Category Archives: Politics

The Sanity of Honesty

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With liars, the issue isn’t whether the liar lies 70 percent of the time, 50 percent of the time or “only” 10 or 2 percent of the time. The issue is that the person lies. Because you know that liars lie, you have no way of knowing whether or not the words coming out of their mouths are true, or not. Ever.

When you’re associating with a person, doing business with a person or trying to enjoy a personal relationship with a person, you’re counting on them to have a good relationship with reality. You’re counting on the person to be sane and rational. Being sane doesn’t mean you never make errors. Honest errors are part of thinking, and part of the fallibility of human reason. But when someone deliberately and knowingly says “it is” when knowing it ISN’T, they have revealed a disturbing lack of relationship with truth, facts and reality. At that point, all bets are off.

It’s one thing not to know the truth about something, or to be honestly mistaken; it’s another thing not to care what the truth is, and pretend as if the opposite were true. Regardless of the subject, people with this habit don’t tend to make very good or reliable friends. How could they? They’re not very reliable or stable with themselves. So you could never count on them.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

2022: The Year of the Nightmare ?

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Christopher Buckley (writing on Facebook, in reference to the picture): Happy New Year, America. We deserve much better.

Me: Actually, politics and government are downstream from culture. (I believe Andrew Breitbart said that.) Nobody as evil AND insane as AOC would have acquired such power and influence unless our culture had gone off the rails. And millions have succumbed. Millions have not succumbed; but millions have. And the evidence points to a majority of younger people wanting this. Well, they’re going to get it.

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The only way Republicans can lose Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024? If the media declares medical Armageddon over the flu, most states shut down, Democratic Party officials require mail-in voting, unverifiable voting methods and early morning data dumps.
But, no … that could never happen.

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“There is no federal solution.” But the government will enslave you anyway, said the demented dictator.

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1940s Americans are known as “the greatest generation.” What will 2020s Americans be called?

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For generations, Americans have worried about censorship. The assumption was always: Censorship in America will be imposed by the government. Yet that was always at odds with the First Amendment, which forbids government censorship. But who could know that media and the press would willingly, and voluntarily, hand over objective truth in favor of self-censorship to advance green, socialist and other irrational narratives? And who could know that the self-censorship would become so massive, and so profitable, that gigantic corporations could do what no Soviets, no Mussolini, no Castro, and no Hitler could ever have pulled off so decisively? Mass, willful ignorance disguised as enlightenment; Medieval group insanity disguised as science; open evasion disguised as progressive; and brazen one-party rule disguised as “democracy.”

Wow. They did it. How? Because most of us WANT to be self-deluded. Government has barely had to fire a shot. We did it to ourselves–most of us, at least. We embraced our ignorance and labeled it cool and “woke.” We pay government-run schools billions of dollars to promote self-evident, crude, cheap brainwashing. We put the approval of our equally deluded peers above the most basic, sensory-level objective truths. But evading reality is, by definition, irrational. It will come at a very, very heavy cost.

Various Contributors

The Ruling Elite Will Not Surrender

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Over the last two years, many of us have been surprised and troubled at how eagerly millions of citizens have surrendered their freedoms to the shifting, contradictory, nakedly politicized diktats of various “experts” and government agencies. Coerced vaccinations, boosters, masks, and social distancing continue to be mandated and just as eagerly obeyed, even in the case of the mild Omicron covid variant. The technocratic Left currently ruling the country has wrung every ounce of unconstitutional power from the sovereign people, a large cohort of whom, especially the cognitive elites, have willingly gone along with every new crisis and command.

As the year ends, signs of a pushback are multiplying. But will such resistance reach the critical mass of voters necessary for liberating us from such “soft despotism” and its wardens?

We shouldn’t be surprised that progressives have seized the opportunity to aggrandize themselves through serial changes on the pretext of an exaggerated crisis. It has long been a truism of history that, as James Madison said in 1788, “there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of power, than by sudden usurpations.”

Nearly half a century later, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw an even more insidious stealth despotism that could arise in American democracy: “An immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications and to watch over their fate.” And he prophesized that the bureaucratic regulatory state would be the instrument of this “soft despotism”: a power “absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild” that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” The goal is “to keep [the people] in perpetual childhood,” for this power is “well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.”

The last hundred years have seen such a regime gradually become reality. Crises such as the Great Depression, Two World Wars, and other conflicts and recessions provided the pretexts for expanding and concentrating the powers of federal agencies and their “network of small complicated rules.” And like children, too many citizens have accepted these encroachments, willingly ceding their autonomy and freedom to overseers who bribe them with the redistribution of other people’s money, and with promises “alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate” from the cradle to the grave ––what we call “entitlements” but think are unalienable rights.

Moreover, our unprecedented wealth has obscured the dangers of this dependence and weakening of the habits of self-government. But the contrary bad habits of prioritizing comfort, pleasure, and security insidiously erode our tolerance for risk and suffering, the nonnegotiable, eternal constants of human existence. The covid pandemic has graphically revealed this intolerance for risk, which the “managerial elite” has exploited to leverage more power and authority.

Hence the government and its agencies such as the CDC hyped the dangers of an infectious disease whose victims overwhelmingly comprised the elderly already dying of something else. It didn’t take long to see that the typical victim was 80-years-old and possessed multiple comorbidities like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Children and the young––unlike during the Spanish flu––were spared. Masks, lockdowns, and social distancing were mostly pacifiers for soothing anxiety and creating the illusion of control, rather than protecting the vulnerable, even as those measures damaged the economy, impaired education, and multiplied “deaths of despair” like suicide and addiction.

Meanwhile, in Sweden and in states like Florida, the absence of such mandates did not lead to “super-spreader” events, but rather fewer fatalities than countries like England or states like New York with their draconian lockdowns.

These outcomes will surprise no one who understood from the start that after a few months of uncertainty in early 2020, the issue was not the pandemic, but how the pandemic could provide the pretext for expanding government power, and damaging a president whose policies pushed back against the progressives program to “fundamentally transform” the United States. And the way to do that is to erode our unalienable rights and our political freedom, the indispensable tools for checking tyranny and holding office-holders accountable to the people.

Now, however, there are multiple signs that voters are getting fed up with the whole covid endless crises triggered by variants and spikes in infections, a datum that creates big dramatic numbers and increases, but isn’t as significant as death rates. They’re sick of their children’s schools serially opening and shutting, demanding useless masks, and making grammar school kids eat lunch outside in the cold. They’ve had it with the endless parade of “experts,” especially government functionaries unaccountable to either the voters or the market, playing the endless loop of virus porn.

Nor are they fooled by the Dems’ proposed electoral “reform” legislation, which would hijack elections from the states, and put into law many of the shady practices we saw in the 2020 presidential election. And for a year they’ve watched Biden’s feckless incompetence weaken the nation’s prestige and interests abroad as both decline in the face of Iran’s march to a nuclear weapon, China’s threatening Taiwan and our regional allies, and Russia’s positioning tens of thousands of troops and weapons on its border with Ukraine––all the consequences of our shameful skedaddle from Afghanistan that cost 13 dead American troops, left behind billions of dollars in materiel, and stranded hundreds of American citizens and Afghan allies.

Finally, growing numbers of voters have soured on progressives’ “cancel culture” and strong-arm tactics––their “relentless moral condescension, the messianism of mass protests, physical intimidation, social ostracism and demands that you simply shut up”––as the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henninger describes the treatment of renegade Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, who stopped their Build Back Better binge of green pork and welfare lucre.

Throw in the Biden administration’s abysmal record of failure on every important issue like inflation and border security, and things are looking grim for the Dems. Biden’s approval numbers have been tanking for months, and now even usually reliable constituencies are disgruntled.  An Economist and You.gov poll finds fewer than 3 in 10 adults under 30 approve of the job Biden’s doing. A Zogby poll’s approval numbers for independents, the most critical swing-vote, are particularly ominous. They favor Republican control of Congress by 23 points. And another critical constituency for Democrats, Hispanics, are moving towards Republicans. According to a Wall Street Journal poll in early December, Hispanic support in Congressional races is split evenly at 37% for each party.

As of now, these portents suggest a midterm “shellacking” of the Dems, as Barack Obama called the debacle of the 2010 midterms that hamstrung his ambitions to remake America. And Obama was a well-liked president with tons of voter good will, not a cognitively impaired mediocre grifter.

But let’s not be hasty. The Dems still possess the commanding heights of media, entertainment, popular culture, sports, government agencies, and universities. They’re still addled by their humiliation at the hands and tweets of Donald Trump, and still thirsting for revenge against him and his supporters, the “bitter clingers,” “deplorables,” and “smelly Wal-Mart shoppers” who refuse to accept the superiority of self-proclaimed “brights” who feel entitled to push them around.

The ruling elite are not going to surrender power without a fight, and we’d better be ready. Next year will determine whether “soft despotism” is our future, or the love of freedom and our unalienable rights will triumph once again.

The ruling elite are not going to surrender power without a fight.

Bruce Thornton

Happy Un-woke Year !

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Watching teachers unions, government school honchos, the media, etc., deny that Critical Race Theory (which makes race the prism through which its proponents analyze all aspects of American life, categorizing individuals into groups of oppressors and victims) is taught in our schools reminds me of that memorable scene from an otherwise forgettable movie, A Guide for the Married Man. A husband gets caught by his wife in bed with another woman, and he simply denies it. And he does so, vociferously and repetitiously to the point that his wife actually starts to believe him.

A typical example of this gaslighting is “Who is Behind the Attacks on Educators and Public Schools?,” posted earlier this month by the National Education Association on its website. The union claims, “Small groups of radicalized adults, egged on by…bad actors, have been whipped into a furor over…the false notion that children are being taught ‘critical race theory.’” At the same time that NEA is denying that CRT is taught, the union published its Racial Justice in Education Resource Guide, in which teachers are advised how to directly address issues such as white supremacy, implicit bias and acknowledging how race influences their work.

In November, an American Enterprise Institute report definitively showed “how legacy and education media refuse to acknowledge the hard evidence — numerous clear examples of CRT curriculum taught to students, a CRT pledge on a state website, and the political implications of parents speaking out about CRT at school boards.” And just last week, John Murawski at RealClearInvestigations gave us abundant evidence that CRT does indeed exist in our schools. One of the myriad examples he gives is Manuel Rustin, a high school history teacher, who helped oversee the drafting of California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. He discloses “Ethnic studies without Critical Race Theory is not ethnic studies. It would be like a science class without the scientific method. There is no critical analysis of systems of power and experiences of these marginalized groups without Critical Race Theory.”

And then there is Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study which thousands of American educators use to teach children to read. As reported by Daniel Buck and James Fury in City Journal, one part of Calkins’ Critical Literacy: Unlocking Contemporary Fiction, which is geared to middle school students, discloses that the unit will delve into “the politics of race, class, and gender.” The authors explain, “One activity asks students to break down ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in the books they’re reading. Another builds ‘identity lenses’ through which students can analyze various texts, including ‘critical race theories’ and ‘gender theories.’ References to identity pervade nearly every page of the unit. Accompanying materials declare that the curriculum is ‘dedicated’ to teaching ‘critical literacies’ that will ‘help readers investigate power.’”

In Los Angeles, the school district’s Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity released a PowerPoint presentation which explained that critical race theory isn’t being taught in schools. But at the same time, the district made presentations which did precisely that. L.A. Unified also mandated that teachers take an antiracism course taught by a known critical race theorist who told them to “challenge whiteness.”

Anti-CRT activist Christopher Rufo quotes Detroit school superintendent Nikolai Vitti: “Our curriculum is deeply using critical race theory, especially in social studies, but you’ll find it in English language arts and the other disciplines. We were very intentional about … embedding critical race theory within our curriculum.”

In Seattle, the school district’s “Department of Racial Equity Advancement” employs critical race theorists who apply the controversial concept to school policies and practices as part of the district’s efforts to embed it in elementary schools.

Campbell Union High School District in California’s Silicon Valley has become downright religious on the issue. One of its “equity resources” includes a document that teaches students how to put a curse on those who say “all lives matter.” One section titled “Hex” asserts, “Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration.” And it instructs students to make a list of specific people who have been agents of police terror or global brutality.

The “hexers” are on to something. CRT is, more than anything, a religion. In fact, Columbia University professor John McWhorter has based his new book on the subject. Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America makes the case that, “It is not ‘like’ a religion…rather, it is what any anthropologist would recognize as one, with its own superstitions, rituals, clergy, and judgment day.” He adds that despite its worshippers’ best intentions, “the religion offers an oversimplified sense of what racism is and what one does about it.” He also maintains that CRT’s adherents, whom he calls “the Elect,” are “content to harm black people in the name of what we can only term dogma.”

Religion or not, how do we put an end to it? The answer actually comes from Theresa Montaño, a professional CRT coach and professor of Chicana and Chicano studies at California State University, who coached teachers during a November webinar. She advises her acolytes, “Don’t say critical race theory, just teach its precepts.” She adds, “What they did is they took those tenets of critical race theory, the pedagogy, or the methodology, and create[d] pedagogical models. You’re going to see how classroom teachers apply some of these pedagogical models in ways where they don’t even mention the words critical race theory but are doing anti-racist work.”

Following Montaño’s lead, states and school districts that want to halt the spread of CRT should do so by not using the term. Instead, the Heritage Foundation has solid model wording which avoids any mention of the noxious theory:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 very simply “outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Following that line of thinking, the North Carolina legislature recently passed HB 324, which lays out rules that educators must follow. Schools are not allowed to teach that one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex, that an individual’s moral character is necessarily determined by his or her race or sex, that an individual, solely by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, etc. But Gov. Roy Cooper vetoed it anyway, saying, “The legislature should be focused on supporting teachers, helping students recover lost learning, and investing in our public schools. Instead, this bill pushes calculated, conspiracy-laden politics into public education.”

This bill is pushing “calculated, conspiracy-laden politics into public education?” With Cooper’s (intentionally?) warped inversion of reality, it sounds as if a political sequel to A Guide for the Married Man is in the works.

*   *   *Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

The New Public School Orthodoxy

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Readers likely are familiar with the bleak state of American higher education. The U.S. spends more per student than most of its peers, yet comparative-academic-proficiency studies from the Pew Foundation and others consistently rank us in the middle or bottom rungs. Literacy rates are lower today than in 1840, well before the imposition of compulsory public education. University campuses have become pedagogic citadels of woke-ism. What is less understood is the degree to which these same forces have invaded the nation’s primary and secondary public schools.

From Loudoun County to Cupertino, the K-12 public-education system is subverting our shared welfare. A vast array of public and private forces—legislatures, teachers unions, school boards, curriculum providers, and monied special-interest groups—are working in unison to advance a worldview hostile to traditional American values. The evidence for this is legion, and reveals itself in three interconnected threats: sex and gender theory, critical race theory, and replacement parenting.

Sex and gender theory comes in many guises but is centered around the separation of biology from personal identity. This messaging begins in kindergarten, where children are sometimes exposed to cartoon instructional books like Who Are You?: The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity. Teachers tell impressionable children, “Babies can’t talk, so grown-ups make a guess [about their gender] by looking at their bodies.”

This is followed in later grades with books like My Princess Boy and Jacob’s New Dress, and graphical tools like “The Gender Unicorn” to cement the illusion that chromosomes and body parts are irrelevant. At the same time, state legislatures are passing non-discrimination laws allowing students to access school bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identity. Teachers are being ordered to use students’ preferred gender pronouns under threat of dismissal, furthering the lie that biology is irrelevant.

But an equally dangerous goal of sex and gender theory is to sexualize children. What was once known simply as “sex ed” has morphed into “comprehensive sexuality education.” Teaching tools like “It’s Perfectly Normal,” a book meant for ten-year-olds, contain realistic depictions of fully exposed child genitals and sex acts.

Schools today not only promote child sexuality, they facilitate off-campus sex-related medical services for their minor charges. Under California’s Assembly Bill 1184, recently signed into law by Governor Newsom, the first time parents are notified that their child has received such “sensitive services” could be when the bill shows up in the mail.

Then there’s critical race theory, the now-ubiquitous subject that galvanized Virginia’s “domestic terrorists” (parents) and kept Terry McAuliffe out of the Governor’s Mansion. Why the uproar? As Virginia’s parents discovered, CRT is a thinly veiled form of cultural Marxism.

As first reported by Christopher Rufo, in Cupertino, light-skinned elementary school kids are taught to “deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to power and privilege.” Similar kinds of exercises are occurring across the nation. Under CRT, representative democracy and capitalism are taught as tools of white patriarchy. Indeed, the tactics employed to advance the CRT worldview reminds one of the Soviet era joke, “The future we know. It’s the past that keeps changing.” An example is the “1619 Project,” which, although widely discredited, is being pressed into service by public schools in an effort to “reframe” the Declaration of Independence, the War of Independence, and the Constitution as racist machinations of the oppressor class.

Finally, there is replacement parenting, otherwise known as social & emotional learning (SEL). While parents may have resigned themselves to schools acting in loco parentis, SEL takes it to the extreme. Far from being concerned with cultivating traditional conceptions of character and virtue, the goal of SEL is to “mitigate the interrelated legacies of racial and class oppression in the U.S. and globally.” It seeks to “critically examine root causes of inequity” and develop “justice-oriented, global citizens.” In furtherance of these aims, schools have assumed the authority to engage in woke therapy sessions through topics like “self-awareness,” “relationship skills” and “responsible decision making.”

As SEL advocate Dena Simmons put it, “What’s the point of teaching children about conflict resolution skills, if we’re not talking about the conflicts that exist because of racism or white supremacy?” But SEL goes even further: It invades the recesses of a child’s inner life and records what’s discovered there through intimate surveys, family-life assessments, and class exercises designed to achieve doctrinal assent to the ever-evolving demands of social justice.

What’s behind all this? It’s not a secret. The purpose of public-school education is to indoctrinate future generations into a new orthodoxy, a replacement worldview for the beliefs that animated previous generations of Americans. Sex-ed promoter SIECUS, for example, openly advertises its aim: “Sex Ed for Social Change.” This new orthodoxy is religious in nature, with its own dogmas and practices. Metaphysical claims are supported with appeals to “ancestral” and even pagan roots. California’s version of CRT (“ethnic studies“), encourages teachers to guide children in chants to Mayan and Aztec deities. Utterly rejected, of course, is anything resembling the biblical worldview upon which all of western culture developed and advanced, along with its derivative concepts: the nuclear family, liberal democracy, capitalism, and equal protection under law.

If politics is downstream from culture, and culture from people’s personal beliefs, then America’s public schools turning into ideological indoctrination camps is a flashing red signal. How long our civilization can survive such intellectual and moral nihilism is open to debate. But as Lincoln is said to have warned, “the philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”

In 1943 the Supreme Court was asked to decide if public schools could force children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. This was in the middle of the Second World War, a time of fervent patriotism. Notwithstanding, writing for the majority, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in matters of politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word their faith therein.” Perhaps it’s time that public schools were reminded of this.

Mark R. Schneider is a California attorney and founder of the non-profit Protect Our Kids, whose mission is to educate parents about the scope and dangers of the public-school system.