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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

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

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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

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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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FLORIDA: Governor DeSantis Announces ‘Stop WOKE Act’ Against CRT in Schools, Workplace

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By The Geller Report

Newsweek reports Florida Governor Ron DeSantis alleged that critical race theory (CRT) and equity training have become cottage industries, suggesting that experts who provide professional guidance to schools and businesses on racial inequities are making a lucrative living off of their work.

“This has become a cottage industry—the CRT. There’s people making huge amounts of money,” DeSantis said at a Wednesday press conference. “They basically will get tens of thousands of dollars to go in and do a training, sometimes in schools, sometimes in business, basically saying ‘Okay, pay me $50,000 so I can teach your employees how racist capitalism is.’”

“This issue is that you have these whole cottage industries of these consultants that will come and they’ll go into a school district or they’ll go to a business or they’ll go to colleges and universities and they bring a lot of this into those institutions and they call it ‘equity,’” he added. “Just understand when you hear ‘equity’ used that it’s just an ability for people to smuggle in their ideology.”

This week, the governor introduced his new Stop W.O.K.E. (Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees) Act, which seeks to defund schools in Florida that hire and utilize CRT consultants.

DeSantis Announces ‘Stop WOKE Act’ Against CRT in Schools, Workplace

By: Caleb Parke, Dec 15, 2021

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) announced the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” Wednesday “taking a stand against critical race theory in our schools and in the workplace.”

Alongside Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez and Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, he introduced the new piece of legislation: “Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees Act.”

“I view the wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism,” DeSantis said. “They really want to tear at the fabric of our society and our culture.”

The bill would allow parents the right to sue if they think their kids are being taught CRT.

“Our legislation will defend any money for K-12 going to CRT consultants,” DeSantis said. “No taxpayer dollars should be used to teach our kids to hate our country or hate each other.”

The conservative governor referenced the Left’s attempts to erase U.S. history and topple statues of Founding Fathers and other figures.

WATCH THE CLIP BELOW:

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

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Hillsdale’s Imprimis: The Way Out

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By Larry P. Arnn

The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College reception in Overland Park, Kansas, on November 18, 2021.

Here are two questions pertinent to our times: (1) How would you reduce the greatest free republic in history to despotism in a short time? and (2) How would you stop that from happening? The answer to the first question has been provided in these last two disastrous years. The answer to the second has begun to emerge in recent months. Both are worthy of study.

Reducing a Great Republic to Despotism

To establish despotism in a nation like ours, you might begin, if you were smart, by building a bureaucracy of great complexity that commands a large percentage of the resources of the nation. You might give it rule-making powers, distributed across many agencies and centers inside the cabinet departments of government, as well as in 20 or more “independent” agencies—meaning independent of elected officials, and thus independent of the people.

This much has been done. It would require a doctoral thesis to list all the ways that rules are made in our federal government today, which would make for boring reading. The truth is that very few people not directly involved know how all this works. Although civics education is practically banned in America, most people still know what the Congress is and how its members are elected. But how many know how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) came to be, under what authority it operates, and who is its head? Here is a clue: it is not Anthony Fauci.

Admittedly, this new kind of bureaucratic government would take—has taken—decades to erect, especially in the face of the resistance of the Constitution of the United States, which its very existence violates. But once it has been erected, things can happen very fast.

What, for example, if a new virus proliferates around the world? There have been procedures for dealing with such viruses for a long time. They begin with isolating the sick and protecting the vulnerable. But suddenly we have new procedures that attempt to isolate everybody. This is commanded by the CDC, an element of this bureaucratic structure, and by a maze of federal and state authorities, all of which see the benefit to themselves in getting involved. The result is that large sections of our economy were closed for months at a time, and citizens placed under the equivalent of house arrest. This has not happened before. The cost of it, and not just in monetary terms, is beyond calculation.

To set up a despotism capable of pulling this off you would need the media’s help. Those controlling the media today are trained in the same universities that invented the bureaucratic state, the same universities the senior bureaucrats attended. The media would need to be willing to suppress, for example, the fact that 50,000 doctors, scientists, and medical researchers signed the Great Barrington Declaration. That document reminds people that you cannot suppress a widely disseminated contagious virus through shutdowns and mass isolation, and that if you try, you will work immeasurable destruction of new kinds—unemployment, bankruptcy, depression, suicide, multiplying public debt, broken supply chains, and increases of other serious health problems. Some of the signatories to this Declaration come from the most distinguished universities in the world, but never mind: their views do not fit the narrative propagated by the powerful. They have been effectively cancelled, ignored by the media and suppressed by Big Tech.

You would need some help from business, too. As far as influence is concerned, “business” is dominated by large institutions—those comprising big business—whose leaders are also educated in the same universities that conceived bureaucratic government and trained the bureaucrats and media heads. This provides a ground of agreement between big business and the bureaucratic state. Anyway, agree or not, businesses are vulnerable to regulation, and to mitigate the risk of regulatory harm they play the game: they send lobbyists to Washington, make political contributions, hire armies of lawyers. If you are big enough to play the game, there are plenty of advantages to be won. If you are not big enough to play the game—well, in that case you are on your own.

Amidst the unprecedented lockdowns, imagine there comes an election, a time for the people to say if they approve of the new way of governing and of this vast, unprecedented intrusion into their lives. Then let us say that in several states the election rules and practices are altered by their executive branches—the people in charge of enforcing the law—on their own, without approval by their legislatures. Say this brazen violation of the separation of powers takes place in the name of the pandemic. One does not need to know what percentage of votes in the final tally were affected to see that this is fishy. No sensible person would place control of the election process in one party—any party—or in one branch—any branch—of the government, alone. In some crucial states, that was done.

Finally, to sustain this new kind of government, you would need to work on education. You might build a system of centralized influence, if not control, over every classroom in the land. You might require certification of the teachers with a bias toward the schools of education that train them in the approved way. These schools, poor but obedient cousins of the elite universities, are always up on the latest methods of “delivery” of instruction (we do not call it teaching anymore). These new methods do not require much actual knowledge, which can be supplied from above.

As far as content, you might set up a system of textbook adoption that guarantees to publishers a massive and captive market but requires them to submit proposed books to committees of “experts,” subject of course to political pressures. You might build a standard approved curriculum on the assumption that everything changes—even history, even principles. You might use this curriculum to lay the ground for holding everything old, everything previously thought high and noble, in contempt.

Doing this, incidentally, deprives the student of the motive to learn anything out of fashion today. It is a preparation not for a life of knowing and thinking, but for a life of compliance and conformity.

This is by no means an exhaustive account of what it would take to build a thoroughgoing tyranny—for further instruction, read Book Five of Aristotle’s Politics or George Orwell’s 1984. But it gives an idea of a mighty system, a system that seems unassailable, a system combining the powers of government and commerce, of education and communication. Money and power in such a system would accrue to the same hands. The people who benefit from the system would be the ruling class. Others would be frustrated. And such a system would tend to get worse, because the exercise of unchecked power does not bring out the best in people.

Any elaborate system of government must have a justification, and the justification of this one cannot simply be that those in the ruling class are entitled on the basis of their superiority. That argument went away with the divine right of kings. No, for the current ruling class, the justification is science. The claim of bureaucratic rule is a claim of expertise—of technical or scientific knowledge about everything. Listen to Fauci on Face the Nation, dismissing his critics in Congress as backward reactionaries. When those critics disagree with him, Fauci said recently, “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.”

The problem with this kind of thinking was pointed out by a young Winston Churchill in a letter to the writer H.G. Wells in 1901. Churchill wrote:

Nothing would be more fatal than for the government of states to get into the hands of the experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide, than any vigorous direction of a specialised character. Why should you assume that all except doctors, engineers, etc. are drones or worse? . . . If the Ruler is to be an expert in anything he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible.

Churchill goes on to argue that practical judgment is the capacity necessary to making decisions. And practical judgment, he writes in many places, is something that everyone is capable of to varying degrees. Everyone, then, is equipped to guide his own life in the things that concern mainly himself.

Another thing about the experts is that they are not really engaged in the search for truth. Instead, the powerful among them suppress the obvious fact that there is wide disagreement among the experts. There always is.

God save us from falling completely into the hands of experts. But God has given us the wherewithal to save ourselves from that. So let us move to the second question posed above.

How to Defeat a Rising Despotism

In answering the second question, I will tell two stories that are suggestive…..

*****

Continue reading this article from Hillsdale College at Imprimis.

Larry P. Arnn is the twelfth president of Hillsdale College. He received his B.A. from Arkansas State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. From 1977 to 1980, he also studied at the London School of Economics and at Worcester College, Oxford University, where he served as director of research for Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Winston Churchill. From 1985 until his appointment as president of Hillsdale College in 2000, he was president of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. From October 2020 to January 2021, he served as co-chair of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission. He is the author of several books, including The Founders’ Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and Churchill’s Trial: Winston Churchill and the Salvation of Free Government.

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The 1619 Project Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

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By Phillip W. Magness

When Nikole Hannah-Jones published the 1619 Project in August 2019, it initially came under an unfair line of attack from historians who took issue with aspects of its discussion of Abraham Lincoln. Hannah-Jones had correctly identified Lincoln as a supporter of black colonization – a common 19th-century “solution” to slavery that involved coupling emancipation with the resettlement of the freedmen abroad in locations such as Liberia or Central America.

Lincoln’s speeches and writings contain dozens of unambiguous endorsements of colonization, which he intended to subsidize through the US government, albeit on a voluntary basis for the freedmen colonists. Though misguided in its aims, Lincoln’s brand of colonization was also motivated by his antislavery beliefs and specifically the notion that resettlement abroad would permit African-Americans an opportunity to enjoy the rights and freedoms that were denied to them in the United States. Nonetheless, Lincoln’s colonizationism has long been a sore spot for Lincoln scholars due to the complexities it introduces to the “Great Emancipator” political iconography. Several generations of historians have put their pens to work seeking a way to give Honest Abe an out where colonization is concerned. Most contend that Lincoln abandoned the scheme mid-presidency, reading an active repudiation into his public silence on the measure in the final year of the Civil War. Others even put forth the theory that Lincoln only advocated colonization as a political ruse – a “lullaby” to coax public opinion closer to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Reality is much more straightforward. In addition to being a sincere antislavery man, Lincoln was also a sincere colonizationist who meant what he said when he espoused this position. A substantial body of my own work on the Civil War-era investigates this exact question, conclusively showing that Lincoln continued to pursue colonization schemes through diplomatic channels well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation, and likely into the last months of his presidency. When Nikole Hannah-Jones made similar claims in 2019, she was drawing directly on my work as a historian of that subject.

In fact, Hannah-Jones stated as much in a series of now-deleted comments as some of the other historian-critics questioned her claims about Lincoln and colonization.

On November 22, 2019 she tweeted out a link to my co-authored 2011 book on the subject, Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement.

Three days later, Hannah-Jones wrote, “For instance, recent scholarship shows Lincoln did not abandon colonization at Emancipation but worked on it until he was assassinated.” In another comment, she criticized historian James McPherson’s “dated scholarship on Lincoln ending his efforts to colonize black people at Emancipation” (McPherson is one of the main proponents of the above-mentioned “lullaby” thesis). Quite the contrary, Hannah-Jones continued, “recent scholarship shows [Lincoln] continued these efforts until his death.”

In both cases, the “recent scholarship” that she referred to was my own work, which I summarized in a series of articles in 2012 and 2013 for Hannah-Jones’s own employer, the New York Times.

There were certain interpretive differences between my work and the 1619 Project on this point – for example, Hannah-Jones understated the extent to which antislavery motives shaped Lincoln’s support for the measure, which he saw as a pathway to wean the country away from the brutal plantation system. But the historical evidence of Lincoln’s deep connections to colonization was clear, and at least on that point the 1619 Project got it right.

That is, until Hannah-Jones realized that the historian she was citing was also an outspoken critic of other aspects of the 1619 Project.

“What are the credentials, exactly of Phil Magness?” Hannah-Jones fumed in another now-deleted comment after she realized that I had offered a less-than-favorable assessment of her project’s other historical claims, and particularly its error-riddled essay on the economics of slavery by Matthew Desmond. Her fury intensified in January 2020 after Alex Lichtenstein published a lengthy defense of the 1619 Project against his historian critics, attempting to invoke his authority as the editor of the American Historical Review to arbitrate the disputes over its claims about slavery in the Revolutionary through Civil War eras. At the time I pointed out that Lichtenstein – a 20th-century historian – was not an expert in the antebellum United States, and was thus not qualified to assume the role of historical judge and jury on specialist claims about that era. Hannah-Jones snapped back, “Lol. You aren’t a specialist in that era either yet that didn’t stop you.”

Setting aside the fact that only a few weeks prior Hannah-Jones herself had been explicitly touting my work on Lincoln’s colonization projects to justify her own claims in the 1619 Project, I’ll simply note that I’ve authored over two dozen scholarly works on slavery and the Civil War era. This includes my aforementioned book, the chapter on colonization in the Essential Civil War Curriculum, as well as multiple peer-reviewed articles on slavery in the U.S. and broader Atlantic world. Hannah-Jones, by contrast, has no known original scholarship to her name of any kind on slavery or this period of American history.

At first, I chalked this bizarre exchange up to Hannah-Jones’s increasingly unprofessional approach to defending the 1619 Project. Instead of responding to substantive and factual critiques of her work, Hannah-Jones began directing personal abuse and insults at her critics.

When James McPherson offered his own less-than-flattering take on Hannah-Jones’s work in November 2019, she responded dismissively: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” McPherson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Civil War, and author of what is widely considered the standard single-volume treatment of the subject, Battle Cry of Freedom.In December 2019, McPherson joined distinguished scholars Gordon Wood, Sean Wilentz, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes in questioning Hannah-Jones’s attempts to recast the American Revolution as a fight to preserve slavery. Rather than answer them, she dismissed the group as a whole by labeling them “white historians.”

Hannah-Jones saved her most brazenly abusive attacks though for African-American critics of the 1619 Project, such as Columbia University professor John McWhorter and journalist Coleman Hughes. When McWhorter, Hughes, and other African-American scholars launched a competitor 1776 Project in February 2020 through the Robert Woodson Center, Hannah-Jones lashed out on Twitter by posting photos of herself making derogatory gestures at her black interlocutors. Although she later deleted the tweets at the apparent request of her employer, Hannah-Jones made Hughes, in particular, a focus of her continued verbal abuse. “That Ivy League education certainly didn’t do you any favors,” she wrote in another comment to Hughes in August 2020. “Next time screenshot me and don’t quote text me because I’d rather not read your drivel. I tried to find something to quote tweet in that profoundly mediocre 1776 Project essay you wrote, but alas, nothing was worthy.”

It comes with little surprise, then, that my own experiences with Hannah-Jones followed a similar course after she realized that I was the author of the works on black colonization that she had previously been citing. Rather than engage with the evidence surrounding the disputed claims of her work, Hannah-Jones’s first impulse is to insult, attack, and dismiss the critic as “unqualified” to evaluate her work. Only historians that she cherry-picks to affirm her preconceived position, such as the University of South Carolina’s Woody Holton, are permitted under her credential-touting games.

Except in the case of Lincoln and colonization, Hannah-Jones even went so far as to modify her previous historical claims in order to avoid having to cite and credit a 1619 Project critic. As a result, I have the unusual distinction of having fallen from Hannah-Jones’ grace after she previously invoked my scholarship to support her work back in 2019. When an extended version of the 1619 Project came out in book form in November 2021, Hannah-Jones had not only excised substantial portions of her previous arguments about Lincoln – she cast about and found a new source to justify her revised interpretation on Lincoln.

The 1619 Project book now states only that Lincoln supported “colonization schemes as late as 1862,” and further implies that Lincoln abandoned the program after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Hannah-Jones’s new source for this revised claim appeared in footnote 38 of her essay: a 2016 popular press book entitled Stamped From the Beginning by Critical Race Theory activist Ibram X. Kendi.

Hannah-Jones’s new version of Lincoln’s colonization initiative is unambiguously wrong as a matter of history. One of the many discoveries I made while researching this subject was a colonization agreement that Lincoln signed on June 15, 1863 with the colonial government of British Honduras, or modern-day Belize. This document resides in the National Archives of Belize where I discovered it in 2011, and was previously unknown to any historian.

But as a broader matter of principle, Hannah-Jones’s behavior illustrates the absence of basic scholarly integrity from her approach to writing history. Rather than following the evidence where it leads, Hannah-Jones picks and chooses bits and pieces of her arguments from a secondary literature based on whether it conforms to her preconceived political narrative. She approaches citations as a tool by which she can reward other scholars who affirm that narrative. And if a previously-cited scholar runs afoul of Hannah-Jones, she is perfectly willing to alter the “history” presented in the 1619 Project in ways that excise the offending work and replace it with a completely different narrative – provided that its author flatters Hannah-Jones’s own personal politics and ambitions in the process.

*****

This article was published on December 11, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from AIER, American Institute for Economic Research.

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QUESTION: Is it time to reinstate universal IQ testing for every student in America?

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By Dr. Rich Swier

One of our readers named Janine posted the following comment to one of our columns:

I grew up in the 70s. One day all the black husbands and fathers of the family i grew up with just left. They went to just hang out with their friends, or do drugs or violence. My dad was the only father and husband left on our street before we moved to rural area. He did his best to help the other families like cutting their grass and fixing cars and helping the mothers and children with food. They did just leave. The father not allowed in the home restrictions was only 5 years during the 60s and ended in 1968. You can check the history. A black woman petitioned to end those restrictions. The only thing black men has ever petition for is to have access to white women during the same time. You have listened to black men lies. They are only with black women for as long as it benefit[s] them. When they make more money, they partner with white and other women, who are not black. The black race is in the condition solely because of black men, not welfare, not white people or any women; Just like other people are in the condition they are in because of the men of their people.

I never knew they stop giving IQ test[s] in school. Maybe you don’t know when they’re being administered. That is how they place students in advance classes or special Ed. They must be tested.

After reading her comment I felt compelled to write about Intelligent Quotient (IQ) testing and their impact on children in America.

Multiple IQ tests are still available and used, however they are not universally given to every student. Parents can request an official IQ test for their child from a licensed psychologist or a school psychologist. Click here to learn where someone can request to take an Official Intelligence Test.

In a February 8th, 1984 Education Week column titled “Court Finds I.Q. Tests Racially Biased for Black Pupils’ Placement” Susan G. Foster wrote:

In what some are terming a landmark decision, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit late last month upheld a lower-court ruling that prohibits California school districts from using iq tests to evaluate black students for placement in special-education classes on the grounds that the tests are culturally biased.

In a Washington Post July 6th, 1987 article titled “IQ Tests Restricted by Race“ Jay Mathews noted:

Unbeknownst to her [Mary Amaya the mother of then 14-year old Demond Crawford] and most other Californians, a lengthy national debate over intelligence tests in public schools had just ended in the nation’s most populous state, and the anti-test forces had won.

Henceforth, no black child in California could be given a state-administered intelligence test, no matter how severe the student’s academic problems. Such tests were racially and culturally biased, U.S. District Court Judge Robert F. Peckham had ruled in 1979. After losing in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year, the state agreed not to give any of the 17 banned IQ (intelligence quotient) tests to blacks. [Emphasis added]

Read more.

What is the Larry P. v. Riles case and how did it fundamentally transform IQ testing?

According to Disability Rights California:

The Larry P. v. Riles (Larry P.) case was filed in 1971 when five African-American children who had been placed in special education classes for the “educable mentally retarded” (EMR) in the San Francisco Unified School District filed suit in the Federal District Court of Northern California claiming that they had been wrongly placed in the EMR classes based on their performance on intelligence tests that were racially biased and discriminatory.  [Larry P. v. Riles, 495 F. Supp. 926 (N.D. Cal. 1979).] The suit also claimed that a disproportionate total number of African-American students were placed in EMR classes compared to the number of African-American students in the school system.

The Court decided in favor of the students, and the District was prohibited from using IQ tests to identify or place African-American students in EMR-type classes. The Decision was upheld on appeal in 1984.  [Larry P. v. Riles, 793 F.2d 969 (9th Cir. 1984).] The Court expanded its ruling in the case by banning the use of IQ testing for all African-American students who have been referred for special education services.

The federal district court case of Crawford v. Honig prompted a reexamination of the rights of multicultural children in special education.  This case has challenged the Larry P. ruling banning the use of IQ tests for African-American children and has, preliminarily, resulted in three African-American children being allowed to take IQ tests because their parents wish to have them do so. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Crawford, CDE issued a Legal Advisory in October 1994, continuing the directive which banned IQ testing. [See Crawford v. Honig, 37 F.3d 485 (9th Cir. 1994).]

QUESTION: Was this decision the right one for multicultural children in California and beyond?

Should IQ Testing be required of all students in America?

I received an email linking to a 2014 op-ed published on American Renaissance titled “Ten Percent is Not Enough.” The op-ed states:

The black/white experiment has failed.

[ … ]

Some argue it’s a problem of “culture,” as if culture creates people’s behavior instead of the other way around. Others blame “white privilege.” But since 1965, when the elites opened America’s doors to the Third World, immigrants from Asia and India–people who are not white, not rich, and not “connected”–have quietly succeeded. While the children of these people are winning spelling bees and getting top scores on the SAT, black “youths” are committing half the country’s violent crime–crime, which includes viciously punching random white people on the street for the thrill of it, that has nothing to do with poverty.

The experiment has failed. Not because of culture, or white privilege, or racism. The fundamental problem is that white people and black people are different. They differ intellectually and temperamentally. These differences result in permanent social incompatibility.

Read more.

Is there a “permanent social incompatibility” between blacks and other ethnicities? Are blacks different intellectually and temperamentally?

The answer can be found in a study done in 1994. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their seminal book on cognitive ability The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life state,

“The question is how to redistribute in ways that increase the chances for people at the bottom of society to take control of their lives, to be engaged meaningfully in their communities, and to find valued places for themselves.”

Herrnstein and Murray found,

Ethnic differences in higher education, occupations, and wages are strikingly diminished after controlling for IQ. Often they vanish. In this sense, America has equalized these central indicators of social success.

Herrnstein and Murray asked,

“What are the odds that a black or Latino with an IQ of 103 – the average IQ of all high school graduates – completed high school? The answer is that a youngster from either minority group had a higher probability of graduating from high school than a white, if all of them had IQs of 103: The odds were 93 percent and 91 percent for blacks and Latinos respectively, compared to 89 percent for whites.

Herrnstein and Murray concluded:

  • We have tried to point out that a small segment of the population accounts for such a large proportion of those [social] problems. To the extent that the [social] problems of this small segment are susceptible to social-engineering solutions at all, should be highly targeted.
  • The vast majority of Americans can run their own lives just fine, and [public] policy should above all be constructed so that it permits them to do so.
  • Much of the policy toward the disadvantaged starts from the premise that interventions can make up for genetic or environmental disadvantages, and that premise is overly optimistic.
  • Cognitive ability, so desperately denied for so long, can best be handled – can only be handled – by a return to individualism.
  • Cognitive partitioning will continue. It cannot be stopped, because the forces driving it cannot be stopped.
  • Americans can choose to preserve a society in which every citizen has access to the central satisfactions of life. Its people can, through an interweaving of choice and responsibility, create valued places for themselves in their worlds.

Herrnstein and Murray found,

Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality.

[ … ]

Trying to pretend that inequality does not really exist has led to disaster. Trying to eradicate inequality with artificially manufactured outcomes has led to disaster. It is time for America once again to try living with inequality, as life is lived: understanding that each human being has strengths and weaknesses, qualities to admire and qualities we do not admire, competencies and in-competencies,  assets and debits; that the success of each human life is not measured externally but internally; that of all the rewards we can confer on each other, the most precious is a place as a valued fellow citizen.

Finally, Herrnstein and Murray wrote,

“Of all the uncomfortable topics we have explored, a pair of the most uncomfortable ones are that a society with a higher mean IQ is also likely to be a society with fewer social ills and brighter economic prospects, and that the most effective way to raise the IQ of a society is for smarter women to have higher birth rates than duller women.“

Shocking words in 1994 and indeed even more so today. Is it time to have a national public debate on cognitive abilities?

The key factor in setting goals is IQ. Is it time to reintroduce IQ testing for all students?

RELATED VIDEO: Demographic Bomb: Demography is Destiny

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

WATCH: USC Viterbi ‘Diversity Senator’ openly supports Hamas, calls for killing of all Zionists thumbnail

WATCH: USC Viterbi ‘Diversity Senator’ openly supports Hamas, calls for killing of all Zionists

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By Robert Spencer

Once again we see how “diversity” means tolerance of an astonishing level of hatred and incitement to violence. Thanks to Canary Mission for uncovering this.

The Jews in the Qur’an are called the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); they fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); they claim that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); they love to listen to lies (5:41); they disobey Allah and never observe his commands (5:13). They are disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more. They are under Allah’s curse (9:30), and Muslims should wage war against them and subjugate them under Islamic hegemony (9:29).

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Afghanistan: Sunni Muslims murder two people and injure three in jihad attacks on passenger vans

Iraq: Islamic State jihadis murder four people with bomb in predominantly Shi’ite city

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

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Time to Move On School Choice

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By Thomas C. Patterson

Teachers’ unions appear to have run into a buzz saw. On October 25, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten tweeted enthusiastic support for a Washington Post article titled “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.“

By November 6, Her message had drastically changed. “Parents have to be involved in their kid’s education. They must have a voice. At the same time, we have to teach kids how to – not what to think.“ Sure, Randi.

In the interval, there had been a reality shock: the Virginia governor’s election, this time with an electorate that had wised up. Parents had been appalled when they remotely observed the overtly racist curriculum their children were being taught and then shocked at the blowback, including being charged with “white supremacy”, when they protested.

Moreover, they now realized the unions were responsible for the damaging school Covid shutdowns. Weingarten herself pressured legislatures and school districts into closures. Unions influenced the Biden CDC into adding new and impossible conditions for reopening. They threatened outright strikes if school districts tried to re-open for the 20-2021 school year.

Voters were not amused. When Terry McAuliffe vowed “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach“, the damage was done. Polls showed challenger Glenn Youngkin gaining 15-17 points among parents in the last weeks of the campaign. Education-oriented voters swung from favoring McAuliffe by 33 points to a nine-point Youngkin advantage.

Weingarten’s response was that the reports had all been a massive misunderstanding, that it was actually the teachers’ unions that had tried to re-open the schools. Her pathetic gaslighting attempts were ignored.

The longtime symbiotic relationship between the teachers’ unions and the Democrats may be fraying. They both earn the other’s loyalty. According to OpenSecrets, 99.72% of the AFT contributions in 2020 went to Democrats. Fully 97% of AFT donations have gone to Democrats since 1990.

In Virginia, McAuliffe bagged $1 million from the unions. AFT ran ads for McAuliffe and Weingarten personally stumped for him.

Their money isn’t wasted. As governor, McAuliffe had vetoed nine school choice bills. This year, he affirmed on CNN “I will never allow [school choice] as governor”. Nationwide, Democrats have been able to stymie the movement for universal school choice in spite of growing majorities in favor.

The Democrats are in a sticky situation now. According to RealClearOpinion research, voters’ support for school choice surged from 64% to 74% in just the last year. Another poll showed 78% approve of Education Savings Accounts, the most comprehensive method for funding parental choice directly.

Voters have expressed particular contempt for politicians (and educators) who send their own children to private schools but deny the same privilege to less fortunate children. 62% of voters said they would be less likely to vote for such a hypocrite.

Terry McAuliffe, for one, got the message. The veto king sent his five children to private schools. When asked about it on NBC this year, his verbatim quote was “Chuck, we have a great school system in Virginia. Dorothy and I have raised our five children“. You’ve gotta love it.

Democrats are stuck with a policy that is not only morally and educationally wrong but is a political loser. Advocates for children and parents should seize the opportunity to not only win some elections but to fundamentally reform the structure of education in America into a system that serves students and parents, not bureaucracies.

Teachers’ unions must be publicly held accountable. These organizations which relentlessly pound a “for the children“ theme have a wretched record of not promoting their educational interests.

In the 1960s, when the unions first rose to influence, about $3000 ( inflation-adjusted) dollars were spent per student. Today that number is over $13,000. Yet academic achievement and the ethnic gap have stubbornly failed to improve.

Not all of the spending increase has gone to teacher salaries and not all of the fault for academic failure is theirs. But as the dominant influence in education policy for the last half-century, unions must bear major responsibility for the dismal outcomes.

Parents’ rights advocates: take heart. This is our time.

*****

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

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Arizona High School Halts Transgender Spirit Week After Outcry From Parents

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By Spencer Lindquist

A public records request revealed that parents at Estrella Foothills High School in Goodyear, Ariz., successfully halted a Transgender Awareness Week that aimed to push left-wing gender theory on the school community.

The week originally included a variety of different activities, including wearing name tags with students’ pronouns, wearing rainbow colors to celebrate the LGBT movement, and another day on which students were instructed to wear blue, white, and pink, the colors of the transgender flag. The spirit week was being hosted by Estrella Foothill High School’s Coexist club.

The club also made an Instagram post encouraging students to donate to the National Center for Transgender Equality, a far-left organization that advocates for boys to be able to use girls’ restrooms in schools, a policy that threatens the safety of young women.

Courtney Ratkus is the sponsor of the Coexist club and a teacher who proposed the spirit day to principal Kimberly Heinz in an email, also explaining the themes behind each day.

She also advertised the week to students in an email. While advertising Monday’s theme of “Make Yourself Known” where students are supposed to put their pronouns on a name tag, Ratkus noted that “Nametags will be provided to you by your first hour teacher.” In an email to staff, Ratkus explains the spirit week and encourages them to take part.

Ratkus teaches English Language Arts at the high school, and has been vocal about her social and political beliefs online. In an archived Instagram story entitled “Be Kind,” Ratkus reposted a tweet on Independence Day saying “I would say happy 4th of July, but all countries matter.”

She also wrote on Instagram that “you’re killing people by refusing to wear a mask. Just f****** wear the mask” and shared a post that accused Donald Trump supporters of  supporting “racism, homophobia, sexual assault, xenophobia, ignorance, misogyny,” and “fascism.”

Documents gathered from the public records request reveal that parents and students were able to successfully stop the spirit week after the first day.  One parent condemned the push for a “radical sexual lifestyle” in an email to district administrators before warning that if the push continues, he will “be forced to withdraw my children and the funding that your school relies on.”

Another parent told administrators that “my children go to school to learn and be educated about core subjects, not people’s sexuality,” going on to request that the spirit week be canceled.

Amid these and a flurry of other critical emails, principal Kimberly Heinz canceled the spirit week after the first day, telling parents in a mass email that “our administrative team met this afternoon and have made the decision that we will not move forward with the remaining awareness days this week.”She continued to say “we will be working … to help put into effect clearer policies, procedures, and timelines for a more effective vetting process for student club requests such as this week.”

This victory for students and parents is another example of communities taking on left-wing pushes in K-12 government-run schools just as they have in Loudoun County and other locations across the country.

Neither Ratkus nor Heinz responded to a request for comment.

*****

This article was published on December 10, 2021, and is reprinted with permission from The Federalist.

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Creating a School You Love, Part 1

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By Tamara Fromm

If 2020 and 2021 have you rethinking your child’s education path, you are not alone. The world is out of order and the public school system is facing extraordinary challenges in education. Luckily, you have options, lots of them. Homeschooling is one of those great options and parents are taking that leap, joining the largest boom in homeschooling history and creating schools they love.

So where do you start? Well, if this was 2010 I’d tell you to take your time, do some research, attend the summer homeschool convention and pray over it. Today’s parents don’t have that kind of time. They want their child out of government school and they want them out now. Between school closures, masks mandates, vaccine mandates, 1619, CRT, gender fluidity, and more, parents are simply pulling their child from government school, taking funding from the school in the process, and figuring out how to homeschool in record time.

Deciding to homeschool is likely the biggest hurdle you will face in your homeschool journey. Crazy as that sounds it’s true. The decision is overwhelmeing and full of change. Spouses need to be on board, exes need to be on board, there are finances to consider, jobs to schedule around and every fear you never thought of before has likely led to sleepless nights. Thirteen years ago, I spent three months considering it, reading books, enchanted with The Pioneer Woman’s blog on homeschooling before I even told my husband what I was thinking. It took another three months before I had the guts to tell the grandparents!

What fears might keep you up at night? Will my child learn from me, will they have friends, what about school photos, will they have homecoming dances and prom, will they get into college, will I hate it, will I screw up my child, what they will miss not being in a traditional school, will my child be socialized, and how will I explain this to my family and friends to name a few. Let me put those fears to rest. My children are thriving. My high schoolers are well educated and in their 3rd semester at University; they started last fall when they were 15 and 14 years old. They both hold down a regular job. They are enrolled in club sports as well as high school sports and both are accomplished musicians and singers. They attend dances, football games, date, drive, and see their friends regularly. Given the number of families I have mentored and my own experience, I know you can homeschool and think of all you and your family will gain when you do.

The gains I see in my own school reassure me every year that we made the right decision for our family 12 years ago. For starters, I gain time; the time I would spend in the car simply running drop off and pick up is enough time to school all subjects for early elementary! I get to be my child’s number one influence; they learn to function in a civilized society from me, they are not over-socialized day in and day out, and they have a healthy amount of downtime. We have gained control of our schedule; taking vacations when fit into our lives and we avoid crowds, evening sports no longer feel like a chore because they are part of our school day, and evenings with NO HOMEWORK! Enough said.

So if homeschooling is for you, take the first step. Research the homeschool laws in your state. Depending on the state you live in this could be simple with low regulation meaning no notice is needed or subjects are not mandated. Every state is different and some have more complex laws with high regulation; for example, quarterly reporting, attendance recording, or home visits. Curious where your state lands on the regulation scale? The HSLDA (Home School Legal Defense Association) website is full of valuable information and breaks down homeschool laws and requirements by state https://hslda.org/legal/. In Arizona, a low regulation state, your first step is to submit your affidavit to the county superintendent’s office. For Maricopa County visit https://schoolsup.org/homeschool.

The great thing about deciding to homeschool is that you can change your mind at any time. Take it year by year, figure it out as you go, and find what makes schooling tick for your children. My homeschool currently enrolls children kindergarten to 11th grade equivocal. My school has evolved over the years and just like parenting, I’m not the same homeschool mama I was that first year. I no longer have a homeschool room dedicated to all things learning as I quickly learned I’m a Kitchen Table Homeschooler; we work school along our day in the main area of our home. Also, I now school year-round rather than following the traditional August to May school year. In addition, as life changed with moves and babies, we have been able to adjusted our schooling routine around those changes. Our school looks differnet from year to year and sometimes from one day to the next. My children, husband, and I are happy, grateful every day for the decision we made all those years ago, and together, we created a school we love.

Part 2 will focus on the four main homeschool styles, typical time commitment based on grades and ages, and curriculum options. Other parts could include Co-ops, micro-schools, creative scheduling, costing (include Education Savings Accounts or ESAs), special needs students, park dates and social enhancement…and more. Also, questions could be submitted which could spark topics for future articles. You can find Runaway Mama on Facebook @RunawayMama4 and email questions to contact@RunawayMama.com.

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Racial Equity Committee Co-Chair Resigns After Doxxing Parents And Leaving Profane Voicemail

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By The Daily Caller

  • The co-chair of a racial equity committee at a Texas school district resigned Wednesday after admitting she had doxxed parents who opposed her policies and left one a profane voicemail, Fox News reported.
  • While Norma Garcia-Lopez was co-chair of the Fort Worth Independent School District’s (FWISD) school board Racial Equity Committee, she shared parent information and encouraged others to call parents out for opposing mask mandates, Fox News reported. Garcia-Lopez shared the phone number and home address of one parent, Jennifer Treger, in addition to the employer, work email address and phone number of another parent, Kerri Rehmeyer.
  • “But they [school board] don’t care what happened to the parents of nine children in Fort Worth ISD, that’s the biggest issue right there,” Hollie Plemons, a mother of three in the FWISD school district told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So she’s gone, she’s gonna show back up someplace else, she’s not out of this. She’s just not on this committee, and that’s good, but it doesn’t solve the issue that the board doesn’t feel she was wrong.”

The co-chair of a racial equity committee at a Texas school district resigned Wednesday after admitting she had doxxed parents who opposed her policies and left one a profane voicemail, Fox News reported.

While Norma Garcia-Lopez was co-chair of the Fort Worth Independent School District’s (FWISD) school board Racial Equity Committee, she shared parent information and encouraged others to call parents out for opposing mask mandates, Fox News reported. Garcia-Lopez shared the phone number and home address of one parent, Jennifer Treger, in addition to the employer, work email address and phone number of another parent, Kerri Rehmeyer.

“It’s astounding what the ‘White Privilege’ power from Tanglewood has vs a whole diverse community that cares for the well being of others,” Garcia-Lopez wrote publicly, according to Fox News. “These are their names: Jennifer Treger, Todd Daniel, Kerri Rehmeyer and a coward Jane Doe. Internet do your thang,” Garcia-Lopez wrote. Jane Doe has since been identified as Hollie Plemons, a mother of three in the FWISD school district.

Garcia-Lopez announced Wednesday that she was resigning from her position because she “cannot allow the vile and relentless attacks on me by white supremacists to distract from or overshadow the continued pursuit of equity in FWISD,” according to an email she wrote, obtained by Fox New from a school board member.

“I am writing to inform [FWISD] that it has become necessary for me to resign from my volunteer positions with the District, including as a member and co-chair of the Racial Equity Committee and as a member of the Redistricting Committee,” Garcia-Lopez wrote in the email, Fox News reported. “Every student in FWISD deserves equity and respect. That is my passion and reason for serving on those committees,” the email said.

BREAKING REPORT: Texas school board’s ‘equity’ co-chair Norma Garcia-Lopez RESIGNS AFTER DOXXING WHITE PARENTS and leaving foul-mouthed voicemails when they sued over mask mandate…

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) December 9, 2021

Garcia-Lopez admitted to releasing the personal information of and leaving a profane voicemail for Rehmeyer, who along with others, sued FWISD to block its COVID-19 mask mandate and obtained a temporary injunction in August, Fox News reported.

“F— you, you stupid b—-. F— you with your White privilege, not caring about the well-being of others, f— you,” Garcia-Lopez said in the voicemail, Fox News reported. Garcia-Lopez claimed that Rehmeyer, along with other parents, “sent a lynch mob to attack me,” aiming to “silence me from advocating for equity.”

“Some people consider my actions doxxing,” Garcia-Lopez said, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “It’s not doxxing when you expose someone who filed a public motion in a public court of law that impacts public school children.”

“They definitely need to be called out,” Garcia-Lopez wrote after releasing parents’ personal information, Fox News reported. The FWISD’s Racial Equity Committee defended Garcia-Lopez’s actions last week and Garcia Lopez denied she had doxed parents.

“My message contained harsh language — no threats,” Garcia-Lopez said, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Some people find my choice of words in that message offensive. But what’s really offensive is that four white parents could hold so much power.”

Rehmeyer argued that Garcia-Lopez’s actions were wrong, arguing that she “told people to go after us, said where I worked,” Fox News reported. “I received 17 voicemails at work from one person” and “had a previous client who said she hoped that I died,” Rehmeyer said.

Rehmeyer also told Fox News that some of the parents’ businesses received negative reviews online from people who “don’t even try to pretend that they were clients.”

Treger said her focus has always been on informing and protecting the families in her school district, calling it “disheartening that some people feel the discussion around masks should be tied to race.”

“The color of one’s skin plays no part in my belief that families should have the option to choose whether they mask their children or not,” she said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Sharing personal information publicly with ill intent was hurtful to many in our community. We should all be able to disagree and still remain respectful of one another’s opinions.”

“Ultimately, we are relieved to hear that Norma Garcia-Lopez will no longer hold positions of influence in Fort Worth ISD, but we are disappointed by the complete lack of action by the Board of Trustees,” Rehmeyer told Fox News.

Rehmeyer said she thinks the school district “will continue to ignore” the concerns of parents and that the school district trustees “haven’t bothered to notify us she resigned,” Fox News reported.

Plemons told the DCNF it is great that Garcia-Lopez has resigned, “but it’s more telling that our school district didn’t do anything about it, our Board of Trustees didn’t do anything about it and two of our Board of Trustees expressed their sorrow for what happened to Norma.”

“But they don’t care what happened to the parents of nine children in Fort Worth ISD, that’s the biggest issue right there,” Plemons said. “So she’s gone, she’s gonna show back up someplace else, she’s not out of this. She’s just not on this committee, and that’s good, but it doesn’t solve the issue that the board doesn’t feel she was wrong.”

Garcia-Lopez is a community member, but not an employee of the District, district spokeswomen Claudia Garibay told the DCNF in a statement. “She has voluntarily relinquished her position as co-chair of the Racial Equity Committee,” the statement said.

Garcia-Lopez could not be reached for comment.

COLUMN BY

KENDALL TIETZ

Education reporter.

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