolden other Republicans to speak out about this using accurate language. If you’re a Democrat and you agree with me but you’re scared to speak out, I understand that, that’s very understandable but we’ve got to do it if we’re going to make headway here.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, we thank you for your bravery. Kara Dansky, author of “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” We so appreciate you joining us on She Thinks today.

Kara Dansky:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

*****

This interview was conducted on December 10, 2021, and the transcript was reproduced with permission from  The Independent Women’s Forum.

How Do the Feds Get Away with That? thumbnail

How Do the Feds Get Away with That?

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By George Leef

The tentacles of federal power over the states, localities and private institutions have been reaching further and further. Consider, for example, a case involving a small Christian school, the College of the Ozarks.

The college adheres to a strict biblical code of morality and among its requirements is that men and women live in separate dorms. That would never have been a problem until recently, with the advent of the notion of “gender fluidity,” whereby a person who is biologically male might “identify” as female or vice versa. Once the idea that such individuals are entitled to compel others to accommodate their personal conceptions took hold among leftists, it was inevitable that the government would find ways to punish those who “discriminated” against them. College of the Ozarks did so with its housing policy.

Now, you can scrutinize the US Constitution all day long and you won’t find anything saying that Congress has the power to dictate to colleges what their housing policy must be. In fact, you won’t find any reference to education at all. Education was among a great many matters that the Tenth Amendment declared were “for the states or the people, respectively.”

Nevertheless, the federal Department of Education has told College of the Ozarks that it must drop its housing policy or else. Or else what? Lose eligibility for federal student aid money, that’s what. The school sued in federal court to have the Department’s order invalidated, but the judge ruled against it. (For the details, consult this piece that I wrote about the case.)

Where does the Constitution empower bureaucrats in Washington, DC to demand that every college must conform its housing policy to their ideas of what’s right? Can’t we have schools that are different on that?

We certainly should. A “gender fluid” student who doesn’t want to be treated according to traditional sexual binary concepts can attend a college that is accommodating. There is no harm at all in leaving colleges free to set their own rules—but officious federal bureaucrats like to throw their power around.

Back to the legalities. If the Constitution doesn’t give Congress authority over colleges, how can a bureaucracy use the threat of loss of federal money as a cudgel to make them obey it?

That is the point of a new book by Philip Hamburger, a professor at Columbia Law School, Purchasing Submission. He observes that to a greater and greater extent, federal bureaucrats use their money, benefits, and sheer power to force state and local governments as well as non-governmental entities like College of the Ozarks to submit to them.

Hamburger has written previously about the unconstitutional spread of federal power, in his book Is Administrative Law Unlawful? In it, he argued that the vast administrative state—the “fourth branch” of government—is inconsistent with the Framers’ concept of good governance. It harkens back to the kinds of star chamber proceedings in England that the drafters of our Constitution wanted to prevent. The people were only supposed to have to obey laws enacted by their elected representatives and face punishments by properly constituted courts of law, but “administrative law” violates both of those precepts.

In Purchasing Submission, Hamburger shows that the problem of unconstitutional control goes far beyond the visible administrative state, which has to comply with statutes and is at least somewhat subject to judicial oversight. When federal bureaucrats dangle money in front of state and local governments, or private entities, in exchange for their compliance with conditions that they would have no power to impose directly, they are subverting our constitutional order. Hamburger calls it a “transactional mode of control,” and declares, “It is a strange mode of governance, in which Americans sell their constitutional freedoms—including their self-governance, due process, and speech—for a mess of pottage.”

The book abounds in examples that show how far the disease of control by unelected bureaucrats has progressed.

Consider the way federal highway funding has been used to pressure the states into changing their legal drinking ages, clearly a matter for them under the Tenth Amendment. But federal bureaucrats thought it would be good if all states had a drinking age of 21, and threatened to withhold money from any that didn’t go along. South Dakota sued, arguing that the feds had no authority to demand that it comply. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court sided with the federal government, weakly saying that while the drinking age was properly a state concern, the condition imposed was germane.

The better argument was expressed by Justice O’Connor in dissent. She wrote that while the government is entitled to insist that the states build highways that are safe, it is not entitled to demand that they “change regulations in other areas of the state’s social and economic life.”

Returning to higher education, the feds have used eligibility for federal money to make college officials adopt speech restrictions and one-sided procedures for the adjudication of sexual harassment allegations. In K-12, receipt of federal No Child Left Behind funding was conditioned upon states adopting federally mandated curricula.

Nor is money always the bait when the government wants to make unconstitutional dictates. Licenses can accomplish the same thing. The FCC insists that broadcasters must comply with its edicts if they want to be able to continue to broadcast. And the tax code is also useful; churches and charities have to relinquish some of their First Amendment rights if they want donations to remain tax-deductible.

Furthermore, Hamburger points out, federal agencies often use their already constitutionally dubious power as leverage to expand their power into blatantly unconstitutional domains. They do so by threats, letting regulated parties know that if they should challenge agency actions, they’ll face retribution. It’s sheer extortion. They usually get away with it.

This new mode of governance not only means that Americans have to obey rules that were not made by their elected representatives, but also that they will be judged by administrative tribunals rather than proper courts. The Founders’ vision for the nation has been badly subverted. The problem is that the courts have been derelict in dealing with this, often permitting agencies to continue extending their power in ways that undermine freedom and federalism.

Purchasing Submission is a brilliant lawyerly attack on a grave and ongoing problem. Hamburger’s thoughtful analysis will no doubt help future litigants prepare their strongest cases against it. If we are ever to get back to constitutional government in the US, we must absorb the lessons of this book.

*****

This article was published on December 12, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER,  American Institute for Economic Research.

ARIZONA: Paradise Valley Unified School District Considers Adding Math Textbook That Claims Conservatives Are More Racist Than Liberals thumbnail

ARIZONA: Paradise Valley Unified School District Considers Adding Math Textbook That Claims Conservatives Are More Racist Than Liberals

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By The Daily Caller

Paradise Valley Unified School District in Arizona is considering adding an algebra textbook that discusses social justice issues as part of the district’s high school math curriculum review.

One of the math textbooks reportedly being considered for high school algebra teaches students about “racial bias,” “ethnic diversity in the United States” and “the widening imbalance between numbers of women and men on college campuses,” according to resources obtained by Parents Defending Education.

The textbook, titled “Precalculus 6th Edition,” by Robert F. Blitzer features a graph labeled “Measuring Racial Prejudice, by Political Identification,” which claims that conservatives are allegedly more racist than liberals.

Math curricula proposal for Paradise Valley District in Az. I am sharing because this is insane! A bar graph stating that conservatives are the most racists. Algebra can teach our kids about racial bias and ethnic diversity in the United States. @DeAngelisCorey @realchrisrufo pic.twitter.com/yiLeEjdDdY

— Heather Rooks (@ThePeoriaMom) December 15, 2021

Paradise Valley Schools is currently reviewing “Grades 9-12 math curriculum resources for high school math classes,” according to the district’s website. Dec. 17 is the final day for curriculum review.

The district is also considering books by Pearson, an educational publishing company. The company claims that education is a means for achieving “social justice,” according to the Pearson website.

“Education is the most powerful force for equity and change in our world. As the leading global education provider for learners and schools, we have a unique responsibility to be proactive in fighting systemic racism and bias. To promote diversity and inclusion. To bring social justice to the classroom. To be anti-racist,” the company’s website reads.

Pearson offers other left-wing social issue resources such as a story about a 9-year-old transgender child and a video that promotes Colin Kaepernick.

Erika Sanzi, the director of outreach for Parents Defending Education, told the Daily Caller that she believes math should be taught “free of politics.”

“It is not the role of a math curriculum — or a school system for that matter — to define political parties for students,” Sanzi said. “Teach [students] how to do math free of politics and send them off with the skills to draw their own conclusions.”

Matt Salmon, a former Congressman for Arizona and current gubernatorial candidate, told the Daily Caller that he believes the graph is a form of “bigotry” and labels conservative families and kids as racist.

Salmon argued that math textbooks with an emphasis on social justice would “not be rubber-stamped” if more “level-headed people” decided to run for school board positions.

Paradise Valley Schools told the Daily Caller that the district’s curriculum review committee is “reviewing a variety of materials from vendors is currently in the process of seeking community input.”

“These materials are not yet approved. Not all materials will be recommended for use in our schools,” a spokesperson for the district said. “Part of the committee review process is designed to identify materials that do not align with the Arizona Department of Education state standards or PVSchools values.”

COLUMN BY

CHRISSY CLARK

Contributor.

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

PODCAST: Texas School Board has Parents Arrested at Home thumbnail

PODCAST: Texas School Board has Parents Arrested at Home

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By Martin Mawyer

Here’s this week’s Shout Out Patriots Show: Arrested and jailed after attending a school board meeting. 2 dads. Two stories.

​

Imagine the insanity of two police cars arriving at your home with an arrest warrant because you dared to speak out at a school board meeting.

That’s what happened to two fathers in Round Rock, TX.

Jeremy Story, a father of seven, and Dustin Clark, a father of four, spent a night in the Williamson County Jail after raising questions about a superintendent hired by the Round Rock Independent School District.

The fathers (a pastor and a 13-year Army vet) wanted the school board to investigate allegations that its newly hired Muslim superintendent had assaulted his pregnant mistress and threatened to kill them both.

Not an unreasonable request, right?

Maybe not to you or me, but it was for the school board!​

Jeremy Story was dragged out of the school board meeting on Aug. 14 when he tried to raise the issue before the board.

Dustin Clark met a similar fate on Sept. 14 when he objected to the school board raising taxes behind closed doors, which he claims violates Texas’ Open Meetings Act.

On Sept. 16, both men were arrested at their separate homes, taken to jail and then charged with “disorderly conduct with the intent to disrupt a meeting.”

The media, not surprisingly, doesn’t want to tell their side of the story…but we do during our Shout Out Patriots podcast show.

Watch or listen as Jeremy Story and Dustin Clark tell how they were abused, threatened, censored and incarcerated, simply for wanting to hold their school board accountable to Round Rock parents.

Could you help keep our podcast growing and expanding with a tip?

EDITORS NOTE: This Christian Action Network podcast is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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